The Weight of Almost
The clock on Jasi's nightstand read 11:47 when she finally looked up from her notes, and the numbers seemed to pulse at her like a small accusation. She should have been asleep two hours ago. Instead, she sat hunched over her desk, the wheels of her chair locked in place, three highlighters clenched between her fingers like a makeshift bouquet.
Her notes sprawled across the desk in a system only she could decode: yellow for formulas she'd mastered, pink for concepts that still slipped through her grasp like water, and blue for the things she simply refused to forget, no matter what. The Northfield Academy placement exam study guide sat open to page forty-three, its corners soft and curled from weeks of handling. She'd read that page so many times the words had started to blur into shapes rather than meaning.
Jasi rolled her shoulders back and stared at the practice problem in front of her. A quadratic equation, deceptively simple at first glance, waited to be solved. She'd already worked through it twice, and both times she'd arrived at answers that didn't match the one printed faintly in the answer key at the back of the booklet. She exhaled slowly, picked up her pencil, and…
