Chapter 13: The Morning After
North Shore High School. Chicago. The next morning.
Owen locked his bike at the rack and turned toward the front entrance.
Then stopped.
A group of junior girls near the steps clocked him, went quiet, and immediately broke into whispered conversation, two of them glancing back over their shoulders with expressions somewhere between curiosity and disbelief. A sophomore he'd never spoken to gave him a small wave from across the parking lot. Another girl he recognized from AP English caught his eye, looked quickly away, then looked back.
He kept walking.
By the time he'd gotten through the front doors and down the first hallway, he'd counted eleven separate interactions that had not existed in his life twenty-four hours ago — waves, nods, one extremely enthusiastic "Hey, Owen!" from a girl whose name he was fairly certain started with a B, and one girl who simply stopped walking entirely and stared at him with her mouth slightly open until her friend pulled her by the sleeve.
Ah, Owen thought. The party.
Of course.
A house full of teenagers, thin walls, and Karen Jackson's particular vocal range — it had apparently covered the full distance from the second floor to the cul-de-sac and then, via cell phone and Monday morning hallway conversation, the full distance from the Schuler house to every corner of North Shore High School by eight AM.
He arrived at his locker.
The guy at the locker next to his — a senior who had never once acknowledged Owen's existence — turned, looked at him, and gave him a slow, solemn nod. The kind of nod that meant something specific.
Owen opened his locker.
This is fine, he thought. This is completely fine.
It was not fine in the sense that any part of his school day proceeded normally.
In first period, Mr. Harrison — Calculus, dry-humored, reliably professional — finished his lesson, dismissed the class, and then, as Owen was packing up, caught his eye and gave him a thumbs-up with an expression that said well done, son in a way that no words would have communicated better.
The three students still within earshot lost it completely.
Owen walked out of the classroom with the measured dignity of someone who had decided, as a policy, not to react to any of this.
After school. Math Olympiad practice room.
Owen came through the door and his shoulder immediately dropped two inches under the weight of an arm that had been placed there with significant enthusiasm.
"Hey, buddy."
He turned his head.
Marcus Webb — his primary competition for team captain, a six-foot junior with a 4.2 GPA and the competitive instincts of a Division I recruit — was standing beside him with an expression Owen had never seen on his face before. Open. Warm. Faintly desperate.
Marcus and Owen had a functional rivalry. They were cordial at competitions, professional during practice, and had never once called each other buddy.
Owen looked at the hand on his shoulder. Looked at Marcus.
"Marcus," he said. "What's going on."
"Nothing!" Marcus removed the hand, recalibrated. "I'm just saying — we're teammates. We don't hang out enough. We should hang out more." He smiled with slightly too much effort. "Right?"
"Mm-hm."
Owen walked to a desk, sat down, set his bag on the floor, and crossed his arms. He had time before the session started. He looked at Marcus with the patient expression of someone who was willing to wait this out.
Marcus lasted about eight seconds.
"Okay, look." He pulled up a chair, sat backward on it, and leaned his arms on the back. "You know what today has been like? I have talked to more girls today — girls who came up to me — than in the entire previous semester combined. And every single one of them was asking about you." He held up both hands. "I'm not even mad about it. It still felt incredible. I don't fully understand what's happening but I want to stay near it."
Owen said nothing.
"I want to be your wingman," Marcus said. "Official wingman. I will be the most loyal, most capable, most dedicated wingman in the history of North Shore High School. I will take the hard conversations. I will run interference. I will talk to the friend so you can talk to the girl. Whatever the operation requires."
Owen looked at him. "And when the operation fails, the wingman covers the retreat?"
"With your current status?" Marcus waved a hand. "Operations don't fail. I ran the probability. You're sitting at like a ninety-plus percent success rate right now. This is a historically favorable environment. Even as wingman I'm going to see numbers I've never seen before." He leaned forward. "Owen. I have been labeled a nerd since the sixth grade. By my own lab partners. I am asking you, man to man, to let me be adjacent to whatever this is."
Owen looked at him for a long moment.
Marcus Webb was, objectively, one of the sharpest people in the building. His math was genuinely excellent — native talent, Level 4 at minimum, the kind that Owen, with all his late nights and System upgrades and accumulated dedication, could not comfortably claim he'd beat in a straight race. The team captain distinction had gone to Owen by a narrow margin built on preparation and consistency, not raw ability.
He was also, clearly, a fundamentally decent person who had just spent an entire day experiencing what it felt like when the social tide shifted slightly in his direction, and who was now responding to that experience with complete honesty.
Owen appreciated honesty.
"You understand the wingman position," Owen said, "is not glamorous."
"I understand."
"You take the difficult conversations. You run the distractions. You absorb the awkward silences."
"Fully prepared."
"And you do all of this," Owen said, "on the long odds that some of it reflects back."
"Thirty percent reflected," Marcus said immediately, with the confidence of someone who had already done this math, "is thirty percent more than zero." He extended his hand. "Deal?"
Owen looked at the hand.
The System had been quiet all day — processing, cataloguing, doing whatever the System did with a school full of secondary contacts and shifting social dynamics. Owen could feel it in the background, gathering data on the new landscape the previous night had created.
Wild Card probability across multiple contacts, it had noted this morning. Expanding.
More contacts. More story intersections. More potential.
He shook Marcus's hand.
"Ground rules," Owen said. "First: you call me Owen. Not buddy, not bro, not any variation. Owen."
"Done."
"Second: you don't tell anyone you're the wingman. That's not a thing that gets announced."
"Obviously. Announcing it defeats the purpose."
"Third," Owen said, "if things go sideways on an operation, you don't bail. You stay in it until we're both clear."
Marcus put his hand over his heart. "On my mother."
Owen nodded once. "Okay."
Marcus exhaled like a man who had just been approved for a mortgage he'd spent months worrying about. "Okay." He stood up, straightened his chair, resumed a normal posture for when the rest of the team came in. "This is going to be a good semester."
"We'll see," Owen said.
He opened his notebook.
Down the hall, he could hear the usual after-school sounds — lockers, sneakers, someone's music leaking from their headphones. The completely ordinary infrastructure of a Tuesday afternoon.
Somewhere in it, three separate girls were apparently planning to find reasons to be near the Math Olympiad room in the next forty minutes. Marcus had mentioned this with the reverence of a man reporting a natural phenomenon.
Owen uncapped his pen.
Level 4 Intelligence. One Wild Card spent. Eighty-two Existence Points remaining.
A long road ahead. Sheldon in Austin, writing letters. Leonard somewhere in New Jersey, not yet arrived at Caltech. The group not yet formed. Years of groundwork still to lay before the real work started.
But Chicago was turning out to be full of story.
He started on the practice problems.
Let's push the story forward!
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