Revenge14 min read
The Zero That Became a Score
ButterPicks18 views
I still remember the exact moment the rumor started, how it spread from mouth to mouth like a spilled jar of ink, staining everything it touched.
"You see her? That's Stella Gallo. Caught cheating on the last math exam," someone whispered the first day I returned to the new classroom after the transfer.
"Wait—Stella? But she entered City One as the top scorer in the whole district," another voice replied, incredulous.
"Her dad is the education bureau director. Heard they arranged seats so second and third sat right behind and beside her," someone added with a slow, knowing smile.
I let them talk. Let them stack the slop and fling the lid on. It would be easier that way—let me sink. Let them enjoy the spectacle.
"You cheated, Stella. Zero." The word "zero" clanged in the air like a small bell. It was the only official stamp the school could give me, and I decided not to fight. If they wanted to believe it, fine. I would be zero, and I would be quiet.
"Why would anyone set a trap for a girl like that?"
"Heard she had the gall to look proud when they carried her in. Karma."
I walked down the narrow aisle and slowed in front of the boy who had been the loudest. He caught my look and smirked like he owned a stage.
"Oh? The cheat still wants to stare? You gonna hit me?" he jeered.
I glanced at the math worksheet folded on his desk. The last line of his algebra solution had a proud flourish and then, at the end, a result: 4=5.
I wanted to laugh, but I simply walked past him to the very last row and sat. The room hummed with the chorus of small cruelties.
"Stella Gallo," our new math teacher said, her voice cutting like a ruler. "Zero."
Laughter erupted. Someone slapped a desk. Another imitated a honking sound. I took the paper handed to me. My grade was indeed printed: 0.
"She filled the whole page," a girl said haltingly, the defensiveness in her voice getting swallowed by the room. "She filled every box."
"Doesn't matter," the teacher snapped. "Cheating is cheating."
I looked up at the teacher—Jennifer Neves, the woman who favored the golden frames of her glasses like trophies. She'd already made her reputation: only good students mattered. The rest were background noise.
"She has no shame," a voice from the back said. "Her father must have arranged everything."
That was when a hand touched my shoulder. Cedric Fisher sat down beside me with a small, crooked smile, as if he'd been waiting for me. He had arrived that week too. Tall, thoughtful, always with a little doodle somewhere on his paper—2022, for reasons I would later understand.
"Don't let them gaslight you," Cedric said in a low voice.
"Gaslight?" I echoed.
He shrugged. "Ignore the noise."
A boy—Gunner Johansson—announced loudly, "If she can't cheat, she'll drag us down. Can't trust a cheat to be on our team." He blinked like a rooster.
I let it be. The truth, I decided, would not be proven by words. It would be proven by skill.
That afternoon a new boy arrived, slipping into the desk next to mine like he belonged to the light. Ashby Daniels. Calm, a little cold, the kind who looked like he had been carved out of winter. He sat, glanced at me, and then at the other boys who fanned around him like moths.
"Hello," he said once, when the noise dimmed. "Stella."
"Hi," I said. Simple as that.
Weeks passed. Rumors became fact in people's mouths. My father—when he came home that night—slapped me without looking at my face. "You ruined me," he said. "You ruined everything."
"Do you even know the truth?" I asked.
He laughed like a broken thing. "I don't need to know. I only need your disgrace."
I swallowed my anger. He had the luxury of humiliation; I had the grind of every day. So I did what seemed sensible: I let them label me. I let them drop me to the bottom. I watched our world. I learned the faces of our enemies and the soft places where they touched one another.
Then the school tightened the screws. Another test, another accusation. This time, they found a crumpled ball of paper on my desk. I had never seen it before in my life. Two strikes at City One meant expulsion.
"But the answers are wrong," I told Instructor Jacques Cabrera when he marched me to the office.
"You think it's that simple?" he said, eyes sharp like a hawk. "We have evidence."
"I won't admit to something I didn't do," I said. "If you think I'm a cheat, test me again."
"Fine," he sneered. "We will test you. On paper."
"They brought me a blank monthly test," I told them in the office, watching as the group of teachers gathered like vultures. Jennifer Neves's lips were thin with anticipation. Jacques's expression was smug. Principal Cyrus Cardenas watched from the doorway, solemn as a judge.
"Do the experiment-class's real math test," I said then. "You think I'm the kind of fraud who can't take a real exam? Give me the hard paper."
Someone muttered. The young teacher in a suit—Sven Ahmad—clapped like an auctioneer. "Yes. Bring it in. Let's see if the cheat can stand on her own feet."
They did. The paper was harder than anything we had. It was a real test—vector fields, tricky trigonometry, a last problem that could take an hour alone. I took the test they had written for the experiment class and, quietly, calmly, solved it. I wrote the last question in four different ways, because solving it once felt too small.
