But I Hate Him

Chapter 1. In Which I Cause the Apocalypse

IN WHICH I CAUSE THE APOCALYPSE

He isn’t here. Not yet anyway.

I scan the competition floor room for the fiftieth time in the last three minutes. Just to ensure my prior analyses were accurate. The scientific method requires a hypothesis be tested as many times as necessary to form a proper deduction.

My competition.

Or how the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium refers to them: the future generation of scientists and engineers, competing for the most prestigious award a high school junior can achieve.

Realistically, these other students could never be my competition.

They could never come close to beating me.

Only one person could.

Luca Melendez.

I look to the left, where track lights shine upon his designated spot.

It’s empty. Void of a poster board. His name is written on duct tape slapped across the laminate floor, waiting for his arrival.

Only one other contestant separates us, thanks to the alphabetical order of our spots and back-to-back last names, Melendez and Prince.

Will he make the symposium in time? Usually, he is late, but he’s never been completely absent. Meanwhile, I arrived at eight this morning, an hour before the doors opened. Just like Mom and Dad insisted. Be first. Prove you’re first in every way.

I will be first today.

Cold goo drips into my blazer sleeve cuff. I glance down. The plastic cup holding the strawberry-and-banana smoothie I grabbed for breakfast, now dented in my grasp.

Okay, so, my adrenaline is a tad high. To be expected.

The rest of my summer, and my entire future, hangs in the balance.

The award for winning first place today is acceptance into Harvard’s Research Science Institute high school program.

It runs for the entirety of August, and it’s the next step of The Plan that Mom, Dad, and I mapped out for me when I was five.

The last step is getting into Harvard’s undergraduate physics program—acceptance rate 3 percent—next year. Once I do that, The Plan will be complete.

Finally.

“Is that the Prince Kid?” someone whispers nearby.

I glance over my shoulder. A short South Asian American girl in a matching black pantsuit. Her contestant lanyard reads Rupa Palanki.

Three other girls huddle beside her, ogling my Discovering New Extragalactic Planet Candidates: A Novel Machine Learning Pipeline for Efficient X-Ray Spectrum Transit Detection presentation.

The head judge must have already visited them.

We need to remain glued to our designated spots until then.

Maybe they recognize me because I defeated them at a similar competition in the past.

More likely, it’s for the same reason I get stopped weekly on the streets of Manhattan and asked for photographs.

Prince List is the number one private tutoring company in the world. Three thousand locations in the United States. A thousand internationally. And my smiling face is plastered on the windows of each one.

I set my barely drunk smoothie on the floor and start to wipe my sticky hand on my pants, only to realize how unprofessional that will look.

I switch to the inside of my suit jacket.

According to the Performance, Image, and Exposure theory of success, winning is 30 percent dictated by appearance.

Thankfully, the rest of my appearance is up to par.

My tie is on the center line. My shirt doesn’t protrude from the vest. My trouser creases are straight and aligned with the tips of my dress shoes.

Not a hair out of place. The way everything needs to be whenever I step out the door.

“Rory Prince,” I correct them. “But yes.”

“Right, Rory,” the girl—Rupa—says, but sort of distractedly, like she’ll continue to call me Prince Kid regardless the moment she leaves this pavilion.

She takes a step closer toward my presentation board, infiltrating my space further.

“I heard you would be at Nationals. I was hoping I would run into you.”

“Really?”

Rupa pulls her backpack forward, digging through the front pocket. “I just have to ask: I heard you proved one of MIT’s mathematics professors wrong at ICERM during your presentation on star patterns in data and their role in computing L-values. Is that true?”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose.”

“Wow.” Rupa pulls out a rolled-up poster and undoes the rubber band, revealing a printout of my face. “Could you sign this?”

Logically, no one sentenced to tutoring by their parents should want my autograph.

Really, I should be the representative of high school suffering.

But Mom and Dad have worked hard to combat that.

Mostly by ensuring I’m as attractive as possible to encourage our predominantly female student base to develop parasocial crushes on me.

They even hold weekly meetings dedicated to strategizing how to best utilize my “handsome face” and “positive image”—their words, not mine—to the company’s advantage.

