They Rejected My Daughter novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Last Problem

The judge turned the two sheets over at the same moment.

The problem was printed in plain black type.

It described a row of numbers in which every number was the sum of the two before it, and it gave the fifth and the eighth and asked for the twelfth.

I read it from the third row on the big screen and understood about half.

Ruby's pencil moved at once.

She wrote for maybe a quarter of a minute, glanced up, wrote again and circled something with a flick.

Her hand went up.

"Cedar Hill has an answer," the judge said.

The gym went dead silent.

On the floor Chloe had not looked up.

She was writing a number, and then another number, and then she stopped to count something on her fingers under the table.

"Ruby has it," Chloe's father whispered. "She's going to win."

"Wait," said Ms. Walmsley.

The judge took Ruby's sheet, looked at the circled number and consulted the key.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That is not correct."

Ruby's mouth fell open a little.

The braid girl at the Cedar Hill table put both hands on her head.

"I used the wrong starting pair," Ruby said. She said it out loud, to nobody, and then she put her pencil down flat. "I skipped a step. I knew the pattern and I skipped a step."

"Ridgeline may continue," the judge said.

Chloe kept writing.

I could see her paper from where I sat, and it was nothing like Ruby's.

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