The first club meeting drew eleven students. The second drew seventeen. A few came because they wanted to meet Elijah, but most stayed because they enjoyed problems that did not have a single answer printed on the back of a workbook. Ms. Johnson developed a rule that no student could say a question was stupid and no teacher could claim to know an answer merely to avoid admitting uncertainty. The rule was written on a poster near the door in several languages spoken by the children at home.
Some students brought interests that had little in common with Elijah's. Marcus wanted to understand why basketball shots sometimes bounced differently off the rim. Amara wanted to design a paper bridge that could survive rain. Nia wanted to know how many ways she could arrange her dancing shoes by color without putting the same color beside itself. Each question became an opportunity to talk about patterns, measurements, definitions, and why checking assumptions mattered.
Elijah helped when he could, but Okonkwo was careful not to make him the club's unpaid teacher. He needed a place to learn from adults as much as a place to inspire other children. She arranged a remote enrichment class with a university graduate student who enjoyed explaining difficult ideas to younger learners. On Saturdays Elijah sometimes worked alone in a corner, exploring new problems whose diagrams had nothing to do with Hartwell. Other days he played with the younger children and forgot that newspapers had called him extraordinary.
The opportunity to attend advanced classes brought its own social difficulty. Some classmates began treating Elijah as different, asking him to finish their homework or assuming he thought he was smarter than they were. One boy who had teased him for drawing squares stopped inviting him to play basketball, convinced that Elijah would now prefer famous people. Elijah came home upset and admitted he had not known how to ask for the invitation. Danielle suggested that he tell the boy directly that he still wanted to play, rather than waiting for someone else to guess his feelings.
The conversation was awkward. Elijah caught Marcus after school and asked whether they could use the outdoor court on Saturday. Marcus looked surprised, then said he had assumed Elijah would be traveling to a university. Elijah laughed and told him that he was not traveling anywhere that weekend unless Ruth needed groceries. They spent Saturday afternoon playing until the ball rolled beneath a parked car, and the other children slowly began treating him like the boy they had known before Boston.