She Said I Wouldn’t Finish Middle School, I Just Became the Principal Who Rejected Her Daughter Chapter 02
The next morning, a black Audi drove straight up to the administration building.
She looked older than she had eighteen years ago.
Her hair was styled in elegant silver curls. She wore a tailored suit and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.
She was now chairwoman of the City Education Board and chief advisor to the City Gifted Scholars Initiative.
In the education world, her word carried enormous weight.
Vice Principal Carter personally escorted her upstairs, all deference and nervous smiles.
The office door opened, and Margaret walked in, calmly surveying my office.
The vice principal gave me a look, then closed the door and stepped out.
“Principal Hart. Impressive, achieving so much at your age.”
Margaret sat down on the sofa as if it belonged to her and crossed her legs.
She did not recognize me.
The thin little girl from back then, the one in washed-out clothes who sat beside the trash can with her head lowered and her fingers picked raw, was nothing like the well-dressed principal now running the city’s top college-prep high school.
Besides, people like her never bothered remembering the faces of those they considered beneath them.
“What brings you here, Chairwoman Whitman?”
I sat behind my desk without making the slightest move to stand or pour her a glass of water.
Margaret clearly disliked my lack of courtesy. Her brows tightened slightly.
“Principal Hart, we’re both in education, so I’ll get straight to the point.”
She took out a new nomination form and placed it on the coffee table.
“Regarding Chloe’s MIT nomination, I believe you may have made a serious misjudgment.”
“I raised Chloe myself. I know exactly what she is capable of.”
“She is more than qualified for this nomination.”
“I made no misjudgment.”
I looked at her.
“Chloe Carter’s grades are excellent, yes. But her character evaluation fails by my standards.”
The smile disappeared from Margaret’s face.
“Character evaluation? Principal Hart, don’t you think it’s absurd to block a gifted student over something so vague?”
“Absurd?”
I opened my drawer and took out a stack of photocopied disciplinary records.
“In tenth grade, she was jealous of a girl sitting beside her because that girl was pretty. She turned the entire class against her until the girl developed severe depression and transferred schools.”
“In eleventh grade, she deliberately destroyed Noah Brooks’s competition prototype in the lab because he scored one point higher than her on a practice test.”
“Because she is your granddaughter, the school administrators at the time buried every one of those incidents. Not even a formal disciplinary mark went on her record.”
I tossed the copies onto the desk.
“Chairwoman Whitman, I refuse to recommend a student with this kind of conduct. Am I wrong?”
Margaret glanced at the papers without even bothering to pick them up.
“Principal Hart, you’re still too young.”
She sighed, her voice thick with condescension.
“Outstanding students having a temper is normal. They are gifted. They are the future of this country. Naturally, they deserve certain privileges.”
“As for the children who were bullied, they should blame themselves for being too weak or too fragile.”
Margaret adjusted her gold-rimmed glasses.
“Kids don’t get bullied for no reason. If Chloe singled them out, maybe they were the problem.”
The moment those words left her mouth, my whole body went cold.
Eighteen years.
Word for word.
I stared hard at that hypocritical face in front of me.
Back then, she had looked me in the eye and said the exact same thing.
“Chairwoman Whitman.”
I rose to my feet, my voice turning ice-cold.
“In my school, there are no pests. Only students.”
“Don’t bring your law-of-the-jungle philosophy through my doors.”
Margaret’s expression darkened completely. She stood, picked up the nomination form from the table, and looked at me with open contempt.
“Evelyn Hart, I came here in person today to give you a chance to handle this quietly.”
“If you insist on making this ugly, then we’ll see how long you last.”
The door slammed shut behind her.
I sat back down, my palms slick with cold sweat.
It was not fear.
It was the hatred I had buried for eighteen years finally finding a place to go, leaving me trembling with something almost like excitement.
