Face-Slapping15 min read
My Star, My Exit: A Teacher Who Took the Exam Again
ButterPicks16 views
I learned to hold my breath when my family talked about my brother as if he were the only important child in the house.
“Penn will go to a top high school for sure,” Dad crowed at the family dinner, patting the boy on the head with pride like he was a prize calf.
“Three thousand a month is nothing," Mom chimed. "Girls never do as well. Look at other families — their daughters can’t even hold a job.”
I smiled at the sink while the plates steamed and the words boiled in me. I rinsed a dish, set it in the rack, wiped my hands on my apron. My face stayed blank. I wiped a phantom tear away with the back of my wrist.
They didn’t know about the scholarship, the five years away, the dorm room that smelled like metal and books, the government payments I lived on. They didn’t know I’d signed a contract that promised five years of teaching after graduation — a promise I honored on the patchwork schedule and the chalk-dust nights.
“Can you imagine?” Dad whispered loudly to the cousin. “This is our family’s future. Penn will make us proud.”
I dried another bowl. “Good,” I said into the air, and I meant it for Penn. I meant it for myself too, in some small, fierce way.
They never realized I had been first in my entire school. They never asked.
When I was fourteen they quietly sent me away to a vocational school and changed my future like a page in a book. “It’s safer,” Mom said to me, touching my face with a pity that burned. “There’s risk in high school. You’re our daughter — you must be practical.”
“Understand?” she asked, smiling the engineered smile of people who had decided.
I understood too well. I swallowed my pride and nodded. It was cheaper to be obedient than to be brave in that house.
In the dorm I learned to fix a light bulb, patch a pulley, copy lesson plans from older students. I learned how to feed myself on a budget. The five years gave me routine. The five years made me small in the eyes of my parents; useful and quiet. The five years left me with something else — a pile of textbooks and a stubborn, private hunger to cross a line I had never been allowed to approach.
When Penn aced his middle school test by three hundred and something points less than mine, Dad threw three thousand dollars at a high school counselor and bragged to neighbors. Penn went to the fancy prep school. Dad’s grin widened. My parents’ attention shrunk to a narrow column of light.
The summer I took sick leave from the school where I taught part-time, I offered five private calligraphy lessons for extra money. It was quiet work: children sit, the teacher corrects posture, the brush breathes.
One of the families lived in a villa at the edge of town. The boy there — small and cocky — said, “My cousin’s back from Beijing. He plays piano.”
I tensed. I knew the name even decades before: Galileo Castillo. He’d been at the top of our class once, a rival in textbooks and late-night problem sets. He’d gone to a university I had only read about in brochures. He had a face I remembered like an equation: precise and right.
I loathed seeing him play that piano. My throat tightened when his hands touched the keys like they touched the sky — light and sure.
He looked up when I came back with the practice sheets. There was that half-smile I’d hated and secretly admired since middle school.
“You came back to get practice tests?” Galileo asked, holding them out, the afternoon sun making his wrist look refined and fragile.
I snatched the papers, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes,” I lied. “I tutor five kids. I’m trying to catch up.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You could use help.”
Those words were a tiny key. I nearly laughed at myself for turning it. I needed help, I needed tutoring, and it wasn’t easy to ask. I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded.
We fell into a schedule like old clock hands finding each other again. In the mornings I taught and cleaned; in the afternoons I rode the bus far from home and sat in a sunlit room while Galileo explained how to build an essay outline or split a physics question into manageable parts. He was patient and clear. He never mocked me.
“You will take the exam again?” he asked one afternoon when I had a crumpled stack of tests and a tired face.
“I’ll try,” I said. “I have to.”
“You were first in the school,” he said, as if trying to make me agree. “Two months. You can do this.”
I laughed. “You’re sweet, but I am late by a decade.”
“You’re not late,” Galileo answered softly. “You won’t be by yourself.”
The first heart-stopping moment came when Dad held up the house and opened his mouth to brag about Penn. The second came months later when Mom announced she’d found a match.
“Pierce Bradford,” she said with glee. “His family has three apartments from a demolition project. Solid. Good prospect. He calls you 'my daughter' on the phone.”
