A week later, the results were posted on the same announcement board where the sign-up sheet had been. A crowd had already formed, a low buzz of anticipation filling the humid hallway. Eric pushed his way through, his heart hammering against his ribs. He saw Dian and Tom near the front, craning their necks.
"There! Rank one!" someone shouted. "Adrian, of course. 98 out of 100. Gila."
The murmurs were a mix of awe and resignation. Adrian was a force of nature, an undisputed fact of their school's academic life. Eric's eyes skipped past the top name, scanning the list below. His breath caught in his throat. He scanned it again, slower this time. Rank 3… Rank 4… they were all grade 11 students. He felt a cold dread creep into his stomach. Maybe he hadn't made it.
Then he saw it.
Eric Chris - 85/100
He had made it. He was on the team. But the fifteen-point gap between him and Adrian felt less like a gap and more like a chasm. It was an imperfect victory, a win that felt unsettlingly close to a loss.
A few minutes later, the summons came. "Adrian and Eric, please report to Mr. Budi's desk."
Mr. Budi sat with their two test papers spread out before him, a study in contrasts. Adrian's was a work of art, every answer confined to its designated space, the handwriting a neat, efficient script. Eric's looked like a battlefield, covered in frantic scribbles, crossed-out equations, and sprawling diagrams that bled into the margins.
"Adrian," Mr. Budi began, beaming as he tapped the pristine paper. "Excellent work. Truly flawless execution. Your derivations are textbook-perfect. This is exactly what we need to represent the school."
Adrian gave a slight, confident nod. "Thank you, Sir."
Then, Mr. Budi's gaze shifted to Eric, his expression turning complex. He picked up Eric's paper as if handling a strange artifact. "Eric… your paper was a mess. Your methods are… unorthodox. You almost ran out of time, and you left two multiple-choice questions blank. But this final question..."
He pointed to the chaotic scrawl at the very end of the test. "The official solution provided by the OSN committee is three pages of complex calculus involving relative velocities. You did it in half a page with a diagram and a simple statement about the center of mass. I spent an hour last night convincing myself it was correct. I've never seen it solved that way. How?"
Eric felt a flush of heat rise to his cheeks. "Uh… my pen fell, Sir."
Mr. Budi raised an eyebrow.
"When my pen fell, I realized the rocket's explosion was an internal force," Eric explained, gaining confidence as he spoke the language of physics. "So it couldn't change the trajectory of the system's center of mass. The center of mass had to follow the same simple parabolic path the rocket would have, as if there was no explosion at all."
Mr. Budi stared at him for a long moment, a look of grudging respect warring with deep-seated skepticism. "A clever insight, Eric. Very clever. But cleverness won't be enough. The city-level competition is about speed and rigor. You can't rely on pens falling from the sky to save you. You need to build the discipline to solve problems the standard way, with the speed and precision of Adrian. You have a lot of work to do."
The message was clear: Be more like him.
As Eric walked away from the desk, a mix of relief and frustration swirling inside him, a voice cut through his thoughts.
"He doesn't get it."
He turned. Leaning against the classroom doorframe was a senior student from Kelas 12. She had short, sharp-cut hair and an air of relaxed intelligence. Eric recognized her instantly: Rina, the school's OSN Physics champion from two years ago, a local legend who had made it to the national training camp.
"I saw your test paper," she said with a wry smile, pushing herself off the doorframe. "Budi's a good teacher, but he's a teacher. He sees the textbook. That center of mass trick? That's how you solve problems at the international level, when you have ten minutes for a problem that should take thirty."
A spark of validation lit up inside Eric.
"But he's also right," Rina continued, her smile vanishing. "Your foundations are sloppy. You rely on the 'aha!' moment because you haven't mastered the basics. Your cleverness is a crutch."
She hefted a thick, worn binder she was carrying and held it out to him. "This was my training material."
Eric took it. It was heavy, filled with hundreds of pages of densely printed text and diagrams.
"Forget Adrian," Rina said, her tone suddenly serious. "He's a big fish in a small pond. He'll hit a wall at the national level where memorization isn't enough. Your real enemies are the kids who think like you, but they've been doing this in specialized training camps since they were twelve. They have the intuition and the rigor. Try this one."
She flipped the binder open to the first page and pointed to the top problem.
Eric looked down. He expected to see something about blocks on inclined planes or electric circuits. But the words on the page seemed to be written in a foreign language.
Problem 1: A bead of mass m is threaded on a frictionless circular hoop of radius R. The hoop is rotated with a constant angular velocity ω about a vertical diameter. Find the stable equilibrium positions of the bead using Lagrangian mechanics and analyze the system's stability in a non-inertial reference frame co-rotating with the hoop.
Lagrangian mechanics? Non-inertial reference frame? He hadn't just never heard of the concepts; he didn't even know what to ask. The comfortable world of high school physics evaporated in an instant, replaced by a terrifying, boundless landscape of things he did not know.
The gap between him and his dream, the dream of being a physicist, suddenly seemed impossibly, astronomically wide.