elysium - a prince of tennis fanfiction

prologue

One Year Ago

Ruoying had always been afraid of failure. From the first day her fingers had touched a piano key, from the time she had learned to shoot an arrow, she had understood that it was a hit or miss. One wrong shift of her hands and she was done.

The arrow would fly wherever it pleased, perhaps skewering the floor or a wall. Or, worse, it would land just shy of her target, only millimeters away from victory.

To Ruoying, failing in such a small way was exponentially worse than missing the bullseye completely.

All this ran through her head as she sat in a hard plastic chair, twisting her hands together, adernaline and anxiety flooding her senses.

Next to her, one of her teammates, Lihua, whispered in such a low voice that nobody else could hear it, 

"Don't you dare mess up."

Funny how such a simple statement could make one feel so much more nervous. 

Math had always been her strong subject. She was confident she had what it took to win, and yet Ruoying suddenly felt a need to prove herself, to deem herself worthy.

No, she told herself fiercely. I can't lose. I won't lose. I will not mess up and lose.

She had looked forward to this day for so, so long. She loved math competitions. She loved solving problems, the sound of pencil against paper, the rush of adrenaline when the question flashed across the screen. But above all, what she really loved was when she held that golden trophy above her head as people cheered and clapped.

It made her feel important. Recognized. For once, the center of everyone's attention.

Something she didn't have at home.

And so, Ruoying shifted in her uncomfortable chair, pencil in hand, poised over her paper. She watched in anticipation for the problem to appear on the giant screen above the stage, all while Lihua's words echoed through her mind.

Don't you dare mess up.

I won't, she assured herself. I promise I won't.

Sometimes, though, not all promises can be kept.

A closed circuit TV camera is mounted on a wall 7.4 feet above a security desk in an office building. It is used to view an entrance door 9.3 feet from the desk. Find the angle of depression, to the nearest hundredth, from the camera lens to the entrance door.

Startled, Ruoying did a double take. A problem that easy— a trigonometry problem, no less— at a math competition? It was too good to be true.

There's no way I can mess up on this problem.

She scribbled down a few numbers, haphazardly reaching over her teammate to snatch up a blue plastic calculator, and punched in the expression.

Inverse of tan . . . seven-point-four over nine-point-three . . . 

38.50922837.

Ruoying glanced at the screen again. Round to the . . . what, again? Tenth? Hundredth?

Probably tenth. Problems like these always wanted you to round to the nearest tenth.

If only she had known. Perhaps then she would have spared another few seconds to read the problem again.

But she hadn't known. And so she placed the tip of the pencil on the paper, and wrote down 38.5 degrees. 

Sure she had gotten the right answer, Ruoying threw down her pencil and hit the buzzer in front of her. She looked around wildly, making sure that nobody had finished yet. Next to her, Lihua put down her pencil and peered at Ruoying's paper. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her teammate's eyes widen.