At ten-thirty he stood in front of the hotel bathroom mirror, practicing a calmer version of his introduction. He tried not to picture Whitfield interrupting him again, but the professor's voice kept appearing in his thoughts. Every imagined interruption made Elijah's chest tighten. He looked at his reflection and whispered, "I know this part. I really do." Then he remembered Okonkwo's instruction and changed the sentence to something he could trust: "I can show how I checked this part."
Danielle found him a little after eleven, sitting on the carpet by his bed with his phone. He had been reading comments about the live stream, most of them kind and some casually cruel. Strangers claimed he must have cheated, or that Okonkwo had written the paper, or that the symposium was using him for publicity. One person wrote that a child from Roxbury could never understand mathematics at that level without secret help, and Elijah had read the sentence so many times it was becoming louder than every compliment.
His mother took the phone, not angrily, and placed it face down on the dresser. "Those people weren't there when you were erasing mistakes at our table," she said. "They weren't there when you got confused and kept trying. They don't get to tell the story of your work just because they know how to leave a comment." Elijah asked whether the critics might still be right. Danielle answered that his proof might contain errors because proofs sometimes did, but an error would not turn him into a liar.
They made a small agreement. No more comment sections until the event was over, and no more practice after midnight. Danielle left the bathroom light on because Elijah disliked complete darkness in unfamiliar rooms. When he finally lay down, he could hear trucks moving through the city below the hotel window. He slept in short stretches, dreaming once that every page of his notebook had become blank and once that he was standing at a microphone no taller than his waist.
At five forty-five he opened his eyes and accepted that sleep was finished. He checked the corner diagram one last time, then closed the notebook instead of finding another possible problem. His mother brought him cereal and a banana from the hotel's breakfast room. As pale morning light appeared between buildings, Elijah ate slowly and tried to imagine a version of the coming day in which nobody needed to lose for mathematics to gain something.
The next morning the Boston Convention Center had become a place Elijah barely recognized. Satellite trucks lined the curb, and news crews crowded around the entrance beneath the symposium banners. Someone had posted a photograph of him kneeling to collect his papers, captioned with the question of whether a ten-year-old had embarrassed a famous professor. Other posts showed the corrected graph and praised him as a once-in-a-generation genius. Elijah disliked both versions; neither looked like the person who had eaten cereal in a hotel room an hour earlier.