That thick, terrifying study guide became my shadow for the next six weeks. It lived in my backpack. Its pages were filled with alien symbols, diagrams that looked like scribbles, and math that made my high school algebra look like simple addition. Ohm's Law. Inductance. Capacitance. My brain felt like it was being rewired.
There were nights I'd just stare at a page, completely lost, the old, familiar feeling of uselessness creeping in. What am I doing? This is for geniuses like Samuel. I can't do this.
But then I'd close my eyes and I'd be back on that mountain trail. I'd see the two words on my phone screen: No Service. And I would force myself to pick up the book again. This wasn't just studying. This was forging a weapon.
The Saturday sessions in Gregory's garage were my salvation. He had a way of making the abstract real. When I was baffled by the concept of resistance, he pulled out a battery, a tiny lightbulb, and a few different wires. "See?" he said, as the bulb glowed brighter with one wire and dimmer with another. "More resistance, less flow. Simple as that."
Azhar would drop by and untangle the math for me, sketching formulas on a napkin in a way that finally made sense. And Samuel… Samuel was my rival. He was a machine. He never struggled. He just absorbed the information and asked for more. His presence was both infuriating and incredibly motivating. I could not, would not let him be the only one to pass. I'd spend hours on practice exam websites, drilling the questions until I was seeing them in my sleep.
My parents were just happy I wasn't a zombie anymore. My dad would pop his head into my room. "How's the secret radio language coming along?" he'd ask.
"I think I'm starting to become fluent," I'd reply, and he'd get this big, relieved smile on his face.
The day of the exam, my stomach was a knot of terrified butterflies. The test was in a sterile community center room, the same one where they held blood drives. About a dozen of us sat at folding tables, a weird mix of teenagers and retirees. I looked at Samuel. For the first time, he actually looked a little nervous too.
The volunteer examiner handed me the test booklet. I took a shaky breath. This is it. Don't fail.
I opened it to the first page. Question 1: Which of the following is a purpose of the Amateur Radio Service as defined by the FCC?
I knew the answer. I could hear Gregory's voice explaining it. I moved to the next question. And the next. Suddenly, I wasn't terrified. I knew this stuff. I had climbed the mountain of that textbook, one painful page at a time, and now I was at the summit.
I handed in my test and sat there, my leg bouncing uncontrollably, while the examiners graded it by hand with a plastic template. I watched them mark Samuel's. He got a thumbs-up. Of course he did.
Then they started on mine. The red pen made a little checkmark. Then another. And another. It felt like an eternity.
Finally, the examiner looked up from my answer sheet. He was a kind-looking man with a big, bushy mustache. He smiled.
"Well, Haruka," he said, his voice booming slightly in the quiet room. "Welcome to the hobby."
All the air went out of my lungs in a rush. I passed. I had done it. I had the key. The silence would never, ever trap me again.