After dinner he showered, cracked open a Gatorade from the fridge, and lay on his bed with his phone.
Out of pure muscle memory from another life, he opened the App Store and typed TikTok into the search bar.
No results found.
He stared at the screen.
Of course. It was May 2014. TikTok wouldn't launch for another two years. Its real explosion — the moment short-form video stopped being a novelty and became infrastructure — wouldn't come until 2018, when the user numbers crossed thresholds that would have seemed completely fictional to anyone sitting in this bedroom right now.
He set the phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling.
Short-form video. Social commerce. The creator economy. The entire ecosystem that was about to get built on top of mobile infrastructure that was, right now, just barely mature enough to support it. He knew which platforms would win. He knew which ones would get acqui-hired, which ones would IPO, which ones would flame out spectacularly despite every advantage.
He had a complete map of the next decade sitting in his head.
What he didn't have was the capital to act on any of it.
World Cup first, he thought. Then everything else.
He closed his eyes and ran the bracket from memory until he fell asleep.
Tuesday morning, Mr. Henderson walked in with the graded mock exams tucked under one arm and his coffee in the other hand, gold-rimmed glasses slightly askew, the same navy cardigan as always.
He set the stack on his desk.
Henderson adjusted his glasses and looked out at the room.
"Before I return these, I want to acknowledge some strong performances." He picked up one paper from the top of the stack. "I'll start with the most significant. Ethan Hayes — 1480."
The room stirred.
"That's a 210-point improvement from your previous mock."
The stirring became actual noise. Someone in the third row said what out loud. Someone near the window turned around to look at Ethan directly.
Henderson regarded Ethan over the rim of his glasses with an expression that was equal parts appreciation and genuine curiosity. "Keep that trajectory through the real thing and you're looking at top programs across the board."
"Thanks, Mr. H," Ethan said, leaning back in his chair.
"Maybe aim for the ceiling and see what you find."
"I'll think about it."
Henderson held his gaze for a moment longer than usual, then moved on to distributing papers.
The second he turned back to the board, it started.
Mia spun in her seat. "210 points."
"Mm."
"From one mock to the next."
"More or less."
She stared at him. "How, specifically."
"I figured out where I was losing points and stopped losing them there."
"Ethan, that is literally not an explanation—"
"It's the whole explanation."
"It's a fortune cookie." She turned back to face front, shaking her head. "210 points. Unbelievable."
Jake leaned across from the next aisle. "Okay I saw the score sheet when Henderson was sorting them. 1480. Do you understand what that means?"
"Generally yes."
"That's everywhere, man. That's any school you want."
"Most schools."
"Every school that matters." Jake pointed at him with his pen. "You're going somewhere insane aren't you. Like Princeton."
"Haven't decided."
"Princeton," Jake said, nodding slowly, like he was confirming a theory he'd always held. "Calling it now."
Sophie appeared from two rows over, arms folded, paper in hand, looking at Ethan the way someone looks at a vending machine that gave them two snacks for the price of one — pleased but slightly suspicious.
"Reading section," she said. "The paired passages. The two that contradicted each other. Walk me through your approach."
"Find the thing they agree on," Ethan said. "There's always something. That's your anchor. You build the synthesis from there."
Sophie uncrossed her arms. Looked at the ceiling briefly. Looked back at him. "That's going to bother me that I didn't think of it."
"Jake knew," Ethan said. "I told him yesterday."
Sophie turned to Jake.
"I forgot," Jake said.
"I cannot stand either of you," Sophie said, and went back to her seat.
Meanwhile, two rows back, Connor Walsh was reviewing his own paper with the focused devastation of a man itemizing a car accident.
Mia leaned over to check his score, winced sympathetically, and patted his shoulder once.
At the window seat, Dylan Park had his exam upside down on the desk like he was hoping it would improve if he didn't look at it directly.
Across the room, the general post-exam autopsy was underway — students comparing answers, identifying the questions that had gotten everyone, reconstructing the crime scene of the stats section in particular, which had apparently been brutal enough to qualify as a shared trauma.
Henderson let it run for a few minutes, then called the room back to order.
"The questions with the highest error rate this exam were the paired reading synthesis, the statistics problem in section four, and the final essay's argumentative structure. We're going to spend this period walking through all three." He uncapped his marker. "Pay attention — these same patterns will appear in three and a half weeks."
Ethan opened his notebook and took notes he didn't need, because it looked right and because Mr. Henderson deserved the respect of appearing to have the room's attention.
Lunch.
Riverside Subs, corner table, all four of them — Ethan, Jake, Sophie, Mia.
