Sweet Romance16 min read
How I Wrote My Way Out of Being Played
ButterPicks14 views
I never thought I would trade sulking for a keyboard, but there I was, typing the second my sister stole yet another boyfriend.
"Again?" I said to myself, hands hovering over the keys. "Again, Mae?"
"Stop calling her that," my roommate Maja would say later, but that afternoon I sat in our tiny dorm and typed like a person possessed.
"He's not mine," I typed into a draft. "He was never mine."
"You look serious," Maja said from the doorway. "What's up?"
"I'll show her," I said. "I'll write the kind of story she can't steal."
"You're going to write?" Maja smiled. "You wrote that satire last semester. People liked it."
I did not plan to start a war. I only wanted a quiet victory: a story that would rearrange the small reputations around campus so my sister couldn't keep stepping into my life like it had rails for her feet.
I wrote a silly, bright revenge romance. In the story the boy adored the heroine in secret, a slow, clumsy build. The boy's name in the piece was Tomas Baird because, to be honest, that name just fit. I mixed truth and wishful thinking—small details, a comedy of devotion. The post took off. By the next afternoon the comments were a chorus.
"Is this based on someone from our school?" one comment read.
"It mentions the North Building. That's our North," another said.
I nearly deleted it. Instead I kept writing. I wrote until my eyes stung, and I wrote the character of Tomas so tenderly that strangers started asking after him like he was real.
"You're crazy," Maja said. "You know a guy like that won't come knocking."
"Maybe not," I said. "Maybe I'll just keep writing."
Then he stood in front of me.
"Nice post," a low voice said.
I looked up. He was tall. He wore a baseball cap low, and his face looked carved in cool light. I swallowed.
"You wrote about Tomas?" he added, and his mouth pulled into a half-smile that could have been friendly or cruel.
"I—it's just fiction." My chest felt tiny. "I didn't mean—"
"You called him weak in love," he said. "You called him a fool."
"Am I a fool?" I blurted. The words came out sharper than I'd planned.
He laughed softly. "I suppose you can call me that. I don't mind."
He read aloud some lines from my story, laughing with his friends. Their voices braided into an embarrassment I could taste.
"Do you always make yourself the joke?" one of his friends asked.
"Shut up," Tomas said. "Leave her."
A hand brushed my shoulder then—broad, warm. I felt the heat of him like sunlight.
"I'm not your joke," I said. My voice shook.
"Then stop writing me sarcastic things and write something nice next time," he said. "You have a decent eye."
He left with his friends, those lazy smiles still on their faces. I stayed in place, confused and oddly buoyant. That evening I deleted the post, then rewrote it as a sweeter chapter where Tomas watched someone from the sidelines and couldn't stop caring.
"If this is a game, I don't know how to play," I told Maja.
"You're playing with words," she said. "Words are dangerous."
I started following him in a safe way: from a distance, watching Tomas Baird like a quiet comet. He was better than I expected—good at basketball, sharper than his quiet face let on, a kind of careless kindness. He had friends who called him "boss" and "idiot" in equal measure. The more I watched, the worse I wanted him to be mine, not with arrogance but because he made me feel courage I hadn't known I had.
"Why him?" Maja asked once. "Isn't this about Mae?"
"It started as that," I said. "But it's bigger now. It's about not letting someone else choose my story."
I had been used to losing: boyfriends slipping away, friends drifting, my life like a rug pulled at the edge. My sister Mae Simpson stepped through rooms with practiced sweetness and took what she wanted. She had done it since we were kids. I had been the background to her performances—always polite, always forgiving.
"You're going to be my excuse," I told Tomas one day, when he offered me a jacket after I cried in the cold, embarrassed to be seen. "You saved me from people who hurt me."
He shoved me gently. "Stop being dramatic. Just take the jacket."
Little moments became my proof. He noticed when I was cold. He joked about ridiculous things in a voice that made me laugh before I knew why. When he left, his friends teased him; when he stayed, I felt like an island of calm in the middle of noise.
"Is this how you planned it?" Tomas asked one afternoon while we walked along the campus oval.
"Planned what?" I said, even though my heart was knocking so loudly I worried someone might hear.
"Hiding," he said. "Hiding behind writing and then pretending you weren't doing this on purpose."
"I started it because of Mae," I admitted. "But I don't want any part of her stealing everything."
"She sounds clever," Tomas said. "She sounds dangerous."
"She is," I answered. "She is poison in pretty wrapping."
For the first time I told someone about the small cruelties: a friend taken, a secret shared, a lie that became truth. Tomas listened like he was learning the shape of me.
