I walked through the blissful land of ice cream. A large panda placed a crown on my head. I took my seat on a throne of marshmallows. Looking down, I smirked as I saw the kids, from my school, that I despised with my entire heart.

I held my head high, deciding to dole out revenge. I opened my mouth and….

“Get up, beta! It’s already six-thirty!” my mother called from the kitchen.

I groaned, turned over and mumbled the universal excuse: “Five more minutes.” They turned into 20, and I scrambled to get ready to get to school on time.

Mother just shook her head and said, “You’ve become so irresponsible. God knows how you will handle your exams!”

Trying not to roll my eyes, just in case she could see them, I stuffed the toast in my mouth and ran outside to meet an equally grumpy van driver. “You’ve been making us wait for 15 minutes, Kashaf.”

Without saying anything, I went to my seat, as the occupants of the bus looked at me with anger, drenched in sweat. I spent the journey to school in silent embarrassment. I came into the class quite late, with just five minutes before the bell for the first period started. I sat down with a thud, sighing loudly.

“Why were you late?” Mishal started, but before I could answer, the teacher walked in and I didn’t have to give any excuse for my usual late arrival.

The teacher started droning on about something that sounded ancient, irrelevant and possibly useless. Mishal whispered for me to pass her a pen. I quietly handed over my pouch.

“Which one is the blue one?” she asked.

“The one with the polka dots,” I whispered back.

SLAM! The teacher brought the duster down hard on the table. She glowered at us. “Stand up, all of you! What a bunch of careless students!” she started yelling.

After spending a long time on Mishal and Hamnah (by the sounds of it, she’d been copying Yashal’s homework), the teacher turned on me. “And here I thought you were responsible. Kashaf, at the start of the term you were so obedient. These girls have spoilt you. Stop sitting with them. Go sit there.”

That was exactly what she had done when I was in her class last year and sat next to the quietest girl in the class. “You are so quiet now. Socialise. I have barely seen you contribute to anything this year,” she had said.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. I spent lunchtime trying not to be seen by any teacher while acting silly with my friends, trying to be quieter and fitting the good-girl description as if I still were.

The last class arrived in the form of a blessing, until we found out there was a quiz. Again! What’s the point? All we did was learn how much we will score. As if life were a 10-mark A4 paper with five MCQs, two long questions and three “True or False” answers.

Miss Anum smiled expectantly at me. I doubted she knew I had shifted my interest from math to literature. Just because I was a good little girl as a child, it didn’t mean I was supposed to follow that into everything I did. But a quiz I had prepared for was something in my hands. I could ace it. I could get average marks if I wished to ruin my privileges and prove how dumb I was, or just leave it blank.

But I chose to pretend I wanted the first option because I wanted to, when the real answer was because if I didn’t, my mother would end my existence.

When the teacher handed me the checked quiz paper, I had gotten 9 out of 10 marks. I looked at the one mark lost. Such an easy question, such a stupid answer!

I knew being average was hard. But once you became a topper, you were one. Either maintain it, or just let it go and be called a fluke. The point was, we don’t choose who we want to be. Just saying the ABCs right in kindergarten — stuff like that made toppers “toppers”. But then once you had an image, it was hard to forget it.

I knew it sounded ungrateful. But sometimes I didn’t know how to fix that ungratefulness in me. Maybe it was who I was. Maybe being a topper and wishing you weren’t wouldn’t be as apocalyptic. Maybe being a good girl didn’t mean you couldn’t talk back, be rude or say no. Marking your bad traits in red didn’t help. Adapting to them did. Because this life wasn’t a quiz with five MCQs.

Published in Dawn, Young World, June 28th, 2026