Chapter 27: One of Us Isn't Going to Make It
On the Way Home
Adam walked in silence for a while, then couldn't help himself.
"Who do you think is actually smarter? Paige or Sheldon?"
"What do you think?" Juno said.
"Paige," Adam said, after a pause. "Girls generally develop faster than boys, and that's supposed to even out eventually — but she's a month younger than him and she just took him apart completely."
"Did you notice what she was doing during the game?" Juno asked.
"What do you mean?"
"She was managing his emotional state the entire time. Leading the conversation, getting him invested, letting his guard down, and then pressing on the board while his focus was split. Sheldon lost because he was playing two games at once and only knew about one of them."
Adam thought back through it. "She was steering the whole conversation."
"The whole visit," Juno said. "Chess tests intelligence and composure equally. Sheldon has the intelligence. Paige has both."
"So you think she's genuinely ahead of him, not just tactically better?"
"In every meaningful way, yes." Juno considered it. "Mental discipline is part of intelligence. Sheldon is extraordinary. Paige might be something rarer than that."
"She's going to have a rough time of it then," Adam said. "Sheldon doesn't handle rivals well."
He thought about what he knew — the story of a young physicist who had briefly shattered Sheldon's confidence years from now, sending him into a professional crisis that had taken Leonard and the rest of the group significant effort to pull him out of. Super geniuses encountering other super geniuses was rarely a graceful process.
If Sheldon and Paige crossed paths consistently, one of them was going to push the other toward something drastic. Knowing Sheldon, it would be elaborate and probably involve more planning than anyone expected.
Then another memory surfaced, quieter and less dramatic.
Paige's parents. Their marriage. The direction things were heading in the original timeline, and what that had done to Paige — the particular way a brilliant, self-sufficient kid goes sideways when the ground disappears underneath them.
Adam went quiet.
That's the window.
Right now Paige was untouchable — cold, self-contained, interested in exactly the things she was interested in and nothing else, with no reason to register Adam as anything other than furniture. The system had confirmed it. Zero response, zero recognition.
But a kid in crisis was a different situation. Someone going through something real tended to open doors they'd kept sealed. Not because they became weaker, but because the warmth that had been locked under all that self-sufficiency had somewhere to go.
He didn't need a deep friendship. He just needed to cross whatever threshold the system recognized — the same minimal acknowledgment it had detected with Sheldon.
He started paying attention to where Paige showed up.
Juno noticed. Her expression toward him developed a quality Adam recognized and didn't love.
Several Weeks Later
"The Nobel Prize in Physics announcement is this Wednesday," Sheldon said, with the excitement of someone announcing a national holiday. "Swedish time, which means five in the morning here. I'm listening to the radio broadcast. Who's in?"
"Hard pass," Emmett said immediately.
"What time exactly?" Juno asked.
"Will Paige be there?" Adam asked.
Sheldon's expression shifted at Paige's name. "Absolutely not. I am not sharing this moment with her." He looked at Juno. "Five AM. Before sunrise."
Juno thought about it and shook her head. "That's too early. I don't think I can make it."
Sheldon turned to Adam.
"If it's just the two of us, it feels a little sparse," Adam said. "If you invited Paige, we'd all come. More energy, more fun."
"No." Sheldon didn't hesitate for a millisecond.
Adam shrugged. "Then it sounds like a solo event."
"Someone else will come," Sheldon said, with the confidence of someone who had never successfully cold-invited a peer to anything.
"I genuinely don't think so," Adam said.
The next morning, the school intercom crackled to life during homeroom.
Sheldon's voice came through clearly, announcing an open invitation for any interested students to gather in his garage at five AM Wednesday morning to witness the Nobel Prize announcement together, with snacks and drinks provided, all welcome.
Emmett put his head on his desk.
"He doesn't actually think people are going to show up," Emmett said, muffled.
"This is huge progress," Juno said, genuinely meaning it. "Six months ago he wouldn't have invited anyone. He would have sat in his garage alone and been completely satisfied with that."
"Paige rattled something loose," Adam agreed. "She made him take other people seriously for the first time. As an actual variable, not just background noise."
It was true. Before Paige, Sheldon had operated in a world where everyone else was simply less advanced. Peers were people who occasionally required managing. The idea of someone his age — younger than him — functioning as genuine intellectual competition had forced a recalibration.
He'd started running for student council. He'd taken on a shift managing the school radio station. And now he was on the intercom inviting the general population to his garage at five in the morning.
For Sheldon Cooper, this was essentially a social revolution.
Paige had done that. Without trying. Without even being particularly nice about it.
Kindred spirits, Adam thought, are the most dangerous kind.
End of Chapter 27
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