I got caught cheating on a test and the school is threatening suspension

I'm not someone who cheats. I've never done it before and I actually care about school. But last month everything hit at once at home, I hadn't slept properly in days, and I walked into a math test I wasn't ready for. Someone had shown me a trick a while back where you can store notes inside your calculator memory in a way that looks clean from the outside. I spent an hour loading everything in the night before and told myself it was just this once. Halfway through the test my teacher walked up behind me and asked to see my calculator. She scrolled through the memory in about fifteen seconds and found everything. Zero on the test, meeting with the vice principal, suspension on the table, and my parents need to come in by the end of the week. I've been going to school every day acting completely normal. Nobody knows. The meeting is in three days. I started thinking about what was actually scaring me most. Not the suspension. Not even the zero on the test. It was telling my parents. My mom would be devastated and my dad would be furious, not just at what I did but at the idea that I was the kind of person who does something like this. I also thought about whether I was going to walk into that meeting and try to minimize what happened or whether I was going to own it completely. And I thought about why I hadn't just asked for help when I started falling behind instead of letting it get to this point. I realized that trying to manage the fallout without telling my parents first was only making things worse. They were going to find out regardless. The only thing I could control was whether they heard it from me first or from the school. Hearing it from me first and seeing that I was owning it completely was the only version of this that gave me any ground to stand on. I decided the only thing I had any control over was whether my parents heard it from me first or from the school. Telling them myself before the meeting was the one move that gave me any ground to stand on. I wasn't going to try to justify what I did or explain it away. I was going to tell my mom exactly what happened, why I'd been struggling, and why I hadn't asked for help when I should have. We agreed that after I talked to her we'd tell my dad together. That felt less overwhelming than facing both of them at once and it meant my mom already understood the full picture before it became a bigger conversation. I wasn't going in expecting them to be fine with it. I just knew that walking into that meeting having already owned it to both of them was the only version of this that gave me a real shot.