I remember the hum of the fluorescent lights in that empty classroom, a flat, tired sound that always seemed to sink into the marrow of my bones around midnight. It was a Saturday. The air outside was crisp, the kind that promised spring but still bit at your ears if you lingered. Inside, it smelled of stale coffee and chalk dust, a familiar perfume of servitude. My sister had called earlier that morning, her voice bright, full of the kind of effervescent joy that always felt a bit alien to me. “His first birthday, Marian! You HAVE to be there!” she’d chirped. Little Charlie, my nephew, the boy with eyes like polished river stones. A year already. It felt like yesterday I was holding him, all warm and new, a tiny bundle of potential. But the final exams. They were stacked on my desk, a precarious tower of adolescent anxieties and triumphs. Seventy-three of them. English Lit. Each one a fragile vessel holding someone’s hopes for promotion to the next grade, for a summer free of summer school, for a future that, at that age, felt both infinite and terrifyingly immediate. I could practically feel the weight of them pressing down, a physical burden on my chest. I kept picturing Charlie, his face smeared with cake, those little hands clutching at frosting. The laughter, the bright balloons, the easy warmth of family. My sister would be disappointed, of course. Her “disappointed” always felt like a clinical assessment, a quiet diagnosis of my chronic inability to prioritize joy. A maladaptive coping mechanism, perhaps. A self-sabotage. But what was the alternative? The pay, you see. It wasn’t much. Enough for the rent, for the utility bills that arrived with alarming regularity, for a can of tuna and some day-old bread if I was careful. Enough to keep the wolves from the door, as my mother used to say, her own hands raw from laundry tubs and dishwater. Every paper graded was a brick in that wall. Each red mark a tiny, almost imperceptible tremor in the foundation of my own precarious existence. So I stayed. The silence in the school building was vast, almost oppressive. I could hear the occasional scurry of a mouse in the walls, the distant sigh of the old boiler. My red pen felt heavy, a surgeon’s tool, making precise incisions into misspelled words and faulty arguments. I marked each paper with a kind of grim devotion, meticulously, almost reverently. Not a single error missed. Not a single point unfairly deducted or granted. A pathological commitment to fairness, maybe. Or just a terror of not doing enough. The next morning, when the sun finally filtered through the high classroom windows, painting weak stripes across the scarred linoleum, I was still there. The stack of graded papers was much smaller, a defeated little pile. My eyes burned, gritty like sandpaper. My back ached with the dull throb of too many hours hunched over a desk. I felt wrung out, hollowed. When I finally got home, the house was silent. My sister hadn’t called. She wouldn’t. The cake, I imagined, was all eaten. The balloons deflated. The memory already fading into the quiet archives of family history, a celebration I hadn’t been a part of. Sometimes, I still see Charlie’s face in my mind, that pristine, joyful innocence. And then it's overlaid with the scrawled handwriting of a student, an essay on *Moby Dick*, and the dull, insistent ache of a life lived, always, on the razor’s edge.