Jan

Ksyusha was sixteen and she was a good student.
Not an A student, but a B student. Bs and A's. Almost perfect, but not quite. That "almost" was enough to make her parents sigh at dinner, teachers shrug, and classmates dismiss her as a nerd who wasn't quite there.
She tried. She really did. But math was a struggle, physics was terrifying, and chemistry seemed like magic she didn't understand. She sat in the front row, diligently taking notes, raising her hand, but deep down she knew she wasn't the smartest. She was just the most diligent.
"Ksyusha, when will you learn the formulas?" the teacher sighed.
“Ksyusha, you’re so boring,” her classmates said.
“Ksyusha, we believe in you,” the parents said, but there was disappointment in their voices.
And Ksyusha believed. She believed that if she tried just a little harder, if she learned just one more paragraph, if she stayed up until two in the morning, everything would change. But nothing changed.
Every morning she left the house an hour before school. She sat on a park bench, opened her textbook, and tried to study. But instead, she looked at the snow. At the trees. At the empty swing, rocked by the wind.
And every morning she saw him.
He stood at the entrance to the park. Tall, blond, wearing an old fur hat with earflaps. He did nothing—he just stood and watched. Sometimes he smiled at her. Sometimes he nodded. But he never approached.
Ksyusha didn't know who he was. But she noticed: when she sat with a textbook for too long and frowned, he shook his head. When she closed the book and looked at the sky, he smiled. As if he read her mind. As if he knew she was tired. That day was an algebra test. Ksyusha studied all night, but she still wasn't sure. She sat in the front row, writing out the answers with shaking hands, and felt panic rising inside her. She didn't know the last problem. At all.

She wrote something at random. She handed in her notebook and left the classroom to avoid seeing the teacher's disappointed face.

She stood by the fence, looked at the snow and felt tears welling up in her eyes.

• Hey.