The quiet hum of Zaid’s dorm room was usually a comfort, but tonight it felt like the mocking silence before an execution. Spread across his desk was a battlefield of open textbooks, scrawled-on notepapers, and a calculator that seemed to be judging him. It was Advanced Algebra, and he was realizing, with a sinking, cold dread, that he was in very, very big trouble.
He’d been procrastinating for weeks, telling himself the concepts would “click.” but they had not clicked. They had remained a dense, impenetrable fog of variables and quadratic formulas that seemed designed specifically to t*****e him. Tomorrow was the exam, and as he stared at a problem that might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian, the full weight of his doom settled upon him.
“Okay, focus,” he muttered to himse
