ME, CINDERELLA?(16)

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.

“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.

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.