In August, Afsona's name was not on the list. She read it four times, from the top to the bottom. She was three points below the line.
Her mother said nothing on the bus home. Her father said one sentence at the gate.
"This time next year you will be walking into that building."
A year is three hundred and sixty-five days. Afsona wrote his sentence on a piece of paper and put it above her desk.
From September she worked in the bakery on the corner from six to eleven every morning, carrying trays. In the afternoons she revised. Her alarm clock rang at half past four.
In February she wanted to stop. Her little brother found her crying at that desk at midnight, with the paper in her hand.
He was nine years old, and he used his father's trick on her.
"In August you will be sitting in a room with two hundred people," he said. "Will you be thinking about February?"
In July she slept four hours a night. In the last week she didn't open one book: she walked instead.
On the first of August, at nine o'clock in the morning, she was walking into that building.
Her name was on the list in the second week. Number forty-one.
There is a new paper above that desk now, in her own writing: "In five years I will be teaching in the school in my street."
She is in her third year. Two more Augusts.