The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 15: Under Watch

Coach Nguyen had a way of paying attention that most students never noticed until it landed on them directly, and by the fifth week, Ethan had become distinctly aware of being on the receiving end of it.

It wasn't anything dramatic. Coach Nguyen didn't single him out in front of the group or make a production out of it. It showed up in smaller ways the extra thirty seconds he spent correcting Ethan's stance compared to the ten-second corrections everyone else got, the way he'd occasionally stop mid-drill to have Ethan repeat something three or four times while the rest of the group moved on to the next exercise, the specific matches he assigned Ethan against, each one a slightly harder opponent than the last, like Coach Nguyen was quietly running an experiment to see where the ceiling actually was.

"You're doing the thing again," Priya told him one afternoon, watching Coach Nguyen walk Ethan through a footwork drill for the third time in a row while the rest of the group had already moved to partner drills. "The thing where he decides you're worth extra time."

"I don't know what I did to deserve extra time."

"You threw Diego's little brother into a wall two weeks ago. That's what you did." She said it without malice, more amused observation than accusation. "Coach doesn't do that with just anybody. He did it with Marcus, back when Marcus started. Everybody remembers because Marcus was, like, nine."

"Marcus started when he was nine?"

"His whole family does this. His older sister was regional champion two years running before she went to college. It's basically genetic at this point." Priya shrugged, resetting into her own stance for the drill she was supposed to be practicing. "You're the first person since Marcus that Coach has bothered giving that kind of attention to. People are gonna start asking about it."

"Great," Ethan said, without much enthusiasm, because attention was exactly the thing he'd spent the past month quietly worried about not the physical attention of Coach Nguyen's coaching, which he genuinely wanted more of, but the social kind, the kind that came with questions he didn't have honest answers for.

The questions started small. A kid two years below him asked, with the blunt curiosity only underclassmen seemed to manage without embarrassment, whether Ethan had done martial arts before he transferred to Bridgewater, and seemed genuinely disappointed when Ethan said no. Someone else asked if his parents had put him in private lessons, which Ethan also had to deny, watching the person's face do the same small recalibration Priya's had done weeks earlier trying to fit an explanation onto something that apparently didn't have an obvious one.

He handled it the way he'd been handling the same questions about his grades for over a month now vague answers, a shrug, a change of subject as soon as politeness allowed. It worked well enough. Teenagers, he was discovering, had a limited attention span for mysteries that didn't affect them directly, and most people let it go after one round of questions and moved on to whatever was actually interesting to them that week.

Coach Nguyen didn't let it go, exactly, but he handled his curiosity differently less interrogation, more observation, watching Ethan with the specific patience of someone used to reading athletes rather than asking them outright.

"You pick up corrections faster than anyone I've coached in a while," he said one afternoon, after a particularly grueling round of footwork drills that had left Ethan's legs shaking. "Most kids need to hear something four, five times before it actually changes what their body does. You get it in one, sometimes two."

"I guess I've just been paying attention."

"Everybody pays attention. Not everybody's body listens that fast." Coach Nguyen studied him for a second longer than the moment strictly needed, and Ethan felt the specific discomfort of being looked at by someone who was clearly building toward a question he didn't currently have an honest answer for. "You're not on anything, are you? Some kind of supplement, something your parents got you into?"

"No, sir. Nothing like that."

"Didn't think so. You don't move like someone who's chemically sped up, you move like someone whose brain's just wired a little differently than most." He said it thoughtfully, more to himself than to Ethan, and let the subject drop as easily as he'd raised it, moving on to correct the next student's stance without further comment.

Ethan let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He'd gotten better at deflecting these conversations over the past month, but Coach Nguyen's version of curiosity felt different from the casual hallway questions sharper, more specifically aimed, coming from someone whose entire profession was built around noticing exactly how bodies worked and didn't work.

He thought, walking home that evening, about how much longer he could keep doing this the vague answers, the shrugs, the careful redirecting of every conversation that got close to the actual truth. Jason hadn't let the ninety-eight go entirely, still bringing it up periodically with a raised eyebrow that promised he hadn't forgotten his request to be told eventually. Sophie noticed things too, quietly, the way she always had. And now Coach Nguyen was starting to look at him like a puzzle he intended to eventually solve, whether Ethan volunteered the pieces or not.

He didn't have an answer for how long the secret could hold. He just knew that for now, at least, it was still his to keep, and some stubborn part of him wasn't ready to hand it over yet not until he understood it better himself, not until he'd earned enough of what the System had handed him for free that the explanation might actually make sense to someone else, instead of sounding like exactly the kind of thing a seventeen-year-old makes up to explain an inconvenient jump in test scores.