Chapter 6
“Everything okay?”
Ivy didn’t immediately answer her TA. She exhaled as she took a seat behind her desk.
“Yeah.”
Not really.
When Tristan didn’t say anything else, she shot a glance in his direction.
He quickly looked away, red pen in hand, his attention focused on the stack of papers on his desk—a much smaller version of hers.
Ivy logged into her computer and checked her emails. There were only three. Well, only three that mattered. The rest were spam, countless spam.
She opened the one from the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.
EC ‘25 cordially invites you to present at our upcoming conference. As a Clay Research Fellow . . .
Ivy stopped reading. She couldn’t focus, couldn’t concentrate.
How many times had her father presented at the EC? Six? Eight? A dozen?
Keynote, guest lecturer, career achievement award. You name it, Eugene Reeves had done it.
Ivy closed the email and continued to scroll.
Found one called “Anniversary” from an unknown email address. Normally, Ivy wouldn’t open such a thing, but she needed a distraction.
The moment she did, her eyes narrowed. She’d expected to see a block of text or colorful graphics advertising a casino or a dating service, but saw nothing of the sort. Instead, Ivy read something that seemed like a macabre poem.
1092—three days to the date.
Twenty-seven minutes, why were you late?
Thirteen will fall, if their problem is unsolved,
Reduced to a constant, your death is involved.
Ivy shuddered. Spam, no doubt. Still, it was ominous and disturbing.
Your death is involved?
Ivy quickly deleted the email. So much for taking her mind off things.
“Hey, Dr. Reeves?”
“Hmm?”
Tristan slashed at a page with his red pen.
“The students’ grades are pretty bad.”
“How bad?”
“Not quite done yet, but . . . seventy-six average? Maybe lower?” Tristan raised an eyebrow and Ivy made a face.
“You sure?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Of course Tristan was sure. Like her, math was what the TA did. What he knew.
Would she be pissed if someone asked her if she’d made a simple arithmetic mistake?
Well . . . no, probably not. But Tristan Coates was a year older than her, in his second year as a PhD student in the Applied Mathematics department while Ivy was a tenure-track professor, the youngest in Princeton’s long, esteemed history.
She was also a Clay Research Fellow, a Sloan Research Fellow, a finalist for the Fields Medal, blah, blah, blah.
Tristan had something to prove.
Ivy didn’t.
“Sorry.”
Ivy pulled up the reports from the previous ORF 145 Fundamentals of Statistics class and did some quick calculations.
The historical mean for this particular test—one that didn’t actually count—was 86 percent. Standard deviation ±3 percent.
This year? 76 percent, which was a 4σ deviation. Like Tristan had said, pretty bad. If this was just a one-off, Ivy wouldn’t be too concerned.
But it wasn’t—it was a trend.
Ivy’s strategy when introducing a new topic was to give the students a test early into her teachings. Gage how well they were grasping the material.
Well, here was her answer.
“Hey, maybe this year the students are just—”
“No,” Ivy said sharply. “I’m not getting through to them.”
Ivy wasn’t one for external validation, but she wouldn’t have minded a comment from Tristan now. Something positive, reassuring. But Tristan just went back to marking, saying nothing.
“Tristan,” she hesitated. “You have any advice? A way to explain Bayesian stats more on their . . . level?”
A half smile crossed the man’s lips, and he tucked his hair behind his ears.
Tristan was older than her, but he was also more in tune with today’s students. Had taken a more or less traditional route to his current position. Hadn’t skipped countless grades and countless more social events to reach the highest levels of the profession in record time.
“I mean, what do kids their age—what do first-year students—think about?”
Drinking and sex. And drugs.
“Drinking and sex,” Tristan said, his half smile growing into a full grin.
You forgot drugs.
Ivy cocked her head and Tristan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. His smile faded.
“But I doubt the department would go for something like that,” he added quickly.
“You’re probably right.”
Tristan lowered his eyes to the tests and then immediately raised them again. “Hey, the marks are generally bad, but Rebecca did well. Ninety-three.”
A glimmer of hope. Not surprising, though—Rebecca Quinn was one of the brightest students in the class. Pretty, too. Red hair, green eyes, freckles. Interested and interesting. A good combination. Reminded Ivy of somebody, minus the red hair and freckles. Blue eyes instead of green, but still.
“Zeke, too,” Tristan added hesitantly.
“Zeke?”
“Zeke.”
This was a surprise, and not a welcome one.
“Huh. What did he get?”
“Ninety-three.”
Alarm bells rang.
“The same ninety-three?”
“Yep.”
Tristan flipped through the tests, found Rebecca’s and Zeke’s, and held them up.
Ivy took them and looked them over to confirm what Tristan was implying.
This wasn’t the first time that Ivy had suspected Zeke of cheating. She’d reported him once before for copying off Rebecca, no less. This was the last thing Ivy needed right now.
Or maybe not.
A close second to thinking about her father and her own project, on which she’d made zero progress over the past few months.
EC ‘25 cordially invites you to present at our upcoming conference. As a Clay Research Fellow . . .
Third, then.
Ivy glanced at the tests again. Zeke didn’t even try to hide it. The tests weren’t just close to the same—they were identical. If they’d both gotten perfect marks, there would be no way to tell that he was cheating. The proof, however, was in the wrong answers. It always was.
“What do you want to do about it?” Tristan asked.
Ivy stood.
“Only one thing I can do.”