Isaac was a tall athletic boy, he knew when he had to shine. He was tall with dark hair, light eyes and a body like the old greak gods. Most boys envied him for getting girls attention not only from his senior class but also freshmans. He was as the girls said a catch

The room was hushed, filled only with the restless ticking of the clock and the sound of pens scratching over paper. Senior year. One last exam before the long stretch of summer would carry them away from these walls for good.

Isaac Veynar sat in the second row, steady, deliberate, his hand moving across the page with practiced certainty. His friends, scattered across the classroom, hunched over their own work, each of them known in their own right—athletes, talkers, the kinds of boys and girls who filled hallways with noise. But none of that mattered now. Not to Isaac.

Because two rows over sat the reason his focus burned sharper than anyone else’s.

It had always been this way.

From the very first year, they had collided. First it was in the small things—the spelling test in third grade, the multiplication tables in fourth, the science fair in fifth where her project edged out his by a single point. From then on, every contest, every score, every measure the school invented became another battlefield. When Isaac stood at the front of the class with a perfect grade, she was already there waiting with her own. When she won a race on the track, he trained harder, pushed farther, until he claimed the next victory for himself.

Their rivalry did not fade with time. It only grew. Teachers sighed at the constant back-and-forth; classmates came to expect it. By the time they reached high school, their duels were a part of the school’s rhythm—spoken of in hallways, joked about at lunch, but always watched with a kind of awe. It was not hatred. It was something fiercer, something that burned and drove them both.

And now here they were.

Another exam. Another silence. Another chance for one of them to step ahead. Isaac’s jaw tightened as he wrote, aware of her pen moving across the page in perfect counterpoint to his own. He didn’t look up—he didn’t need to. The weight of years pressed between them, invisible but heavy, as though every mark of his pen carried more than an answer.

This was not just a test. It never was.

The clock ticked. The room remained still. And in the quiet of their final year, the rivalry that had shaped their lives from the beginning carved itself into yet another page.