“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I tried to get it into a graphable form, but it wasn’t working.”
“Oh,” Quentin said. “So you didn’t finish it? That’s weird.”
“What, you finished all of them?”
“Mostly, or at least a partial answer.” Quentin continued talking about the last question, but a root of worry had dug itself into my chest and wouldn’t come loose.
What if Eliot knew which tablet was mine? What if he had rigged the test? I had been terrified of having to confront Eliot and tell him my real name, but worse than that was the possibility that I didn’t deserve the prize at all. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence that I still sat here in the auditorium. My palms gripped the armrests of the seat.
Eliot returned alone and called the other student, the one I didn’t know, for his turn. By the time Eliot came into the room to call in Quentin for his interview, my heart was racing. I wanted to speak up, but didn’t know how, and they had left the room before I could say a word. Now, alone in the auditorium, I cursed myself for being such an idiot. I couldn’t stay. Eliot would think of me as a complete liar when I told him who I really was. Not only that, I hadn’t even finished half of the problems. As much as I wanted to win, I didn’t want to win unfairly. My grandmother had always told me that cheating was wrong, and if I won the prize it would be by cheating. I could always find another way to get to Hungary.
Liar. Cheat. Liar. The words reverberated in my head. The lecture hall closed in on me and I gasped to breathe. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t.
My heart pounded in my chest as I rose from my seat. I crossed over to Eliot’s desk and picked up a scrap of paper, pulling a pen out of my jacket pocket to write a brief note.
Sorry. I don’t deserve this.
I didn’t sign the note. Who was I to him, anyway? Valentina was nothing more than a wisp of imagination.
I left the note on his desk, and before I could change my mind, I turned and ran.
Eliot reached his hand out to dismiss the first student, someone who hadn’t written down a single partition for the first problem. Surely Valentina would know what a partition was? A flash of anxiety surged through him. If she were the first student to be dismissed—
Never mind that. Eliot berated himself for being so biased. Perhaps it was for the best that he couldn’t tell whose work was whose. Valentina had been writing, anyway, or pretending to. He pressed the button on his screen, sending the dismissal out into the auditorium. He stared at his screen for a moment until he heard a seat creak, and then he looked up to see a boy rolling his eyes as he left.#p#分页标题#e#
Not her.
Eliot pulled himself upright in his seat, wiping at his weary eyes. The night before already felt far away, the stuff of dreams and magic. He had looked forward to the internship test because he knew he would see her. And yet he was scared, too, for what reason he could not tell. Perhaps he worried that she would fail. She did not seem like the kind of person to take failure lightly. Perhaps he worried more that she would win, and all that would mean for him.
He flipped through the students’ work on his screen quickly, dismissing all those who had nothing written down. Then he went back and dismissed all those who were simply writing down partitions in any random order. He did not want guessers. He did not want anyone whose brains were disorderly.
Valentina still worked on in the second row. Her dark hair fell over her face, obscuring her eyes. She held the stylus carefully, precisely, as though cutting one slice of cake in two perfectly equal pieces. As he scanned through the remaining students on his screen, he tried to guess whose screen belonged to her. Perhaps this one, with the delicate handwriting, the numbers slanted in a hurry toward the right of the page. Perhaps this other one with the sums in an orderly matrix. One student had written all of the partitions out already and was beginning to show the proof for a general case.
Enough. He deleted the problem set, erasing all of the answers. Anybody still here deserved to move on.
As the problems went on and he dismissed the students more slowly, he grew prouder and prouder of Valentina. She certainly would become a great mathematician if she kept at it. All of the remaining few students—four of them—had done a remarkable job in their attempts at finding the answers to unreasonably hard questions. He thought he knew which tablet was hers before erasing the last question.
“Congratulations,” he said, looking directly at Valentina. She blushed and looked away. “You have passed the first round of testing. We’ll start the interview portion of the test now. Relax here; the interviews should take less than a half hour each. You first,” he said, pointing to the young man sitting next to Valentina. Eliot glanced back at the tablet on his desk. Although he wanted to be impartial, he knew that it would be hard to interview anyone after he had spoken with Valentina. He held out his hand to the young man who approached the front of the lecture hall.