Tess Try-Small

Tess sat down — somehow — on the edge of the table, swinging her feet.

"Here's the thing nobody tells you," she said. "A big problem and a small problem are usually the same problem. The big one's just wearing a scary costume. A hundred lights is terrifying. But two lights? Three lights? Those you can actually do, with your hands, on paper, in a minute. And while you're doing the tiny ones, you start to see how the whole thing works."

She tapped the table. "When I was little, big problems used to make me want to disappear. A hundred of anything felt like being asked to climb a mountain in one step. Then I figured out the trick: I never had to do the big one first. I could do the smallest, silliest version — one light, two lights — and just watch what happened. The mountain didn't get smaller. But suddenly I was taking a step I could actually take."

"So we just... do one light, then two?" Min asked.

"Do one. Then two. Then three," Tess said. "And keep your eyes open. Small cases love to whisper secrets."

The circle bent over their paper, and for the first time all afternoon, they were actually moving.

One light: it ended up on. Easy. Two lights: Reet worked it out, switching them by the rule. Then three, then four, then five. Min kept a careful list of which lights glowed at the end of each tiny version, and slowly the frozen feeling melted into something that almost felt like a game.

"Wait," Anya said, staring at the list. "Look at which ones stay on. One stays on. Four stays on. Nine stays on."

Theo leaned in. "One, four, nine... those are square numbers. One times one. Two times two. Three times three."

The table went very still — but it was the good kind of still now.

"We did five lights," Reet breathed, "and we can already see the pattern. We never needed to do a hundred at all. The little ones told us."

Tess watched them, beaming, her feet still swinging.

"There it is," she said. "That's the whole magic. You were frozen in front of a hundred. So you did one, and two, and five — the tiny ones you weren't scared of — and the tiny ones handed you the secret of the hundred for free. The lights that stay on are the perfect-square ones. Now you don't have to do a hundred lights. You just have to count the squares up to a hundred."

"Ten," Theo said immediately. "One, four, nine, all the way up to a hundred. Ten squares. Ten lights stay on."

"Ten lights," Tess said. "Out of a hundred. And you cracked it by starting with one." She grinned at their amazed faces. "Feels different than 'there's no way,' doesn't it?"

Theo looked at the answer they'd been so sure was impossible an hour ago. "We almost didn't even start," he said quietly. "It just looked too big."

"They always look too big," Tess said. "That's the costume. Underneath, it was a problem about one light, told a hundred times."