I knew Pierce from a community gathering years before. He had a grin the shape of slippage. He smelled like aftershave and cigarettes. He spoke loudly and laughed harder. His voice had the kind of easy ownership that scares people into silence. Mom’s eyes shone like coins.
“He’s kind and will take care of you,” she added.
I heard nothing beyond the sound of a trap closing.
He was eager on his first meeting, a performance of softness wrapped in calculation. “Andrea, I will take care of you,” Pierce said, raising both hands like a man who had already purchased the fate of other people.
“Thanks,” I said because I had learned to say what they wanted to hear.
But there were warning signs in his chatter and in his friends’ easy seats at places that reeked of trouble. They were the kind of men who joked about more than jokes could bear. The night I was forced into a hall of arranged smiles and pressed flowers for a fake engagement, the world felt heavy. I smiled like a proper woman, returned gifts with gifts of equal or greater value, nodded at toasts. My head throbbed with the weight of pretending.
On a winter night, I followed a thread of suspicion and found Pierce leaving a private club surrounded by men and the kind of women his family never mentioned. He staggered under the neon and laughed too loud. I stepped forward. He didn’t know I had seen.
I called the police like the call had a blade inside. Thirty minutes later, the lights were flashing riot colors on snow and plaster. Pierce tried to run. He fell in the slush. He was cuffed with his shirt inside out, shoes on the wrong feet.
I watched him being shepherded into a police van under the streetlight and felt something inside me snap and then, oddly, breathe out relief.
“You did the right thing,” Galileo told me later, handing me a steaming cup of coffee at a bus stop as if nothing had happened.
“Did I?” I asked, my hands wrapped around the cup.
“Yes.” He paused. “You did not deserve to be engaged to a man who walks like a predator.”
My world began to split in two after that night. Pierce’s arrest became a whispered scandal, then a headline. For the first time since I was a child, people looked at me and saw something else — not just a quietly useful daughter, but a woman who had agency. For a fragile month, I allowed myself to imagine life with degrees and lectures, a future I had been smuggled away from.
And then high school life interfered in another way. Penn fell. He tasted the sweetness of college-level privilege without the work. I tried to correct him: set a schedule, teach him math, drill him on basics. He took the money I gave him for a phone and bought games, excuses, and more slippage.
One day he handed me a shockingly good grade report and a face that demanded worship. “See? I’m doing fine,” he said.
My teacher’s instincts were a blade. I looked closer, cross-checked, and realized the grades had been manufactured.
I told him not to tell Dad. “Hide it,” I said. “At least until you actually learn.”
He nodded and then did nothing. He drifted. He sank.
A year later, the family praised Penn at dinner again. “He improved so much,” Dad beamed. “Your brother will make us proud.”
I let Dad place his pride where he would.
I treated my students like they were my life. I loved grading their papers. I loved the small victories — a correct punctuation, a parrot learning a poem. I loved the silence after a class where everyone did their homework and slept easier. I kept my own dream in a small pocket.
When the engagement with Pierce collapsed amid legal trouble, I did not feel vindictive joy. I felt pity and the fatigue of someone who had carried a hundred fights and lost many.
The real fight came when Penn’s fake grades fell apart in a public way. During a parent-teacher meeting a few weeks before the college entrance exam, the math teacher hauled Penn’s report into light and flung it like a gauntlet.
“Where did this come from?” he demanded. “You can’t possibly have improved this much.”
My father’s face turned stormy. He accused Penn until Penn confessed. Dad hit him. The teachers called the principal. The conversation burned like acid in my ears. I left quiet, walking through moonlit corridors where students bent over calculus as quietly as prayers.
I had built a new life for myself beyond our house, but I still felt the tethers pull. Penn cried the kind of tears that used to be mine. I patched him with what I could: keeping his secret for a while, coaching him, telling him how to bluff when needed.
But secrets erode. One night, Penn’s scam unraveled publicly. The teacher confronted him, the school called a meeting, and life hollowed out into the sound of a gavel I could not see.
