SOME EVENTS ARE so profound in a person’s life that they can even alter the trajectory of their life. It’s not always an outwardly traumatic event, though times of trauma do tend to persist indelibly in a person’s psyche. For Matthew Tharson, one such event happened to him early in his high school education.

Growing up with a gift for understanding mathematics, the world around Matthew just made more sense when viewed through that lens. Some people’s brains are wired to see things and communicate using music, or other forms of art. Others are inherently capable of navigating social circles and rallying their peers. Matthew was more comfortable in the world of numbers where things just made more sense.

For his first eight years of school, he was friends with everyone. By no means a social climber, he was content just being some nice kid in class who happens to get good grades in math. Other kids treated him normally and he generally felt like he belonged. But all that changed in ninth grade when he took his first algebra class.

Matthew was endlessly fascinated when the algebra teacher explained how her grading system was based on something called a “normal statistical distribution model”. He immediately grasped it even though his fellow students were stumped by the concept. The bad students were happy to hear that, to maintain a bell-shaped distribution, the teacher always only failed one student per semester. Most would end up with a C no matter how poorly they performed on their exams. But on the other end of the spectrum, one student would earn a perfect A and the rest of the high achievers would form a statistically pure curve behind the leader.

It was a brutal, unforgiving grading scheme which pitted students against each other for the top spot. And when you have a person like Matthew who can’t help but ace every assignment and quiz, the margin for error becomes that much smaller for the other students trying to earn one of the precious few A’s.

Is it ever right to blame someone else for the grade you earn? Of course not! But that’s exactly what one of his classmates tried to do. You would think, for someone with so many other God given talents and advantages in life, that young Diana Faldi would recognize and appreciate when someone else has a talent. Perhaps it was just too hard for her to admit someone else might be better than she at something. After all, she was already popular, sang well and played the piano, and spoke two languages, English and Italian. Did she really have to be the best at algebra too?

She was an impressive young lady, strikingly beautiful with long dark hair that framed her round face. Using her expressive brown eyes and full lips to project confidently to the back of the theater, she had earned the titular role of Juliette in the upcoming school play. Despite being only a freshman, she was already drawing romantic interest from older boys, even juniors and seniors. But her parents had instilled in her that school always came before dating.

The big plans Diana had for her life included graduating at the top of her class. Most people would consider her a contender for something like that. She was smart and organized and, most importantly, she never got confused. She had already identified that her greatest competition to earning the prize of class valedictorian would be Jimmy Vaughn. He had lucked out and been put in the other Algebra class whose teacher used a traditional grading method. Diana remained confident in her ability to earn an A. But then Matthew Tharson came along and blew the curve for everyone in her class.

It wasn’t fair to resent him for ruining her perfect 4.0 GPA. After all, it’s not like he was cheating or anything. He was simply using his own God given talent for numbers. To her credit, she didn’t start blaming him right away. When their first quiz came back and she saw that Matthew had a perfect score while she had a low “B”, she simply came to him and asked if he would tutor her.

Matthew was flattered that someone like Diana wanted his help with something and eagerly agreed to help her out. Beyond the fact that he was getting to hang out with a pretty girl after school, tutoring came naturally to him. It’s almost like he was destined to become a math teacher someday. Diana worked hard to unlock the mysteries of Algebra which seemed to come so effortlessly to Matthew. But when the scores for their second quiz came back and she got another B while Matthew got another A+, her opinion of him began to sour, and she cancelled further tutoring sessions.

Near the end of the semester, when it became obvious that Diana would not be able to save her grade, she lashed out in a way only popular kids can. As the teacher handed out the results of the latest quiz, she saw Matthew preening over his seventeenth straight perfect score and uttered the high school equivalent of the kiss of death for his social life.

“Stop being such a math nerd,” she scoffed, loud enough for him and the whole class to hear. Matthew shrugged it off, but the class played along, snickering at Diana’s joke.