Then I set the pen down and said, "Grade it."
The first man—Jacques—scoffed, walking circles like a dog around a bone. He was ready to see my humiliation. Jennifer sat like a queen awaiting a show. Sven leaned forward. Principal Cardenas held his expression like a shield that hid nothing.
"Full marks?" he said, incredulous. "Impossible."
"Grade the rest," I said.
They did. Time slowed. The math teacher's grin slipped. Jacques's jawbox tightened. The young man in the suit let out a short, sharp laugh—then it died down as pages folded and fingers stopped.
"This is impossible," Jennifer said, eyes wide. "You—"
"She vanished into the gradebook as zero," Jacques sneered. "How—"
"I think," Cedric said softly, "you owe her more than that."
The silence that followed was a kind of punishment itself.
They had painted me a cheat and been caught with smudges of their own lies. For the first time, the teachers' own faces betrayed a crack. Their expressions cycled: confident, then startled, then denial, finally pinched with the knowledge that they had misstepped.
They wanted the easy humiliation of a student. Instead they got exposure. I had not wanted spectacle; I only wanted a fair yardstick. But the world loved spectacle, and once the truth had weight, the crowd found its voice.
"How did she...?" Jacques began.
"Stop. Enough," Principal Cardenas said, voice low. "We will investigate. We will review the protocols."
Jennifer opened her mouth, closed it. Her fingers trembled a little. "You—" she tried again and failed to find the old contempt.
"Stella," Sven said, hand hovering the other side of the table, "do you want us to make an announcement?"
"No," I said. "I want fairness."
But fairness is slow. The school needed a public spectacle to repair itself. The teachers wanted to show they had been thorough. The students wanted blood. I knew their hunger.
So I asked for what I had always wanted: an answer in public. A moment on a stage.
"Fine," Principal Cardenas said at last. "We will clear the matter publicly."
We scheduled a meeting in the assembly hall. Word spread like a match in a hay loft. Every corner of the school filed in. The experiment class, in their neat pride, sat in the front rows. Parallel classes filled the sides. Banners rustled: "Integrity First," "Fairness for All"—the irony tasted like copper.
I walked onto the stage with the exam and the office copy of the paper under my arm. Cedric and Ashby were at my sides. Cedric with the little doodle on his paper—2022—Ashby with the same implacable calm. Behind us the teachers shuffled uneasily.
"Everyone," Principal Cardenas said, voice booming with the kind of authority he wore like a coat. "We are here to resolve a serious allegation."
"She cheated her way across our campus," Jacques said quickly, looking like a man reciting a prepared speech. "We found evidence on her person. We acted as any school must."
I waited.
"We asked Stella to retake the actual exam used by the experiment class," Sven said. "She accepted."
"And?" someone in the back shouted, like a child urging on a fight.
"And," Principal Cardenas continued, "she earned a perfect score."
A ripple went through the hall. Gasps, small laughs, the sound of a paper turning. Jennifer Neves's face shifted from a heap of composed contempt to a bleaching mask.
"Full marks?" a student near the front hissed.
"Stella," Jacques said, and his voice had lost something, the confidence that had warmed his earlier cruelty. "Is there—any explanation?"
"Yes," I said, and my voice was small but steady. "I don't need to explain myself to those who chose to call me guilty without proof. But since you want a show, let's make it plain."
I opened my exam on the podium. Pages gleamed. I explained the fourth solution to the last problem out loud, methodically, so anyone could hear. I walked them through it the way you'd show someone how to tie a knot: step by step, hands outstretched.
"She solved it four ways," Ashby said softly to the crowd as I worked. "That's not a cheat. That's understanding."
A teacher in the front row whispered to a colleague, "How could we have misread such a thing?" The murmurs swelled until the hall filled with them. They were whispers of guilt and, oddly, shame.
Jennifer's face collapsed. She had been so sure. Her finger tapped her notes like a metronome that kept losing tempo. "You must be mistaken," she said at the end, voice thin, as if someone had given her a cup with a hole.
"No mistake," Cedric answered. "You wanted evidence. You got it."
The punishment that followed was not a courtroom sentence. It was public reversal with stinging clarity. The teachers who had been most eager to brand me were asked to stand before the entire school and explain the basis of their actions.
"Why did you insist she was guilty?" I asked Jennifer later, during the segment when the principal opened the floor to questions.
"I cannot defend the way I handled this," she said, each word a small, brittle thing. "I—" She looked at Jacques, and his own face looked like a cinder pulled out of ashes. "I let a rumor and my bias do the job for me."
"You accused me of cheating," I said. "You put that mark on my record. You let others pile on. What do you say to that?"
She swallowed. "I am sorry."
The crowd hissed. Apologies in public land unevenly. Some accepted, some spat.
