At Whitman, the VMC team meets before the start of the grand final, the last Friday of April, with the parish newspaper's webpage on display and that makes predictions for it. For some reason, beyond the Venomous Agendas, Palo Alto, University High, TJHSST, Saratoga, Montgomery Blair, Lexington, Phillips Exeter and Stuyvesant are given as favorites, all being part of the 13 co-champions of Square Root of the Answer last year, except for Montgomery Blair. Whitman is in the same tier as, for instance, Adlai Stevenson, which, without being a favorite, can hope to do well.

"Tonight, it's the swan song for me as a mathlete. We will not go down without a fight, we can defeat these powerhouses! Our opponents may have MOP qualifiers, or EGMO gold medalists, but we shall take the fight to them!" Zhou shouts at his teammates.

"The VMC is not the same kind of contest as the Math Madness or the MOP, Zhou. By now you know that doing well on one type of contest does not mean you will do well on another kind of contest" another Viking mathlete tells him.

"Stevenson proved it last year; they had a MOP qualifier for a captain and couldn't even make it to the SRA final! The only one we have any confidence whatsoever of defeating is the Venomous Agendas; as before, we shall stop them here and now!" Zhou continues.

"Zhou, please stop considering these math contests as if we were playing Fortnite! Everyone plays against everyone else at once; you seem to treat the VMC as if we need to beat schools piecemeal to win!" the Vikings coach scolds Zhou.

Meanwhile, at TJHSST, people, while not always motivated for the same reasons as at Whitman or among the Venomous Agendas, they have another reason to seek to defeat the Venomous Agendas: they hold the Venomous Agendas responsible for Lucy's arrest, which cannot compete in the VMC because she's still behind bars. She continues to take classes as if nothing happened, with the other prisoners deemed equivalent to 12th grade. However, if one compares her to the other inmates, even with her mind still damaged by the overdose, she's clearly better than them academically.

"Tonight, we are going into the Vans Math Contest final to avenge Lucy, our teammate in jail. And also to avenge our losses to the Venomous Agendas this season" the coach of the Colonials harangues his large team.

"For Lucy! Down with the Venomous Agendas!" Colonials then shout.

The population keeps wagering on the VMC and most of them bet on their own to win tonight, and Zack is perhaps the only one in town that's a little ambivalent about the Venomous Agendas at the VMC. That said, he's patient, knowing he can't get out with his beloved Tara before the end of the contest.

Finally, the six Venomous Agendas that are officially entered into the competition are in the room and shortly assume a formation where the four girls are at the vertices of the mass of desks, and the two boys are between the girls on the flanks. The unofficials get seated, drawn by the extra credit that unofficial participation to this competition can give to calculus BC students (the school does not offer Calculus AB).

- For several of you, this tournament is a swan song as mathletes, first, me, Cory begins. I am not too personally invested in mathletics, but I feel our stars were so invested as mathletes that I believe their lives once in college will be marked by a clear departure from what they lived as Venomous Agendas this season.

"We will seek to avenge this season's mathletic failures! For example, us at the Math Madness" Vontae adds, stretching his hand, with Cory stacking his hand on Vontae's.

"And me on the AIME!" Marcia shouts, before putting her hand on Vontae's.

"And me on the USAMO!" Krista adds.

"And me on the Purple Comet!" Imélie continues, with her hand on Krista's.

The Venomous Agendas A and B were very far off on the Purple Comet without their three stars; even a state championship at 17/30 would not have had the same meaning than even the defense of their state title at the VMC. Yet Imélie was less traumatized by this 17/30 at the Purple Comet than her 82.5 on the AMC12 in 9th grade. What an immense waste of mathletic talent! To think that Gen scored only 9 more points than I did on the AMC12 that year and now she is an EGMO gold medalist? Imélie thinks while she feels regrets about giving up on mathletics too early. But she feels she now has a chance to avenge her past mistakes as a mathlete, to repair the broken pots.

"Even though I have absolutely nothing to reproach myself on a purely mathletic level, after all, I won the gold medal at the EGMO, for me too, it will be a swan song" Gen says in front of her teammates.

The 6 mathletes raise their hands in the air to then get seated at their assigned positions, and to reduce at a minimum the temptation for the unofficials to cheat on their stars, Geneviève is in the back left corner of the room, while Krista is in the back right corner. However, unlike the last edition, here was no other unofficial entrant from another school.

For the VMC, however, Cory, Imélie and Vontae studied apart, and they went around doing a lot more practice problems of all kinds than the other three girls, who were content solving only a handful of problems covering the competition's key notions, solved in group.

But unlike the rest of their mathletic season in « traditional » contests, that is, modeled after a test, it appeared a little strange for everyone, but the VMC is nothing like an attrition race. The three girls that the public lionized during the first half of the season found it a little strange that there was no panic attack; that said, when it was pertinent to do so the teacher made asides on how it happened in several variables in class.

