Billionaire Romance Boxed Set 1(105)

There were so many partitions. Start with the basic ones. 13. 12+1. 11+2. 11+1+1. I settled into an easy rhythm, breaking up the numbers in order and writing them down in separate columns. Not so bad, once I got everything organized. 10+3. 10+2+1. 10+1+1+1. I heard a chair behind me creak as a student got up. Dismissed already? Well, the physics majors probably didn’t even know what a partition was. I felt better, more certain, and I kept on working steadily. 9+4. 9+3+1. I had gotten down to the line of fives when a voice broke my concentration.

“Next question.” Eliot’s voice startled me. He erased the question from the blackboard and began to write another. My tablet screen blanked out the question as well as all of my work, and the second question appeared.

“What if we aren’t finished yet?” a student from a few rows back called out.

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Eliot said. “Then you’re finished. Next question.” He drew a circle on the board and began to sketch out chords between the points on the circle. “Let M be the midpoint of the chord PQ…”

I knew this proof. The butterfly theorem. The chords sketched out drew the shape of a butterfly in the circle. I quickly wrote out the proof, adding in the missing perpendiculars. I finished in only a few minutes and looked around the auditorium, surprised at what I saw. Already a third of the room had been eliminated. I leaned back in my chair but then remembered what he had said. We were being tested on creativity, and my proof was the most straightforward version. I panicked and went back to the problem. There must be another way to do it. I scrambled to think of another proof, maybe one based on angles. Maybe projecting the circle, or maybe thinking of it as a conic section…

Math was wonderful for me. It was an escape from the world which was messy and full of vague ambiguities a frightening muddle, into a new world of perfection. A world of lines which had no end, and points which were infinitely small, of curves that reached out always further and further into the plane, functions that repeated themselves in undulating waves which had no beginning and no end.

It was only in this clean, perfect space that I felt comfortable playing. In my imagination I could drift off into daydreams, and in math I could construct the realities that I wanted to live in. I worked for twenty more minutes until Eliot called time, but couldn’t finish a second proof.

“Next question.” I sighed as my tablet blanked out again. I must be doing okay, but this test stressed me out more than any other I’d ever taken.

The next question was even harder, involving some partial differential equations that I had just learned. I worked on it without success for a half hour, but when time was called I wasn’t even close to an answer. I gulped, waiting for the red DISMISSED bar to appear on my screen, but it never did. Eliot wrote the next problem on the board and we continued working on our tablets. Students left the auditorium throughout, a stream of dismissals at the beginning of every problem that trickled down as time went on.

Eliot sat quietly at the large desk in the front of the room, watching us through his tablet. Watching me. I stole quick glances up at him every so often, convinced that his eyes were on my screen. He wiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his rumpled shirt, occasionally frowning. With so many other students in the room, it was impossible to tell whose work he was following, but my imagination made me feel like I could tell. Some hidden sense inside of me activated and I knew that he was watching over me.

The problems became more and more impossible and I became more and more desperate, writing down any solutions I could think of, regardless of whether or not they were elegant or creative or hell, even right. I fell into the work with the kind of determination a marathon runner uses in the last mile of the race, throwing my all into a last desperate effort not to be eliminated.

“Stop.” Eliot’s voice broke my focus and I leaned back into my chair and closed my eyes, sighing deeply.

“Congratulations,” he said. He looked straight at me and I felt my skin burn red. Turning away, I saw that only three other students remained in the auditorium: Quentin, Mark, and one guy I thought I remembered from a combinatorics class. Quentin turned around to glance back at Mark and me, his eyes wide with pleasure. Hell yeah!

Eliot said something about interviews, and called Mark first. Mark crossed by me and gave my shoulder a squeeze, his face beaming with pleasure. We had done it! I smiled back at him and gave him a quick thumbs up. Eliot led him out to the interview and the rest of us waited.

“Hey, how did you do that last one?” Quentin said, turning around eagerly.