Face down.
He put her paper on her desk… face down.
Uh oh.
Jemma took a deep breath, clenching her eyes shut as her teacher finished handing everyone else’s exams out.
Face up.
Great.
Sighing, she tuned the man at the front of the class out as she mentally prepared herself for what she was potentially about to face. She hadn’t done well, that she had known this whole time. But nevertheless, she couldn’t have done that badly.
Could she?
Surely not.
Jemma excelled at school; it was what she (and everyone else) was proudest of. Her only true source of validation, and her only real way to make her parents care.
Yes, science was her strong point, but she was good at it all.
Never below a grade six, which she held notably in her mind.
Going in, Jemma had known that Shakespeare was her weakest link, but usually her knack for English Literature pulled through; she had made some solid points, leaving the exam hall feeling relatively okay.
Blinking slowly, she realised that 30 minutes had passed.
Well, it was now or never.
Quickly, she folded the corner of the page over where she knew her score would be sat awaiting her.
Glancing at it swiftly, she let the paper flop back down as she allowed a sharp intake of breath.
Oh.
It was, in fact, that bad.
A five.
She had barely scraped half of the marks.
And yet, everyone around her seemed to have done well.
So, she deduced, this was definitely just a fault of her own.
Tears spilled silently over her cheeks as she mentally berated herself: she was supposed to be good at english. This was not good. She was a fool for feeling as though it might’ve gone okay.
How could she have been this stupid?
This was not her.
Jemma Simmons was a grade seven to nine student.
Not a five.
And it was all her fault.
She should’ve studied harder.
Poured all her time into Shakespeare, focused less on Biology.
The bell ringing broke her from her trance and sent her scrambling to leave class as quickly as possible, completely ignoring the worried glance Fitz shot her way.
Practically running down the corridors, Jemma’s tears flowed harder and harder as her breathing became more and more laboured and sporadic.
As fast as possible, she threw herself into her dorm room, slamming the door less than gently behind her.
Exasperated, she flung herself onto her bed, stifling her wracking sobs with her pillow.
Everyone was going to be so disappointed with her; she was supposed to be better than this.
It wasn’t good enough.
She wasn’t good enough.