The Overnight Prodigy

The test came back with a 61 written in red pen, and Mr. Harris hadn't even bothered circling it. Just wrote the number and moved on, like he already knew Ethan Chen wasn't going to be surprised. He wasn't. Sixty-one was practically a personal best. Ethan folded the paper in half, then in half again, until it was small enough to disappear into the bottom of his backpack where it could live with the others. History, this time. Last month it had been chemistry. The month before that, a math quiz he still had nightmares about, mostly because his dad had actually seen that one. "You good?" Jason asked, sliding into the seat next to him as the bell rang. Jason's own test was sitting face-up on his desk, a 58 that he seemed weirdly proud of. "Fantastic," Ethan said. "Living the dream." "Beat me by three points, so really you're the smart one here." "Don't say that like it's a compliment." They walked out into the hallway together, the usual after-class crush of bodies and backpacks, and Ethan let himself get carried along by it instead of actually steering anywhere in particular. That was mostly how his life worked lately. Get carried along. Don't rock anything. Try not to think too hard about the test in his bag, or the one before it, or the conversation he knew was coming the second he walked in his front door. It came right on schedule. "Sit down a second," his dad said, before Ethan had even gotten his shoes off. Robert Chen was still in his work clothes, tie loosened, laptop open on the kitchen table like he'd been in the middle of something and decided this was more important. Never a good sign. "I have homework," Ethan tried. "This'll take five minutes." It took closer to twenty. It always did. His dad had a way of turning "how was the test" into a whole lecture about effort and potential and what Kevin, Ethan's cousin, perpetually mentioned, never present had been doing at seventeen. Kevin had been taking college courses at seventeen. Kevin had a scholarship lined up. Kevin, as far as Ethan could tell, had never once in his life gotten a 61 on anything. "I'm not Kevin," Ethan said, which was the wrong thing to say, because it always was, but it came out anyway. "Nobody's saying you have to be Kevin. I'm saying you could try half as hard as him and be fine. You're a smart kid, Ethan. I don't understand where it's going." Ethan didn't have an answer for that one either, mostly because he'd stopped trying to find one a while ago. He mumbled something about studying more and went upstairs before the conversation could grow a second head. His mom caught him on the stairs, the way she sometimes did, like she'd been waiting for the exact moment he'd need someone to not be mad at him. "He means well," Linda Chen said. "I know." "You could actually study, though. Just saying it as your mother and not your dad." "I do study." She gave him a look that said she'd raised him and knew exactly how much studying "study" usually meant, but she let it go, because that was also part of how she operated. Ethan appreciated it more than he ever said out loud. His room was the same as it always was bed unmade, desk buried under notebooks he opened maybe once a week, a window that looked out over the Bennetts' yard next door, where Sophie was, unsurprisingly, sitting on her back porch with a textbook open and an actual highlighter in her hand. She'd probably already finished the history test. She'd probably gotten a hundred on it, the same way she got a hundred on everything, and gone home to do more homework for fun, or whatever it was Sophie Bennett did with the extra hours in her day that Ethan spent doing nothing in particular. He watched her for a second longer than he meant to, then caught himself and pulled the blinds halfway, which was a stupid thing to feel embarrassed about since she couldn't even see him. Dinner was quiet in the specific way dinners were quiet after his dad had already said his piece for the day. Ethan pushed rice around his plate and thought, not for the first time, that there had to be some kind of switch other people had gotten flipped that he'd somehow missed. Some setting labeled actually cares about this stuff that came standard in Kevin and Sophie and probably half his graduating class, and had just never made it into him. He didn't think about it too hard, though, because thinking about it too hard usually ended with him feeling worse and doing exactly nothing differently. That was the pattern. Bad grade, bad conversation, quiet dinner, homework he didn't do, sleep, repeat. He fell asleep that night the same way he always did phone in hand, some video playing that he wasn't really watching, the history test still folded up small at the bottom of his bag downstairs. He had no idea it would be the last night that pattern held.