Dreams of Genius scholar

Heat and Hunger

The New York summer didn’t just shine, it burned. The sun hung above the city like a forge, spilling molten light onto every inch of concrete. The sky was a cruel, washed-out blue that offered no mercy, no shade, no break.

Down on Lexington Avenue, I stood still, one more figure in the endless shuffle of New Yorkers, but unlike the rest, I wasn’t moving anywhere. My cheap T-shirt clung to my back, soaked through with sweat. The denim of my jeans felt like sandpaper, the air so thick and heavy it pressed against my skin like a hand trying to push me into the ground.

I looked like any other senior at New York High, but inside, I was a mess of reasons not to be here.

And under that suffocating sun, one thought kept circling like a vulture: What if I just stopped showing up? What if I just… stopped altogether?

Because this wasn’t living. It was endurance, the kind where the predators didn’t have claws, they had perfect smiles and cruel laughter.

They hunted me with the ease of people who’d never known what it felt like to be prey. Their weapons weren’t fists, but whispers that spread like wildfire, shoves into lockers that rang like steel drums, laughter that echoed in my head long after they’d walked away.

They turned my pain into entertainment, and the city, loud and indifferent New York, was their perfect audience.

And at the center of their little circus was him, the self-appointed king of the halls. The cologne-slicked, always-smirking leader who treated my misery like it was his daily affirmation. He ruled over a kingdom of cracked sidewalks and rusted lockers with the kind of charm that made teachers smile and victims disappear.

Still, part of me, the smallest, most foolish part, believed the world would eventually get tired of watching me lose. That one day, the script would flip. That karma would finally remember my name.

But those hopes were paper boats on a storm drain, fragile, pointless, and gone the second the rain hit.

That afternoon, the heat reached its breaking point. The pavement radiated it back up at me, roasting my legs until even the scent of my own jeans turned metallic and sharp. My head swam. The laughter of my tormentors, loud, careless, endless, mixed with the chaos of traffic, the hiss of buses, the scream of subway brakes underground.

Something inside me gave way.

My knees buckled. The world tilted.

I hit the pavement hard, cheek scraping the hot concrete, every breath feeling heavier than the last. The noise of the city faded, first into murmurs, then into nothing.

And through that narrowing tunnel of sound, I heard it: a whisper that didn’t belong to anyone around me. A voice, smooth, cold, deliberate.

“Impetum in Eo.”

Then, blackness.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in my room.

The light leaking through the blinds was soft and gray, early morning. The air smelled faintly of dust and warm metal from the old radiator by the window.

For a moment, I thought maybe I’d dreamt the whole thing, the heat, the fall, the voice. But the heaviness in my chest was too real, too familiar.

I was a senior at New York High. That meant college applications were looming like storm clouds, and every teacher’s question about the “future” felt like a small act of cruelty.

I used to dream of becoming a software architect, of building systems so intricate they’d feel alive. But dreams didn’t feed families, and grades didn’t lie. Mine were buried deep in the bottom half of the class, the kind of scores guidance counselors tiptoed around.

So the dream had bent, quietly, reluctantly, into a compromise: humanities.

A polite word for failure.

My classmates were already charting bold futures, med school, internships, foreign universities, while mine was just blank space. I could try for higher studies, maybe claw my way into a Master’s program, but even that felt impossible.

Dad worked twelve-hour shifts at an electrical factory in Chicago. Mom was retired, her health fading by inches. My little brother still had high school to get through, and my older sister’s tuition was already sinking us.

There wasn’t much left to dream with.

Some nights, I thought about skipping college entirely, just getting a job, grinding my way upward one exhausted day at a time. But that idea came with its own quiet dread, like seeing two versions of myself: one chasing ambition with bloody knuckles, the other giving up and pretending not to care.

And then came that morning.

Something was different.

The air felt charged, sharp and clean, like it had been filtered through lightning. My head was clear. No morning fog, no exhaustion, just focus. My thoughts lined up neatly, precise and vivid, as if my mind had been rewired overnight.

Even my body felt new, light, awake, almost humming under my skin.

I skipped breakfast, I always did, but not because I was sick of food this time. I just didn’t need it.

Instead, I sat down at my desk and cracked open my physics book, flipping to a chapter that usually made my brain shut down before I even reached the first equation.

“Strain and Elasticity.”

Normally, I’d stare at those symbols until they blurred. But now, the equations didn’t just make sense, they clicked.

ΔL = FL₀ / YA

The formula came alive in my head like a living diagram. Every variable slotted perfectly into place, Y for elastic modulus, A for cross-sectional area, L₀ for original length.

It wasn’t memorization. It was understanding.

It felt like I had studied it a hundred times, though I knew I hadn’t.

I glanced at my watch. My stomach dropped.

Twenty minutes until class.

I cursed under my breath, grabbed my bag, and bolted. The stairwell reeked of detergent and old dust as I flew down the steps two at a time.

Ryan Cole, my roommate, gaming partner, and unofficial therapist, had already left for school. He’d carried me through countless all-nighters and more failed ranked matches than I could count. We joked that my Diamond rank in League was more his than mine.

Outside, the city was awake, loud, alive, unstoppable. Skyscrapers glinted in the sunlight, food vendors barked orders over the hiss of their grills, and the crowd moved in waves of fabric and perfume.

Everything felt brighter, sharper, faster.

I reached the school gates with seconds to spare, swept into the building by a tide of students in sneakers and Seoul-inspired streetwear.

And then I ran straight into Ms. Rivers.

Maya Rivers. Physics teacher. Deadly precision in a human body.

“Archer,” she said, her voice like a blade scraping across flint.

“My bad, Ms. Rivers.”

Her eyebrow rose. “Inside. We’re starting with the quiz.”

I slipped past her into the classroom. Chloe Bennett’s laugh caught my ear, blonde hair catching the light, smile too easy to look at for long.

I moved past her toward the back of the room, away from the usual suspects. The ones who thought torment was a sport.

Their smirks followed me, but for once, I wasn’t afraid to meet their eyes. The bruises they’d left yesterday were gone. Completely.

That was new.

Ryan leaned toward me, whispering. “Yo, did you even study for the quiz? You were still out cold when I left.”

I grinned, a flicker of confidence I hadn’t felt in months sparking to life.

“Didn’t need to,” I said. “I’m about to make up for every bad grade I’ve ever had. Watch me.”