<blockquote>You don’t make mistakes. You don’t fucking make mistakes, because everyone’s out there just waiting for it, waiting for you to screw up so they can move in and shove you down, get ahead of you. Rodney knows this, has known it since high school, when he was at one of the top schools in the country and still a couple years younger than everyone else and ten times as smart. If he’d made one mistake, just one, Cory Simmons or Delilah Hartley or fucking Mr. Tindley would have moved in and taken him down. No happy life of geekdom, blowing up the chemistry lab and hacking into the system, because everyone from the freshmen to the principal hated his guts and if he’d left them a single opening, one little illegal slip, he would have been lost. He learned that lesson real fast after Delilah’s mom called the fucking CIA on him when he was twelve years old.</blockquote>