"What regions are we coloring?" Elijah asked. "You drew the surface, but you haven't divided it into a map. If you put different maps on the strip, they can need different numbers of colors. Do you want me to build a particular graph on it?"
For a moment Whitfield seemed uncertain. "I'm asking a conceptual question," he said. "I would expect someone presenting work on coloring to understand the topological distinction."
"I think I do," Elijah replied. "A Mobius strip can hold lots of different maps. There's no one answer until you tell me the map and the adjacency rule. I don't want to guess the answer to a question you haven't finished asking." He was almost whispering by the end, yet the final sentence carried across the auditorium.
Brooks looked toward Ruiz with the involuntary smile of a teacher hearing a student identify an essential missing condition. Ruiz addressed Whitfield directly. "That is a sound clarification. If you want him to analyze a specific embedding, provide one. If you want him to distinguish the surface from the graph on it, he has done so."
Whitfield called the answer a technicality, but several reviewers shook their heads. A mathematician on the remote panel remarked that defining the problem was often the most technically important step.
Elijah should have felt relieved. Instead, all the fear he had been holding in place escaped at once. His eyes blurred; he tried to read his notes, found he could not, and heard himself ask, "Why are you doing this to me?" The question came out before he could decide whether to say it. Whitfield looked startled, as though a child crying at the end of a long public interrogation were an unexpected turn in an experiment.
"I just wanted to show my work," Elijah said, wiping his face with a sleeve that had been too long for him the day before and now seemed useful. "I know I don't know everything. I never said I did. But every time I answer, you make it sound like I shouldn't be here." His voice broke, and for several seconds he could not speak.
In the auditorium Danielle rose halfway from her chair. Okonkwo was already moving toward the stage, but Park reached the microphone first. "We're taking a short break," she announced. "Elijah has been asked difficult questions and deserves a moment to rest. The review will continue only if he and his parent agree."
Elijah shook his head. He was ashamed of the tears and terrified that leaving the room would be treated as proof Whitfield had been right. "Can I finish?" he whispered.
Park stepped toward him so he would not have to address the entire room. "Of course you can," she replied. "And you can also stop. Those are both legitimate choices."