Revenge14 min read
Not the Moon
ButterPicks15 views
I am Kylee Ashford.
"I'll be late tonight," I typed, thumb lingering over the send button until the little blue tick appeared.
On the screen his name glowed: Hudson Martin. "Okay, baby. Handle what you need. Game later," his voice message came, husky and soft. I pressed play, and his laugh filled my ear like a small, warm light.
The street was half-empty. A single lamppost spilled a circle of yellow on the pavement. I wrapped my coat tighter around myself and looked up. There, leaning against the brick like he'd stepped out of my phone, was Hudson—half in light, half in shadow. My chest tightened.
"You're late," he said, smiling in a way that matched his face in the photos.
"I was just sending you a message," I answered, voice small.
He took a step forward. "You shouldn't be out so late. You should be careful."
Then his gaze slid to my hand. "What's that notification sound?"
My phone buzzed in my hand. A new voice message blinked on the screen. I thumbed it open.
"You got lucky," said a recorded voice. "Apologize."
Hudson folded his cigarette between two fingers and watched me with eyes that had been kind online but were sharp tonight. He did not move when the people behind him closed in.
"Say it," the recorded voice—Zoya, I realized—demanded.
I stood there, stunned. The man I'd called mine, the voice that had spent three years learning how to say my name so it sounded like honey, turned off the soft smile. He looked away from me the way you look away from a boring painting in a museum.
"Say it and we'll let you go," Hudson murmured.
I swallowed. "Okay," I said, thinking my ordinary voice would be enough, thinking he would step in and stop them. I had been wrong in so many small ways.
Hands pressed into me. Fists found skin. Voices shouted. The world narrowed to the taste of copper and the sting of palms. I pressed my face into my arm and waited. When I finally lifted my head the alley was empty and the night smelled like dust and regret.
*
"Why would she target you?" Cassandra West asked the next day in our dormitory, handing me a towel. "She's always been a show-off. But this—"
"Because she could," I said. "She looked for a weak spot and used it."
"You pushed her in line," Chaya Watson—the one who lived across from me—said, eyebrows up. "That could happen to anyone."
"It shouldn't," I told them. "It shouldn't make someone think they can bend a life like a toy."
My phone vibrated. Hudson.
"Baby, are you okay?" his voice asked in a voice message that sounded like an alarm gone off far away. "I heard you fell. Are you bleeding? Do you need me?"
"No," I texted, fingers trembling. "I'm fine."
He kept sending messages. Heart emojis. "Come play tonight?" He never missed a night. He never missed my birthday or the day his grandfather died. He called me at three in the morning when the world felt like a hollow cup and told me stories of a house that had rooms he never used.
"He's the only steady thing I've had," I said once to Cassandra. "He is steady."
"You mean the boy who stood and watched them hit you?" she said quietly. "The one who handed them the lighter? The one who laughed when they told those jokes? That's steady?"
"People show you pieces of themselves," I whispered. "Sometimes the pieces add up strange."
Cassandra's eyes were flat. "If he's part of that, then he's not a piece I want to keep."
I didn't argue. I had learned that when people you trust show tiny cracks, you can't patch them with wishful thinking. You have to see them for what they are.
*
She started with small things. Zoya Rice would cut in front of me in the cafeteria and look at me like I had offended her heritage by existing. She would push, shove, whisper names and watch the circle tighten.
One afternoon she shoved me while I waited for a tray.
"You should watch where you're going, trash," she spat.
"You cut in line," I said, and it was the single honest thing I said that day. I didn't mean to shove her. I just meant to put space between us. My palm found shoulder, she went down hard, and the room froze.
"You broke her," a woman said behind me.
Zoya's face turned the exact angry red I had seen before. She had never been pushed like that by someone who looked her way and refused to bow. She found a group of friends and started whispering, planning.
The next day things escalated. Zoya cornered me by the lockers, and before I could understand what was happening, Hudson arrived—because he always did—and when I thought he'd pull them off me he closed the circle.
