> Maya’s mouth opened. Closed. “Because… the answer key said so?”
She copied the answer. Then sentence five: could have taken the bus . Copied. Sentence six: might have been delayed . Copied. A hollow feeling settled in her stomach. She wasn't learning. She was transcribing.
That night, Maya took a red pen. She covered the answer key with a sticky note that read: . Then she forced herself to think.
The ground is wet. It must have rained. She pictured dark clouds, an umbrella forgotten on the bus. He’s not here. He might have been delayed. She imagined a broken-down train, a phone with a dead battery. Each wrong guess—she wrote should have rained first, then crossed it out—taught her something the answer key never could: why .
She’d read the examples three times. “She must have forgotten the meeting.” “He can’ have left already.” But when she looked at sentence four—”The ground is wet; it ____ (rain) last night”—her mind went blank as fresh snow.
Dr. Alvaro didn’t look angry. He looked disappointed. “The answer key is a map,” he said softly. “But you have to walk the road yourself. Go home. Don’t look at the key. Make ten wrong guesses. Then come see me.”
That night, her professor, Dr. Alvaro, kept her after class. He held up her homework. The answers were all correct. Perfect, in fact.
With a sigh, she did what she swore she’d never do. She opened her desk drawer, pulled out the slim, stapled booklet, and flipped to Unit 7.
