The Mathematics of Love ✔

Chapter 21

A/N - As promised, here is the recap and chapter! Whoo! 

Super-quick-recap-time: Nancy is a math nerd who wants to go to Harvard, she's got friends and a crush, there's this math competition thing, Nancy and Alexander are super awkward together, friend drama happens, a cliche bus scene occurs because I'm not original, a looooot of shit goes down and Nancy isn't really talking to her friends or Alexander, they aren't talking to her, Nancy gets rejected from Harvard, her Asian parents flip out, her world basically ends, I (the author) take a vacation from Planet Writing for God knows what reason, readers want to stab me with pitchforks.

Whoo. Think I covered all the bases with that ridiculously long run-on sentence. Enjoy! I'm going to have to stay up alllll night writing my two essays thanks to you peeps lol :P (Jk I love you guys and SERIOUSLY can't believe your support! Ah!)

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What do you do when your whole life comes to a standstill, and yet the world still insists on going on? How do you react when you realize your biography could be split into two parts: Pre-Harvard Rejection and Living Death?

That was what I felt like in the days after my Harvard decision: living death. I don’t know how I made it through the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. In a sense, it wasn’t really me who cycled through the daily motions of my life. It was a shell of me.

Empty. Emotionless. Dead.

I no longer felt the drive to work hard in my AP classes or write more essays for college. I no longer wanted to put so much effort and hope into a dream only to see it crash and burn right in front of my eyes. No, never again. No more sacrifice. No more pain. No more dreaming.

I no longer knew who I was.

Nancy Pang…just who are you under the study geek surface?

I didn’t know. I didn’t know the answer to that question. Before, I’d been Nancy Pang, always at the top of her class, considered a shoo-in for Harvard by some. And now, I was…who, exactly? A pathetic girl who’d been jilted by her dream university?

Wow, what an impressive persona I’d been hiding under the studious surface. Harvard sure was going to be sorry they were missing out on all of this.

It was only now that I realized Kevin had been right for one of the only times in his life. There was no me under the study geek. I wasn’t like him. I didn’t have a whole lot of natural talent for anything in particular. Studying was all I had.

And now, even that had failed me.

It was silly, but I felt like I’d just been fed to lions by my own parents. So many hours and hopes I had invested into getting into Harvard, just like my cousin Andrew did years ago…and it had all gone to waste.

I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. How sad is that? Even my own tear ducts were against me.

With my ex-friends still (understandably) playing the Let’s Pretend Nancy Dropped Off The Face of the Planet game at school, I found that I had begun to hate the place with a burning passion—especially because the teachers kept piling up homework that I no longer cared about.

What was the point of doing all these stupid AP classes, anyway? They hadn’t gotten me into Harvard. I’d pushed myself so hard in school all these years for the sake of getting into my dream school. And now, I had nothing to show for it.

It was at quite possibly the lowest point of my life that I got a Facebook message from an unexpected person.