I'm happy to see Krista regaining her old composure; I relied on my 4 girls to win tonight. Cory and Vontae too but suppose that Gen could absorb a week of delay in class and not be too affected. After all, the SRA got her used to doubling down intellectually since last year, Trent ponders, while the absence of anxiety or panic attacks changes him from test such as the AIME and the USAMO, that he proctored and coached for (but, for the USAMO and the EGMO, he didn't actually do much; Gen and Krista primarily used AoPS for post-AIME training).

Yes, for the unofficials, there's the extra credit to keep in mind, but it's more of a safety valve to prevent them from stressing out on the calculus final and, if applicable, Physics C. But for every assignment with a multi-variable bonus portion, there was a comparison between the single-variable notion and the corresponding multi-variable notion presented before the problems using these notions.

Tempting, very tempting, for some among the unofficials to engage in « fire-and-forget » regarding multi-variable calculus. In other words, learning the material for an exam and then forget everything, or almost so, shortly after the end of the exam in question. But none of the mathletes seemed to engage in fire-and-forget to an extent that could compromise their education; it's perfectly normal to forget some notions in the long run.

Here one feels everyone in the room can focus on the 12 problems the VMC asks without stressing too much. Obviously, Gen has been very fast, as are Krista and Marcia, who are the first three to finish the test. Later on, Cory and Vontae. Imélie seemed off to a good start but takes her time to review her solutions to each problem multiple times; she does not trust her solutions as much as her teammates.

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Even the unofficials were more confident in their solutions than she was; however, Trent must separate the copies in two piles, as last year. At the exit, the three senior mathletes wonder what their future in college is made of, none of them made their decision yet, but they are about to do so.

"Did we make a decision regarding college attendance?" Marcia asks. "The deadline to decide is fast approaching, we only have a few days to do so"

"Provisionally I will attend Carnegie Mellon, from what I've seen this place seemed happier than Cornell to me, but with a seventeen on the USAMO, I may be able to get into Caltech off the waitlist" Krista announces to the group

"I might tell myself, OK, girls are not common at MIT, I could put my score on the USAMO as well as my gold medal at the EGMO on a LOCI and still hope to attend from the waitlist, after everything I heard about the waitlist at MIT, unfortunately, it's not worthwhile. But on the other hand, Harvard vs Chicago? Harvard has better financial aid, and more flexibility on how to choose off-concentration courses but has more careerist students than Chicago. For what I want, they resemble each other academically"

"As for me, between UPenn and Vanderbilt, the financial aid decision just arrived, and UPenn for me" Marcia announces her choice.

"Harvard if that's how it's going to be" Gen makes hers.

"Good for you... from the moment you know what to expect, and I am not worried for your success" Cory adds. "You are all so brilliant, wherever you go, I am sure you will learn a lot"

"Thank you..."

Luckily, no matter what choice we make, our parents accept that we must leave the town to continue our education. It's not like we were, I don't know, in New Orleans, Krista ponders, while she can't help herself but think of some students in the big cities nationwide that must choose between several institutions and maybe even prefer attending a college in their own yard so they can stay in their city in college.

"Will you forgive me for letting you down on the USAMO?" Krista asks Gen.

"Yes, Krista"

"Thank you, Gen. We pushed each other a lot intellectually together, but I wouldn't say that I regret this panic attack, only that it's pure bad luck. I can then end high school without regret"

In the meantime, Zack returns to see his girlfriend, who returned from what was to be her mathletic swan song, too. Even though Tara participated in the VMC as a matter of course, despite her parish not having any claim whatsoever to victory, her father proposes the following:

"Since math is your weak subject Zack..." Tara's father comments before he ends his proposal.

"Tara knows it's my weak subject only from a relative standpoint. Granted, she's much smarter than I am, but she's a change from my past girlfriends"

"Thank you. You made me realize that footballers aren't all brainless" Tara then tells Zack.

Come to think of it, maybe, maybe Randy and Ted could date Marcia and Krista respectively because they have brains, too! Obviously not as much as they do, but I think I read in an assignment at some point that, if the intellectual gap is too big, the difficulty to understand each other would make a romantic relationship much more complicated, Zack thinks while Tara's father suggests the following:

"You interrupted me, Zack. What I wanted to say is that you will play quiz bowl one vs one, with no math question, and questions will cover material in courses you have"

"Listen. dad, neither Zack, nor I played quiz bowl, but my teammate that plays it talked about as a quiz game"

Zack and his girlfriend seem to play a little clumsily, especially since that quiz bowl forces both people to answer very rapidly. Tara's dad used quiz bowl questions to which other members of his family answered in their careers as quiz bowlers. He too he was a little annoyed by the heavy tendency of so many coaches in Louisiana – and from other places, too - to start with the math team in order to build a quiz bowl team.

