Sweet Romance11 min read
I Dreamed I Was Your Bride (And Woke Up with a Frame on My Head)
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I dreamt I was someone’s bride.
"It was a chapel," I said, even to myself, because saying it made the picture sharper.
"I was in white," I told the mirror, touching the collar of my shirt as if it could turn to lace.
"It was him," I whispered, but the face blurred. The chapel light felt like cotton. The priest looked like Mr. Hartmann, who never smiled. The groom's features floated, and then the dream fractured with a glass sound.
"Ow!" I sat up.
The frame that hung crookedly over my bed fell and hit my forehead. I touched the bump and saw our old photo, five girls grinning like we thought the world owed us sunshine. A thin crack cut the glass across my friend Mai's laugh.
"Grace, you okay?" Denali called from the kitchen, his voice full of clattering pans.
"Dad, I'm fine," I lied because bumps do not make dreams less true.
Denali walked in wearing the piglet apron I had given him three years ago. He looked ridiculous and perfect. He made breakfast like a feast for kings. He always did things as if celebration was the only way to keep sadness out.
"Eat up," Denali said, eyes shining. "Today is your first day back."
"I'm not a kid," I muttered.
Edward stuck his head in. "You faint at the idea of life, do you, or what?"
"Mind your face," I said. He grinned like a small, dangerous animal and tapped my wounded head with a joke. The knock hit the sore spot and made me cry out.
"You're a mess," Denali scolded in that soft way only a father can, then grinned and ruffled my hair. "Come on. School."
I grabbed my brush and the thin minty smell of toothpaste felt clean on my tongue. I pulled the books into my bag and tried not to think about the man in my dream who had a face that made my cheeks hot.
There was a knock at the gate and someone called, "Grace? Need a lift?"
Jordyn bounded in like she owned the morning. Her arms were like a warm blanket, and she squeezed me. "You look like you dreamed of princes," she said between bites of toast.
"I did," I admitted. "I dreamt I was getting married."
"Who?" Jordyn's eyebrows went up like an arrow.
I swallowed and glanced toward the street, where a gray car idled. Everett was at the wheel. He looked ten years older and ten years softer than he should have for a man who was twenty-seven. His smile was a small, guarded thing.
"Everett?" I blinked.
"Want a ride?" Everett called, his voice calm as a library.
"Sure," I said, and then my chest felt funny for reasons that had nothing to do with motion sickness.
He wasn't supposed to be our teacher. He was the university professor who had come to our school to teach for the semester. People talked about him like he was a legend: brilliant, handsome, reserved as winter. I had loved him since I was seven, before I knew what "love" meant.
"Get in, you two," Jordyn said, and clambered into the back like a bear cub. She took my bag and tucked it beside her.
Everett offered me a peppermint. "Here," he said.
"I hate peppermint," I whispered, but his eyes held the candy between us and it felt like an intimate offering. I took it anyway.
"Grace," he said softly that day, when he parked at the school gate and the sun cut him into a painting, "if you ever feel dizzy again, sit with me for a while."
That was the first time his words hit my ribs like something deliberate. I put the mint in my mouth. It tasted like quiet goodness.
We walked into class, and I sat somewhere I did not expect. The new seats were shuffled like a deck of playing cards, and for reasons I would never fully understand, I ended up alone.
"Grace?" Jordyn mouthed, but I waved her away. Being alone with my paper and pencils was a rare comfort. Then the door opened.
"Good morning," Everett said, and the room went very quiet.
"From today on, I am your homeroom teacher." He wrote his name on the board—E. Watkins—and when he looked up at us, something in my chest fluttered like a trapped bird.
It was like the world had rearranged itself. I tried to keep my breathing steady. I tried not to think that the dream from hours ago had felt like a promise.
That morning, I fainted in class.
"I saw stars," I told Everett later, sitting across from him in the infirmary, feeling foolish and thrilled in equal parts.
"Drink this," he said. He handed me an orange juice, and when his fingers brushed mine I felt the world hiccup.
"Thank you," I managed. He looked at me with a tenderness that made me ache.
"You need to be careful," he said.
"I'm always careful," I lied.
Jordyn barged in like a storm. "Someone needs to be tougher," she announced. "This girl faints and they treat her like it's a national emergency."
"Jordyn—"
"She could have been hurt," Everett said, and the tone in his voice made me feel small and noticed.
The day went on, and then school curled into lunchtime, and a rumor took seed.
"You're seeing Aiko?" someone said in the hallway. "I saw them together in the parking lot."
"Stop," I thought. "They're just colleagues."
But rumor is a living thing in a school. It eats facts and puffs them up until the truth looks like a monster. That afternoon, a group from another class cornered me.
"Stay away from Mr. Watkins," their leader said. She had a sharp voice and a mean tilt to her mouth.
"He's my teacher," I said.
"Not for you," she said. "He doesn't date students. He dates artists."