I was teaching a small group at a street-side stall when Pierce walked up and overturned our meal in a drunken rage. The splatter of oil and sauce on my shirt felt like a baptism. He accused me loudly in front of the kids.
“You leave my future alone,” he spat. “You come here with a pack of kids — who are you to be in public like that?”
“You’re the one who’s a fraud,” I said, the words tasting like metal.
“You’re dirty. That’s why I won’t move in with you. You’re dirty,” he said, proud and ugly.
“You’re dirty,” I replied, and I meant it.
That night a fight started. Miles Collins — a lanky boy with a quick temper I had once tutored — pushed Pierce away to protect me. Pierce swung. Miles caught a blow but kept his temper. The fight spiraled. Miles fell and broke his leg. He smiled like a ruined hero, lips cracked, and muttered, “Scum.”
The boys from the basketball team recorded the scene. The next day Miles was hospitalized. The video spread. People were shocked. Pierced public figure status collapsed into a pile of discarded flowers and shamed acquaintances.
That night, when I stood in the emergency room with my hands cold and the fluorescent lights humming, Miles — generous even through pain — said, “You’re not the kind who loses.”
“I had to do something,” I whispered.
“You did,” he said. He was proud, which made me want to be brave for him.
The legal consequence came fast after that. Social media drew blood for Pierce: people did what the internet does best — pile on, dig up old stories, and demand justice. The club where he had been arrested was investigated. Witnesses testified. He had been given second chances before. That time, the law did not let him buy his way out.
I will not summarize the penalty because the law’s paperwork is bland. I will describe the punishment the way a crowd saw it — public, ugly, and deserved.
The courthouse was a concrete pulse of breath. I sat in the back bench like a small animal. The room smelled of cheap coffee and new paper. People filled seats, some deliberate, many curious. That’s the part I hated: humanity watching.
Pierce came in with a limp and a look that tried to assemble dignity. He had already gone from swagger to worry. His friends sat stiffly in the front row, eyes on the floor. His parents tried to hold composure like it was an heirloom.
When the prosecutor read the counts, the room became a theater of shifting expressions. Minds raced. Phones peeked out. Cameras clicked.
“On the evening of January twenty-first,” the prosecutor began, “the defendant solicited illegal services in a private club. He was arrested and detained. This is not his first encounter with the law.”
Pierce’s face changed in stages. At first, he looked amused. Then the amusement thinned into irritation. He bit his lip like a child. His gaze flicked to my direction and found me standing — just once, standing to collect myself. The shift was almost comic: swagger, disbelief, indignation, anger, the old denial. From the slight curl of his lip to a tremor, the room watched him fall apart.
“You’re ruining my life,” he mouthed at someone near him. “They’re lying.”
A murmur rose. “They” was the word that isolated him. People spoke into their sleeves. He fumbled, searching for an ally, and met only stares and cameras. He was stripped of the anonymity he had relied on.
We came to the public shaming. The prosecutor, who held the kind of clinical anger that thrives on truth, laid out examples of Pierce’s patterns — the nights of drunken violence, the unpaid debts hidden beneath promises, the way he relied on others to prop him up. He was not powerful; he had simply been given power and used it like a blunt instrument.
Around him, witnesses testified one after another. A woman from the club described what she saw in careful detail. A neighbor testified Pierce came home slurring, breaking things. A waitress described the way he had treated staff like possessions. Each voice compounded like bricks in a wall. The prouder he had been outside that club, the harder those bricks hit.
When the verdict came, the courtroom was silent except for the breath of people. He was sentenced to three years, and the judge’s voice was cold and final.
“The court finds the defendant guilty,” the judge declared. “He is sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.”
For a heartbeat, Pierce raised his head. His eyes went wide like a trapped animal. He had expected something else — a fine, a night in detention, anything that could be negotiated away from ruin. But the sentence landed like a heavy object on the world he had been building with borrowed coins.
People left the courtroom like a slow exodus, whispering. Cameras flashed. Men in suits walked away in small groups, pretending their chairs had not heard the judge’s words. Pierce’s mother, previously a picture of embarrassment, began to cry loudly and collapse into the arms of a cousin. The shame was a living thing, hot and red. Pierced friends watched as the man they’d toasted with fell into a public digestion of his past.