But the punishment wasn't only that they had to stand. It was that everyone watched them shrink. There were shifts on faces—students who had jeered now looked away; those who had gossiped with relish were suddenly quiet. The laughter turned inward.
"You will organize a remedial program," Principal Cardenas said finally. "You will be present for it. And you will publicly correct the record."
Jennifer turned white. "Yes. I will."
Jacques bowed—an awkward, involuntary nod—and left the stage as if the floor had become a social quicksand.
Later, in the hallway, mob justice took over in small ways. Some students filmed the episode, others whispered about the cruelty of teachers who forgot they were teachers. A few even snapped photos of Jennifer and Jacques standing together, their pride dinged. The cameras were merciless. Their faces went from authority to glare, to the helplessness of those who had been unmasked.
Jennifer tried to weep, to say she had acted for the school's good. "We were protecting standards," she said to a circle of teachers who had murmured around her like vultures who'd lost their prey. "She might have really cheated before and we were only being cautious."
The crowd reacted. "Too cautious until you break someone," one student said.
Her defenses crumbled like old plaster. She shifted between denial and pleas, then rage, then finally confession. She scrubbed at her glasses as if to wipe from her eyes the memory of how she'd condemned me.
People clapped in the hallway, but not with delight. It was the kind of clap that carries debt: applause because wrong was righted, heavy with the knowledge of how long the wrong had been allowed.
Through all of it, I kept my face still. The punishment had not been mine to savor. But it was real. The teachers who'd tried to blacken me had their professional credit made thin. They had to explain, to correct, to apologize. It was public. It was messy. It was human.
Afterwards, standing with Cedric and Ashby, I felt the room close around us like a new skin. It held warmth. We had not only proved a point; we had shifted something in the school's center of gravity. The rumor that had once hung over my head like a wet blanket was no longer untouchable. I felt the first, cautious flutter of something like relief.
But the story would not end there. Humiliation turned others crueler. The girl who had whispered that she saw me put a phone in my pocket—Veronika Dumas, who had been a friend once—had to be answered to. There were consequences for betrayal beyond teachers' apologies; sooner or later, those who lied would be called to account in ways the school intended to avoid.
I knew full well there would be more of a fight to come. We had cut a wound open, and the infection would not heal quietly. We had lit a small bonfire. People loved to gather around a flame.
"Now," Cedric said, squeezing my shoulder, "we do the rest."
"Together," Ashby added.
"Together," I said, and we left the hall to the swirl of a school that now smelled, faintly, of change.
*
We moved classes a few days later, not back to the stratosphere but sideways—into Parallel A. The students there were loud, warm, and unpolished. They were not the glossy experiment class kids; they were scrappy. They called themselves undervalued. They were the ones that teachers tossed doubts at like paper airplanes.
"You're with us," Cade Burris said the first week, slapping my shoulder with boyish ceremony.
"I didn't ask to be rescued," I said.
"We didn't ask either," Cade said. "But now we fight."
Cedric and Ashby sat on either side of me. Cedric was always sketching that number—2022—on the corner of his notebook. Later he told me it was a private joke: a beginning. Ashby taught physics in a way that made the air thrum. He had a quiet patience that led people to the right answers without announcing their ignorance.
"Teach me," Gunner said once, urgent, surprising in his manner.
"All right," I said. "Start lugging your textbooks."
We made a bargain. Two months of furious afternoons, small-group tutoring, mornings memorizing vocabulary with the English teacher who finally agreed to help. The whole class started to run like a machine with three hearts—me, Ashby, Cedric. I taught algebra and probability; Ashby taught physics and chemistry tricks; Cedric translated ideas into the kind of simple diagrams that stuck in people's heads.
We made a chant in those first days: "We will win." It was childish and perfect, a practice for hope.
"Do you think we can actually beat the experiment class?" Gunner asked at lunch, his voice small.
"You'll be surprised," I said.
Course after course, we chipped away. The experiment class was good, but they had grown used to being lifted. They had not learned, perhaps, the bitter sweetness of pulling each other up with threadbare hands. We had that hunger.
And then came the big competitions—the monthly tests that determined bragging rights, that teachers used as excuses to divide students into altars and peons. We pitted ourselves against them. The stakes were the stupid, childish sort: which class would kneel in the field and sing that mocking song? But under that foolishness was truth: we wanted recognition.
The first time we matched their papers, the school was shocked. The second time we narrowed the gap to a few points. The third time, we beat them. It wasn't a miracle, exactly; it was a hundred small stubbornities stitched together.
When the results came in for the city-wide mock exam—the Nine-City test—our class average climbed past Experiment A. The assembly hall burst apart in noise. Sven, the young teacher who had once smirked at me, cried on a podium like a small, embarrassed boy; he could not hold it together. Principal Cardenas smiled until his cheeks hurt, delighted at the policy changes the result would force.
