Morning at school felt the same as always.
The bell rang. Chairs scraped against the floor. Voices filled the room with the usual noise of children settling into their seats. I sat where I always did, near the window, sunlight falling at an angle across a textbook that still looked too clean for someone like me.
English class began without ceremony.
The teacher wrote a short passage on the board, her chalk moving steadily. Simple sentences. Nothing difficult for students who studied regularly, and nothing interesting for those who didn't.
"Who wants to read?" she asked.
A few hands went up.
Mine didn't.
I lowered my head and followed the lines with my eyes. The words didn't feel completely unfamiliar. Some of them sounded like echoes things I had heard before without understanding. From the radio. From cassette tapes. From fragments of sound that had once passed through me and disappeared.
The turn moved down the rows.
Without warning, the teacher pointed at me.
"You. Read the last paragraph."
The classroom went quiet.
I felt my friend glance at me, quick and surprised, as if to ask whether this was a joke. I stood up anyway.
My fingers tightened slightly around the book. When I opened my mouth, the first word caught in my throat.
Not because I didn't know it.
But because I was afraid of getting it wrong.
I took a breath and began to read. Slowly. Not smoothly. My pronunciation stumbled in places, and there were awkward pauses in the middle of sentences. A few words came out uncertain, but I didn't stop.
I finished the paragraph.
The teacher didn't speak right away. She looked at me longer than usual, her expression unreadable.
"Have you been practicing at home?" she asked.
I shook my head.
"No, ma'am."
The answer was honest, and somehow that made the room feel stranger.
She nodded once. "Your pronunciation needs work," she said calmly. "But… do you understand what it means?"
I hesitated, then answered, "A little."
Whispers moved through the class.
"Since when?"
"I thought he was average."
I sat back down, my heart beating harder than it should have. This didn't feel like winning. It felt like being seen.
During break, my friend dropped into the seat beside me without his usual joke.
"Be honest," he said quietly. "What's going on with you?"
I opened my lunch slowly, buying time.
"I don't know," I answered at last.
It was the safest answer I had.
He let out a small breath and leaned back. "Well," he said, "you've been weird lately. Not in a bad way. Just… different."
I smiled faintly.
That afternoon, after school, I tried reading the textbook again on my own. No teacher. No eyes watching. That was when I realized the truth.
I wasn't as good as I had looked that morning.
I guessed the meanings of many words wrong. I misunderstood entire sentences. The confidence I seemed to have in class dissolved quickly when I was alone.
I closed the book.
I wasn't disappointed.
I wasn't angry.
I felt relieved.
I was still far from understanding, and that was fine.
Outside my room, I could hear my father putting away his tools. My mother called me for dinner, her voice the same as always. The world continued without caring about my small confusion.
But I knew something had changed.
The small difference I had tried to hide would not stay invisible forever.
And for the first time since my second life began, I felt something unfamiliar but real.
Fear
and the quiet desire to keep moving forward anyway.