"I’m leaving," Camille said. Her voice wasn't loud, but in the oppressive quiet of the library, it sounded like a gavel dropping. She stood up, her chair scraping harshly against the industrial carpet. She didn't look at Leo, and she certainly didn't look at Jovan. She just began stacking her books—her Calculus textbook, her dog-eared copy of a history reader, and a notebook filled with the very logistics Jovan had relied on for his ‘Prom Paradox.’ Jovan blinked, the rhythmic tapping of his pen coming to an abrupt halt. He leaned back, his brow furrowing as if he were trying to debug a script that had suddenly returned a fatal error. "Camille, wait. We’re in the middle of a revenue projection. If we don’t finalize the tier-two pricing for the florist delivery slots by six, the entire margin for the Friday rush evaporates. You know this." Camille stopped. She tucked a loos

 Camille stared at him, her eyes searching his for some flicker of hesitation, some sign that he recognized the gravity of his words. Instead, she found only the cold, crystalline clarity of a boy who had mistaken strategy for existence. "I'm not asking you to apologize for being smart, Jovan," Camille said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "I’m asking you to stop pretending that this—all of this, the library, the spreadsheets, the 'market inefficiencies'—is more important than the people actually sitting in front of you. You aren’t building a business. You’re building a wall." Jovan leaned forward, his elbows resting on the worn laminate table. He gestured vaguely toward his laptop, his tone laced with a frantic, misplaced sense of logic. "A wall? Camille, look at the projections. By the time we graduate, we could have enough capital to bypass the entry-level grunt work everyone el

 "Why do you keep acting like everything is a survival scenario?" Camille whispered. The library was deathly quiet, the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead buzzing like a trapped insect against the stillness. "We aren’t in a war, Jovan. We’re in high school. And for the first time in my life, I don’t think I recognize the person sitting across from me." Jovan felt a sharp, metallic taste rise in his throat. He looked at his hands—hands that had spent months clicking through market trends, refreshing price trackers, and calculating the exact profit margins of prom corsage markups. They looked like strangers’ hands. He tried to laugh, a dry, hollow sound that died before it could fully leave his chest. "I’m just planning ahead, Camille. Is it a crime to want a better future? Is it so wrong to use the tools we have to make sure we aren’t stuck in this town ten years from now, working jobs that don’t ev

 "I’m not absent," Jovan repeated, but the words felt like lead in his mouth. He looked up, his eyes meeting Camille’s rigid posture, but she was already turning toward the exit. "Camille, wait. If I stop moving—if I stop anticipating—we lose everything I’ve built. You know I’m right about the volatility. You’ve seen the spreadsheets." Camille stopped. She didn't turn around, but her shoulders slumped just enough to betray the exhaustion she’d been harboring. The library air felt recycled, stale, and thick with the scent of old paper and the sharp, ozone-tang of cooling laptop fans. "You’re always right, Jovan. That’s the most exhausting part about you." "That wasn't an insult," he countered, his voice rising a fraction of a decibel. He glanced nervously at the librarian, Mrs. Gable, who was peering over her spectacles from behind the circulation desk. "It’s a str

 "She’s dramatic," Leo muttered from across the table, though he didn't look up from the stack of algebra homework he was grading for a sophomore who had paid them five bucks for the service. "But she’s not wrong, you know. You’ve been vibrating at a frequency nobody else can hear for months." Jovan didn’t answer. He stared at the spot where Camille had been standing. The air still held a faint trace of her perfume—something like vanilla and old library books—a lingering ghost of the argument that felt far more substantial than the lines of code and trend data on his screen. "I’m not vibrating, Leo," Jovan said, his voice flat, forced into a monotone that he hoped sounded like indifference. "I’m focused. There’s a difference between obsession and optimization." Leo finally looked up, his brow furrowed, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He dro