Age 13
Most people fade after midnight.
I don't.
The campus goes quiet, the lights thin out, and the air feels clearer, like all the extra noise has burned away. That's when I work best.
The library closes early during winter semester, so I study in my room. Desk lamp angled low, notebook open, half a cup of cold water beside me. My handwriting looks mechanical under the yellow light, lines too straight for thirteen.
The math comes first. Dr. Li's latest assignment: vector fields, gradients, directional derivatives, the kind of problems that unravel only if you already know how they end. I like that about them. They reward patience more than speed.
Somewhere down the hall, someone laughs too loud. The sound bounces once and dies. I keep writing.
After two hours the equations start to blur, not from confusion but from repetition. That's when I switch over, movement instead of numbers. Push-ups, slow stretches, balance drills in the small rectangle of floor between desk and bed. Ten minutes, fifteen. Breathing syncs with thought. It always does.
The trick isn't strength. It's control.
If I can hold still between movements, I can hold still between thoughts.
By morning, most of what I worked on looks easy. The notes make perfect sense, my body feels light, my head clear. The only evidence of fatigue is the clock, how little time passed since I started.
Paige noticed once. We were in the cafeteria line, trays balanced between us.
"You ever sleep?" she asked.
"Sometimes."
She raised an eyebrow but didn't push. That's what I liked about her, she never asked for answers she already knew.
Later that week we met in the library again. She was buried under a logic assignment; I was rewriting proofs for Li's class. Her pencil tapped every few seconds, a tiny metronome of frustration.
"You ever get tired of being right?" she muttered.
"Sometimes," I said again.
That earned me a faint smile, the kind you see but don't keep.
The hum of the dorm heater carried me back to another hum, Meemaw's old countertop fan on a Texas summer night. I must've been eight, elbows deep in pancake batter that didn't want to cooperate.
"Sugar," she'd said, tapping the bowl with her spoon, "you can't bully it into smooth. Some things only even out if you let 'em rest."
I'd rolled my eyes, certain rest was for people who ran out of equations.
Now, standing over a page of perfect math, I finally understood the lesson. Stillness is part of the formula. I just wasn't very good at the resting part.
Friday night on campus has its own kind of quiet, the loud sort that comes from everyone else being elsewhere. The dorm's common room glowed under fluorescent light, the TV muttering through a rerun no one was watching. A vending machine hummed in the corner, full of candy bars that had probably outlasted Reagan.
Paige sat cross-legged on the couch, hair loose, a notebook open on her knees. She looked up when I came in.
"You're supposed to be asleep," she said.
"So are you."
She smirked. "Couldn't. My brain keeps replaying Dr. Kim's lecture on data recursion. I swear I dreamed in brackets."
"I finished that assignment an hour ago."
"Of course you did." She closed her notebook halfway. "You ever wonder if we're missing something normal? Like movies, or parties, or the part where teenagers act their age?"
"Define normal."
"Exactly," she said, smiling. Then, softer: "You always sound like you've already done all this before."
"I just prefer when things make sense."
"Yeah, but sense gets boring."
She reached over and plucked one of the jellybeans from the open bag on the table, tossing it into her mouth. "So, what's the secret to not burning out?"
"Control," I said automatically.
She laughed quietly. "That's not rest, Stephen. That's fencing off exhaustion with logic."
"It works."
"For now." She leaned back against the couch, eyes half-closed. "You ever try letting the math wait till morning?"
"Equations don't sleep."
"Neither do you."
We sat there a while, the only sound the vending machine's low hum and the occasional creak of pipes in the ceiling. The TV faded into static, then silence.
She looked over finally. "Do you ever get scared you'll forget how to stop?"
I thought of Meemaw's kitchen again, the bowl, the fan, the lesson I'd ignored.
"I think I already did," I said.
Paige studied me like she was solving a proof with no clear answer. "Then start practicing."
The clock on the wall clicked over to midnight. She stood, gathering her things. "Goodnight, Professor Control."
"Goodnight, Insomniac Engineer."
She smiled as she passed, the faint scent of coffee clinging to her sweater. The door shut softly behind her.
Back in my room, the air was still warm from the heater. The notebook waited open on the desk. I looked at it a long time before sitting down again.
The first equation on the page was already solved, but I rewrote it anyway, tracing each symbol slower this time. Not for precision, for calm.
I'd started to notice something small. Equations had a kind of silence to them. Not emptiness, silence. The kind that hums just beneath what you can hear. Maybe that's why I liked working at night. No interference. Just quiet math and steady breath.
I thought about Paige's question, about stopping. About Meemaw and the batter that needed rest. Maybe people do, too. Maybe balance wasn't the absence of movement but the pause between repetitions.
The clock read 2:47 when I stopped. I turned off the lamp, the glow fading slow across the pages.
Tomorrow would be the same.
It needed to be.
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