On the courthouse steps, strangers came to him for comments beyond the law. A reporter thrust a microphone: “Do you have anything to say?”
“I'm sorry,” he stammered. “I… I didn’t mean—”
“Sorry?” someone in the crowd hissed. “Too little.”
Laughter snapped like a whip. Someone recorded him apologizing in a shaky voice. "Sorry" became a parade of humiliations: his name, his crimes, his friends' avoidance. Men who once laughed with him now turned their faces.
Then the extraordinary happened. A woman in the crowd — Pierce’s own brother’s ex-wife — stepped forward and held up a folder. She began to name times when he had promised to pay, when he had broken their lives and walked away. People cheered her. A former employer who had been fired due to Pierce's intervention stood up and said, “I lost my pension because of him.” A former neighbor produced photos of him leaving a night club in the dead of winter, trousers unzipped, stumbling.
Pierce tried to defend himself. “This is not fair,” he said, voice raw. “They took one thing and blew it up.”
People laughed. “You took the one thing nobody should have had power over — other people's bodies, dignity,” a woman said. “You used your money to hide it. That stops now.”
He faltered. The camera lenses around him were like cold eyes. They recorded his humiliation, and it spread.
“Do you understand that your reputation is now…?” a reporter whispered as the cameras snapped.
He had no answer. The process broke him in public: the denial, the anger, the pleading. At first he denied. Then he blamed others. Then he begged. Then he sat, slack-jawed and small.
The surrounding crowd reacted in a chorus: some shook their heads in disgust, some clapped in approval that justice had been done, others videotaped. People posted the clips online. The footage of Pierced collapse into apology trended within hours. Colleagues at his workplace blocked him. His friends distanced themselves. Shopkeepers who had once accorded him extra credit refused to even look at him.
That day I saw how quickly social currency evaporates when the truth is revealed. Pierce had been powerful in small circles and cruel in private. He was stripped when the private became public. The law had done its part; the public had done the rest.
After the sentence I heard whispers: “He’ll try to come back.” “No, he’ll be gone.” “He’ll beg.” I watched him try to smile like a man who planned to remount a throne. The smile cracked. It was not dignity he would be taking with him into that future.
When the guardians of shame were through, the crowd dispersed. I stood on the courthouse steps with Galileo. He took my hand like a question and a comfort. “You did the right thing,” he said again, and this time the words were heavy with observation, with the knowledge that standing up costs people things.
“You did,” I admitted. The confession felt like a clean blade.
In the years that followed, my life filled with quieter victories. I took the exam in the old building where students once tormented each other by throwing books. I sat at the window seat and felt the pine tree out front wave like a patient friend. I answered questions with a focus that felt like prayer. I walked out of the testing room lighter than I had expected.
A telephone call the next morning changed everything. The university officers called Dad by mistake at first and realized there were two test-takers under the family name. After confusion, they asked for me.
“Andrea? We have your score. We would like to speak about your intentions,” the admission officer said.
The number — 683 — made their voice tremble. “Provincial rank eighteenth,” the woman on the line read like someone reporting a weather miracle. I kept my voice calm. My parents were stunned. Penn was speechless.
For the first time in my life, they looked at me like someone important. The room where they sat was the same house I had grown up in, but the air that followed me out that night was not their approval. I carried my bag across the city and did not look back.
I got a scholarship, a dorm room, and a seat among students who did not know me as “the daughter” or “the obedient one.” I learned how to be small around people for the first semester, then large in curiosity. I met Galileo sometimes in the quad or at late lectures about the cosmos. He told me about the star they had mapped — a rose-shaped thermal map in a distant galaxy.
“We named the center NaN,” he said once, fingers tracing invisible letters. “NaN: undefined, impossible, but also… you.”
“You named a star after me?” I laughed.
“You’re like a NaN,” he said softly. “Hard to categorize. Necessary. Bright.”
