Chapter 1: The Monument to Bad Math
The architecture studio at the University of Geneva was supposed to be a place of perfect silence. It was a beautiful, grand room with giant windows, polished concrete floors, and long oak tables. The school wanted the students to think deep, serious, and professional thoughts.
For Isla, it was a place of total, hilarious panic.
Isla was a first-year student from England. She was cheerful, she smiled a lot, and she was completely, spectacularly terrible at the metric system. Back home, she measured things in inches and feet. Here, everything was in centimeters and millimeters. Her British brain was currently melting into a puddle.
Her assignment was to build a beautiful, precise cardboard model of a modern pavilion. Instead, Isla had built a cardboard monster. Because of her terrible math, the curved roof looked like a crushed, deflated taco. To make matters worse, she had used so much superglue that her thumb was now literally stuck to a tiny plastic model tree.
"Brilliant," Isla whispered to herself, tugging at her hand. The little green tree stayed firmly attached to her skin. "I have built a house for ants, and I am also trapped in it."
She sighed and looked across the giant drafting table.
Sitting directly opposite her was Soren. Soren was a third-year student from Canada, and he was an absolute legend in the school. He was famous for two things: making perfect models that looked like they belonged in a museum, and never talking to anyone. Ever.
Right now, Soren was in his own perfect world. He wore a neat grey sweater and a pair of massive, matte-black noise-canceling headphones. His desk was so clean it looked illegal. His pencils were lined up by size, his ruler was perfectly straight, and he was calmly drawing a blueprint on his laptop, looking like a very handsome, cool robot.
They had shared this exact desk for two whole weeks, and Soren had not even blinked in her direction. He arrived at noon, put his headphones on, and vanished into his work.
Isla looked back at her sad taco building. The project was due tomorrow morning at eight. If she did not fix the roof, she would fail her first big assignment. The school rules said students had to work completely alone, but Isla was desperate.
She picked up a bright green marker. She found a scrap piece of clean cardboard and wrote a message in giant letters:
“HELP! My building looks like a sad taco. My thumb is currently glued to a tree. How do I calculate a 1:50 curve before I start crying?”
She held her breath, aimed carefully, and slid the note across the table.
She pushed it a little too hard. The cardboard note skipped across the wood, crossed the invisible border line between their desks, and hit Soren's expensive laptop with a loud thack.
Isla instantly froze. She wanted to crawl under the table, find a dark corner, and live there for the rest of her life.
Soren did not move for ten long, agonizing seconds. Then, his hand stopped on his computer mouse. He slowly looked down at the bright green note resting against his keyboard. He stared at the word taco.
Slowly, Soren reached up and pulled one side of his headphones off his ear, letting it rest against his neck. He looked across the table, his winter-blue eyes staring straight into Isla's soul.
Isla did not act cool or professional. Instead, she gave him a massive, incredibly awkward smile. She raised her right hand—the one with the fake plastic tree firmly glued to her thumb—and gave him a weak, trembling wave. The little green branches shook in the air.
Soren stared at the tree on her thumb. Then he looked at the sad cardboard building. For a fraction of a second, his left eyebrow twitched. He looked like a very serious doctor examining a highly unusual medical emergency.
He did not say a single word. Breaking the silence of the studio was clearly against his personal code. Instead, he grabbed a heavy silver mechanical pencil and flipped her note over to the clean side.
With quick, angry-looking but absolutely perfect lines, he drew a flawless diagram of her roof. He wrote down a simple formula that even a child could understand, bypassing the metric confusion entirely.
At the bottom of the diagram, he wrote in neat, precise block letters:
1. Stop using an entire bottle of glue. The paper is drowning.
2. Use acetone to unglue your thumb. It is in the yellow cabinet by the door.
3. Please do not throw things at my computer again.
Soren slid the note back across the desk. Without waiting a single second for a thank you, he slapped his headphones back over his ear, clicked his mouse, and went right back to typing, completely blocking her out again.
Isla picked up the note. To her surprise, the math actually made total sense now. She looked across the table at Soren, who was already ignoring her existence, and smiled a wide, goofy smile.
She might be a walking disaster, but at least she had a very smart, very quiet, and very annoyed tutor now. She stood up to go find the acetone, ready to unglue her thumb and give her sad taco a second chance.
To be continued........
