There's nothing quite like the sound of second place.
The polite applause, the stiff smile, the way the gold medal doesn't quite look at you — it looks past you.
Rio sat on the cold step outside the teacher's office, staring at his trembling hands.
He could still hear the judges reading out the scores from this morning's math olympiad.
Second. Again. By a margin of two points.
"I'm proud of you," his coach had said. "You did your best."
Best. He hated that word. Because it always meant "not good enough."
"Bro, you're seriously a robot, I swear!" his classmate laughed, clapping him on the back as they left the classroom. "Second in the whole province? You're insane!"
"Yeah," Rio replied with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Insane."
Inside, he was screaming.
He studied until his head hurt. Memorized until his fingers cramped. Skipped meals. Skipped games. Skipped being human.
All for what?
A silver medal that felt like rust.
At lunch, he barely touched his food.
He noticed a commotion in front of the teacher's lounge. Some parents were crying. The school counselor was speaking in a hushed voice.
"Sari's parents," someone whispered. "She's been missing since yesterday."
Rio blinked. Sari? The quiet girl from Class C?
He didn't know her well. Just that she had perfect attendance. Always wore long sleeves. Always smiled too fast.
Missing.
His heart beat faster — not out of fear, but confusion.
How does someone just disappear?
He returned to his rice. It had gone cold.
After school, Rio stayed behind to revise calculus problems, even though the next competition was months away.
He didn't know why. Maybe because silence was better than the pressure in his chest.
On his way out, he passed the old music room. A faint smell caught his nose.
Cigarette smoke.
He stopped. Someone's smoking inside? A student?
He peeked through the slightly ajar door — and there she was.
Alifah.
A girl from his year, quiet in class but somehow always noticeable. Today, she was leaning by the open window, puffing lazily with a cigarette between her fingers.
"Hey—what the hell?" Rio stepped inside. "Are you crazy? You're smoking? Here?!"
Alifah turned her head slightly. "Oh. It's you."
"You could get suspended, you know!"
She blew the smoke out the window and said calmly, "Then I'll just disappear like Sari."
That shut him up.
She didn't look rebellious. More like… tired. Like someone pretending not to care because caring was exhausting.
"Sorry," she added after a moment. "That was a bad joke."
Rio hesitated, then closed the door behind him. "You… knew her?"
"Not really," Alifah said. "But I noticed her. Everyone notices too late."
He sat down on a nearby bench. "People notice me all the time. Doesn't mean they see me."
"Oh? You're invisible in a loud way, then?"
He let out a weak laugh. "Math competitions. Debate team. Student council. I keep stacking achievements, but it's like building a tower on a cracked floor."
"And today?"
"Second place."
Alifah took another drag, held it, then flicked the ash into a tissue. "Ouch. That's practically losing, huh?"
"You joke, but yeah. That's how it feels."
There was a pause.
"You know, you don't seem like someone who needs a cigarette," he muttered.
"And you don't seem like someone who needs validation," she shot back.
They both chuckled quietly.
Then Rio said, "Do you think it's stupid? That I feel this way?"
"No," she said. "I think it's heavy. Just carried in silence."
He looked at her more closely. "Why do you smoke?"
She thought about it for a while. "Because sometimes, I want something to hurt me slowly — on my terms."
"…That's messed up."
"Probably," she said, not denying it. "But we all have our little ways of coping. Yours is equations. Mine's this."
A breeze blew through the window, ruffling some old sheet music. Neither of them moved to touch it.
"Do you miss who you were before the medals?" Alifah asked.
Rio blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Before you became 'the smart one.' When losing didn't mean failure. When learning was fun."
He stared at the piano in the corner. "I used to play. I stopped when I got serious about school."
Alifah stubbed out the cigarette in the tissue and tied it up tight. "Then maybe it's time to start playing again."
That evening, Rio went home and opened the box of old piano music under his bed.
He wiped off the dust, sat down, and tried the keys. His fingers were clumsy, but the melody still lived somewhere in them.
And for the first time in a long while, second place didn't feel so heavy.
—Some towers are built to be tall.
Some to be safe.
And some just need to fall a bit before they feel like home again.