Page 29 of Wild Card 13

Because there it was again.

That holy shit this is real feeling.

The realization kept hitting in random waves all day long like my brain still hadn’t fully caught up yet.

Lucy looked down briefly, trying and failing to hide her smile behind the edge of the books pressed against her chest.

Peterson cleared his throat loudly enough to remind us he unfortunately still existed.

Right.Biology.

Potential academic ruin.

Important things.

He looked between us once with the exhausted expression of a man realizing exactly why my grades had suddenly improved. Then he pulled one paper free from the stack in his hands. “You,” heinformed Lucy flatly, “are the only reason this boy understands cellular respiration.”

Lucy laughed softly under her breath.

And I swear to God I wanted that grade more than oxygen itself.

Peterson looked down at the paper once more like he was reconsidering all his life choices before finally holding it out toward me. “B plus.”

For a second, I genuinely thought I heard him wrong. My eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“B plus, Burns.” Peterson sounded almost annoyed about it. “Which means against all odds, you are capable of learning.”

I stared at the paper in complete disbelief before grabbing it from his hand. Not barely passing. Not academic survival by miracle. An actual good grade.

Holy shit.

“I got a B plus?” I repeated.

Peterson pointed at the test. “That is generally how letters work, yes.”

I looked back down at the paper again just to make sure it hadn’t somehow changed in the last three seconds. The giant red B+ still sat there at the top of the page.

Something electric shot straight through my chest.

Not because of the grade itself exactly. Because I had worked for it. Not like I worked at hockey, where instinct and repetition took over until my body knew what to do before I even thought about it. Not the kind of work that came from being naturally good at something where things came easy enough that nobody noticed the effort underneath.

Hours sitting in the library while Lucy forced me to relearn entire chapters I’d half ignored in class. Flash cards spread across cafeteria tables. Her color-coded notes shoved into my hockey bag between rolls of tape and protein bars. Re-reading sections of the textbook so many times the words started blurring together until Lucy would sigh dramatically and start explaining it all over again from the beginning.

And somehow she never made me feel stupid while she did it.

Most teachers looked at me and saw hockey first. Most people did. Big varsity idiot. Future athlete. Guy who could fight and scoreand probably wouldn’t need biology once junior hockey took over his life completely.

Lucy never looked at me like that.

She got annoyed with me constantly, sure.

Threatened violence at least twice a study session.

But underneath all of it, she acted like she genuinely expected me to understand eventually. Like failing wasn’t inevitable just because science made my brain want to leave my body.

I stared at the grade another second longer before laughing under my breath in complete disbelief.

Lucy was already smiling before our eyes met fully, and the second they did, her whole face lit up in this quiet, proud way that hit me harder than the grade itself.