Zelaya Creativity Scholarship

By the time Jonah and Miles reached the library steps, the argument had already survived two crosswalks, one iced-over puddle, and the smell of popcorn drifting from the hockey rink. “It’s day-tuh,” Jonah said, pulling his scarf over his chin. “Computer science settled this decades ago.” Miles stopped walking like he’d been personally betrayed by the ACM. “You don’t get to say ‘computer science settled this’ while I’m standing here as a data science major. It’s dah-tuh.” Jonah looked at me for support. I refused to give it. I was too busy watching the campus lights flicker on, one by one, as if the whole place were becoming a low-resolution constellation. The rink glowed at the bottom of the hill. Students moved toward it in little clusters, all hats and laughter and ticket screenshots. “You study databases,” Miles said. “I study data.” “You study spreadsheets with confidence intervals.” “You write loops and call it architecture.” They kept walking. A thin wind pushed through the bare trees. Somewhere behind us, a saxophone student was practicing the same lonely phrase over and over, never quite landing it. It made the sidewalk feel like a scene from a memory none of us had lived yet. Jonah said music like that was proof the universe had a garbage collector. Miles said it was proof the universe had variance. At the science building, they passed the big glass doors and their reflections stretched across them, tall and strange. For one second, the three of us looked like figures drawn on a flat plane, sliding across a world with no depth. Miles, who had once made me read The Planiverse, tapped the glass and said, “In two dimensions, pronunciation wouldn’t matter. Words would just be shapes.” “In two dimensions,” Jonah said, “you’d still be wrong.” A flock of students surged past us toward the rink. Someone shouted that we had ten minutes until puck drop. The argument should have died there, buried under urgency, but trivial things have a way of becoming sacred if two people are stubborn enough. Miles picked up a fallen maple leaf and held it like evidence. “Language changes. Ovid knew that. Everything transforms.” Jonah took the leaf, inspected it, and handed it back. “It transformed into compost. That doesn’t help your case.” “You’re both missing the obvious,” I said. They turned. I gave myself a second, mostly for drama. Oscar Wilde would’ve wanted that. “The correct pronunciation is whichever one makes the sentence sound more expensive.” Miles laughed first. Jonah tried not to, which made it better. We reached the rink doors just as the crowd started roaring inside. The sound rolled through the lobby, warm and enormous. For a moment nobody spoke. The argument hung between them, not solved, exactly, but softened. Then Jonah opened the door for Miles and said, “After you, Doctor Dah-tuh.” Miles walked through with a bow. “Thank you, Professor Day-tuh.” Inside, the ice shone bright enough to erase every serious thought. The players circled. The crowd stamped. Jonah and Miles stood shoulder to shoulder, still pretending to be enemies over a vowel, though anyone could see they were happy. The puck dropped. For once, neither of them tried to define anything.