Most kids lived in fear of receiving an insult from one of the popular kids which marks them as a pariah. Once you receive a dreaded label like “math nerd”, it’s nearly impossible to shake. For Matthew, the label certainly stuck. He heard it wherever he went, including his other classes, even from people who didn’t really know him! It stung more when he heard a cute girl say it. It haunted him in the halls and hounded him in the cafeteria.

He tried to grow a thick skin about it. He even tried to wear the title like a badge of honor, pretending like the aspersion didn’t bother him. But deep down, he harbored a resentment for what she had done to him. No one wanted to date him or even be associated with him lest they be branded with a similar title. She had turned his entire complex existence, full of potential, into something that must be avoided at all costs. She had given him the intellectual equivalent of cuties.

Like any kid who’s being bullied, the real emotional damage doesn’t come directly from the bully. It comes from all the other kids willing to fall in line and play along. Matthew was pretty much stuck with the label “math nerd” until he graduated and was able to reinvent himself in college. It looked like his traumatic experience was behind him.

After enough time had passed, the details of his time in high school faded from conscious memory. He moved on with his life and even eventually returned to work in a school, this time as a junior high math teacher. But the trauma remained, buried deeply within him like a forgotten bomb. For twenty years it sat, gathering dust, and waiting for some spark to come along and relight its fuse. That spark did arrive one day, taking the form of a mostly naked young student.

Caroline hoped to slip unnoticed into Mr. Tharson’s seventh grade math class and find an empty seat without making too much of a scene. But it’s kind of impossible for a pretty girl not to make a scene when all she’s wearing is a pair of cute, white panties. The door was near the front of the class, so the students didn’t need to turn their heads too much to notice her. Gasps of shock erupted from the student body when the young teenager appeared in the doorway showing off way too much of her student body.

She wasn’t quite out of breath but was breathing heavily. Her cheeks were flush, and her hair was slightly disheveled. But the other kids weren’t looking at her cheeks or her hair. They were mostly staring the two little exposed bumps on her creamy, white chest along with the other interesting bits of anatomy she was currently exhibiting free of charge.

Caroline was confused. She hardly expected the slightly late arrival of a single student to cause this much of a stir. The other kids were acting like they had never seen a tardy kid before. The girls generally reacted with gasps morphing into laughter. But the boys continued to stare unblinking at their pretty, almost naked classmate. For most of them, it was the first time they had ever seen a girl’s breasts in real life before. Sure, they all paid close attention to the growing and changing female bodies around them. They fantasized and tried to picture the mysteries beneath girls’ clothes. But with Caroline, they didn’t have to use their imagination anymore.

Mr. Tharson took much too long to react and regain control of his class. He had been writing something on the chalk board when Caroline first appeared and hadn’t turned to look until he heard the gasps from his students. For some strange reason, upon seeing the exquisite form of a beautiful brunette standing in the doorway, a long-forgotten phrase burst into his head: “math nerd”.

In a flash, he was transported back to that insecure, bullied teenager he had been in high school as old emotional scars that had never really healed were torn afresh. He felt a strong urge to lash out at the girl even though she had done nothing to deserve such fiery wrath. Sure, she was causing a disturbance to his class, but that was hardly enough to warrant the anger he felt towards her. It was Diana’s cruel childhood antics that were instinctually driving him to go hard on this child. He didn’t even know they were related as mother and daughter.

Snapping his chalk in frustration, he grabbed a yardstick he kept leaning against his desk and rapped it on the wooden desktop several times to regain control over his class.

“Young lady, I don’t know why on Earth you think streaking on the first day of school, or any day, for that matter, would be a good idea,” he barked, “but I will not tolerate such disturbances in my classroom!” Opening a drawer, he pulled a pad of paper from his desk and began scrawling something.

