Chapter 44: I'm Writing a Novel in America
The Duncan HouseLate Night
The party was over. Adam and Teddy helped their parents clean up before everyone went to bed.
Adam lay in the dark and replayed the conversation with Juno.
It had happened toward the end of the evening, when the crowd had thinned enough to talk.
"Prom's next week," Juno had said, with a particular kind of smile. "Do you have a date?"
"No."
Adam had looked at her carefully, not sure where this was going.
Going to prom without a date wasn't something that particularly bothered him. Graduation was weeks away, a new chapter was starting, and he had no interest in manufacturing a short-term romantic situation when his actual focus was on figuring out how to make money before arriving in New York with essentially nothing.
"I need a favor," Juno said. She glanced at Lauren, then back at Adam. "Would you take Lauren to prom?"
Adam stared at her. "Say that again."
"I want her to have a normal senior experience," Juno said simply. "A real prom. Someone to go with. Something that feels like how it's supposed to feel."
"Just the dance?"
"Just the dance," Juno said, with mild exasperation. "What else would you be imagining?"
"Nothing," Adam said. "I just wanted to be clear." He thought about it. "It's up to Lauren."
"I'll do whatever Juno thinks is right," Lauren said, with a bright, uncomplicated smile.
Adam returned the smile and felt a chill move through him that he kept off his face.
Lauren's affect had shifted significantly since she'd left Jennifer's orbit and moved closer to Juno's. It was warmer, more open — but it was also, in ways he found hard to articulate, slightly too smooth. Like a signal that had been cleaned up so thoroughly it no longer had static.
He'd told himself for four years that he wasn't afraid of Juno. Standing in the front yard under the old oak tree, its tire swing turning slowly in the evening air, he finally stopped pretending.
"Is it safe?" he asked.
"With me there, yes," Juno said.
That was both reassuring and exactly the kind of answer that confirmed his concerns.
"We're friends," Adam said. "I'll do it."
"Thank you." Juno patted his shoulder. "You won't regret this."
Adam had not found that phrasing as comforting as she probably intended it.
He stared at the ceiling until the replay finally wound down, then sat up.
"It's one dance," he said to the dark room. "A dance. Normal high school event. Nothing to analyze."
He pulled a stack of blank paper from his desk drawer, set it on the table, and picked up a pen.
The money problem was the real issue that needed solving. He'd been turning it over since New Jersey. Columbia's financial aid covered tuition. Living expenses in New York were a separate, significant, ongoing problem.
How did you make money quickly without capital, without technical infrastructure, and without compromising the time and focus that medical school preparation required?
He'd gone through the obvious options and eliminated them one by one. Investment required starting capital he didn't have and knowledge of specific market movements he couldn't reliably access. Patents required engineering work and legal infrastructure. Anything business-related required either money or time, and he had neither in surplus.
Which brought him to the one thing that required almost nothing to start.
Writing.
He'd thought about it since becoming a genius — since that clarity had come over his memories like a fog lifting. In 2020, the last year of his previous life, he'd read a novel. A long one. Genuinely popular, widely discussed, the kind of story that moved through cultural conversation rather than sitting quietly on a shelf.
When his intelligence had crossed 140, those 2020 memories had sharpened to an almost uncomfortable precision. He could recall the novel in detail — not fragments, not impressions, but actual content. The arc. The characters. The progression.
It was set in America. It was suited to an American audience. And it was, by any honest standard, a very good story.
He wasn't going to win a literary prize with it. He wasn't planning to. He was planning to serialize it, earn a modest and consistent income while he was in school, and not go broke in New York.
That was the whole plan. Modest, practical, and legal.
He set the pen to the paper and wrote the title at the top.
End of Chapter 44
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