Speak Up Chapter 15
In the end, I replied with one sentence.
“Because I didn’t want to rely on that.”
Wade answered quickly.
“What about today?”
I looked at the message, and my chest tightened.
I closed my eyes, the image from the assembly still sharp in my mind.
He’d been held back by a teacher, his voice hoarse, and he was still fighting for me.
He really could have been expelled because of me.
I couldn’t let that happen.
“Because of you.”
I sent the text.
Again, the other side went quiet for a long time.
Then a GIF popped up.
A golden retriever was grinning, a caption underneath reading “hehe.”
I stared at the GIF and laughed.
After that, life slowly returned to its old rhythm.
Wade’s grades kept climbing.
On the midterms, he went from three hundred and twentieth in our class to two hundred and tenth.
He had earned every point himself.
One day, he was sprawled across his desk when he suddenly said, “Bianca, at my old school, nobody cared if I studied or not.”
I stopped writing and looked at him.
He buried his face in his arms, his voice muffled.
“My mom gets up at four every morning to make pizza dough. She’s busy until noon before she can even sit down.”
“She doesn’t have time to check my homework, and she can’t make sense of my textbooks.”
“The teachers didn’t really care about me, either. My grades were bad, so I sat in the back, and no one noticed if I slept through class.”
“My dad left when I was in middle school. After that, nobody ever told me I could actually improve my grades.”