"Why'd you push my girl?" one of the boys asked.
"I didn't mean—" I started.
"She deserved it," Hudson said, the words flat and final. "You should apologize."
"To her?" I said, confused.
"You will apologize," Hudson said. "Publicly."
The way his voice carried that night, like a verdict in a court I'd never asked for, told me everything. The love I'd had in my headphones for years disintegrated into this cold decision. I tasted betrayal.
"I won't," I said and that single word felt like a cliff-edge.
"You will," he repeated.
He was my entire past three years of comfort folded into a man who could be cruel with his hands as easily as with his silence.
*
I told Cassandra everything that night. I told her about the messages that read like salt in my mouth, about the middle-of-night calls, about the way Hudson knew the intonation to make my name vibrate and heal the rough edges of the day. I told her about the photos he'd sent—him smiling in his yard, his shirt catching the wind like it belonged in a magazine—and about the way that face and the face that watched me get hit could both be his.
"You can still make him pay," Cassandra said. "You don't have to be his apology."
"Make him pay?" I echoed. "How would I do that? He has money, influence, friends who believe him if he says I started it."
"By turning the world to look," Cassandra said. She was small, deliberate, the kind of person who read a room and arranged a chessboard in her head. "He loves the spotlight. He loves being the one who controls it."
"He does," I said. "He used me like a costume."
"Then put him on," she said, and reached for my hand.
*
"West, you can't be serious," my roommate Chaya said when I told her my plan. "You're really going to show them? You're going to make them watch?"
"I'll make one person watch," I said. "Zoya."
"It won't be enough," she said. "They'll laugh."
"They won't have the anchor," Cassandra said. "That's all you need."
I planned like someone planning a small funeral and a new party at once. I posted nothing, said nothing. The night before I saw Hudson again I sent one message to a group chat under a fake name: "How does it feel to watch the one you backed down kneel?" I watched the comments pop up. Some laughed. Others promised to come.
Hudson texted me incessantly that night. "Baby, are you asleep? Are you sure you're okay? Are you coming to the field?" His messages were honeyed rope. I let them coil.
"I will be there," I told him in front of the coffee shop, and the words were both a command and a lie.
He arrived with his hair perfectly in place and a smell of cologne that belonged in old money. He gave me flowers that looked like contrition.
"You look tired," he said.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'm ready."
He smiled in the kind of way that had always made my heart soften. Then he walked away into the crowd like a man who had the right to stand by while others made their noise.
*
The night was crisp enough to make the air smart. The track stadium lights were on, and people sat on the bleachers in small groups, not all of them friends. Some had come because they had been told to come. Others had come because a rumor had teeth.
"Play the show," someone said from the crowd. Camera phones already searched for the first frame.
I walked to center field in my sensible shoes and felt every person become a weight. Cameras hummed like distant bees. I could see Zoya even from here—red lips, a hard braid, her eyes like knives.
"So dramatic," she called, voice carrying. "What are you doing out here, freak?"
I stopped and let the hush do its work. "Zoya."
She turned in time to find Hudson a few steps behind me, shoulders a little slumped as if the world had taken small bites out of him. He had a soft bruise near his jaw. The bruise did not look like a man who had not been punished.
"Why are you here?" she demanded.
"You told everyone I'd come," she said to the crowd. "You said she'd kneel. Let's give them what they want."
There were murmurs: "I bet she'll cry," someone said. "She'll beg."
"Watch," I said. "Watch closely."
I took three steps forward. The track rubber felt like a stage. I looked Zoya in the eye, and in that steady gaze I understood I would not pretend to fear her anymore.
"Do you want me to apologize?" I asked.
The words landed with a thump.
"What are you babbling about?" she hissed. "You owe me—"
"For cutting in line?" I said. "I already said sorry for that. This is different."
The crowd shifted, sensing the change in tone. It was a low, electric thing, like before a storm.
"Do you want me to kneel for cutting in line?" I asked again.
