Chapter 6: Round One

The Cup's first round was held in the Milledge Hall auditorium in front of three hundred people.

Four judges sat at a long table on the stage.

Our team sat at a desk on the left, and Peyton's team sat at a desk on the right.

Hannah was bouncing her knee so hard the whole desk shook.

"Stop," I whispered.

"I can't. I'm made of nerves."

The problem came out sealed in an envelope.

A judge read it aloud: a regional shipping company, forty-eight depots, and a fuel budget that had to be split to minimize late deliveries.

Four hours to model it.

Peyton's team started writing in the first minute.

They did not read.

They just wrote, fast and neat.

I frowned.

"Lou," the physics junior said. "We have to do the numbers first."

"We'll do them," I said. "Watch their pens."

I took ten minutes to look at the problem the way I look at a field in the morning.

I found where the work was heavy, and where it was only noise.

By the end of the hour, I had a rough model on the page and Hannah had the statistics lined up behind it.

At the twenty-minute mark, a judge stood.

"A correction," she said. "The fuel budget printed in your packet is wrong. The figure is forty, not forty-eight. Please adjust."

A groan went through the room.

Every team rewrote their first page.

Except one.

On the right side of the stage, Preston did not erase a thing.

His page already said forty, in his own neat hand, and it had said forty since the first minute.

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