“Don’t pick French,” she says, “that teacher, you know,” lowering her voice, “he is awful…”

Mr. Lord wasn’t a good The-Prince-character teacher, he was feared and hated by his students, therefore a big no-no. With his forever unflattering frown face and an equally unflattering tensed tone, practically no one liked him. I had been, for a very extended period of time, terrified of him.

It was almost like what happened in a cliche romance episode when a girl saw a notoriously awful guy and somehow dig out the good part of him, only difference with her story is that, well, it wasn’t a romance episode.

And that’s how it begins, a petty girl with a sense of arrogant insecurity, which she used to blame in on her Dickens-style childhood, but not anymore, for it to be nothing but her immature past and a horrifying teacher. 

She believed Mr. Lord didn’t know about her not-so-subtle feelings, that no one did. But truth is, even she got lost in the maze of feelings, one entangling with one another. The truth about feelings is that we are always finding what we yearn for, a forever hide-and-seek with ourselves until we walk out of the childhood shadow that was casted upon us, penetrating into our everyday life. 

It was my secret that I can never tell, that I really liked him. I was a drowning girl trying to find a hint of my father’s existence on him. A lost girl trying to find my way in a boarding school. A teenage girl trying to grow up. But at the end, he was just my French teacher for one brief year, and I was just his student.