The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 7: Next Door

Sophie Bennett had lived next door to Ethan for as long as either of them could remember, which meant she'd also spent that entire time watching him from a closer distance than pretty much anyone else at Bridgewater, whether either of them talked about it or not.

So when she caught him through her kitchen window on Thursday evening, sitting at his desk with three textbooks open at once actually reading them, not just staring blankly the way she'd watched him do a hundred times over a hundred different homework assignments it registered as strange almost immediately, the way a familiar song sounds wrong the second someone changes a single note.

She didn't say anything about it right away. That wasn't really her style. She filed it away the way she filed most things, quietly, and brought it up three days later when they ended up walking to school at the same time, which happened often enough to not really be a coincidence anymore, even if neither of them had ever said so out loud.

"You've been studying a lot," she said, apropos of nothing, adjusting her backpack strap.

"I've been studying some."

"I can see your desk from my window, Ethan."

He felt his ears go a little warm at that, though he couldn't have said exactly why there was nothing embarrassing about studying, objectively, except that it was such a departure from every version of himself she'd ever actually witnessed that it apparently qualified as worth commenting on.

"Is that weird?"

"It's not weird, it's just" She considered her words the way she considered most things, carefully, like she was double-checking her work before turning it in. "You got a ninety-eight on the chem test. Jason wouldn't shut up about it in group chat."

"Jason needs a hobby that isn't my grades."

"He's not wrong to be surprised, though. That's a big jump."

"Maybe I just decided to actually try."

"Maybe," Sophie said, in a tone that suggested she wasn't buying it but also wasn't going to push, which was one of the things Ethan had always appreciated about her without ever quite articulating it she noticed things, filed them away, and let you get to them in your own time instead of demanding answers on her schedule.

They walked in something close to comfortable silence for half a block, the kind of quiet that only worked between people who'd known each other long enough to not need to fill it.

"For what it's worth," she said eventually, "whatever you did, keep doing it. You're smarter than the grades you've been getting. I've always thought that."

"You've always thought that?"

"You used to help me with word problems in like fourth grade. Before you decided school was stupid."

"I never said school was stupid."

"You said it with your whole personality for like six straight years, but sure."

He laughed, and something about the easiness of it the fact that she could tease him and mean the compliment underneath it at the exact same time made him want, briefly and intensely, to just tell her everything. The dream. The light that wasn't a voice. The way a diagram of a throw in Isabella's textbook had unpacked itself in his skull like something he'd known all along and simply forgotten.

He didn't. Some instinct held him back not distrust, exactly, more like a sense that this particular secret needed to survive contact with more than one careful conversation before he handed pieces of it out, even to someone he'd trusted since they were both small enough to ride bikes with training wheels down this same street.

"I've just been trying harder," he said instead, which was true in the sense that all lies of omission are technically true.

Sophie glanced at him a longer look than the moment strictly needed, like she was weighing whether to push and then let it go, the way she'd let go of things before. "Well. It's working. Ninety-eight's a good look on you."

"Thanks."

"Don't let it go to your head, though. I've still got a ninety-nine average and I intend to keep it."

"Wouldn't dream of catching up."

"Good," she said, smiling in a way that made the walk to school feel a whole lot shorter than it actually was, and neither of them said anything else about it, though Ethan noticed because apparently he noticed everything now, in a way he hadn't before, whether that was the System's doing or just his own attention finally waking up that she glanced back at him twice more before they split off toward their separate homerooms.

He filed that away too, the way she'd filed away his desk full of open textbooks, and decided it was a problem for a version of himself with slightly more emotional bandwidth than the one currently trying to figure out what a voice made of light had actually done to his brain.