Ethan leaned back in his chair and watched his friends do their thing.
Sophie and Mia were grinding through their physics sets, pencils flying like they had a plan and were just checking boxes. Jake had — somehow — been staring at his reading sheet for almost forty-five minutes without once bringing up the gaming café. Honestly impressive.
With nothing to do, Ethan's mind wandered.
Back in his old life, right around this time senior year, he'd been doing something way less useful — spending like three days straight texting some girl he'd met on a language exchange app. Swedish, he was pretty sure. She'd been really patient with his terrible attempts at conversation.
He thought about the stretch a few years later when Apex started working with partners in Eastern Europe, and he'd decided to learn some basic Russian to help break the ice. He practiced for two months with a tutor online, felt pretty good about it, and then actually used it at a dinner in Chicago with the visiting partners.
The woman across the table just... stared at him. Politely blank.
He pushed through two more sentences before her colleague quietly leaned over and mentioned she was from Poland.
Ethan had folded his napkin, taken a long sip of water, and just switched back to English like nothing happened.
He still cringed about that sometimes.
He shook it off and tuned back in.
Sophie and Mia had hit the last problem in their physics set — some multi-part monster that looked like it was designed specifically to ruin your evening.
"Okay," Mia said, staring at it. "I literally don't know where to start."
"Same," Sophie said. She looked over at Ethan. "You did AP Physics last year, right? Any ideas?"
Ethan picked up the paper and read through it.
It was an electromagnetic induction problem — a rod moving through a changing magnetic field, a bunch of moving parts across several sections. The type of question that looks totally hopeless until you find the right place to start, and then it just clicks.
"Start with Faraday's law," he said. "Calculate the induced EMF at the beginning — E equals BLv. The magnetic field is changing at a steady rate, that's the key thing. Once you've got that, the rest just falls into place."
Sophie looked at the problem again. Then at him. "Why did I not see that."
"You were coming at it from the wrong angle," Ethan said. "Most people try to tackle everything at once. Just find the one thing to start with."
Mia was already writing. "Okay. Yeah. Yes." She kept going, faster. "That totally works."
"It's always like this," Ethan said. "Hard problems have a first domino. Find it and knock it over."
He slid the paper back and got back to his own stuff, noticing Sophie giving him this little evaluating look.
"You're actually really good at explaining things," she said.
"Thanks."
"No, like — really good. Like you've done this before."
"I haven't."
"Hm," she said, in that way that meant she didn't quite buy it, and went back to her work.
Across the table, Jake was done.
He shoved his notebook forward, dropped his head onto his arms, and made a noise like a man slowly giving up on life.
"I cannot," he announced into the table.
"You've been going for almost an hour," Ethan said. "That might be a record for you."
"It is definitely a record for me." Jake turned his head sideways without lifting it. "My brain is making a noise."
"What kind of noise."
"Like a dial-up modem. Like 2003."
Mia patted his shoulder without looking up. "You're doing great."
"She's lying," Jake said.
"I'm being supportive," Mia said. "Not the same thing."
Ethan actually looked at Jake's work. It wasn't bad. A little rough, missing some structure, but he clearly understood more than he thought. He was losing points to bad habits, not because he couldn't do it. That was totally fixable.
"Okay," Ethan said. "That's enough for today. You actually got stuff done."
Jake lifted his head. "Are you lying or being supportive."
"Neither. Look at three through seven. You got all of them. Two weeks ago you would've skipped half."
Jake looked at three through seven. Didn't say anything, but he sat up a little.
"Let's head out," Ethan said, packing up.
The afternoon sun was doing that thing where it cuts long golden lines across the hallway — warm, end-of-May light that made everything feel kind of cinematic.
At the school gate, a new bubble tea spot had opened up two weeks ago and was still pulling a line that either meant really good tea or really good Instagram, maybe both. The window had a big pink sign: BUY ONE GET ONE HALF OFF — LIMITED TIME.
Sophie stopped. "Okay, we're doing this."
"The line is so long," Jake said.
"Don't care." She was already walking toward it.
Mia followed immediately. "They use real fruit. I looked it up."
Jake looked at Ethan. Ethan shrugged. They got in line.
It moved faster than it looked. The four of them shuffled along in the warm air, the smell of brown sugar and fresh milk floating out every time someone opened the door.
"What are you getting," Sophie asked Ethan.
"Brown sugar milk tea. Less sweet."
"Less sweet?" She looked genuinely offended. "Why would you do that."
"I just don't like things super sweet."
"Full sugar," she said. "Trust me."
"I'll get it how I want it."
"You're going to regret it."
"I won't."
She pointed at him. "When you taste mine and it's better, I want you to admit it."
"Deal."
Jake spent four minutes staring at the menu like he was making a life decision, then got a taro milk tea, room temp, medium sugar. Mia got jasmine green milk tea. Sophie got brown sugar full sweet and threw Ethan a look when she ordered.
