Chapter 37 Mia

• I couldn’t believe it. She actually gave me an F. And not just any F—the kind that comes with public humiliation attached. I walked in barely a minute late, and the moment I slipped into my seat, she pounced. “Rewrite that homework,” she said, practically snarling, “because you failed—dismally.” She made it sound like I’d committed a crime against humanity.
• Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, she twisted the knife a little deeper. “There’s failing,” she continued with a dramatic sigh, “and then there’s whatever this is.” She held my paper up between two fingers as if it were toxic. “This is an utter disgrace to the pen and paper you wasted.” She actually called it a “disgrace.” Who even talks like that?
• The class went dead silent, and I could feel everyone’s eyes drilling into me. She didn’t stop, either. She just kept going, piling on comment after comment about how I’d wasted her “in-demand” time reading my “unbearably substandard” work. She might as well have set the paper on fire in front of me; it probably would have hurt less.