Dreams of Genius scholar

Race Against Time

The first rays of sunlight were barely crawling through the half-open blinds when I woke up, feeling for once like I’d actually slept properly. It was that rare kind of morning where your body finally feels in sync with itself.

That peace lasted all of five seconds.

My eyes landed on the glowing red digits of my alarm clock: 9:40 a.m.

My heart dropped. The final math class, the one I really couldn’t afford to miss, started at ten.

“Seriously?!” I groaned, rubbing my face. “What the hell is wrong with me lately?”

Across the room, Lucas didn’t even flinch. Still hunched over his sketchpad, he was in his own world, pencil scratching like he was trying to summon something from another dimension.

“Keep it down, man,” he muttered without looking up. “Trying to concentrate here.”

Typical Lucas. He’d forget to eat, sleep, or blink if it meant finishing a drawing. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even manage to wake up on time.

No time to dwell on that though, I had a full-blown crisis on my hands.

I threw on the first clothes I could find, grabbed my backpack, and bolted out the door. No brushing teeth, no mirror check, nothing. Just pure, unfiltered panic propelling me forward.

The old staircase leading down from our apartment building was its own obstacle course, cracked steps, creaking railings, and the kind of uneven flooring that could end lives. I nearly tripped twice before catching myself on instinct. My lungs burned, and my heartbeat felt like a drum solo echoing through my chest.

By the time I burst through the rusted gates of the school, sweat clung to my shirt, and I was gasping like I’d just finished a marathon. It was already 9:45.

Fantastic.

I sprinted into the classroom, trying to make myself as small as possible. The room went silent, every head turned. Mr. Harris, our math teacher, raised one eyebrow and gave me that smirk teachers reserve for special occasions.

“Well, look who decided to join civilization,” he said. “Get a good nap in, Archer?”

“Sorry, Mr. Harris,” I panted. “Overslept. Ran here as fast as I could.”

He chuckled darkly. “Good. Perfect timing. We were just tackling a geometry problem that might show up on the SAT. Care to show the class how it’s done?”

Of course. The man had a flair for public humiliation.

But instead of freezing up, something inside me clicked. I walked to the board, grabbed the marker, and started explaining the problem.

“The point E’s the midpoint of AD,” I said, sketching quickly. “That makes DE and EA congruent. We’re told AB is 6 inches, BC is 4. So…”

I wrote out the Pythagorean theorem, running through the math without hesitation.

“AE squared plus EB squared equals AB squared,” I said. “Plug in the numbers, AE squared plus 4 squared equals 6 squared.”

A few more strokes of the marker, and the solution was done. “AE squared equals 20, so AE equals 2√5. Since DE’s the same length, it’s also 2√5, about 5 inches.”

I stepped back, marker still in hand. The room went quiet.

Even Mr. Harris blinked, clearly not expecting me to actually nail it. His grin faltered for just a second before he cleared his throat and muttered, “Well… good.”

The rest of the class buzzed with new energy after that. We dived into SAT prep, a relentless back-and-forth of rapid-fire questions. Chloe Bennett and I carried most of it, bouncing answers off each other like a perfectly rehearsed routine.

“What’s the sum of the first five terms of an arithmetic sequence if the first term is 10 and the difference is 3?”

“Eighty,” I answered before anyone else could breathe.

“What’s the degree of a constant function?”

“Zero.”

It was like something had rewired in my brain overnight. I wasn’t just keeping up, I was leading. And judging by the sideways looks from my classmates, they noticed too.

But the rhythm broke the moment the door creaked open.

Maya Rivers, the physics teacher, walked in with that calm, controlled confidence she was known for.

“Leo Archer?” she said, scanning the room.

Mr. Harris gestured toward me. “Right there.”

“I need him in my office. Now.”

The air seemed to tighten around me. I knew what this was about before she even said a word.

We walked down the hall in silence until we reached her small, cluttered office. She gestured for me to sit.

Then, with zero preamble, she said, “Care to explain why you cheated on the last quiz?”

The words hit harder than I expected, even though I saw them coming.

“I didn’t cheat,” I said firmly. “You can test me right now if you want. I finished that section faster because I actually knew it.”

She folded her arms, studying me carefully. “You used your phone, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said quickly. “I’ve just been studying a lot lately.” A little white lie, but I needed her to believe me.

Something softened in her expression. “Alright,” she said finally. “Even if you did, I’ll overlook it. I can tell you’ve been putting in the effort. Don’t let one mistake define you right before the SAT.”

Relief washed over me. “So, I can go?”

She smiled faintly. “Yes. And good luck next week.”

I stepped out into the hallway, breathing easier, my heart still racing. The noise of lunch break echoed around me, lockers slamming, laughter bouncing off the walls.

Pulling out my phone, I saw a text from Maya: “Don’t forget, see you at 2 p.m.”

Right. The library study session.

By the time I got there, the quiet hit me like a soft blanket. I returned the PreCalculus book I’d torn through in one night. The librarian raised an eyebrow but said nothing, just smiled politely as if she saw this sort of madness every day.

I drifted toward the math shelves. The heavy titles, Calculus I, II, Linear Algebra, felt like invitations to another world. I picked one up, settled at a desk, and started reading.

Two hours passed before I even noticed. The equations and concepts danced vividly in my mind, planes, lines, and vectors crisscrossing like a mental light show.

That’s when Maya appeared, sliding into the seat beside me.

“Hey,” she said with a teasing grin. “Sorry I’m late. Our teacher’s kinda cute, couldn’t get away early.”

I glanced up at her, tall, confident, radiating the kind of effortless charm that made people turn their heads, and couldn’t help but smile.

“Figures,” I said. “You’d flirt your way out of class just to help me study.”

She laughed softly, leaning back in her chair. “Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to see how far you’ve actually come.”