"Yes!" Zoya shrieked, sure she'd won. "Kneel. Don't waste everyone's time."
I could see Hudson's face change. The smugness dissolved into déjà vu and panic. His hand reached for the cigarette in his pocket and couldn't find it.
"Then I will," I said.
I bent my knee.
The stadium fell away. I was on the ground and the lighting made my shadow long and strange. I touched the red track with my palms and listened to the crowd's breathing.
Zoya's smile faltered. Her cheeks flushed. "What are you doing?" she asked, voice thin.
"It's your turn," I said quietly. "You want me to be small, to beg, to fall apart for you? Then we will play your game."
She blinked hard. The weight of the moment unexpectedly pressed on her. "You're crazy," she spat.
"Then prove me right," I said. "Prove me right and don't let me call you brave."
Zoya hesitated. A dozen phones shone like constellations, waiting to capture the moment. "Get up," she demanded finally. "If you think you're better, get up."
I didn't move.
"Do it," she repeated.
Around us, people began to talk faster, the chorus of gossip like surf.
"Either you go loud," I said, "or you keep the script."
"Huh?" She frowned. "Kneel? Are you begging me?"
The first crack in her confidence widened. Her mouth opened and closed. She looked at Hudson with that split-faced rage that had threatened me in alleys and cafeterias. The way she sought approval in his eyes used to make me afraid. Now it made me wince.
Hudson stepped forward. "Zoya—"
"Don't help her," she snapped.
The crowd leaned in. Cassie—Cassandra—stood near me, arms crossed like a sentinel. Chaya watched from the bleachers with a small, triumphant smile.
Zoya's legs trembled. Her knees wobbled as if a sudden wind had blown the arrogance out from under her. "Fine," she said, voice shaking. "Fine. I'll kneel."
And she did.
The cameras captured it. The phones flashed like fireflies. The girl who had spat at my face now bent until her knees touched the track. She had always been my tormentor, but now she was mine to watch up close. I rose slowly, feeling the small, raw joy that comes from reclaiming a measure of power.
"Now apologize," I said. "Kneel and say it for everyone."
She swallowed. Her voice squeaked, "I—I'm sorry."
The word sounded like a cloth dragged across glass. Some people whispered, disbelieving. Zoya's friends looked away. Hudson's jaw tightened until I thought it might crack.
"Look at them," I said softly, pointing to the crowd. "Remember who applauded you. Remember who fed the rumor machine. Remember who let you believe you were untouchable."
Hudson's face was draining of color. "Kylee," he said, low. "This isn't—"
"—Not what?" I cut in. "A game where you pick your pieces? Where you break people's lives for sport and then apologize when the sport gets uncomfortable? You thinking about how you'll spin it? About how you'll say you were the better man? About how you were trying to keep the peace?"
He stumbled over his words. "I—I can't—"
"You expect me to forgive you for standing with them," I said. "For being with those who hurt me. You expect me to let your hands clean themselves on the list of people who trusted you."
"I—I'm sorry," he whispered, and the apology was stripped bare of any expectant softness.
People around us started to clap—first a few, then a ripple. It wasn't applause for Zoya. It was the sound of the world shifting. Zoya's knees dug into the rubber, her hands pressed to her thighs, her eyes wet and furious. The crowd recorded. Whispers turned to laughter. The girl who had tried to break me had been broken into a public spectacle.
"Do you feel better?" I asked.
"No," Zoya said. "This isn't fair."
"Nothing about what you did was ever fair," I said. "You built your ladder with someone else's shame."
She put her hands over her face and started to cry. Her friends put their hands on her shoulders like props. Phones kept flashing.
Hudson stepped toward me, face raw, eyes pleading. "Kylee, please," he said. "Please, don't make it worse."
"Make what worse?" I asked. "Your reputation? Your story? The way people see you now?"
He flinched. "I didn't know—"
"You didn't try to know," I said. "You were the kind of person who thought cruelty could be stylish."
