Page 10 of Alice Chen's Reality Check

I know exactly who she means. I glare at her. “We don’t speak of him in this household.”

“Still sore about that, huh?” Cindy snickers.

That’s an understatement. Even though it’s been years, I haven’t forgotten my old high school nemesis and greatest academic rival. I still remember the first time we met, the memories vivid and almost too sharp. It was one month into my freshman year of high school, the day I made my debut as a member of Eastridge’s Quiz Bowl team at our first competition.

As the only freshman who’d made the cut, I was the most junior member of the team, and I had everything to prove. I’d started the morning in a bad mood, but that was nothing new. Back then, a feeling of wrongness hovered over me like my own personal rain cloud.

“You come home so late! Why even come back at all?”

“You’re right. If I didn’t come home, I wouldn’t have to listen to you complaining all the time!”

I was haunted by the jagged shards of overheard arguments and the suffocatingly quiet dinners that followed. When I closed my eyes, I could see my dad’s car pulling out of the driveway for the last time, the rear lights casting an eerie glow on the garage door in the night.

But none of that mattered in Quiz Bowl.

No one was expecting much from me or from our team that day. Eastridge didn’t have a reputation for winning. Our school usually had trouble even fielding a full team.

To make matters worse, we were up against Charles Exeter Prep, one of the most expensive and exclusive boys’ prep schools in the state—the kind where the guys all wore tailored suits and shiny shoes and carried briefcases instead of backpacks.

No one even glanced our way as we took our places.

The Quiz Bowl moderator was already at the podium in the center. He looked like someone’s poor uncle, dressed in an ill-fitting suit and a crumpled tie. After introducing our teams to the audience—a handful of dedicated parents, two teachers, and Cindy, who had stopped by before SAT tutoring—he jumped into the questions.

“Okay,” the moderator began, “let’s start off with something easy.What is the chemical symbol for ordinary table salt?”

I slammed my hand on my buzzer before anyone else could even twitch.

“NaCl,” I said, adrenaline rushing through me. The Exeter Prep boys looked startled. They probably expected our team to just give up and wave the white flag of surrender, but here I was putting up a fight. Even their captain was eyeing me with a narrowed look. The competition had only just begun, but I was loving every second.

“Slay, queen!” Cindy called from the stands. She’d produced little pom-poms from her backpack and was cheering like this was the homecoming game. I should’ve known that even if she could only show up for a few minutes, she’d show up big.

“Next category is classic literature,” the moderator said. “InThe Great Gatsby, what does the color green symbolize?”

My hand smashed the buzzer, but the Exeter Prep captain beat me to it.

“Hope,” he said, looking right at me. He was challenging me.

I scowled back. I had to be faster. Better.

“What is mitosis?”

I buzzed in before the moderator even finished the question.

“The process of cell division,” I said, my words tumbling out in a rush.

“Correct again!”

As a freshman, I wasn’t eligible to be captain, but question after question, it was my hand that hit the buzzer first, and my answers that lit up the scoreboard. The only person who posed a threat to me was the captain of the opposing team, and with every question it felt more and more like a duel between just the two of us.

As I competed, the feeling of wrongness that had been plaguing me dropped away. There wasn’t much I had control over back then—not my family, not the way I could hear my mother crying in the bathroom, not the fact that we were moving out of the house I grew up in and into a one-bedroom apartment—but I could control the outcome of thismatch, and I was going to win. All those long hours of studying would be worth it.

At the break, the Exeter Prep captain approached me. I was reviewing my flash cards and snacking on haw flakes in an isolated corner of the gym with my back against the wall, my fingers idly tearing the paper tube to shreds.

The captain loomed over me, a scarecrow of a teen boy, with a thin frame and broad shoulders. His hair was black, cut short and even, perfectly neat except for an errant strand that I’d seen him brush away from his dark brown eyes throughout the competition. He had high cheekbones and a pretty face, which was a weird thought to have, and I shoved it away immediately.

“Hey, I’m Daniel,” he said with a friendly smile, sticking out his hand.

I stared at him suspiciously, ignoring his hand. “Daniel Cho. I already know who you are.”

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