They held a ceremony. We stood on a dais and accepted awards. Seventeen of us—our whole class—would effectively be guaranteed spots at top universities if we kept going. We had rewired the school's prejudices.
At the end of the ceremony, I found Veronika in a crowd of her family—her face paler than usual. She had come to listen. I saw the small, hard line in her jaw as she watched us.
I walked up to her. The place had gone quiet, as if the air needed to brace.
"Why did you tell on me?" I asked.
She looked up, and for the first time I saw a flicker of real regret cross her face.
"It was easier," she said. "You were getting too big. I wanted to stand out."
"You thought dragging me down would make you higher?" I asked.
"No," she whispered. "It wasn't like that. I—"
"You chose a lie," I said. "You chose to hurt someone."
The crowd listened. Teachers craned their necks. Veronika's defenses folded like paper. Then she began to say things: excuses, then apologies, then pleas. At first she tried to wriggle free—"I didn't mean it"—but as the students watched, and as the teachers' faces hardened, her story shrank.
"You will say sorry properly, in front of everyone," I said.
Her mouth moved. "I am sorry," she said, trembling. "I was jealous. I was cowardly. I'm sorry."
There was murmuring. Some students applauded; others hissed. She wanted to explain, but the air had already decided.
"People," I said, "we're done with being small. That means we don't humiliate people for sport. It also means we don't betray friends to climb."
Veronika's eyes shone. "I deserve whatever comes," she said. "I'll do anything."
"Then do this," I told her. "Help us. Teach with us. Be honest."
She nodded like a person waking from sleep.
*
There would be more cruelties—people who tried to sabotage our tests, who whispered in corridors, who set traps. There would also be kindnesses, like Cedric waiting with a steady hand when I could not sleep, or Ashby slipping his sleeve over my shoulders when the autumn wind came in cold.
We were not perfect. We fought. We cried. We made mistakes. But we learned how to be a team, and in a season of tests and nights, we became something else: a class that refused to be defined by the assumptions of others.
The results came. We rose and rose. The city papers wrote puff pieces about our improbable climb. University offers arrived—some from the great places people named in movies: Tsinghua, Peking. I sat through the calls as two schools argued about me on my front steps.
"Tsinghua thinks it's a joke to lose you," one man from their admissions panel told me, red-faced with disappointment. "They say they'd like to take you and the science top scorer for company."
"I appreciate it," I said, smiling at his frustration. "But I'm headed to Peking."
He could not understand my reason. It was small and private: Peking offered a program that fit me, and I had learned to make choices for myself.
When the final scores were released, Ashby and Cedric and I found ourselves tied at the top of the city. We three had pushed and pulled ourselves and our classmates and, improbably, ended up shoulder to shoulder.
We stood at the back of the assembly that day, dodging hugs and loud congratulations. The principal came up to the microphone and announced a change to the school's long, rigid policies: from now on they would revise the system so monthly evaluations could change students' classes. The school had been forced by our result to acknowledge that a single test should not ordain a future. It was the sort of real reform that turned small rebellions into new rules.
We had not only won a bet we had made as angry boys and girls; we had made a new world for those who came after us.
That night we celebrated until we fell asleep on couches and cafeteria benches. We took the prize money—modest and strange—and used it the way teenagers do with a taste of adult cash: a messy caravan of theme parks, KTV, and midnight walks.
On one of those walks, Cedric came back from a trip, and I watched him appear at the school gate like a comet. He hugged me on the street and whispered, "I went to competitions. I had to see if I could find the end of the horizon."
"You came back," I said.
"I came back because this—this is home," he said. "Because whatever 'home' is, the one who keeps it is here."
He left again for a while after that—math camp, then university offers—and later returned to stand with us at graduation. Ashby left and came back as well, quiet as always, the sort of friend who doesn't need to speak to know what you need.
On the day we took our college photos, I thought of the odd things that had made the turning points: the zero stamped on a sheet of paper, a tiny doodle that read 2022, a red pen, a phone that had never vibrated during an exam. The trivial things become totems of memory.
Years later, when administrators asked me to speak at City One, I told them this simple truth:
"Never let one exam define you. The right yardstick is work, done honestly, and the friends who will carry you when you falter."
When I stepped down from the stage that day, someone in the crowd shouted out, "Stella! Say your line!"
I laughed. "We will win," I mouthed back, because the chant had become a promise.
We did not become gods. We became people who learned to live with our small, human errors and to fix them. We learned that public reckoning can be savage but, when honest, can mend what was broken.
And every now and then, when a younger student asks me about that tattoo of numbers on my old notebooks, I point to the little scrawl still there—2022—and tell them, "It was the year we decided to begin."
The End
— Thank you for reading —