He fell to his knees then, in a motion like a puppet cut from its strings. He reached out for me with shaking hands. "Please," he said, voice breaking. "Please forgive me. I'm sorry. I'll fix it. I'll go apologize to everyone. I'll—I'll do anything."
Around us the crowd inhaled. Someone laughed. Someone else murmured, "Look at him. The great Hudson Martin on his knees."
"No," I said quietly. "This isn't for you."
"Then what is it for?" Hudson pleaded.
"This is for the people you left bleeding," I said. "This is for the girls you stood silent while they were stepped on. This is for me."
He began to beg properly then. "Kylee, please. I can't lose you. I didn't mean—"
"Meaning isn't a shelter," I said. "If it were, you never would have needed me to patch you up in the night."
The stadium was a constellation of small, bright eyes. The phones recorded everything. Zoya sat numb, the echo of humiliation already curdling in the air. Hudson's posture showed someone who had misread himself as loveable and discovered instead that he had been comfortable in cruelty.
"You will get up," I told Hudson. "You will stand and you will do something I can watch."
He looked at me as if waiting for a command. I held his gaze until he straightened. The next moments were slow—one step at a time—like a man walking out of a dream. He climbed the bleachers shakily and faced the crowd.
"I was wrong," he said hoarsely into a held microphone that someone passed him. "I hurt people. I hurt Kylee. I'm sorry."
People murmured. Some believed him; others could not escape the memory of his hands. He was human on a stage now, shaky and small. He had been powerful once; power was a high-roofed house that, when stripped, left a raw, empty room.
Then, as if collecting every quiet cruelty into a moment of truth, the people in the stands began to speak. A girl I had seen in a hallway pressed forward.
"You stood with them," she said, voice trembling. "You let them hurt her and laughed."
Another raised a phone. "We remember how you smiled that night," she said. "We have the videos."
Hudson's face paled. "Please," he said. "I beg you. Don't make this worse."
"Make it worse?" Cassandra's voice carried like a bell. "He already made it worse for years."
Zoya's knees finally left the track. She staggered up, unsteady, and looked at Hudson with a mixture of fury and shame. "You ruined me," she spat. "You made me this."
"Did I?" I asked, and my voice did not tremble. "Or did you let yourself be what you wanted to be?"
Zoya recoiled, searching for an answer that wasn't there.
"You won't break me anymore," I said to the crowd and to myself. "Not with silence, not with the night, not with your friends."
Hudson whispered my name; his voice was thin.
"You will learn," I told him. "Or you'll watch as your house falls for reasons you never thought of. This—this is the reckoning."
*
It didn't stop in the stadium.
After that night the school's online threads filled with videos: Hudson in the cafeteria with food on his shirt, Hudson apologizing in corners, Hudson being ignored by people who had once bowed. Zoya's messages turned from taunting to pleading. Quincy Martin, Zoya's own boyfriend, who had once thrown a bowl to my feet the day of the soup attack, found himself left out by his own crew when the mood shifted.
"You thought it would be one scene and you'd keep the script," I told him once, when he cornered me in a hallway. "But scripts end. People remember."
He left like someone who had been clipped of wings.
Hudson tried many things. He sent me long messages and new phone numbers. He came to the coffee shop where I met a stranger with a name and a face and he knelt on the bathroom floor until pain made him quiet. He told the students he had been an accomplice to nothing; he told his version and offered receipts of his own fabricated kindness. The problem was that the receipts were thin.
"Please," he begged once in the student lounge, voice small and raw. "I don't know how to be anything else."
"I never asked you to be anything," I told him. "I asked you to stop being cruel."
He knelt at my feet then, repeating apologies like a mantra. It had the effect of a bandage pressed onto an old wound. It did not heal.
Hudson's face, once a magnet, became a cautionary tale. Videos circulated of him asking for forgiveness from people he had humiliated. Some filmed him as he was shoved in a small crowd—his knees scraped and apology clumsy.