The word “streaking” triggered something in Caroline’s brain. Slowly, a terrible thought, the one her brain had been screaming about ever since she left the locker room, broke through her fog of confusion. Looking down at her body anew, she finally noticed her wardrobe mistake. It was a girl’s worst nightmare showing up to class without her dress. She screamed and rushed to move her notebook to cover her exposed chest, but that only revealed more of her lower half. She moved the book up and down indecisively a few times before settling on keeping it over her chest and putting one hand over the front of her panties which she had never intended for any of the boys to see.

Mr. Tharson finished writing and angrily ripped the top page free from the pad. “Congratulations, you just earned a one-way pass to the Admin office. I’m sure Vice-Principal Bolton will straighten you out. Come on, I’ll even escort you myself.”

Being the first day of school, he didn’t have anything prepared for his class to work independently on, so he told them to sit quietly until he got back. The kids nodded in complete, stunned silence. But as soon as he left, they started talking excitedly about what had just happened. The rumor about little Caroline Adlow walking into Mr. Tharson’s math class wearing nothing but her shoes and a skimpy pair of white panties would, without a doubt, be spread all over school before the day was out.

Caroline was glad to be away from the room full of classmates. But that hardly made her comfortable with her current situation. Unlike her trip to class, she was acutely aware of her lack of clothes this time as she walked beside this man she had never met before. She knew they were headed to the Admin office. That didn’t sound good. What if the Vice-Principal gave her detention? On the first day!

But her greatest concern by far was her lack of clothes. She continued to hug her books protectively to her bare chest and tried not to think about her panty-clad bottom. But with every step they took, her stress level rose. And as usual, as her stress grew, so did her confusion.

Matthew tried to figure out why he felt so uneasy about the young lady walking beside him. Something about her kept drawing his attention, and it wasn’t just her scandalous lack of outerwear. There was something so familiar about her; familiar, yet so distant.

He couldn’t stop glancing at her, more out of curiosity than because of her dire state of dress. And every time he looked, he caught unmistakable flashes of someone he had once known, a girl named Diana Faldi. Out of the grave he had used to bury the trauma that woman had caused so long ago, a resentment was seeping. It hovered in the air like an ill mist and, for reasons he couldn’t explain, tainted his opinion of this girl.

He fell back a couple paces so he could study her without being accused of leering. As a junior high school teacher, he was used to seeing kids go through awkward stages of development. And as a math teacher, he couldn’t help but make some quick visual measurements of her body; an easy feat since she was practically naked.

She stood five and a half feet tall, but that was aided by the slight heel in her shoes. Her legs were more cute than beautiful, with plenty more growing to do. She hadn’t filled in womanly curves yet, but her shoes did help make the shape of her legs more interesting and hinted of the curves she would someday possess. She had good vertical proportions with her body’s mid-point being just above her privates – right about where it should be. She walked neatly with her feet crossing over each other. The narrow gait made her hips swivel with every step she took. Even though her excess motion was unintentional, it was also quite seductive.

Her shoulders were starting to widen, likely in anticipation of supporting the impending arrival of new breasts. She was covering her chest at the moment. But he had seen enough earlier to know she didn’t have much growth in that department just yet. The subtle broadness of her shoulders did make the tapering of her torso down to her petite waist much more noticeable.

Her naturally light-brown skin had a flawless all-over tint which most girls could only get by tanning. Because she was topless, he could see her entire spine curving gently down from her graceful neck all the way to disappear into the waistband of her panties. She carried herself well with an effortless good posture, keeping her shoulders back and her head steady as she walked. Her childish hips had begun widening and were already tilted forward. That, combined with her exceptionally good posture made her ripe, panty-clad bottom stick out nicely. Overall, while she didn’t exactly have an hourglass figure yet, all the crucial ingredients were there for an eventual, certified head-turner.

Matthew couldn’t possibly understand what would drive such a pretty young lady to show off so much of her private assets to her classmates for free like that. But he knew one thing. When someone who looks as good as this girl shows up to class in just her underwear, she better be prepared to accept that she’ll be starring in the fantasy of every boy who sees her for a good, long while.