The score breakdowns came out properly over sandwiches.
Jake: 1180. Up forty points, still room to move.
Mia: 1420. Solid, frustrated about the essay.
Sophie: 1390. The paired passage had cost her, she'd calculated exactly how many points and was still annoyed about it.
Ethan: 1480.
"Okay so here's the full class breakdown as I understand it," Jake said, counting on his fingers. "You're second in the class. Mia's third. Sophie's fourth. Connor's probably fifth but he looked like he was going to cry so I didn't ask."
"First in the class?" Ethan asked.
"Grace Yoon," Mia said. "She doesn't talk about it but Henderson basically told her she could go anywhere she wants. She got a 1510 last mock."
Ethan nodded. He remembered Grace Yoon — quiet, meticulous, full ride to Northwestern in the previous life. Good.
"Alright," he said, finishing his sandwich. "Study room after school. All of us."
Sophie pointed at him. "Already planned on it."
Jake pointed at him. "You said no gaming café."
"Still no gaming café."
Jake sighed. "Fine. But I'm bringing snacks."
"Bring enough for everyone," Mia said.
"That's going to cost me—"
"Jake."
"Fine."
The third-floor study room filled up steadily after the final bell — seniors spreading out across the long tables, backpacks unloading, the low collective hum of twenty-some people trying to get serious about the next three weeks.
Ethan claimed a table near the window. Jake, Sophie, and Mia filled the other three seats.
Jake, true to his word, produced a bag of chips, two granola bars, and a pack of Oreos from his backpack like a magician with a very specific act.
"I said enough for everyone," Mia said.
"This is enough for everyone. Collectively."
Sophie took an Oreo. "I'll allow it."
They settled in.
Sophie and Mia opened their physics materials and went to work immediately. Within five minutes they were deep in problem sets, pencils moving steadily, the occasional murmured exchange about a specific formula.
Jake opened his backpack, looked into it, took out a notebook, put it back, took out a different notebook, looked at it, set it on the table, then took out a third notebook and arranged all three in front of him without opening any of them.
Ethan watched this for approximately ten seconds.
Then he reached over, took Jake's middle notebook, opened it to a blank page, and started writing.
He wrote for about seven minutes — a structured breakdown of the question types that appeared consistently on the exam, the patterns underneath the surface variation, the specific traps that were built into each category and how to recognize them before they cost you points. The kind of pattern recognition that took most people years of test prep to develop.
He slid it across the table.
Jake read it. Read it again.
"Did you just write me a cheat sheet."
"It's not a cheat sheet. The format is public information. This is just pattern recognition written down."
"Where did you get this from."
"I've been thinking about it."
Jake looked at the page again. "Ethan. This is — this is genuinely useful. Like actually useful." He looked up. "You should charge for this."
Ethan kept his expression neutral. "Focus on the reading section. Third pattern on the list. That's where you dropped the most points today."
Jake uncapped his pen and finally, actually, started working.
Sophie glanced over from her physics problems. "Can I get a copy of that?"
"You don't need it," Ethan said. "Your issue is synthesis framing, not pattern recognition. That's different."
Sophie considered this. "...Accurate." She went back to her physics.
Ethan worked through a practice set with the surface attention but his mind was running a separate calculation entirely.
Jake's comment kept sitting there. You should charge for this.
He did the math quietly.
The exam was three and a half weeks out. Every senior in this school was currently in some degree of panic. He had a 1480 mock score, a 210-point improvement that was already the talk of the third floor, and knowledge of exactly which question types were going to appear on the actual exam and why.
Ten students. Two sessions each. Thirty dollars a session.
Six hundred dollars. Clean, legitimate, no questions asked.
Added to his existing $847, that was nearly fifteen hundred.
Still short of where he wanted to be for the World Cup. But it was a real number, not a hypothetical one. And it could scale — twelve students, three sessions, forty dollars. The variables were flexible.
He wrote a number in the margin of his notebook.
Circled it.
Flipped to a new page and started drafting, in small neat handwriting, what a two-week tutoring session would actually look like. What he'd cover, in what order, what results he could reasonably promise.
Mia looked up from her physics, caught Ethan writing something that wasn't a practice problem, and raised an eyebrow.
He turned the notebook slightly so she couldn't read it.
She went back to her physics.
Outside the window, Columbus was doing its late-May thing — golden afternoon light, the smell of cut grass drifting up from the soccer fields, the particular quality of air that meant school was almost over and summer was right there on the other side of something hard.
Twenty-five days.
Ethan kept writing.
There are some advance chapters ahead in my Patreon. If you are interested can check it out.
patreon.com/B_A_3439