Chapter 3

She gripped my hands tightly, overwhelmed with emotion.

"Thank you! Oh, god bless you, thank you!"

From that day on, my daily routine gained an extra chore: heading straight to her apartment after my shift to tutor her son.

The first time I stepped into their home, my stomach turned.

The entire apartment was barely four hundred square feet, yet four people were crammed inside.

Her youngest daughter had only been born a few months prior.

Her teenage son, Jeremy, was sprawled out across the filthy couch, glued to his phone.

Empty snack wrappers and garbage littered the floor.

His thumbs flew across the screen as he screamed into his headset, "Shoot him, you dumbass!"

"Are you braindead or what?! What a useless piece of trash!"

His mother forced an awkward smile and rushed forward, shaking his shoulder.

"Put the game away! The teacher is here!"

Jeremy scowled in irritation.

"Why the hell did you bring another tutor here?"

"Didn't I tell you I'm not doing this crap? Even if I tried, I wouldn't get it anyway!"

"Can you stop annoying me for five damn minutes?!"

Watching his mother plead so pathetically on her knees, I couldn't hold back any longer.

"How about this? Let's make a bet."

"If I can make this interesting for you, you stick with my lessons."

"If you find my class boring, I'll walk out the door right now, and I'll buy you whatever video game bundle you want—your choice."

Hearing that, his eyes lit up instantly.

"For real?"

I nodded firmly.

"Completely real. That is, if you have the guts to take the bet."

Ego always ran high with teenage boys. He shoved his phone into his pocket, sat up on the stool, and glared at me.

"Fine. Bring it on."

I grabbed his past test papers and skimmed through them.

He wasn't stupid at all.

He had the right logic for the advanced problems, but he kept plugging in the wrong formulas.

As for the foundational questions, he lost points simply because he couldn't be bothered to show his work, leading to careless arithmetic slips.

In short: reckless, impatient, and overconfident.

Without a word, I pulled out an advanced math competition problem and tossed it on the table.

"Work it out."

He blinked, staring at me in utter disbelief.

"I don't even know what the hell this is asking, and you want me to solve it?"

"If I could do this, would I even need a tutor?"

I nodded calmly in agreement.

"Fair point. At least you're not an idiot."

"I didn't ask you to solve it completely. Just write out your train of thought."

"Don't worry. I can show you how to crack this whole problem in under five minutes."

He scoffed, rolling his eyes as he picked up the pen.

Once he jotted down his rough thinking, I mapped out a tailored approach using his specific logic.

At first, he lazily twirled his pen, half-listening with a smug smirk.

Yet slowly, without even realizing it, his gaze locked onto my notepad, completely engrossed in what I was explaining.

He didn't even notice how focused he had become.

The second I finished breaking down the method, his pen flew across the paper.

In barely three minutes, he arrived at the correct solution.

He leaped out of his seat, shouting, "Holy shit, it actually worked!"

I watched him with a calm smile.

I had seen this countless times before.

Struggling students rarely fell behind because they lacked the brains.

There was almost always an underlying root cause holding them back.

The moment I had stepped through the front door, I already suspected the real issue: his toxic home environment.

The bruises on his and his mother's arms, the shattered beer bottles in the hallway—every detail screamed violence and trauma.

Over the weeks that followed, Jeremy grew increasingly close to me.

He eagerly waited for my tutoring sessions every evening.

Whenever I assigned him practice sets, he never complained about the workload.

Instead, he worked through them diligently, waiting for me to review them the next day.

His mock scores shot up rapidly, and when the actual SAT rolled around, he scored high enough to gain admission to a top-tier state university.

His mother was so thrilled that she practically tried to push expensive gifts into my arms.

I turned every single offer down. As an educator, doing right by my students was my fundamental duty.

My job was simply to guide these kids to a better future.