"Good," he said finally. "Now that I'm warned, I can act accordingly."
I wanted more than words. I wanted Mae to feel the sting of losing what she treated as a toy. I wanted Egan Brady—the last boy Mae stole, the one who wrote that stupid line on his social media, "I fell for this beauty" under a photo of Mae—to be embarrassed publicly for his callousness. I wanted a real, clean victory.
I worked slowly. I wrote more stories, small tests. I watched Tomas on the court and at debates; he was brilliant in both. He had a dream, a stubbornness, and a way of making people feel safe. He also had friends who cared like brothers—Fox Peters and Foster Cruz among them. They liked to push and rib, but they paid attention.
"You have an army," Fox told me once when Tomas had gone quiet and let me sit near him during practice.
"An army?" I said.
"Yeah," Fox said. "We all notice who makes him soft."
"It's a term of honor," Foster added. "Because he doesn't give that look usually."
The plan, if you could call it that, was small and messy. I didn't want to manipulate Tomas or use him as a pawn. I wanted to expose Mae and Egan's cruelty and defend the people I cared about. I started saving evidence—screenshots, messages, photos of the dog that had been poisoned back home, because I had begun to suspect Mae was not only cruel to feelings but to life. When our dog Duffy died suddenly that year, there was a shadow on my life I couldn't ignore. My parents found Mae near the yard on the security camera. She had been there minutes before Duffy's collapse.
I kept those worries to myself until one evening Tomas came to my dorm with a box of pastries.
"Why are you like this?" he asked, sitting on the foot of my bed.
"Like what?" I said.
"Like you're always waiting for someone to take from you," he said, and his fingers found my hand. "Stop waiting."
"I tried to stop," I said. "But my sister—"
He tightened his grip. "Tell me everything."
So I did. I told him about the boys, the friends, the little things Mae had done, the dog, the threats from her to my parents about money. I handed him the screenshots and the camera stills I had pulled together. He read them without surprise, without judgment. When he finished, he looked at me with an intensity I had never seen.
"This is terrible," he said. "We will expose it. Not to be cruel—so it doesn't hurt you anymore."
"Public?" I asked, my voice small. "I can't handle a private fight. Mae is good at private."
"We'll make it public so the truths can't be twisted," Tomas said. "But we have to be careful. Not vindictive. Just true."
We planned. Tomas and his friends helped me. We printed the messages and the stills. We compiled them into a timeline and added witnesses: classmates who had seen Mae lie, neighbors who had heard her threaten my family, even the vet who confirmed Duffy's poisoning. It felt heavy to put everything out, but every piece made the image clearer: Mae had crossed a line.
The day I chose was the school's spring fair, a crowded event with teachers, parents, and students.
"I can't believe we're doing this," Fox said nervously as he helped me set up a small display table near the amphitheater.
"It's not just us," Tomas said. "We will call it out gently. We'll show them the truth and let people decide."
"Are you afraid of backlash?" Foster asked.
"I am," I said. "But I'm more afraid of letting it happen again."
Students and parents mill around. The sound of music and chatter made my chest tight. Mae arrived with a perfect smile, wearing clothes that made her look like the sun. She saw me and her expression flickered—not surprise, but something like annoyance that anyone had the audacity to be here.
"Justine?" she called, loud enough for some to hear, "what a surprise."
"Hi, Mae," I said. I kept my voice steady. "Would you mind coming over? I have something to show you."
She crossed the lawn like a queen walking to a coronation.
"This your show?" she asked, voice syrup-sweet. "You doing a little exhibition now? Cute."
I didn't answer. Tomas stepped forward then, beside me, and his presence star-shaped the moment.
"People are here who might want to know a few things," he said. "We didn't want to go public, but some things keep happening."
"Like what?" Mae asked, eyes sharp now.
"Like cruelty to animals," Tomas said. "Like threats. Like stealing other people's lives."
"That's a lie," Mae burst out. "You can't say that. Who made you judge?"
"Maybe the evidence will decide," Tomas said quietly.
I took a breath and started showing the pictures, the messages, the camera stills. At first a few people glanced, thinking this was campus drama. Then the veterinary report. Then Egan’s post where he casually boasted about falling for "this beauty"—a line I had read first as a stab at me and then as carelessness at best. I walked through the timeline: the friendship, the secret messages, the night my father got the call about the dog, the photo of Mae near the yard half an hour earlier.
Mae's face changed. The practiced softness cracked like porcelain.
"What proof is this? You could have faked anything!" she yelled, voice high and sharp.
