Ifeoma read her name three times before she believed it.
MTH 101: F.
The notice board was crowded with students pushing forward, shouting, taking pictures with their phones. Somebody behind her said, "Ehen, who failed this one?" and laughed. Ifeoma stepped back from the board as if it had burned her and walked out of the faculty without speaking to anyone.
She had been the best student in her secondary school. Her principal had called her name at the prize-giving four years in a row. Her mother had told everyone at church that her daughter was going to be the first engineer in the family. Engineers, Ifeoma thought, do not fail mathematics.
For two days she told nobody. When her roommate Halima asked how her results were, she said, "Fine," and changed the subject. When her mother called, she said the results were not yet out. Each lie made the next one easier and her chest heavier.
On the third day, she went to the course adviser's office to ask about registering the course again. She waited in the corridor for an hour, preparing a speech about how the exam had been unfair, how the questions had come from outside the syllabus.
Dr. Okafor listened to the whole speech. Then she turned her computer screen around.
"Your continuous assessment," she said. "You missed two tests."
Ifeoma opened her mouth and closed it again. She had missed them. One because she overslept, one because she had thought it was not important. She had told herself she would make it up in the exam.
"Many brilliant students fail their first university course," Dr. Okafor said. "Not because they are not brilliant. Because they think university is secondary school with a bigger hall." She paused. "The question is what you do now."
That evening Ifeoma called her mother and told her the truth. She cried. Her mother was quiet for a long time, and then said something Ifeoma had not expected.
"Do you know I failed my first typing exam at the secretarial school? Twice."
"You never told me."
"You never failed anything before. I didn't need to tell you." A pause. "Now I'm telling you. You will register it again and you will pass it. And you will not hide from me again, you hear?"
The next semester, Ifeoma did everything differently. She sat in the front row of the carryover class, among students she had once quietly looked down on. She went to every test. She found out, to her surprise, that the boy who sat beside her, Musa, a 300 level student repeating the course for the second time, was funny, kind and very good at explaining things he had once got wrong.
"Everybody fears limits," Musa said one evening in the library, tapping a past question. "But they're just asking what happens as x gets close. Close, not equal. Watch."
They studied together twice a week. When she understood something, she explained it back to him. When he got stuck, she was the one who saw it.
The results came out in June. Ifeoma did not run to the notice board this time. She walked, and she stood at the back until the crowd had thinned.
MTH 101: B. Musa, two rows down: C. He punched the air as if he had won the league.
In her second year, a nervous 100 level girl stopped Ifeoma in the corridor and asked, almost in a whisper, whether it was true that she had once had a carryover.
"Yes," Ifeoma said. "Come. Let me show you what I did."