When I was in the senior year of my high school, there was a classmate of mine in the same block as me. Let’s call him Wade. In every single class, Wade would sit in the same seat: fourth row (of five) from the front, second column (of five) from the left. Nearly every day, he would simply hang his head low. There would be perhaps a half-inch of distance between his nose and the wooden desk. At first, I thought Wade was just napping away his days and paid him no mind. But as his behavior continued, I began to take notice. I would see the tiny movements of his left hand back and forth, left to right, almost constantly. From my seat across the room, I could never figure out exactly what he was doing, and my curiosity grew.

One day, during calculus, I got up to go to the bathroom and took the long way around the room. As I slowly passed by Wade’s desk, I glanced at his furrowed-over body. In his short, stubby fingers was a tiny pencil, barely anything more than a sliver of graphite attached to an eraser. Tucked into his right elbow were dozens of scraps of paper, all crumbled up and hidden away. I stood still and stared for a brief moment, partly in awe. There was something about that image that is still burned into my skull. Wade clearly had some sort of manic obsession with writing. I wanted to see exactly what was written in those little scraps, but I was spending too much time by his side already. I quickly made my way to the restroom and tried to put the thought out of mind. Now that I’d seen his little secret, I was satisfied. I didn’t need to bother with him anymore and could just focus on the lessons.

And yet, I still couldn’t get Wade out of my head. Like a tidal wave advancing, curiosity washed over my head, drowning out all other desires. I wanted to see what he’d had hidden in those pieces. I tuned out the words of my teacher and blindly gazed at the white slides explaining the concept of Riemann sums. My outer appearance was that of a vegetable, but my inner cogs were spinning, cranking out the possibilities of those scraps. Could they be comments on everyone around him? Beautiful little poems? Perhaps a diary of some sort?

When class finally came to a close, I jumped out of my seat and made my way to his little “alcove.” Plopping down in the seat in front of him, I very directly asked him what he had been writing in his scraps. Wade looked at me, a little perturbed. To my pleasant surprise, he offered to show me after a moment of brief hesitation. I was expecting a lot more struggle to hide his secret. He pushed several scraps toward me, and I greedily snatched one up at random. Unfolding the paper quickly enough to tear, I pored over the tiny words.

A relative maximum can be found when the first derivative equals 0.

Confused, I looked through the rest of the scraps. I found more and more pieces of mathematical information. Not some grand postgraduate work of a theoretician, but the basic knowledge of AB Calculus. I stared at Wade with a look of betrayal. Misinterpreting my reaction, Wade patted my shoulder.

“I noticed you looked kind of lost during this lesson. You know, you can borrow my notes if you need.”

Dumbfounded, I thanked him and pocketed the scraps. Wade bid me good luck and walked into our next class together. I simply stood there in my reverie until my calculus teacher finally kicked me out of her classroom.