Timothy gulped one of the pills.
At first, there was nothing. Seconds later, there was a tingling sensation—like static electricity brushing across his scalp. His eyes widened as the feeling spread down his neck, into his chest, then into his fingertips. His vision sharpened, as if someone had turned the contrast up on reality.
And then, something stranger happened.
Numbers.
Not written on the walls, not hallucinations, but memories.
"The derivative of sine is cosine…" he muttered without meaning to. His voice cracked as his mind raced. "The derivative of cosine is… negative sine. Chain rule: d/dx of f(g(x)) = f'(g(x)) * g'(x). Limit of (sin x)/x as x approaches 0 is… 1."
He froze.
Wait. He had barely studied that part. Back when the professor was droning on about limits and differentiation, Timothy had been busy staring at the clock, worrying about which job he had to run to after class. He had skimmed through YouTube crash courses before, but most of it slid right out of his head the next day.
Yet here it was. As if someone had dug through his brain, scraped out the junk, and reorganized it into neat, labeled folders.
He staggered back against the stall door, his hand gripping the cold metal. "Holy shit… I remember… everything."
Formulas stacked themselves in his head like puzzle pieces clicking into place. Integration by parts, volume of revolution, the damn epsilon-delta definition of a limit—concepts he never fully wrapped his head around now played like a slideshow in his mind.
He pulled his cracked phone from his pocket, opened his calculator app, and typed in a random integral:
∫(3x2+2x+1)dx\int (3x^2 + 2x + 1) dx∫(3x2+2x+1)dx
Instantly, the answer appeared in his head before the app could load: x3+x2+x+Cx^3 + x^2 + x + Cx3+x2+x+C.
He blinked. "I didn't even… think about it. I just knew."
Heart pounding, Timothy scrolled further into his photo gallery, where blurry lecture slides from last semester still lingered. He tapped one, squinting at the professor's notes on triple integrals—a nightmare he had completely given up on before.
But now? He read the first line, and the solution pathway unfolded instantly in his brain. Step by step. Like watching a YouTube tutorial at 10x speed, only the narrator was him.
He whispered under his breath, unable to stop the grin spreading across his face. "I… I can solve this. I can solve all of this."
A surge of adrenaline hit him harder than any caffeine ever had.
It was like his brain had been running at 20% all his life, and suddenly someone yanked the throttle wide open.
Timothy looked down at the vial of remaining pills, his hands trembling slightly.
"This is game-changer!"
He stuffed it back into his pocket. "With this… I can ace every exam. Keep my scholarship. Graduate at the top. Hell, I can probably learn anything."
For the first time in his academic life, the upcoming exam didn't feel like a looming execution. It felt like a chance.
He exhaled, steadying himself. "Alright. Let's test this out for real."
Timothy flushed the toilet for cover noise, slipped the empty candy wrapper into the trash bin, and walked out of the CR with a new fire in his eyes.
***
Timothy pushed into the classroom a few minutes before call time. Half the class was already there, heads bowed over reviewers, highlighters squeaking, calculator covers clicking open and shut.
Rows of battered armchairs fanned out toward the windows. At the back, near the far pane where the morning light turned dust into glitter, she sat alone.
Tiffany Co.
White knit top tucked into a black leather skirt, Gucci belt gleaming, a quilted bag with matching hardware hanging neatly from the chair. Gold-framed glasses rested on the bridge of her nose, strands of long brown hair slipping past her ear as she read. A tiny Tiffany tag pendant winked at her throat like a punchline to her name.
Burgis, Timothy's brain said automatically.
But the word carried less bite than usual.
He took his usual seat, unfortunately, the one beside her, because the last time he came early was never. Today it was open. He slid into the armchair, trying not to jostle her stack of neatly clipped notes. They were color-coded, margins ruled with a precision that would make an architect jealous. Despite the flawless packaging, she was very clearly cramming.
They'd shared this math class all semester, a mix of freshmen from different colleges. He was Mechanical Engineering; she was Chemical Engineering. They had never spoken with one another despite the close proximity. Maybe because that's just how the upper class works?
Five minutes later, Timothy sat in silence, palms flat on the armchair, tracing his breath like he'd seen monks do on YouTube. The pill's clean hum held steady behind his eyes. Around him, paper rustled, pens clicked, last-minute prayers were whispered.
The door swung open.
Their professor. Thin, angular, chalk already smudged on his cuffs, strode in hugging a stack of test booklets like a judge carrying verdicts. Conversations died on impact.
"No notes. No phones. No whispering. If you stand, you submit," he said without looking at anyone in particular. "Two hours. Ten questions."
He started dealing booklets down the rows. Each thud felt heavier than the last. When one landed on Timothy's armrest, the room seemed to narrow to white paper and black ink.
He read.
And swore inwardly.
Even with the pill, it was a minefield. The very first problem was an implicit differentiation nightmare, where x²y + ln(y) = e^(x³), and he had to find dy/dx in its cleanest form. The second twisted the chain rule around an exponential nested three layers deep, with bases and powers swapped in places meant to trip even the confident.
Then came logarithms—traps hidden in change-of-base formulas, questions where careless algebra meant certain failure. One problem asked for the nth derivative of ln(1+x) evaluated at zero, clearly a Taylor expansion in disguise, but disguised cruelly.
Trigonometric derivatives filled the middle section. Not the easy ones—sine and cosine—but combinations of tan(x)·sec(x), or an identity wrapped in an arc-function, where one slip in algebra would eat twenty minutes. Another question merged product and quotient rules with trig simplifications that only the sharpest could untangle under time pressure.
And just when the students thought they'd survived, the professor unleashed hyperbolic functions. A derivative of sinh(x)cosh(x) hidden inside an exponential; a coth(x) that blew up at x = 0 if you weren't careful; and finally, a proof question that asked them to show that d/dx [tanh(x)] = sech²(x), from first principles.
Even Tiffany, whom Timothy assumed was untouchable in math, was stiffening beside him, her pen pausing just a second too long on the first implicit derivative problem. The kind of pause that meant inward panic, even if her face stayed calm.
For everyone else, it was slaughter. But for Timothy, the pill made the pathways light up—derivatives flowed through his brain like water following carved channels. He started writing, one line after another, answers forming without hesitation.
Ten questions. Two hours.
He finished in twenty minutes.