The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 9: Lang

Derek Lang had never had a real reason to care about Ethan Chen one way or another, which was sort of the point guys like Derek didn't need a reason, just an opportunity, and Ethan walking home alone past the strip mall on Elm most days after school had always technically qualified as one, even if Derek's crew had never bothered acting on it before.

They bothered on Friday.

It started small, the way these things usually did Derek and two of his usual shadows, a kid named Cole Fischer and another Ethan only knew as "Bricks" for reasons nobody had ever explained, positioned outside the convenience store like they'd been waiting, though Ethan suspected it was just bad luck rather than actual planning.

"Chen," Derek said, in the tone of someone greeting an old friend he didn't actually like. "Heard you're some kind of genius now."

"Not really," Ethan said, already recalculating the route home in his head, weighing whether crossing the street casually would look like exactly what it was.

"That's not what I heard. Heard you went from failing everything to acing tests overnight. That's a pretty big jump, Chen. Almost like you're cheating or something."

"I'm not cheating."

"Didn't say you were." Derek smiled in a way that suggested he absolutely thought Ethan was, and further suggested he didn't especially care whether it was true, only that it gave him something to say. "Just saying it's weird. You should be careful. People notice weird stuff like that."

Cole Fischer laughed at nothing in particular, the way people do when they're supposed to be intimidating and don't actually have anything to add.

Ethan had been in versions of this conversation before not with Derek specifically, but with the general genre of guy Derek represented, the kind who needed someone smaller or quieter to feel bigger next to and the standard move, the move that had worked reasonably well for seventeen years, was to make himself small, agree with whatever was said, and walk away as fast as politeness allowed.

He started to do exactly that. Took a step to go around them.

Bricks moved to block the sidewalk, not aggressively, just enough a wall of a teenager repositioning himself between Ethan and the rest of his walk home, and something about the deliberateness of it, the practiced ease of three guys who'd clearly done this dance before with other kids, made something in Ethan's chest tighten in a way that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite anger, but was sitting closer to anger than it usually did in these moments.

"I need to get home," Ethan said, keeping his voice level.

"What's the rush? We're just talking." Derek stepped closer, and Ethan noticed, in the sudden hyperattentive way he'd been noticing things all week, the shift of Derek's weight onto his back foot, the slight c**k of his shoulder — not a full swing, nothing that dramatic, just the kind of loose, testing shove that guys like Derek used to establish who was going to back down first.

The shove came.

Ethan's body moved before his brain fully caught up with what it was doing a half-step to the side, a redirect of Derek's own momentum the exact way Coach Nguyen's throw had worked, weight going somewhere it wasn't expecting to go. He didn't throw Derek. He wasn't trying to, hadn't decided to, hadn't consciously decided anything at all. He just wasn't where Derek's shove expected him to be, and Derek, overcommitted to a push that had nothing behind it to push against, stumbled half a step and had to catch himself against the convenience store's window.

The whole thing took maybe a second and a half. It felt, to Ethan, like it took considerably longer, every part of it laid out with unnatural clarity the angle of the shove, the exact moment his own weight needed to shift, the physics of it arriving in his head the same instant his body used it.

Derek straightened up fast, face gone red in the specific way faces go red when they've been embarrassed in front of an audience they were trying to impress.

"The hell was that," Derek said, and it wasn't really a question.

"I don't know," Ethan said honestly, because he genuinely didn't, not in any way he could explain out loud. "I didn't do anything."

"You pushed me."

"You pushed me first."

Cole Fischer and Bricks had both gone quiet, watching Derek with the specific attention of guys waiting to see how their friend was going to save face, and Ethan understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with the System, that this was the moment where things could go a lot worse a lot faster if Derek decided his pride needed it.

For a second, it looked like it might. Derek's jaw worked, his hands curled slightly, and Ethan's whole body went tense and ready in a way he'd never experienced before a fight in his life, some new awareness of angles and distance and where his own feet were sitting on the pavement.

Then Derek seemed to reconsider maybe the audience of three didn't feel worth the risk, maybe something in Ethan's stillness read as less like an easy target than it usually did and he settled for a scowl instead.

"Whatever," Derek said. "Watch yourself, Chen." He said it like a threat he hadn't fully committed to, and turned to go, Cole and Bricks trailing after him a beat too eager to leave.

Ethan stood there on the sidewalk for a solid ten seconds after they'd gone, heart going hard, replaying the half-second of the dodge over and over in his head, trying to figure out what exactly had just happened to his body and whether it would happen again if he needed it to.

He walked the rest of the way home faster than usual, and didn't tell his parents about it at dinner, but he lay in bed that night thinking less about chemistry tests and diagrams and a lot more about the word Coach Nguyen had used two days earlier.