You know that warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven english muffins are supposed to taste good. But if you’ve just checked your math score on a test you know you failed, because you couldn’t complete the last four questions, and you got your worst score ever on a test, they’re bound to taste worse than normal.

    But you ate them to calm down after spending half an hour (when you should have been doing homework) crying because of your awful score. You’d already spent the majority of the study hall after math class crying because you were the only one who didn’t get all of the questions done. So, your english muffins didn’t taste half as bad as your day did.

    Your day tasted bad because of two things: Math. And Friends. Your best friend wasn’t at school today because she had an abnormally low temperature of 96.5, which her mom calls a fever because she says that any change in your body’s temperature is a fever. You know that this isn’t true, though, because your mom is a doctor and she tells you about things like this. But it’s not just her absence that made your day sucky. It was the fact that all of your friends were mad at each other because some people felt left out when the rest of the people were choosing their friends to sleep with in their hotel rooms (something that you think is stupid). But people are mad at you, so you had no choice except to apologize and say that you understand why they are upset. But you aren’t really sorry. You’re actually glad that there are people who want to put you on their lists. Because you are thinking of that poor 6th grader with no one to sit with at lunch because she has short-term memory loss and some other stuff, too (but you actually aren’t sure about the “other stuff”, it’s just what people said), and how no one probably put her on their lists.

    Also, the night before, when you were trying to study for your math test? You couldn’t focus. Your dad tried and tried to help you, but you felt like being stubborn: you kept on saying, “But I don’t get it!” You did get it. But you didn’t  want to, so your brain refused to absorb it. Because of this, when you came in to school the next day you were literally trembling because you knew you weren’t prepared. You tried to study during math club, but there were just too many people and even though you asked questions and did the problems, you didn’t learn anything. You worried about it all through language arts, but that didn’t help; it just made you more nervous, because you got assigned a whole bunch of homework that you didn’t think you’d be able to get to. During the next break, after lunch, you played a game with your other friends instead of studying. You knew this was a bad idea, but it was hard to resist having some fun with them.

You walked into the math classroom sweating. You were scared. You sat down at your usual spot, next to one of your friends. The test was already at the table and you knew you should get started. But you were scared to look at it. You didn’t want a simple sheet of paper to be the one to tell you how dumb you were. But you only had 45 minutes, and it was going to be a hard test, so you got started. The first page wasn’t hard; you went through it twice before moving on to the second. You finished half of the problems, no problem. But when you were on the last 3, you kept getting the same answer for both the sine and the cosine of the same angle, so you were confused. You spent 10 minutes on it, but then your teacher said that you only had three minutes left. You still had 4 problems to go, and at least 1 of them was worth 9 points. The others were worth 5.

You kept doing the same sine and cosine problem, which was stupid. It seemed like less than a minute had passed but then your teacher was telling you to turn in your tests and you weren’t done and you were crying and you were grabbing your test and you were standing up and walking to her desk and you were stapling it and you were turning it in and you were trying to hide your tears and you were sitting down. You don’t really remember hearing anything, but someone was comforting you and you were sobbing into the table and you vaguely recall someone from the “popular” group (who you don’t even know that well) coming over and patting you on the back and one of your friends coming  over and hugging you which makes you feel a tiny bit better, but not really.

Then the teacher is telling you that it’s time for you to go to your specialist rotation, but you don’t really care. You wipe your eyes, smudging your tears, and pick up your backpack. You wait for your friends like you always do. You hold the door open for them and they go into the hall. You walk slowly, but they don’t notice. They’re too caught up in their chatting. When they head outside to the language arts room, you hang back. You slip your backpack off and go into the bathroom. You don’t actually have to go to the bathroom. You went in there to clean up your act. You splash a bit of the cold water on your face (it smells like paint) and you look at yourself in the mirror. If you smile, you can barely tell that you were crying. You slip outside and go to the language arts room. You sit down at a table without saying anything and hide your head in your hands. You don’t cry though. You resolve not to cry again until you know your score.

During your specialist rotation, which is book club, you don’t read. You just stare at a page in The Book Thief until it’s time to go.

When it’s time to leave, you go quickly. You sit outside in the wood chips and look at your phone even though you aren’t supposed to. You swipe through your apps, eventually clicking on photos. You click through photos and videos of you and your friends, hiding your phone whenever a teacher walks by.

A friend’s friend asks to see your lock screen. You show her. It’s a stock photo of a beach that you’ve never been to. She insists that you take a picture with her, so you do. But then Stacey arrives.

Stacey is the lady who picks you up most days. She’s nice, and you feel like you can tell her mostly anything. But you don’t feel like talking today.  She drives you home, and when you get there you grab your ipad to check your score.

It's up.

You got a 76. The worst score you’ve ever gotten. You are dead. You can’t feel anything. You accidentally-on-purpose drop your ipad. You run to your parents’ bed and start to cry. One point less and you would have failed. You cry and you cry and you cry and you cry until your sister and your mom get home. Your mom isn’t mad like you expected, she just tries to comfort you. You don’t really listen. Your mind can’t hear anything other than your brain telling you that you failed you failed you failed you failed.

You get out of bed to grab your phone so you can text your friends to see if they got as bad scores as you. The first person you text responds after a couple minutes. She says that she hasn’t checked her score yet; she doesn’t want her day to go downhill. Good thinking, you think.

Your other friend got a 95, so that just makes you feel worse, but you congratulate her anyways.

Another friend responds immediately, saying that she’s gotten the worst score ever: 86. Yeah, right, you think. My score is worse than yours! But you don’t text her back.

None of this is making you feel any better about yourself, so you just give up and start crying again. Then, to get it out of your system, you write it all down.

Then, finally, your day doesn’t seem that bad.

You realize, after reflecting, that maybe the test score isn’t the end of the world. That there are bigger problems than a stupid math test. That one score on a test and an imperfect hotel room won’t determine your future. They hardly even matter.