“Ugh, girls suck at math.” I turn my head and see a girl trying to solve a problem.

“Why can’t you just figure it out?” Caleb snaps.

Mia keeps her eyes glued to her paper and wipes away the tears threatening to fall from her eyes.

“Attention class!” shouts Ms. Hoffman. “We’re going to go over the math problems. Who wants to answer question number one?”

I look around to see that Mia, Caleb, Andrew, and Lily have raised their hands.

“Andrew. Could you show us how solved the problem?” announces Ms. Hoffman.

“The answer is 15 because I took off the zeros from 150 and 10. After I did that I divided 15 by 1 and I know that it equals 15,” explains Andrew.

“Very good. Caleb, would you like to answer question number two?”

“Sure,” says Caleb. “I can take off the zeros from 360 and 20. When I do that I get 13”

“You’re headed in the right direction, but you had small calculation error. Think about what 36 divided by 2 is again.”

“Oh yeah. It’s 18, not 13.”

“Very good, Caleb.” Ms. Hoffman says, smiling. “Who would like to answer the next one?”

Mia and Andrew raise their hands.

“How about Mia this time?”

“I got 31 because I took off the zeros from 960 and 30. After that I divided 96 by 3.” Mia explains quietly.

“Not quite. Andrew would you like to give the class the correct answer?”

“It’s obviously 32” Andrew responds.

We advance through the questions, Andrew and Caleb answering every time, with the exception of two questions when Mia and Lily answer them.

“That’s weird” I thought. “Mia had her hand raised the whole time.”

I’m walking down the hallway on the first day of 7th grade. I see her get stopped.

“Put your arms by your side, Mia” the Principal shouts.

“Um okay.” Mia says nervously with her arms at her sides.

“Make sure your shoulders are relaxed.”

“They are”

The principal puffs and says, “those shorts barely made the cut. Make sure that your shorts don’t get any shorter.”

I walk away disgusted that the principal stopped Mia and start walking by Henry. Before I start talking to him I hear him say, “so, are you still joining the frisbee team?”

“Yeah.” Mia says.

“They should really do a separate team for girls. I don’t want to be brought down.”

“Dude, what the hell?” I say to him.

“Calm down Ian. It’s just a joke.” Henry says defensively.

I laugh it off and catch one more glimpse of Mia. She’s standing by the wall and staring into the flood of middle schoolers.

It’s Freshman year of highschool and I’m rushing to my next class. “So you’ve moved on to the next guy.  Seems like you’re just being passed around the football team.” I hear Jaxson snark. I stop and pull out my phone, pretending to check it.

“Shut up.” Mia says acting like she doesn’t care. Like it’s only a joke.

“We’ve only been in High School for 2 months and you’ve already dated 3 guys. Wow”

“You’ve dated two girls. What about that?”

The smirk falls from his face and he say, “jeez I was just kidding. Stop being so sensitive. Are you on your period or something?” I see her staring behind Jaxon with her hands clenched into fists. She opens her mouth to say something, but locks her jaw back into place. I can’t tell whether she’s going to whisper, or scream and let out everything that’s threatening explode. It seems like she’s trying to swallow all of her anger, but it’s trying to release itself. After what feels like an eternity, she finally relaxes her body and I turn away disappointed. I start walking away, but then I hear her shout, “Nick thought it was okay to stick his finger up my ripped jeans and Adam cheated on me. At least I had good reasons to break up with them!” I slow my pace, but don’t turn around. I smile, happy that she stood up for herself.