She feels confident about the midterm she passes in for once since the start of the semester. The night before the test, she’d been cramming for her other midterm in AP Government, frantically writing down vocabulary and desperately trying to remember what the definition of government even was. Math has never been Seulgi’s favorite, usually she can understand a foreign language better than the confusing subject, but this time, it’s as if the answers flowed easily from her fingertips, and she understood each and every problem as they stared at her from the page. And then, it all shatters. Her hopeful attitude drops to her knees and joins her self esteem as it tumbles to the floor. She sees her grade stamped across the bottom of the ScanTron in blood red ink, and the excitement freezes within her veins. Around her, her younger classmates shout out their excellent marks while she stares blankly at her pitiful one. Compared to all the A’s she was hearing the freshmen yell, there was nothing worse than getting a God-awful grade while everyone else seemed to understand the material. She thinks her heart might’ve stopped the moment her eyes flicked to the harshly printed numbers, and she sits down heavily in her desk, weighted down by the grief stricken across her features.

    Wendy notices the change in her immediately, three rows away, after glancing up at her own grimacing grade, eyes alight with uneasiness. They both were struggling in this class, sophomores with unison F’s slapped across their report cards. “What’d you get?” The Canadian transfer student asks, tone filled with worry at the older girl’s look. Tears are threatening to blur her vision, and Seulgi chokes out, “A 58.” And after that, she can’t bear to look over at her best friend, for fear that she might burst into tears. She stares straight ahead at the cinderblock walls of the classroom and plugs herself into her iPhone, trying to think of anything else other than how she’s an utter failure or the argument she got into with her father a quarter to midnight last night about her grades. Everything was crashing down around her, and this glaring grade seemed to prove it. The freshman sitting next to her, Joy, Seulgi’s usual partner in crime in making fun of the other classmates and sharing inside jokes, throws her concerned glances, and the tears are pooling in Seulgi’s dulling eyes. 

    Good thing the bell rings less than five minutes after the teacher takes their tests back up, because if Seulgi had stayed in that classroom a second longer, she would’ve lost her composure to the racing thoughts in her head. All she can think about is the disappointment her parents would feel the moment she told them about her grade, especially when she thought she did great on it. She thinks about Joy watching her stuggle to keep the tears from flooding her face, the freshman biting her lip and biting back her words. As she speed walks through the hallways of the winding high school, weaving within the crowded corridors, a text interrupts the music blasting from her earbuds. She raises the screen to her face and reads: At least you did better than me. And that’s when the tears finally kick in, for the first time in Seulgi’s life, school is affecting her negatively. She manages to keep it together on the walk over to the school’s band hall, where she wordlessly walks into the orchestra room behind Amber and Krystal, two of her closest friends. She’s wiping stray tears off her cheeks and gathering her viola case next to her seat before stepping out of the room to rush to the bathroom. 

    Even her teacher, Mrs. Song, notices Seulgi’s loss of composure, not to mention some of her classmates are watching her out of the corners of their eyes. “Is everything okay?” The maestro asks, genuinely troubled by the usually enthusiastic and smiling student’s devastated expression. No one has