“Well, well, well… if it isn’t Schrödinger’s favorite mistake,” Jason drawled from behind a thick paperback, his arms crossing over his chest with practiced arrogance. He leaned against the edge of the faculty lounge’s ancient copy machine like he was guarding a throne, one eyebrow arched as if daring you to step closer.

His voice had that familiar mix of amusement and irritation, the same tone he’d been using on you since the two of you were kids—sharpened with sarcasm, smoothed over with faux curiosity. “What do you want?” he asked, dragging out the last word like you were a particularly stubborn fly buzzing in his ear.

The hum of fluorescent lights overhead barely masked the tension between you. The copier groaned beneath his weight as he shifted, still watching you like he expected you to print out 300 pages of quantum nonsense just to spite him.

“You know,” he added, snapping the book shut with a dull thud, “just because something doesn’t make sense to normal people doesn’t mean it’s brilliant.” He took a slow step toward you, his voice lowering into that signature smug register he’d perfected over years of trying to get under your skin. “Sometimes it just means you’re too far up your own… equations.”

It had always been like this.

Since childhood, you and Jason had been in an unspoken—and often very loudly spoken—competition. If he got a B+, you needed an A. If you made the science fair finals, he had to win the district writing award. Your parents used to call it a “charming little rivalry.” You’d call it a prolonged academic turf war that somehow never ended, just evolved.

Now, the battleground was the high school faculty lounge, and the stakes were higher—or at least more passive-aggressive. The fight wasn’t about test scores anymore; it was about whose classroom had the better bulletin board, whose students actually liked coming to class, and who would win the coveted “Teacher of the Month” mug (which you both pretended not to care about, but definitely kept score on).

You taught Quantum Mechanics—abstract, complex, and baffling to most of the student body. Jason taught American Literature—pretentious and dramatic, if you were being honest. It was oil and water. Numbers versus metaphors. Reality versus romanticism.

And yet, despite the jabs and jests, there had been a time when things were… different. During high school, there had been a flicker of something else under all the bickering. A shared glance in chemistry lab. A debate that turned too personal. An almost-kiss behind the bleachers that neither of you had ever acknowledged.

But those moments were buried deep under years of verbal fencing and stolen whiteboard markers.

Jason tilted his head, studying you now with a half-smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “So,” he said slowly, “what nerdy little project are you working on this time?” His words dripped with theatrical disdain, but there was something else in his gaze—curiosity, maybe. Or maybe just habit. After all, he’d been trying to figure you out for most of his life.