"Then we have the vet," Tomas said. "We have people who will testify. We have the camera. We are not relying on opinion."
A murmur rose from the crowd. I saw teachers lean in. I saw parents exchange looks. I saw Egan Brady flush red when someone called his name—he had come with Mae, thinking they'd enjoy the fair and perhaps show their little romance. He looked smaller when everyone started to whisper.
"You're making a scene," he snapped. "Why would you drag my name into this?"
"Because," Tomas said slowly, "you posted about love as a joke, and then you helped someone who hurt a dog cover things up. That's not a joke."
Egan's mouth opened and closed. "I didn't—"
"Speak up," I said, and there was more steel than I expected in my voice. "Tell them you didn't know. Tell them you didn't care. Tell them what you did when Mae told you to."
Egan tried to answer. He tried to smile. The microphone of crowd opinion was crueler than any schoolyard rumor. People stepped back and then forward again, raising their phones.
Tomas kept calm. "We have a sequence of texts," he said. "We have witnesses who saw her near the yard. We have a vet who says the dog's symptoms match poisoning. We have a pattern of taking things that aren't yours."
Mae's lips trembled. She looked at Egan, then at her father—an important man at a local firm—standing stiff at the edge of the crowd. For a moment she looked like a child waiting to be saved.
"You're lying," she whispered. "This is revenge. She always wanted attention."
"Then we will let the truth speak," Tomas said, and he passed me the printed medical report. "This isn't punishment. It's facts."
"You're ruining my life!" Mae cried. She pointed at my father in the back, who looked horrified. "Do you know what this will do to my family? Do you want to drag them into this?"
"Do you know what your actions do to other lives?" I asked, voice steady. "Duffy is dead."
There was a long beat. Then phones were up. People were interviewing neighbors who corroborated that Mae had been near the yard. A teacher who had seen strange messages between Mae and a friend of mine stepped forward to say she had noticed warning signs. An older neighbor quietly nodded that Mae had been seen that morning with an empty bottle near the shed.
Mae's expression shifted rapidly—first anger, then shock, then denial like a play. She scanned the crowd, looking for someone to anchor her. She found her father. He looked away, then at her, eyes stringing tears.
"Egan," someone murmured from the crowd, "did you know?"
He opened his mouth and closed it. He had the look of a man who realized his choices had consequences.
"This is absurd," Egan said, louder than necessary. "You're using public humiliation."
"Public?" Tomas said. He looked right at Egan. "You posted your love for her on social media. Public means everyone can see. You chose to make her movement public. We're just answering."
Around us people leaned close. Some took pictures. Others nodded, mouths thin. Mae's brother—who had been a high school popular kid—stood a few steps away and looked ashen. For a second, Mae tried to play victim.
"You can't do this to me," she said, voice choking. "You have no right."
Tomas laughed, but it was brittle. "We have every right to protect the weak. We have every right to tell the truth."
Then came the shift I had been afraid of and secretly hoped for. A student from another class said, "I remember when Mae pretended she was my friend, then told everyone I cheated on the test. She smiled while I cried."
Another student: "She made me delete his number and told him I had said mean things about her. I didn't say any of that."
The crowd swelled with small accusations, not all of them mine, but they all pointed to the same pattern: Mae had used charm as armor and cruelty as a weapon. Faces turned away from her as if the sun had suddenly gone dim.
Mae's father stepped forward, stunned. "This is…my daughter?" he said, voice breaking.
"Isn't she decorous in front of you?" someone called. "Or is decorum just a costume?"
The humiliation came slow and then fast. It was not a single blow but a bank of small revelations. Mae's expression moved through stages: anger—"That's slander!"—shock—"I didn't do that"—denial—"You're lying"—then collapse. She sagged as if someone had cut the strings holding her up. People around her whispered, some with pity, some with scorn. Phones were held up. Someone streamed live, someone else recorded. There were those who stepped forward and offered a hand, teachers with solemn faces. There were also callers to the school's administration, and in minutes the principal, who had been across the grounds, arrived.
"Egan," the principal said in a voice that suggested he had not expected to get involved in gossip. "What do you know?"
Egan's face had lost color. He mumbled. "I... she told me not to worry. She said it would fix things. I didn't mean—"
"Did you report this? Did you tell anyone?" the principal asked.
"No, sir," Egan said. He sounded like a boy caught.
"Parents," the principal said. "This will be handled properly. But this is serious."
Mae tried to speak again. Her voice was thin. "You're ruining us—"
"You're the one doing the ruining," I said. "You were there. You didn't stop it."
