Chapter 23: A Lifelong Rival
Summer — Coming to an End
Summer wrapped up fast.
Adam passed his driving test without much drama, having started in second gear on the first day of practice and not looked back. His driving had genuinely startled Emmett, who had expected a nervous beginner and gotten something considerably more confident — smooth through corners, composed under pressure, efficient in ways that a new driver had no business being.
Every time Emmett asked how, Adam just smiled and said talent.
"What does being good-looking have to do with driving?" Emmett had said, genuinely puzzled.
Adam hadn't answered that one.
Emmett was smart enough to know there was a real answer somewhere, and not quite curious enough to push for it.
New Semester — Tenth Grade
The American credit system meant that even though all four Hard Candy members were technically sophomores, they were spending less and less time in the same rooms. Course selection had pulled them in different directions, and their overlap in the actual school day had shrunk considerably.
Emmett had the most complicated situation — several incomplete credits from the previous year meant his schedule was a patchwork of catch-up courses and electives, leaving him stretched thin across the day.
Adam and Juno were moving through the curriculum steadily and on track.
Sheldon was operating in a category of his own. His teachers had collectively, and with some desperation, approached the principal about alternatives. A scholarship arrangement with a private academy had been quietly organized, but Sheldon was still too young to be placed there independently. The compromise that emerged was that his grandmother drove him to the state university once a week to sit in on undergraduate lectures.
The lecture hall had adjusted to him with mixed feelings. The students found him equal parts fascinating and exhausting. When exam papers came back and Sheldon looked at other people's scores with an expression of quiet, unintentional pity, the urge to say something unkind was widely felt and generally suppressed.
Lunch
Adam noticed Sheldon pushing his food around without eating and figured something was genuinely off.
"You okay?"
"Fine," Sheldon said immediately. Then he registered that all three of them were looking at him. "It's just an unfamiliar feeling. My grandma called it jealousy, but I don't think that's accurate."
"Jealousy," Adam repeated, sitting up slightly. "Did you meet someone smarter than you?"
The first name that came to mind was one he'd been waiting to hear about — a particular girl whose name had surfaced in the background of things he remembered, someone whose intelligence put her in rare company even by Sheldon's standards.
"Absolutely not," Sheldon said, his voice going up half a register. "She may appear intelligent, but she is not smarter than me."
"She?" Juno raised an eyebrow.
Emmett leaned forward. He'd noticed Sheldon's mood all through the morning and had been waiting for exactly this. The fact that someone had apparently gotten under Sheldon's skin — Sheldon, who treated every other human being as a mildly interesting but fundamentally lesser life form — was the most entertaining thing that had happened in weeks.
"Tell us," Emmett said.
"Her name is Paige Swanson," Sheldon said, with the specific resignation of someone who has replayed an incident too many times to pretend it doesn't bother them. "She's also auditing courses at the university."
"How old?" Juno asked.
Sheldon went quiet.
His photographic memory, characteristically unhelpful in this moment, reconstructed the scene in full detail whether he wanted it to or not.
He had walked into the lecture hall and found a girl sitting in his seat. Blonde, small pink backpack, completely at ease, like she belonged there.
"Hello," Sheldon said, with restrained displeasure.
"Hi!" She looked up and smiled easily. "I'm Paige. Paige Swanson."
"You seem very young," Sheldon observed. "Are you here with one of the adult students?"
"No." She laughed. "Dr. Campbell heard about my paper on quantum chromodynamics at high temperatures and invited me to audit his lectures."
Sheldon's expression went flat.
Dr. Campbell was his mentor. Dr. Campbell had also, in a development Sheldon had actively encouraged, begun spending time with his grandmother — a situation Sheldon supported entirely on the grounds that marrying into the family of a distinguished physicist would raise the overall intellectual profile of the Coopers considerably.
He had not accounted for competition.
"I should clarify something," Sheldon said, recovering his composure. "Dr. Campbell is my mentor. He also came to my house for dinner. He had pasta."
Paige looked at him with an expression that was somehow both friendly and entirely unbothered. "Okay."
"He made the pasta himself," Sheldon added.
"Do you know if he's planning to cover eight-color gluon field calculations using matrix methods this semester?" Paige asked.
Sheldon paused. "I don't know."
"What about Leibniz's integral rule? Is that on the syllabus?"
"I don't — I'm not certain."
Paige tilted her head. "Then what do you know?"
Sheldon, who had never in his life been asked that question and meant it as a genuine inquiry rather than an insult, felt something he couldn't immediately name rise in his chest.
"I know," he said, with as much dignity as he could locate, "that you are sitting in my reserved seat."
Paige blinked. Then she looked around the lecture hall.
"There are no reserved seats," she said.
Sheldon sat down next to her in a different chair and did not speak to her again for the rest of the lecture, which took considerable effort because she kept asking good questions.
By the end of class he had established, through careful indirect questioning, that she was ten years old. Same as him. Her birthday was in June. His was in February. She had smiled when he pointed this out, as if it was a pleasant coincidence rather than a direct challenge to his status, which somehow made it worse.
"I don't like her," Sheldon concluded, having shared approximately seventy percent of this with the table.
Emmett burst out laughing.
Juno pressed her lips together, clearly suppressing a smile.
Adam laughed too, and then something shifted behind his eyes. A fragment of memory, half-formed, surfaced from somewhere in the back of his mind.
He'd heard that name before. Or a name very close to it. In a context he couldn't quite reconstruct clearly yet.
He filed it away and kept smiling, but something about it stayed with him.
End of Chapter 23
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