Ethan paid for all four before anyone could say anything.
"You really don't have to—" Mia started.
"You all came to study. It's like fifteen bucks. It's fine."
Sophie took her cup. "Okay, that was a good move."
"Thanks," Ethan said.
They hung out in front of the shop in the last of the warm evening — Sophie and Mia waiting for their bus, Jake's mom blowing up his phone about dinner, the usual end-of-Tuesday stuff happening around them.
Sophie tried her brown sugar milk tea, made a very satisfied noise, and held it out to Ethan without saying anything.
He tried it. It was, okay, better than expected.
He handed it back. "Still not getting full sugar."
"You're impossible," she said, but she was smiling.
Mia's bus showed up. She and Sophie grabbed their stuff, said bye in that easy way people do when they know they'll see each other in like fourteen hours, and jogged to the stop.
Jake's mom texted again.
"I gotta go," he said. He grabbed his bag, then stopped. "Hey. Ethan."
"Yeah."
"Thanks for today. For real." No sarcasm, no deflection. Just straightforward. "The pattern stuff. The explanation. It actually helped."
"Good," Ethan said. "Same time tomorrow."
Jake nodded and headed off.
They walked the same direction for three blocks. Comfortable quiet, milk teas in hand, the evening winding down around them — someone's dinner smell drifting out an open window, a dog going off somewhere nearby, streetlights popping on one by one.
They split at Elm and Castleton.
Ethan walked the last block alone.
He was actually thinking through the tutoring idea now — running the numbers for real. Ten students, two weeks, two sessions each. Thirty bucks a session, which was under market but totally reasonable for a peer tutor. Six hundred dollars, no overhead, no drama.
But he could do better.
He knew which question types were going to show up on the actual exam in three and a half weeks. Not from cheating — just from the fact that he'd already lived through this exam, knew how it worked, knew what it liked to throw at people. He could put together a two-week plan that hit exactly the spots where people were throwing away points.
Word would spread in like two days after that. Jefferson's senior class was three hundred people, all stressed out of their minds, all with parents who'd write a check if someone could actually deliver results.
He stopped at the convenience store, grabbed some chips, and stood on the sidewalk doing the math in his head.
Fifteen students. Three sessions each. Forty dollars a session.
Eighteen hundred dollars.
Add that to his $847 and he was looking at almost twenty-seven hundred.
He needed five grand to pull off the World Cup plan the way he wanted. But twenty-seven hundred was a real start. And he could run the tutoring on the side — three sessions a day in the two weeks before finals, no problem, wouldn't even mess with his own prep.
He crumpled the chip bag, stuffed it in his pocket, and kept walking.
He could hear his mom talking before he even got the key in the door.
"Robert, can you call him? He should've been home twenty minutes ago—"
Ethan pushed the door open. "I'm here, I'm here."
The smell hit him right away — his mom's chicken soup, the one with the garden vegetables and that specific mix of spices she'd never actually written down and always said she just knew. In his old life he'd gone almost a full year without smelling it. Coming home to it now, out of nowhere, hit him somewhere he wasn't ready for.
His mom came out of the kitchen with a dish towel on her shoulder, giving him that look — the one that meant she'd weighed how worried to be and landed somewhere between slightly concerned and ready to give a speech.
"Why so late? Were you actually studying or is that just what you're telling me?"
"Actually studying," Ethan said, dropping his bag by the stairs. "Study room on the third floor. Jake and Sophie were there too."
His mom looked at him for a second. The Sophie part seemed to shift something — her expression went from mildly suspicious to mildly curious, which was a whole different thing.
"Sophie?"
"Yeah."
"She's a nice girl."
"She is," Ethan said, keeping his voice totally neutral, and went to wash his hands.
His dad was already at the table, newspaper folded next to his placemat, doing that thing where he looked like he was reading but was really just having a quiet moment before dinner. His dad was someone who needed those quiet moments more than he ever said, which was something Ethan had figured out way too late the first time around.
"How'd the mock exam go?" his dad asked, not looking up.
"Good."
"How good?"
"1480."
His dad put the newspaper down. "Out of 1600?"
"Yeah."
His dad looked at him for a moment — surprised, then pleased, then something a little quieter behind that.
"Huh," he said.
"Yeah."
"Your mom's going to—"
"Don't tell her yet," Ethan said. "It's just a mock. I want to see how the real one goes first."
His dad raised one hand like, fair enough, and picked the newspaper back up.
Ethan sat down across from him and waited for dinner, listening to his mom moving around the kitchen, the soup pot bubbling on the stove, all the regular sounds of a Tuesday night in a house that was, he now fully got, exactly as good as it had always been.
He just hadn't really noticed the first time.
There are some advance chapters ahead in my Patreon. If you are interested can check it out.
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