Don't Mess with the Girl with Candy novel Chapter 501

The cameras at the press conference, along with everyone watching the livestream, were her witnesses. If she was going to clear her name, she might as well do it all at once.

"Let's not drag this out. Try to wrap it up before five," Juniper Payne said, her voice low but laced with a chilling coldness as she lifted her gaze. She wanted to get home for dinner, and leaving any later meant hitting rush hour traffic.

"So confident?" a reporter in the front row asked, eagerly raising his hand. "I'll give you a math problem."

Juniper's gaze met his, a silent agreement.

"It's a recursive sequence problem..." the reporter said, holding out his phone to show Juniper a question he'd just looked up. It was an exceptionally difficult problem from a past university entrance exam.

"You can..." The reporter was about to say she could take a few minutes to think, but before he could finish, Juniper had already picked up a marker, turned to the whiteboard, and began writing out the solution with fluid, confident strokes. Every step, every calculation, was flawless.

The reporter was stunned. The audience gasped in amazement.

It was unbelievable. Less than ten seconds from seeing the problem to writing the answer? Even a math genius would need a few minutes to think that through.

"Maybe she's just seen this specific problem before," someone in the crowd suggested.

"That's right!" The reporter who'd asked the question seized on the idea. "She must have done this one before. I'm picking another one."

How else could she answer without even pausing to think?

"Fine," Juniper said, glancing at him with a cool, indifferent expression, the corner of her mouth twitching into a smirk.

The reporter immediately pulled out his phone and found a new question after searching for the "hardest math problem ever." It was a monster involving non-linear recursive sequences and limits, so difficult that the national average score on it had been close to zero. Even a math Ph.D. had called it harder than graduate-level material.

"How about this one?" he asked, a defiant look on his face.

Juniper's eyes narrowed slightly. She didn't respond verbally, just turned back to the board. Her "thinking time" for this problem was two seconds longer than the last—the exact amount of time she spent glaring at the reporter.

"I'm done. I'm starting to believe the perfect score is real! This girl is terrifyingly smart!"

"No, there has to be a catch!" The reporter, not expecting her to solve this one either, started to panic.

"Let's move on," Juniper said, her tone and expression as calm as ever. "Someone else's turn."

This time, a math teacher from another school stepped up. He flipped through a thick binder of materials and picked out a particularly complex problem.

Juniper glanced at it and immediately wrote out the answer.

In the span of five minutes, she had solved three problems, each from a different area of mathematics, each exceptionally difficult, and all of them correct.

At this point, everyone was completely baffled. What was going on? Was it possible she was just a math whiz, and her other subjects were average?