At that point the crowd was no longer about entertainment. It had turned into a civic hearing in miniature. I saw neighbors give testimony. I saw my father's hands shake while strangers told truth after truth. Mae's father stood back, face red, tears tracking down. Egan cowered like a man who had been a puppet and suddenly felt the strings.
People filmed. Some spat. Some looked away. Some said nothing, because the truth had weight and made silence too loud. Mae finally crumpled, pressed her face to her hands, and I saw a tiny, terrified child inside the woman who had tormented me for years.
"Please," she whispered. "Please don't tell anyone else. Please, my father will lose his reputation."
My father stepped forward then. He had listened all along, quiet. He put a hand on my shoulder that steadied me.
"Reputation matters," he said. "But not more than rightness."
He looked Mae's father straight in the eye. "If you give us trouble for revealing the truth, we'll involve authorities. But first, you have the chance to fix this."
Mae's father, who had watched his daughter's undoing, started to cry openly. People around us murmured. Mae's voice became a shriek of denial and fear—"You're lying! It wasn't me—"
"Mae," Egan said faintly, and his voice was not the strong, swaggering sound he had used in photos. "I'm sorry."
The crowd, which had been hungry for scandal, now turned toward consequence. Teachers took notes. A counselor arrived. A phone call was made: to the vet, to the police, to the principal's office. Mae's father held her trembling hand and for the first time looked stricken and small.
When it was over, people started to drift away, some with pity, others with the satisfaction of being on the right side of truth. I felt hollow and oddly cleansed. Tomas squeezed my hand.
"You did well," he said.
"Did I?" I whispered. "I wanted revenge."
"There's a difference," he said, voice soft. "You wanted relief. They're getting accountability."
Mae's breakdown continued at the edge of the crowd. She kept repeating, "I'm sorry," and sometimes "That's not true," to a wall of faces that would not believe the version she wanted.
Her fall from grace was not satisfying like a cartoon tumble. It was a public, messy, inevitable unmasking. She moved from fury to pleading to stunned silence. People filmed. Some clapped, some whispered, some cried. Egan's shoulders sagged under the weight of being exposed. He tried to call his father, tried to apologize to Mae, tried to ask what to say to the cameras. Each attempt only made him smaller.
At one point Mae lunged toward me, as if to plead. "Please," she said, voice small. "Please don't tell anyone else. I'll fix this. I'll—"
"Fix what?" I said. "The dead dog? The lies? The friends you drove away?"
She sank to her knees in the grass like someone finally admitting she's hit rock bottom. Around her people gathered: some to condemn, some to listen, one or two to tell her that she needed help. Cameras whirred. Her father stood and put his face in his hands.
It was ugly, but it was honest. The crowd became the jury—neighbors, teachers, friends—and they reached a verdict in looks and whispers. Mae's world, which had seemed so invulnerable when she walked in like she owned the air, now trembled.
I didn't shout. I didn't dance. I only watched the truth tilt and fall into place.
After the event, there was fallout. The principal called meetings. Mae was suspended pending investigation. Egan lost a scholarship application because a faculty member said his conduct looked irresponsible. Mae's father had to answer hard questions at his office. In a week, whispers replaced smiles around her.
Most of all, something changed in me. I had not wanted to humiliate; I had wanted relief. Watching Mae's face as the crowd turned made me feel both guilty and strangely lighter. Tomas came closer and wrapped an arm around me.
"You did something brave," he said.
"It felt like treachery," I said.
"It felt like truth," he corrected me. "Telling the truth in public when private lies harm people—it's messy, but sometimes it's the only way to stop harm."
After the fair, life changed. I was no longer the quiet girl people felt comfortable ignoring. I started to feel a new kind of freedom, a claim to my own story.
Tomas stayed near. He texted daily. He teased me and took me to late-night study rooms and made me laugh until I couldn't remember the sting. He also taught me how to speak up without shouting—how to be firm and gentle at the same time.
"Do you ever worry," I asked one night, "that you might be doing this because you feel sick when people hurt me?"
He looked at me, the streetlight painting his jaw white. "I worry that I feel things too much," he said. "I also... care about you. That's messy."
"That's fine," I said. "Messy is nice sometimes."
We had small victories: a cookie shared, a study session where he handed me his jacket, a debate he won and then pretended he owed to my luck. I kept writing—this time not to hurt but to practice being brave on paper. I wrote chapters where a shy girl found her voice and a boy with a bruised past learned to care. I wrote how a dog could be saved in a parallel world because in this one the truth had to come out in order to stop more pain.