Each punishment was different. Zoya's public kneeling and the laughter that followed rewired her self-image. Quincy found himself pushed away by his own friends. Hudson's humiliation was more corrosive: a man used to being desired discovered instead that desire had a memory and a cost.
"Why are you doing this?" he demanded to me once, voice ragged.
"Because I chose," I said. "Because the only way to make you feel the right size of shame was to show you where you sit in other people's hands."
He cried then, for the first time honest and without performance. "I don't deserve—"
"Nobody does," I said. "But some people still insist on taking it."
*
The worst night for him was the one after the cafeteria incident. Someone had found a video of him being surrounded years before by boys who'd laughed while they beat him—payback in reverse. In that video he was the center of cruelty. He watched himself on screens across campus, watching faces that used to be his mirrors now make him into a lesson.
"It's all turned back on me," he whispered to Cassandra who had once stood at my side. "I thought that only others could be small."
Cassandra looked at him like one looks at a child with a scraped knee. "You thought you'd break others and no one would break you."
"Is that cruel?" he asked.
"It was true," she said. "For a while."
His public unraveling had weight. People who had once ignored my pain now saw him in a beam of light that made his flaws visible.
He tried to find me after that video went up. He appeared outside my dorm with a small bouquet of cheap flowers. It rained then, not heavily, but enough to smear his mascara and make his apology look like a newspaper left in a puddle.
"You hurt me," he said. "I hurt you. We can trade and be even."
I looked at him with a steady calm I had found in the most brutal of nights. "This isn't a trade ledger, Hudson. You can't balance shame like debt."
He knelt again, and this time his hands shook so badly he couldn't hold the bouquet together.
"Please," he said. "I will do anything."
I let him remain on the pavement with rain between his palms and hands trembling. I walked away.
*
Months later, after the dust settled and the campus began to forget the fire because new gossip was always arriving like migrating birds, I sat in the library and listened to people talk about the night. Some called it justice. Some called it spectacle. The truth smelled like coffee and old pages.
"Cass," I said one afternoon, leaning over a book at our usual table.
"Mm?"
"Do you think he'll change?"
She chewed the end of her pen. "People can change if they're willing to do the hard work. If they look for the things they hide from and own them, maybe."
"And if they don't?"
"Then they'll be the same story told differently."
Hudson stopped trying to reach me after I closed the door. He kept his head down in class. He kept apologies short and private, like ornaments he couldn't let anyone see. He learned that what he had used as a stage had been removed, and the audience was no longer willing to clap at someone who had hurt for sport.
Zoya applied for a transfer. Quincy stopped speaking to her. The social engine that had fed them collapsed when the leader who fed it realized how ugly the map was. I didn't gloat. I simply let the small exactness of justice do its work.
*
There was a day, late in the semester, when Hudson found me on campus one last time. He had a bruise along his jaw and a helplessness that had no pretense. He offered no parade of remorse. He had learned, finally, what it meant to be seen and not adored.
"Kylee," he said, the name small. "I don't expect to be forgiven."
"Then why are you here?" I asked.
"I wanted you to know," he said, looking at his shoes, "that I remember in full now. I remember what I did and who I was."
"That will always be a part of you," I said. "If you want to be different, do the hard work."
He looked up, eyes bright as if he'd been given a map. "I will."
"Not for me," I said. "Do it for the people you will meet who don't deserve to be broken."
He nodded, and we parted.
I kept my hat pulled low that day and walked home, feeling the air change in a way I hadn't allowed it to before. The city was turning toward summer, and people laughed along the streets as if nothing had happened. I wasn't sure if everything had been settled. I didn't know how much pain would never quite vanish. But something had changed.
Once, Hudson had been the moon in my night sky: distant, always there, a comforting light. I learned his light could burn. I learned that I didn't need to orbit him.
"I am not the moon," I said to Cassandra once, over tea.
She smiled. "You're better than that."
"I am Kylee," I said, simple and clear. "I am myself."
And that was enough.
The End
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