We were out to change the world. This was our time, our senior year. My best friend Beth and I had big dreams and hopes for our last year in high school.

“Kris, did you see the girl standing by us in the lunch 1ine—she looks so lost, so out of place.” We had heard of a family that had just moved to our town from the country of Cambodia. We knew there was supposed to be a new girl at our school from that family, but we had yet to meet her until now.

Lucy was a small dark-haired beauty. She was starting her freshman year in this new country. She struggled with the little English she knew and that made it very hard for her to get to know people in our small town.

In most cases, students of the same grade would sit together. We watched in the lunchroom from our “Senior Table”. This table was reserved (预留) for our “senior sports jock (运动健将) friends,” and no one else. Most of the time, Lucy would get her lunch tray (托盘) with the rest of we students but she always kept her head down with her eyes focused on the floor. She would then head to the table of the freshman class. Unfortunately, it was the table for the most popular girls in the freshman class. Every single day Lucy would sit at the very edge of her seat and eat as fast as she could. She kept her eyes fixed on her food and we never, ever saw her look up. We would watch quietly as the other girls were interacting with each other at her table. They would make gestures to one another and laugh at Lucy while she ate.

As we paid attention over the next week, we never heard anyone at her table say “Hi” to Lucy. We decided to try our hardest to let one lonely girl know that there were people who knew she existed.

Para1: We sat with Lucy at the freshman girl’s table.

Para2: From then on, Lucy began to change.

Miss Baugh taught seventh-grade social studies. She was the kind of teacher that just about everyone has had at least once: frightening. When my friends learned that I was in her class, they looked at me with pity.

Miss Baugh didn’t allow nonsense. She taught us to take school seriously. She had been teaching for a long time and knew how to frighten even the boys who typically behaved badly in the back row. They behaved well in her classroom. I was as frightened as anyone.

But I also had a life outside of school and had just discovered cheap props (道具) for pranks (恶作剧) that I could play on friends and family. One such prop had two parts: an ink (墨水) bottle painted to look as though it had overturned, and a piece of shiny black metal shaped like a puddle (水坑). It didn’t take long to run out of people to fool (愚弄) at home, so I took my props to school.

Of all the people I could have pranked, strangely I chose Miss Baugh. At the beginning of the class period, before she’d returned to her classroom, I was brave enough to approach her desk.

I opened her grade book and placed the bottle and the metal on one of the pages, proudly noting that it truly did look like spilled ink!

Then I went to my desk and waited for the fun. I wasn’t disappointed. When Miss Baugh saw the bottle and the metal, she let out a little cry and looked for something to remove the ink with.

The prank had succeeded way beyond my expectations. But then the realization began to set in that I had pranked Miss Baugh. I began worrying when Miss Baugh tried to remove the ink with a paper towel and discovered that it was just a piece of black metal. She picked up the “puddle”, then the bottle, and examined them.

She looked up. Her eyes searched the classroom. My classmates avoided looking at me so as not to give me away.   

Then came the question: “Who did this?”

After some hesitation, I raised my hand.

“Well, it certainly fooled me!” she laughed.

When I was in seventh grade, my parents paid a tutor(家庭教师)forty dollars a week for her coming to my house and helping me with math. It ended up raising my marks from 50 to 55.

I had to admit it was mainly my fault. Maybe I should have concentrated on my math from the beginning. But studying math was a painful and tough thing. My teachers and friends would frequently ask the question after tests, “How’s your math this time？” Gradually I became extremely afraid of math. My fear of math got worse in ninth grade. Every report card I received from my new math teacher Ms Robbins had the comment to encourage me,“I’m glad to do what I can to help you.” But I couldn’t tell her the real reason why I didn’t ask for help—I didn’t want to be considered stupid. Every question I had was, in my opinion at that time, something that the whole class had understood but me. So I ended up not caring about anything related to math, without working hard on math at all. But in my bottom of my heart, there was still a worry that I would not pass the math exam or even fail to be admitted to high school .

Finally, the day came when my classmates and I took the final test that would lead to our graduation from middle school and stepping into high school. Days after the exam, on a rainy summer morning, Ms. Robbins called me to her office.