At a diner several blocks from the convention center, he ordered grilled cheese and a milkshake. Okonkwo spread three sheets of paper beside the ketchup bottle and began listing possible objections to his proof, stopping when Danielle gave her a look. "Tomorrow," Danielle said. "For ten minutes, please let him eat like a child." Okonkwo folded the papers immediately, and Elijah smiled for the first time without feeling that his expression belonged to somebody watching him.
"Do you think Dr. Whitfield hates me?" he asked after a while.
Okonkwo took a moment. "I think he feels threatened by your work, and I think he handled that shamefully. Those are his feelings and his choices to manage. You don't have to fix them." Danielle reached for the check before Okonkwo could, determined to pay for at least one small part of this extraordinary trip herself. Elijah looked at the melting ice cream and tried to understand how doing mathematics had become a way of learning such difficult things about adults.
By early evening, the community center's volunteers had arranged a quiet classroom near the convention building where Elijah could prepare without reporters finding him. Okonkwo covered a whiteboard with the questions the panel might ask. On one side she wrote DEFINITIONS, and beneath it she listed the assumptions that restricted his construction. On the other she wrote WHAT IF, followed by several examples that had defeated earlier researchers. Elijah read the list and groaned.
"It's too much," he said. "Yesterday I was practicing five minutes. Now I have to answer everything."
"Not everything," Okonkwo replied. "You need to understand what you have claimed, what you have not claimed, and where you might be wrong. If somebody asks a question beyond your knowledge, you say so. That is an honest answer, not a failure."
She tapped the heading WHAT IF. "Nobody gets a perfect score in being a mathematician. You get better at learning what your ideas can survive."
She challenged him on a boundary state that had no outgoing transition. Elijah explained that his admissibility conditions ruled out that particular case, then discovered he had failed to write the condition clearly on his main slide. Okonkwo made him add it. Next she asked whether two different sequences could reach the same boundary with conflicting color assignments. He drew a square and traced both routes until he found the compatibility argument he needed, then corrected a symbol in his manuscript.
They worked steadily rather than frantically. The best preparation did not involve stuffing Elijah's head with a graduate mathematics course overnight. It involved separating the argument he understood from the terminology he had not learned yet. Okonkwo insisted on breaks for water and food, despite his belief that every minute not spent studying would be a minute someone else used to prepare an attack.