Lately, they’ve resorted to making me hold Einstein’s fuzzy cockapoo body in photo shoots.

It’s a complicated psychological nightmare that I don’t condone or fully believe works. Especially not in these competitive academic circles, where beating the Prince Kid is one of these students’ major roadblocks.

Although it’s clearly worked on Rupa and her friends.

I pull a fountain pen out of my dress shirt pocket. “Of course.”

As I return the signed poster, I peek over the girls’ heads to check Luca’s spot for the fifty-first time. Still unattended.

For regional academic competitions, New York is divided into thirds due to our massive population. New York Metro: the city and its boroughs. New York Long Island: the island to the east, where bro culture runs rampant. New York Upstate: farms.

The Upstate finalists change almost every time. But I always win Metro. And Luca always wins Long Island. Whenever the three regions compete against one another, he ultimately beats me. Each and every time.

So far, I’m up to thirty-five losses against him. It’s been this way since high school began, when these competitions became the best way to prove our smarts outside of the classroom.

So, where is he?

Not like I care.

But, also, I do. He’s my only real competition.

And this is my last chance to beat him. After this, the competition season will be over for the year.

And once my senior year of high school begins, my sole job will be drafting and perfecting my university applications.

I won’t have time for more competitions.

All I’ll be focused on is finishing The Plan.

This isn’t just about the Harvard high school program. This is personal.

Out of the corner of my eye, a familiar older man passes Luca’s empty spot. His suspenders pull his suit pants to his belly button. And his thin white hair—toupee?—looks like it’s been through a blender.

Randall Hiller: theorist of behavioral finance and economics, tenured professor at Yale, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on stock price predictions and market inefficiency.

The head judge of the symposium. Heading my way.

My spine snaps straight. Scrambling to smooth out my suit coat to better hide the smoothie stain on its inner lining, I present myself properly beside my poster board—to the left, a foot’s length away, right arm gestured toward the title.

A few more contestants join the girls from earlier, inspecting my board and whispering in ways that prove they’re specifically here to witness the Prince Kid. A few, potentially, because of the whole parasocial crush thing.

And some just hoping I’ll fail. We’re all here to win.

Professor Hiller stands before me. He studies me up and down before glancing at the presentation title on my board.

“Begin,” he says abruptly, jotting a note on his clipboard.

No introduction. Not even a hello. It leaves me stunned for four whole seconds that I can’t reclaim from the three-minute presentation time limit.

“Good afternoon, Professor,” I finally say, kicking my clear, confident presentation voice into high gear. “I’m Rory Prince, regional winner of New York City Metro’s JSHS. It’s an honor that my research has been requested for the national competition.”

Professor Hiller doesn’t look up from his clipboard. Unsurprisingly, the head judge is playing hard to get.

“Within the Milky Way galaxy, we have cataloged over seven thousand planet candidates,” I say, pointing at the Abstract section of my board.

“Each offers clues to planetary formation within our own system. But what about beyond the Milky Way? To this day, only one extragalactic candidate, M51-ULS-1b, has been spotted orbiting amid the chaos of an X-ray source, one of the most chaotic bodies in space. How could this planet have formed and survived in such an extreme environment?”

Professor Hiller doesn’t respond.

“We don’t know,” I answer for him. “This proves our existing methods are ineffective in detecting extragalactic transits due to the challenges in X-ray observations and the variability of X-ray sources because of the lack of automation. This is why I’ve invented the automation that we need.

” I point toward my Methods section next.

Professor Hiller finally looks up. His facial wrinkles deepen as he squints at where I’ve laid out details of my automated, GPU-accelerated machine learning pipeline.

It’s all there: the data extraction, the preprocessing, and the Bayesian-based feature engineering, ready to make everyone at this symposium faint in awe.

The moment I’ve been waiting for.

Professor Hiller clears his throat. He returns to writing notes. “Your font is small.”

My heart cracks down the center.

Maybe he shares the same beliefs as Mom. Research on planets? Planets don’t convey genius to me, Rory. What about actuarial science for business and finance? Something more mathematical. More Prince List?