Chapter 30: The Baby Suffers, The Baby Cries
The Cooper Family Home
Ding!
Intelligence +6
Adam sat very still for a moment.
He'd been working toward that notification for over a year. A full year of patience, of showing up, of carefully navigating around a ten-year-old genius who had no particular interest in acknowledging his existence. And there it was.
Six points.
More than Sheldon had given him on first contact. More than he'd gotten from anyone.
He felt, genuinely and unexpectedly, like he might tear up a little. He kept his face composed.
Juno had given him one point on first contact, 0.005 daily after that. Sheldon had given him five on first contact. Paige had just given him six — from a single conversation, after more than a year of near-total invisibility.
The system had answered his question about where Paige sat relative to Sheldon. There was no ambiguity in the number.
He looked at Sheldon, who had gone to the kitchen to make tea and was now returning with careful, deliberate steps, holding two mugs like they were scientific instruments.
Poor kid, Adam thought, with genuine feeling.
Paige was going to be extraordinary. Once she stepped out of this shadow she'd been living in, there would be no ceiling on what she did. The scientific world was going to have to make room. And Sheldon — proud, certain, utterly convinced that no peer could genuinely challenge him — was going to have to figure out how to exist in a world where that wasn't true.
Adam hoped he managed it better than he had with the chess game.
"Your expression is really something," Paige said, glancing at him sideways.
"Sorry." Adam refocused. "Just thinking."
Sheldon set the mugs down with ceremony and took his seat.
"Sheldon," Adam said, "what university are you thinking about?"
Sheldon tilted his head. "Caltech. Specifically the physics department. My dad took me to visit the campus once. When I saw the faculty dining hall, I had a very clear sense that I would have significant scientific conversations there."
Adam pressed his lips together hard.
"That makes complete sense," he managed. "I can picture it perfectly. You at a table, talking, colleagues all around you, completely absorbed, forgetting their food entirely."
Sheldon processed this and nodded with satisfaction. "Exactly."
"He's teasing you," Paige said flatly. "Scientists aren't the only ones who get stared at in disbelief. So do people who've lost the plot."
"Anyway," Adam said, moving on quickly. "Paige, what about you? Have you thought about where you want to go?"
Paige's expression shifted — something slightly warmer than her default — and she said, "I haven't fully decided. I've already heard from Harvard, Yale, Caltech, Princeton, and Columbia, among others. I'll see."
Sheldon's head turned slowly toward her. "You've already received invitations?"
"Yes." Paige said it simply, without performance. "Top schools recruit proactively for students they want. It's a two-way process. Haven't you heard from anyone yet?"
The silence that followed had a specific quality.
Sheldon's face went through several expressions in quick succession, none of them comfortable. His lips pressed together. His eyes went slightly bright in a way that had nothing to do with happiness.
The chess matches had been painful. This was a different category of painful. Chess was informal, deniable. University recruitment was an official, institutional, comparative verdict. And the verdict, delivered without any particular cruelty by a girl his age sitting three feet away, was that she had cleared a bar he apparently hadn't.
"I'm sure those schools have been in touch," Adam said quickly. "You just might not know about it yet."
Sheldon looked at him with genuine distress. "Why wouldn't I know?"
Adam suddenly found the ceiling very interesting.
The reason, of course, was that Mary Cooper had been quietly managing her youngest son's correspondence for years, making decisions about what he was ready to know and when. Pointing that out directly would earn him a look from Mary that he preferred not to receive.
"Just ask your mom," Paige said.
"Mom!"
Sheldon's voice cut through the house with the precision of a fire alarm.
End of Chapter 30
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