Days passed. Everett kept his distance and his kindness in proper measure. He would hand me a peppermint in the hall sometimes, and once he tucked my hair behind my ear under the guise of checking for a scratch.
"I don't understand," Jordyn complained one night. "You and Everett make all of us look bad because you stand still and make him talk to you."
"Jordyn, you are impossible," I said, brushing crumbs from my shirt. Jordyn was the only person who could call me a mess and mean it with love.
Then, on a night when the moon was a pale coin, the world cracked again.
I was leaving the shop where my brother worked when a shadow moved. My phone slipped from my hand and skittered. A hand grabbed me. I tried to scream but a big palm smothered my mouth.
"Give me your money," the masked man hissed.
I fumbled and handed over the little cash I had. Then he pushed me to the ground. I hit my head on the wall and stars burst. My phone clattered away. Then someone stepped in.
"Get off her!" a voice shouted.
Daniel lunged at the man—a flinch of bravery—and the two men fought. A blade found Daniel's belly. He stumbled, blood dark like tears. The attacker ran.
I cried out and clung to Daniel while people called an ambulance. Everett reached me first and took my shoulders like an anchor.
"Hold on," he said. "Hold on, Grace."
"Which one was that?" a siren asked, but all I could hear was Everett's voice and the thudding of my own heart.
We rode to the hospital in the back of an ambulance. Daniel was wheeled into emergency. I felt hollow, like a cup emptied of soup.
"He saved me," I told Everett when the world went small and neat again.
"He did," Everett said, and his fingers were sticky with my blood from where I had pressed my palm to the wound. "He shouldn't have to."
Daniel was okay, in the end. He survived the surgery. I slept in a chair in the corridor and woke to a smell of disinfectant and the distant hum of monitors. I wanted to say thank you to everyone, but the thing I said most that night was "I'm sorry," and it didn't feel like it meant anything.
The school needed to do something about the girls who had started the fight—the ones who thought a rumor was a license to harm. The leader, Colette, wore her hair like a razor. She had friends who cheered like a pack. They were proud, loud, and cruel.
"Stand up," Everett told me the next morning. "If you want them punished, you must be the first to stand."
"Me?" I asked.
"Yes, you," he said. "Speak truth. Speak about what happened and let the light in."
So I did.
It was a Tuesday, and assembly filled the auditorium. Faces multiplied until the room felt like a school of fish. Colette sat with her crew by the back, sunglasses on as if disguise could make a heart honest.
"I want to speak," I told Everett. My voice shook.
"Grace," he said softly, but he did not stop me.
I walked to the stage. Every step made me smaller and braver at once.
"I don't like being the center of attention," I said, and the microphone made my words thunder. "But I owe someone an honest thing."
The auditorium hush swallowed us.
"Colette Box and her friends started a rumor," I said. "That rumor led to a fight. That fight left girls in the hospital and my friend—Daniel Atkins—stabbed while protecting me."
A gasp. Some students shifted. A few took out phones.
Colette's sunglasses came off. She looked surprised, like a child who thought the game would never end.
"What are you talking about?" she spluttered. "You started it with him. You're the flirt."
"Stop," Jordyn shouted from the crowd. "This is not a joke."
I did not scream. I told everything in small, clear sentences: the parking lot, the voice, the hand, the blade. I named names. I said what they had done. I told them I had thought fear would die inside me but it hadn't. And when I told them Daniel had bled, the auditorium smelled like metal and something else—shame.
Then came the punishment. The principal stood and walked to the stage with a stack of printed messages.
"We will not tolerate harm," he said. "Students sending hate or rumors will face disciplinary action and restorative justice."
Colette stood up and stormed the stage.
"This is ridiculous!" she shouted. "I didn't do anything! You people are making it worse!"
"Then explain," Everett said. His voice was soft but it reached into her mouth and drew truth out like a fishhook. "Explain why girls were hurt and why a boy was stabbed. Explain your part."
She sputtered. Her friends murmured and the witnesses leaned forward. I watched Colette's face change—the ease, the arrogance, the smirk—falling off like old paint. She was suddenly small. Her eyes darted. She tried to laugh. The auditorium turned like a tide against her.
"We have screenshots," the principal said. "Emails, messages." He held up a printout. "Your messages encouraged others to escalate. You incited the confrontation."
Colette's face went pale. "That's not—"
"Isn't?" the principal echoed. "The messages say different. You told them to go 'teach her a lesson.' Those are your words."
The crowd was not silent anymore; it hummed like an engine. Parents began to whisper. Someone took a video. Colette's friends looked stunned. The principal read more. There were plans. Times. Cruel jokes. Proof stacked like bricks.
Colette's expression traveled through stages: anger, denial, then panic. Her voice cracked. "No one told me to... I didn't—"
A chorus of phones recorded as the principal announced consequences: public apology to the injured, suspension, community service at the hospital, mandatory counseling, and a restorative panel where Colette would face the students and families involved.
