The auditorium felt like a pressure cooker.
Rows of students packed the seats, banners drooped from the balcony rail, and the mic kept making that tiny, embarrassing pop whenever someone breathed too close to it. On stage, four tables faced the audience-Physics and Electronics on the left, two other departments on the right. Name placards. Buzzers. Water bottles no one touched.
I wiped my palms on my kurta and told my heart to behave. It didn't listen.
Rohit leaned closer, voice pitched just for me. "Breathe, Physics girl. We've got this."
I stared at the question sheet face-down in front of us. "Don't call me that."
"Fine. Champion-in-progress." He winked.
"Contestants," the host boomed, "final round! Rapid fire. Ten questions per team, ten seconds each. Wrong answers pass. Highest score takes the trophy. Audience-are you ready?"
The auditorium roared back. Somewhere in the second row, Nikki screamed, "Physics!" like the word was a war cry. Akshu shushed him and then shouted anyway.
At the far end, near the judges' table, Siddharth Rai stood behind the Physics name card-mentor badge clipped to his pocket, arms folded. He looked like he'd swallowed an instruction manual and was judging the world for not following it. Calm. Reserved. Steady.
When his gaze slid over to us, it barely paused. But my pulse still tripped like it had seen a cliff.
"Team Physics," the host said, "you're up first."
The buzzer felt cold against my fingertips.
"Question one: Who proposed the law of universal gravitation?"
"Newton," I said. "Sir Isaac Newton."
"Correct. One point."
"Question two: Name the phenomenon responsible for the blue color of the sky."
I didn't even look at Rohit. "Rayleigh scattering."
"Correct."
"Question three: Who discovered the neutron?"
"James Chadwick," Rohit said, quick and smooth.
"Correct."
The rhythm caught. Ten seconds. A beat. Another answer. Seven right in a row. We stumbled on question eight-something weird about a lesser-known Indian physicist who worked on atomic spectra-and I chewed my lip for half a second before forcing it free.
"Time," the host said.
"Next team!"
Questions fired across tables, bounced off nervous faces, fell into wrong answers and right ones. The scoreboard ticked up, tiny red numbers mocking my concentration. I pressed my heel into the floor until my leg stopped shaking.
Final turn. Back to us.
"Team Physics," the host grinned. "Make it count."
He read the first question of the last set, and something inside me just... clicked. Years of reading for comfort. Pages in the library that kept me company when people exhausted me. All of it lined up like a neat row of books.
"C.V. Raman."
"Max Planck."
"Compton effect."
"Michelson-Morley experiment."
"Bose-Einstein statistics."
The buzzer under my hand felt like an extension of my pulse. When I faltered on one date, Rohit's fingers tapped our pre-agreed signal twice-I know it-and I let him take it, trusting the sound more than my second guess.
YOU ARE READING
Between the Classes(Two different worlds)
RomanceShe was supposed to be just another student. He was supposed to be just another professor. Vidhu never believed in early mornings, strict rules, or the idea of love waiting inside a classroom. But when Siddharth Rai walked into her college as the ne...
