The ceiling fan spins as Yasmin’s eyes follow it. She breaks the stare and turns to her right, where the black Muji clock sits beside her books on the messy desk.

1:23pm.

Soon, it’ll be break time for zuhur prayers. She shuts her eyes and pictures the class wrapping up. If she recalls correctly (and she always does), it’s Mr. Tariq’s class now. He’s probably explaining to some of the boys how to calculate the area of a circle in another ‘O’ level past year paper. Either that, or he’s going through the whole topic again with the whole class. Whatever it is, it’s something Yasmin can afford to not go through. She covered circles last week, by herself.

She rolls off her bed and leaves her room to the toilet to take her wudhu’.

From outside the toilet, she could hear the house door opening. Confused, since no one is home at this time of the day, she opens the door and to her surprise, sees her older brother placing his sneakers on the shoe rack.

“Abang?” she asked, unable to comprehend her brother’s early return home.

“Yasmin?” her brother, Faris, replied with the same amount of disbelief. “What’re you doing home? Tak sekolah ke?”

“I…”

“Oh my god,” Faris stood up and faced her. “Don’t tell me...”

Yasmin rolled her eyes and went into her room.

“Ponteng lagi?!”

“You don’t understand,” Yasmin says as she lays out the prayer mat on her floor.

“I don’t,” Faris pops his head through her bedroom door before she gets a chance to slam it. He takes a quick glance at her messy desk near the door, her set of mathematical instruments scattered across the table. Under the set are all her papers, and next to them lies the thick green Math textbook, open to the spread on circles. “Apparently, you don’t either.”

“Keluar lah!”

Faris does and Yasmin pushes the door hard.

Instead of starting her zuhur prayer, she slumps to the floor and leans against the wall. She looks at the black clock again. 1:51pm. By this time, the imam at Masjid Sofiah would already have wrapped up his prayer, given his salaam, and recited the post-prayer du’a. The students – her classmates – would be making their way back to class. The next lesson is the last class before the end of school, and that would be Ustaz Ramadan’s lesson on Quran– or was it Tafsir? Suddenly, she couldn’t remember. But it doesn’t matter.

She looks to her desk and even from the floor, she couldn’t mistake the doodles and scribbles that were sprawled across both her textbook and exercise book, where she was supposed to be practicing the second Past Year Paper of the day. Yasmin finally gets up and starts to pray. She looks to the clock. 2:47pm. School was over.