The Stairwell Maths Club

Zayden Cole got his sixteenth rejection email on the same day his best mate graduated.

He found out about both on the stairs.

He was sitting on the fourth-floor landing of his block, where the signal’s best, scrolling. There was Tobi in a gown and a mortarboard, arm round his mum, everyone crying and grinning. Three hundred likes already. Then, a thumb-swipe later, the email: Thank you for your interest in the position. Unfortunately, on this occasion…

He didn’t need to read the rest. He knew it off by heart by now.

Zayden is twenty-two. Slim, athletic, short textured fade, thoughtful eyes that are usually looking at a screen or at the floor. Oversized charcoal hoodie, cargos, trainers, a thin silver chain, headphones round his neck or over his ears, depending on how much of the world he can take that day. He didn’t go to uni. At the time it felt like the right call. Now it feels like everyone got on a train and he’s still standing on the platform, watching it go.

His feed doesn’t help. Somebody’s got engaged. Somebody’s bought a flat. Somebody’s been promoted, somebody’s started a business, somebody’s in Bali. Every scroll is a scoreboard, and every scoreboard says the same thing: behind. behind. behind.

“Zay?”

He looked up. Amir, twelve, from the flat below. School jumper, rucksack nearly as big as him, holding a maths textbook open against his chest like a shield.

“Can you help me with this? It’s fractions. I don’t get it.”

“Not now, Amir.”

It came out sharper than he meant it. Amir nodded like he’d expected it, and went down the stairs.

It wasn’t the first time. Amir had asked three or four times that month. Every time, Zayden said not now, because now he was busy feeling like a failure, and that takes up more time than you’d think.

A few days later, Zayden was coming back from the corner shop when Amir’s mum stopped him by the bins. He braced himself. He thought she was going to have a go about him being short with her son.

“Zayden,” she said. “I wanted to say thank you.”

He blinked. “For what?”

“Amir talks about you all the time. He says you’re the cleverest person in the block.” She smiled. “He watches you fix your bike. He says when he’s older he wants to know things like you know things. So — thank you. For being someone he looks up to.”

Zayden stood there holding a bag of crisps and a carton of milk, completely lost for words.

The cleverest person in the block. Him. Sixteen rejections, no degree, sitting on the stairs every night scrolling through other people’s lives. Someone had been watching him the whole time, and what they’d seen wasn’t behind. It was someone worth being like.

He went to sit on Samuel’s bench, because he didn’t know where else to take that feeling.

Samuel was there, as always. Grey beard, flat cap, dark coat buttoned up against the wind. He glanced at Zayden’s face and moved his bag without being asked.

For a while neither of them said anything. Zayden watched the lads on the court. Then he said, “Everyone I know is doing something. I’m just… not. I’m so behind, Samuel.”

Samuel didn’t answer straight away. He never does. He watched a pigeon walk in a circle for a bit. Then he said, quite gently:

“Behind who?”

“Everyone. Tobi graduated. My cousin’s got a mortgage. People my age are running companies.”

“Hm.” Samuel nodded. “And who’s that race against?”

Zayden opened his mouth. Shut it again.

“I watched you fix that little one’s bike chain last summer,” Samuel said. “Took you ten minutes. Took his dad an hour and a lot of bad words before that.” A small smile. “There’s more than one way of being ahead, son. Most of them don’t get three hundred likes.”

Zayden sat with that. On the court, someone missed an easy layup and everyone laughed, including the one who’d missed it.

“Amir keeps asking me to help with his maths,” Zayden said. “I keep saying no.”

“Why?”

“Because I felt like I had nothing to teach anyone.”

Samuel didn’t say anything. He just looked at Zayden with those calm, patient eyes, the look that lets you hear what you’ve just said.

That evening, Zayden knocked on the door below his.

“Oi,” he said, when Amir opened it. “Fractions. You still stuck?”

They sat on the fourth-floor landing, because that’s where the light was best and the signal didn’t matter. Zayden drew pizzas on the back of an envelope and cut them into slices. Amir got it wrong, then wrong again, then — somewhere around the third pizza — right. His whole face changed. Zayden felt something in his chest he hadn’t felt in months, not since before the rejection emails started.

It felt like being useful. It felt like being exactly where he was meant to be.