When sophomore year class placements were announced, Carlos predictably chose STEM, while Alicia switched to art instead.
Cherl's grades barely scraped by—her STEM scores dragging her down—yet against all logic, she stubbornly picked the same track just to share classes with Carlos.
Even when faced with his icy indifference, she kept banging her head against the wall, grinning through every rejection.
Sometimes Carlos couldn't stomach watching her struggle. Each time he saw her wrestling with equations during math, his face twisted in obvious annoyance.
The midterms changed nothing—Cherl still languished at the bottom. Carlos stared at her test paper, a m******e of red X's bleeding across the page, then at the girl chewing her pencil raw over basic algebra. For the first time, he'd fou