On graduation day when the sun curled gold in our hair, we married. The wedding was modest, a few friends, a quiet blessing. Miles came, walking on crutches but upright like a man who had chosen to be brave. Harper Elliott — the tall girl from the basketball team — hugged me with the kind of joy that sealed the cracks of years.
I built a program on a small name: Morning Star, a scholarship fund that would give girls a chance to climb. The fund used the money from a small piece of my old property and later from donations. I taught workshops, travelled to villages, handed envelopes that meant more than money: they meant a chance. I sat in school halls and talked about the night when the courthouse ruled and the world watched a man fall from his cheap pedestal. I told students about standing up because someone else had to, and about how standing up sometimes costs you, sometimes frees you.
Years later, at a talk about the fund in a small town, a girl asked me, “How do you forgive?”
I looked at my hands. My wedding band glinted. Galileo was in the front row, eyes steady like an anchor. “I don’t know if I forgive,” I said honestly. “Forgiveness is private. Justice is public. I chose to stop shrinking. I chose to make other people’s futures bigger.”
The girl’s eyes shone with a mix of fear and hunger. “Will you come to my school?” she asked.
“I already have,” I said. “Morning Star started at the place I taught. It learned how to grow there.”
Years later, when I visited a university planetarium opened by a team that had once been my competitors — including Galileo’s colleagues — he showed me the databases. On the screen, the rose-shaped galaxy burned like a promise.
“We called it NaN-Rose,” he said. “It’s still undefined in the middle. It keeps asking questions. It keeps growing.”
I smiled. In that hum of the planetarium I felt the long chain: a girl who scrubbed dishes, a boy who broke his leg defending a stranger, a proud family that could not see the daughter for the son, a drunken man whose lies collapsed, a hospital night and the smell of disinfectant and coffee. Justice had happened. So had mercy. So had stubbornness and study and the slow, steady kind of courage that learns to show up.
At a fund meeting later, I took the roster of recipients and read their names. On the banner behind us, the logo read Morning Star — and below it, a small printed line: "For those who find the NaN in themselves and name it light."
I touched Galileo’s hand. He squeezed mine.
Outside, the stars burned like small, unclaimed maps.
I had wanted to be small to avoid being broken. I learned that being broken and being repaired built a frame strong enough to carry a light forward.
When the woman who had once tried to hurt me with a knife in the courthouse — a relative of Pierce’s who later faced charges for assault — stood reaching and angry, she only cut the background. Her knife did not make me smaller. It widened my audience. The world saw the attempt. The world saw the cowardice. The world saw the law follow through. Pierce had already been stripped of his bluster. We watched him crumble in the public square. Justice made a point. The woman who lunged at me faced custody. The crowd hissed and the police acted. The ugly scene did not make me shrink; it made me decide that the safety I planned for other children would include ways to protect them from the people who hurt.
When I teach now, I sometimes use a casual phrase: “Find your NaN — the part of you people can’t label — and make it your star.”
In the quiet of a late night office, when I pen donations and answer emails, the memory of the morning the telephone rang with my exam results hums like a small, bright instrument. Galileo and I keep a copy of that day’s paper folded in his desk — not because it saved us, but because it reminded us that the world can shift in one morning when you decide to stand.
We named a small scholarship after Miles. I visit him in clinics, and he jokes about wanting to be my personal bodyguard for life.
On cold evenings we watch footage of the rose galaxy on screens, and Galileo will say, “NaN remains undefined. We must keep looking.”
“Keep looking,” I echo. The words are our pact.
And when strangers ask me how to leave a house that does not accept them, I say, “Pack a bag, find a night, and move toward a light that calls you. It could be a university building, a scholarship, or a bus stop where someone offers you a coffee and says, ‘You did the right thing.’ That coffee might become a lifetime.”
Sometimes the smallest acts ripple into orbits you could never predict. The morning star of the fund, the rose-shaped galaxy, the boy who broke his leg for me — they are all orbits. They are my proof that leaving a place that does not see you is a beginning, not an ending.
I never stopped being Andrea Cameron. I only stopped being the thing others expected. I started naming my NaN.
The End
— Thank you for reading —