On his first night back in Briston, Richard shut himself in his bedroom.
The notebooks he had brought back from Imperial University's library were spread across the left side of the desk, while the Gargoyle sat in the right corner as a paperweight.
The curtains were drawn tight, and the desk lamp cast a circle of warm yellow light over the tabletop.
Downstairs in the living room, his father was leafing through the newspaper while Evelyn whispered something to their mother. Their voices drifted up through the floorboards, muffled and indistinct.
He had gone over the raw materials in the notebooks again and again in his mind on the train, until he had finally fallen asleep.
Back in his room, he first organized everything he had forcibly crammed into his head into his notebooks.
No matter how resilient long-term memory was, it could never be as reliable as a written record.
He worked until after one in the morning. Evelyn's bedroom light had long gone out before he finally set down his pencil, rubbed his eyes, and prepared for bed.
When Richard returned to Greenwood on Thursday morning, he thought he had gone to the wrong school.
The moment he stepped through the teaching building's entrance, the two boys approaching him in the corridor stopped at the same time.
"Williams!" One of them waved at him, his face piled with smiles.
Richard did not know either of them, so he nodded politely.
He had not even taken twenty steps toward his classroom before he was stopped again.
This time, it was a girl from the neighboring class. She came out through the side door carrying textbooks and nearly collided with him head-on.
"Sorry... Ah, you're Williams? The one from the Cicero Cup?"
"Yes."
"That's amazing!"
The girl ran off