The first time I met Isaac was during our school's Second Grade Spelling Bee. We were the two finalists, and Miss Devore, the moderator, actually ran out of words for us to spell. Principle Wojciechowski called the Bee a draw, and Isaac and I have been friends and rivals ever since. All the way through middle and high school, we constantly jockeyed for position against each other. If he ran a mile in 7 minutes, I'd push myself to the point of puking my Pop-Tarts to sprint a 6 and 3/4 minutes mile. If he took first-chair for oboe in the orchestra, I'd blow my brains out to take first-chair for the flute. When high school graduation came around, we both had 4.6 GPAs, and we had to play rock-paper-scissors to determine who got valedictorian and who got salutatorian. I'm still kicking myself for throwing up paper!



Isaac and I went our separate ways after high school. He jetted across the pond to Oxford while I straggled behind at MIT. But we still kept in contact, mailing our report cards, curriculum vitae, and newspaper clippings heralding out achievements back and forth at the end of each term. Five years later, we both finished up our doctorates and were reunited down in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, where both of us were hired on as material engineers. With age, our rivalry has greatly mellowed out. Rather than trying to outdo each other, we actually collaborate and have made some important breakthroughs. We've teamed up to develop a new space suit whose fabric actually harvests the astronaut's chaffed-off skin cells and converts them into an energy source to power the suit's internal life-support systems.

However, the urge to compete is still at the back of both of our minds. We've just learned how to vent those pent-up urges in healthier ways. When the cafeteria is serving up sloppy joes, for example, we usually race to see who can gobble down their manwich first. Or when we go for coffee, we always try and out-caffeinate the other by ordering extra espresso shots and pumps of chocolate syrup. And when it comes to cars, our rivalry is still red hot. We both drive Type-S RSXs, and there's not a single red light on Merritt Island that we haven't burned out at.

Even though our Acuras have plenty of zip, we decided to bolt on a couple of performance accessories to unleash all the hidden horsepower in those VTEC engines. I went with an AEM cold air intake, and Isaac got an Injen cold air intake. After installation, we drove over to one of the unused tarmacs for a head-to-head race. It was a near photo finish, but I eked out the win by a license plate's length. It wasn't quite as validating as taking the title of valedictorian would have been, but it still felt good.