"Colette Box," he said, "you will come forward tomorrow at noon. You will apologize publicly. You will speak to every student in this auditorium and to the families in that room. You will do it under camera. Then you will spend a month working at the hospital under supervision."
Colette's knees practically gave. "You can't do that to me," she whispered, and then louder, "You can't make me speak!"
The auditorium watched Colette collapse into a chair. Her friends backed away. The teacher who had once smiled at her like a pet now looked like the world had betrayed him.
Parents gasped. Someone snapped their fingers and clapped in sharp salute. Several students got to their feet and booed. Others looked like they had swallowed a bitter fruit.
"That's not punishment," Colette's mother hissed at the principal when the crowd dispersed. "It's humiliation!"
"Humiliation?" the principal said quietly, and then loud enough for the room to hear: "Humiliation is what the victims felt. Accountability is what you owe."
The next day, every camera in school recorded the scene. Colette had to stand before students and say, "I am sorry." She could not compose the apology at first. Her voice shook through the microphone like a bad radio. She tried to explain away facts with small lies. A chorus of phones played back messages she had sent. Her own words stung her.
"I didn't think," she said finally. "I didn't think what would happen."
"That's not enough," said a mother in the second row. "Our children were hurt."
Colette's public apology lasted fifteen minutes. Journalists from the local paper asked to interview the families. The posts went online. Her reputation changed overnight. People who had cheered her now looked at her like a weather pattern gone wrong. Her friends started getting messages from their neighbors. Colette's father lost a contract because clients said they did not want to associate with that family.
At the hospital, she scrubbed floors and passed out pillows and learned how small a person can feel in service to those they harmed. She was confronted by those she had bullied—their voices steady, not cruel. They told her how fear had tasted. She listened. Her posture changed over weeks, from defiance to a slow, awkward humility.
For days, she cycled through reactions: she tried anger, and it failed. She tried denial, and it failed. She tried asking for mercy, and still the record was there. The community responded differently to each attempt. Some people mocked her. Some gave her the cold shoulder. A few offered a chance to repair.
Colette broke down in one of the meetings and begged to be forgiven. People had different responses. Some forgave quietly. Some said that forgiveness without real change was a trap.
She found her place doing small, awkward things that had meaning: holding a patient's hand while they were scared, reading children's books to the hospital's night crew, cleaning the courtyard where the families sat. Slowly the city watched her do tiny, real work.
The punishment was public. The reaction wide. Her collapse was complete, and not theatrical; it was a person who had used people to feel big and now had to be small. She could no longer walk past the mothers who had looked at her with rage. For the first time, she learned the weight of what she had done.
Months later, Colette still stayed away from me. She kept her head down in class. I didn't revel in her pain. I felt a calm that honesty brought, but I also felt weirdly tender. People change because they must; public shame only makes change possible by demanding action.
Everett stood by me in many small ways. He was strict in all the right parts and soft in the parts no one saw. He came to the hospital and sat through hours in the waiting room. Once, when I cried in the corridor, he said, "You are safe now."
There were little moments that felt like stars.
Once, in a hallway, Everett pulled his coat off and wrapped it over my shoulders. "You're shivering," he said.
Another time, when my hands trembled from the memory, he took them and said nothing. His palm was steady and warm.
Once more, after an assembly, he bent and whispered, "You are braver than you know."
Those three things—coat, hands, whisper—were the kind of small mercy that changed the whole weather inside me.
In the end, Daniel healed. Everett kept teaching. Jordyn kept being furious and kind in equal measures. My family fussed like they always had. Colette did her sentence and learned to say "I'm sorry" without it sounding like a spell. I kept my dream to myself for a while, because some dreams need waiting room shelves to rest on.
I learned something about the way people are made: we can be cruel because we think that makes us mighty, but the only real power is the one that makes you show up each day and clean what you broke.
On a quiet afternoon, when the chapel of my dream felt more like a picture in a book than a map of my life, I found an old frame in the attic. The glass still had that thin crack from months ago. I laughed and set it on my dresser.
"I think I'm ready," I told the empty room.
Everett came by that evening with two cups of tea and sat on my windowsill like someone who doesn't take up too much space but somehow fills the room.
"I like that you kept the frame," he said, looking at me.
"It reminds me of what broke and what we fixed," I said.
He smiled with his whole face, not the small smile he once kept in a stall. "I like that you kept it too."
I thought of my dream and how fragile it felt, and I thought of how real things—like a man bringing tea and another man giving his blood—could make a dream feel less like a promise and more like a possible future.
"Do you think," he asked, "that dreams tell us what we want or what we need?"
I swallowed. The peppermint had long dissolved into my mouth.
"Maybe both," I said. "Maybe dreams are practice for being brave."
We sat together and listened to the distant hum of the street. I kept my head in his shoulder like a small bird. When I closed my eyes, the chapel light felt warm instead of cotton.
The End
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