Yet, mathematics proper covered, in quiz bowl, only about 5% of the questions on average, which means they didn't miss out on a whole lot. Tara answers every physics question, while Zack seems more adept in fine arts, but it's more of a tossup in other fields.

At the end of the game, they kiss each other. Botched a little, but Tara confides to him.

"It's about college. I didn't talk about it to you out of fear of hurting your feelings, but I will attend WashU in St. Louis this fall"

"WashU in St. Louis?" asks a surprised Zack. "There's no way for me to go there... but let's hope college will be better for you, socially speaking, than now"

Until Tara evokes it again, my only memory of WashU in St. Louis, or WUSTL, goes back to elementary, where a prof from this university commented on TV about the Ferguson riots, Zack thinks, believing that, since college is often a key transition in the lives of a lot of young people, especially in the highest intellectual echelons, a breakup was not a question of if but of when to him. But, in his mind, better be transparent.

"LSU for me, but no football. Because it's obvious it won't be possible to continue with this relationship as we did in the past four months, I break up"

"You hurt me a lot, but it was due to happen" Tara announces while she bursts in tears.

When Randy leaves the room, at the same time as Imélie, that is, at the end of the three hours allotted, Marcia is about to ask him questions relative to his experience of the VMC, while he decided to take it unofficially, and she helped other footballers with their chemistry and mathematics homework in the meantime, remotely.

"Did it go well?" Marcia asks him about the VMC final.

"I was a little confused by the curl and Stokes' theorem, but I changed a lot with you. And your friends also have something to do with these changes" Randy answers her.

"No doubt Gen and Krista have inspired so many here to work harder in class, you included. Unfortunately, all good things have an end, since I will attend UPenn next fall and you, Louisiana Tech, it will be impossible for us to continue dating. So we will need to break up one day or another, be warned"

"After all, one must not ruin its future for romantic relationships"

That's precisely the problem when one dates girls stronger academically than oneself at this stage of high school. If we were in 9th grade, it wouldn't be an issue, but this is where it hurts, Randy thinks, while being relatively happy of being with Marcia since even before the math team finds itself under the spotlight but hasn't officially declared dating her until well after everyone thought they were dating.

"And same goes for me towards you" announces Geneviève to Cory. "I will be honest, we got along well, but I think my very own quest for mathletic glory has ruined everything in the end"

"I am happy you accomplished this quest. You cared about it so much, you did what practically everyone here could only dream of" Cory smiles to her.

"The further we went, the less satisfied I was with my academic life; mathletics allowed me to fill this void. On top of that, mathletics allowed me to get tools I knew would be useful to me later, even if I decided that mathematics weren't for me in college. Even though the Physics C course, for so many, is pretty difficult, for the four of us, not as much" Gen speaks while referring to Cory, Krista, Marcia and herself.

But Marcia seemed more interested in knowing how it went for Imélie than Gen was; after all, Imélie was a quiz bowler as well, and she will see Imélie again in the coming weeks, while asking for her teammates' exam schedules to coordinate quiz bowl practices for the national championship, which will be held, at the end of the finals season.

"Imélie, how did you find it?" Marcia asks the newest mathlete.

"Not too bad; honestly, if that's a multi-variable calculus final at Harvard... it's not as hard as some would believe. But I don't harbor illusions. A lesser student will struggle more" Imélie answers then.

"Good. If I may, however, for next year, you can give up on the EGMO and the IMO so don't put too much effort on the AIME; I would then advise you to focus on quiz bowl"

"Quiz bowl... I might be wondering who would be part of it, knowing that next year, I might be the only one back on it"

"Don't forget the plan for the nationals: if we are dealing with a team that's weaker in math and science, you're playing, otherwise I play. Also, for practices, I think it's good, the day before a given exam, for players to be asked questions on the material of the exam in question, except for mathematics questions for the two of us. We must not forget about more traditional review, however" Marcia explains the plan to Imélie.

And having a 10 on the AIME is already very good on a mathletic level for a HSNCT, or High School National Championship Tournament, contestant, that people in quiz bowl call the National; about 5 to 10 players at the National will have that or better, of which 3 to 7 will have entered the USAMO as well. And, consequently, I am one of the best mathletes entered in this competition, and probably in the girls' top-2 based on the AIME. Most teams competing in the tournament won't see the mathematical difference between a girl with a 10 on the AIME and an EGMO gold medalist in a quiz bowl context, so there's still a way to make a lot of people believe that we have an EGMO gold medalist on our roster, especially since, in most cases, girls at the HSNCT won't be mathletes, Marcia thinks, while she still tries to formulate this lure plan that must NOT explicitly allude to Geneviève, and which, according to her, could cause some teams to break their teeth, especially teams that are weak mathematically.