Friendships recalibrated. Some people came back, uncertain and apologetic. Others went. The campus hummed with a new order: those who had weaponized charm now had to face the cost.
Mae’s punishment continued outside that day. People avoided her in the cafeteria. The girl's sponsors called. The vet's note circulated quietly among the council and law enforcement. Egan's friends turned on him in private messages. For weeks the school buzzed with the echo of a truth that could not be put back in a bottle.
I didn't gloat. I learned how to be fierce without becoming cold. I learned that exposing a lie is not the same as becoming cruel.
One night, Tomas and I sat under the gym lights after practice and he said, "You wrote this whole mess."
"I wrote parts," I corrected. "But you read me. You believed me."
"Good thing," he said. "Because I like believing you."
"How do you do that?" I asked. "Be so... steady?"
He shrugged. "I have no idea. Maybe I was tired of drama. Or maybe you make me want to do things I never thought I'd do."
He kissed my forehead then, a soft thing. "Let's go home," he said.
On the phone a few days later, my mother cried with relief. "Your father is proud," she said. "We never spoke up because we didn't want trouble. You did right."
"What about Mae?" I asked.
My mother was quiet. "We will help in ways she needs to change. But you are safe now, and that matters."
Tomas and I started being less careful with our hands. We held them in class, we walked close in the cold, we arranged half-secret study dates that turned long and warm. I wrote things for him now—not fanfiction, but small notes tucked into his locker: "You left your gloves," and "You owe me a rematch in capture-the-flag." He left me prints of his messy handwriting. We built small rituals that were ours.
There were nights when I replayed the fair in my head and felt guilty for the public eyes on Mae. Tomas would find me and ask what I was thinking.
"Did we do the right thing?" I asked him once.
He looked at me like he had thought about this a lot. "Yes," he said. "We stopped a pattern. We gave people a chance to see reality. That is a good thing."
"But she was my sister," I said. "I still love her in ways that hurt."
"Love can hurt," Tomas said. "Love with honesty heals."
The campus moved on. Term papers came due, and the big, loud scandal simmered into a cautionary tale. Mae sought counseling. Egan apologized in a small, private way, but people could tell it hadn't been from the heart. My family patched what it could. The dog Duffy's grave got a small wooden cross, and my father planted lavender there, because my mother said he had always liked lavender.
I kept writing, and this time people read my work because they liked the comfort in it, not the scandal. My readership grew slowly. Tomas became a regular in the front row of the little campus readings, throwing me a grin when a line landed. We had small fights—about jealousy, about the fact that he sometimes assumed I was fragile—and small reconciliations. We also had a brutal honesty that made us safer.
Once, when we were walking past the old high school auditorium at dusk, Tomas stopped.
"You ever think about the little girl you were, the one who hid and learned to shrink?" he asked.
"All the time," I said.
He pulled me in close. "You don't have to shrink. You can take up space."
I smiled. "I am trying."
"Good," he said. "Because I want you big in my life."
In the middle of the year, I wrote a piece that finished the story I had started the summer before. I posted it, and I didn't delete it after. People read it. It was not a weapon anymore. It was a thank-you letter to a boy who had made me brave, and to a crowd that had helped me speak.
After the fair and the long tangled months, Mae and I didn't become best friends again overnight. Some wounds needed longer. She sometimes sent me messages—short, awkward—apologies that sounded like a child learning to say new words. I answered them with calm, not praise or anger.
"Are you going to forgive?" Tomas asked once.
"I already have," I said. "Forgiveness is for me. It doesn't mean I let her do this again."
"Good," Tomas said. "Because I like the version of you that doesn't tuck herself away."
One evening two years later, Tomas and I were invited back to that same amphitheater. He had finished a big tournament. I had won a small award for a short story collection. We stood together on the stage as people cheered. I looked at him and remembered the fair: sunlight, the dog, cameras, the slow fall of a girl who had been cruel. I touched Tomas's hand.
"Thank you," I said. "For being a person who stayed."
He smiled that crooked smile of his. "You did the hard part," he said. "You wrote the truth."
Years from then, when I told this story to someone else, I would end with a small detail—the lavender by Duffy's grave, how it smelled in late spring. But that evening, under the lights, with the crowd of old friends and the soft hush of the campus I had finally owned, Tomas wrapped his jacket around my shoulders and said, "You are beautiful, Justine Beard. Not because of anything you lost or anyone you beat, but because you kept your heart, even when it hurt."
I laughed, and it felt like sunlight.
The End
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