I walked home that afternoon with the official report tucked inside my bag, the paper feeling as heavy as a lead weight against my side. When I handed it to my father, the silence that followed was more painful than all the shouting and the insults he had hurled at me before. He looked at the 19.5/20 in mathematics, then at the ashes of the PS5 still visible on the grass in the backyard. The realization hit him like a physical collapse; he dropped the paper, his hands trembling as he realized he had destroyed his son’s spirit for a mistake that wasn’t mine. He tried to apologize, to offer to buy a new console, but the words felt hollow and meaningless in the face of the “sban” he had already inflicted. You can replace a machine, but you can’t replace the trust that burns away in a moment of blind, unearned rage. I looked at the man who had called me a disgrace and saw only a stranger who didn’t truly know his own son. I was the best in the class, but in that moment, we both felt like we had lost everything that actually mattered.
