That night, he emailed his mother a single line: “Tell Aunt Mira to send me the PDF for 10th grade. I think I’m ready.”
He started a new system. He would tackle only five problems a night. Not fifty. Just five. He used the margins to draw angry faces next to the ones he hated, and stars next to the ones that finally clicked. He joined a study group where they shared screenshots of the PDF and argued about Problem 142 ( A train leaves Station A at 8:00 AM… ) for an hour before realizing they had misread “towards each other” as “in the same direction.”
Luka was good at many things. He could name every dinosaur that ever appeared in Jurassic Park , assemble a computer from spare parts in under an hour, and recite the offside rule in three languages. But mathematics? Mathematics was a foreign country where he did not have a visa.
That evening, Luka sat at his desk. The tablet glowed. He scrolled to Chapter One: Linear Equations with One Unknown . Problem number 1: 2x + 5 = 13 . Easy. He solved it. x = 4 . A small victory.
The forest was dark, but he had a lantern now. And he finally knew how to use it.
It was the first week of ninth grade, and the air in Ms. Janković’s classroom smelled of whiteboard markers and quiet anxiety. On every desk lay a thin, unassuming object: a photocopied title page stapled to a stack of 127 pages. At the top, in a bold, slightly faded font, read the words that would define the next ten months:
(Collection of Mathematics Problems for 9th Grade)
“The Zbirka is your best friend,” Ms. Janković said, patting the stack with a theatrical smile. “Inside, you will find over two thousand problems. Some easy, like waking up. Some hard, like… well, like waking up before a test.”
But his mother, overhearing from the hallway, poked her head in. “Luka, the Zbirka isn’t about the math. It’s about the struggle. Read the foreword.”
For most students, it was just a PDF—a file passed around via USB drives, class WhatsApp groups, and a single, dog-eared printout that had been scanned so many times that the geometric diagrams looked like Rorschach tests. For Luka, however, it was a nightmare with a page number.
