Rebirth14 min read
Second Chances, Public Reckonings
ButterPicks18 views
I woke up to a math test I had no business failing.
"Sixty-five," the scanner scored on the paper under Joelle's hand. I laughed in a quiet classroom and everyone stared.
"Joelle, shut up," someone hissed.
"Why are you laughing?" the monitor asked across the desks.
"I'm not Joelle," I said, because saying the truth kept my mouth from going soft.
I looked at the hand that belonged to the girl everyone called Joelle Laurent. The skin was pale and the fingers were delicate. My fingers — my real fingers — had once turned applause into a heartbeat. I had been Lennox Watkins: top of the city, a scholarship, a life that had been a clean line to one university. Dead, then gone.
"You're kidding," my deskmate said. "You bothering us now?"
I opened the desk and found reams of corrections, a leg still wrapped in plaster, notebooks full of watered-down notes. Joelle's life smelled of instant noodles and late nights. Mine had smelled like stage lights and printing ink.
"Do you know what you're doing?" I asked, flipping through a pile of half-solved problems.
"I don't even know who I am today," I told myself aloud.
A minute later someone muttered the answer to the last question. I turned and said, "Negative one — it's negative one."
They looked at me as if I'd thrown a brick.
The teacher came in: a round man with a bald head. "Who finished?" he asked, and a few clumsy hands lifted.
"Joelle, did you hear me?" he said when he saw me with my hand up.
"Yes," I answered. He made me show the correction of a simple problem I had never been allowed to just get right.
Outside, rain had started, and Joelle's friend Gianna Werner waved to me from the corridor. "Come on, Joelle, hurry. It's gonna get worse."
I hobbled, the plaster clacking, and hugged her like a girl who had once believed in friends. She smelled faintly of shampoo and confession.
"How is it you talk so much now?" she asked, surprised.
"I'm having fun."
"Don't get weird. You know you don't deserve any of it." She smiled and clung to my arm.
A tall boy brushed past us. Joel Johansen — sharp cheekbones, quiet like a seal — glanced my way and coldness cut across those pale eyes. I felt it as if he were a winter wind.
"Don't even look," Gianna whispered. "He's for Song Xiaoxue. Not us."
I didn't care about their pairings. I cared about one thing: how I had died. My memory was a flash of light that smelled of oil and rubber, and I remembered leaving a stage of applause and opening my eyes inside a stranger's life.
That night I found Joelle's phone filled with messages. A whole group had been roasting her. "Go die," read one. "We are waiting!" another spat. There were more messages than a person should hold.
I scrolled and found a diary. Every page gasped out the same name over and over — the name the world had put on a pedestal: Joel Johansen. The girl's handwriting trembled with a small, aching worship that boiled my blood with a pity I did not expect.
I sat on Joelle's bed and thought, I am Lennox Watkins. I was the first in the city. I had a life threaded with honors. I had been at the top of a pile of noise and now—now I had plaster on my leg.
The next morning, someone barreled into me. "Hey! Watch it! I'm in a hurry."
"Dario Cooper! Are you trying to break me?" I snapped.
He grinned, a crooked tooth flashing. "Sorry. It's my bad."
"You're always saying that." I tried to sound sour. He picked me up with the kind of casual force teenagers wear like a shield.
"You're changing," he said when he put me down. "I like it."
"Don't be dramatic." I trudged on with Joelle's limp.
Dario's voice followed me. "If anyone gives you trouble, don't run. Tell me."
I wanted to roll my eyes. I wanted to plug my ears. Most of all, I wanted answers.
At school the rumor mill sputtered. "She said she could beat Joel." "She cheated to get first." A kid named Nico Avila, who spent more time smirking than breathing, flung a test at me.
"You're such a clown, Joelle," he mocked.
"Shut up." I slammed my palm down on the test I had just correctly solved with a speed that belonged to a different life.
"You're faking, obviously." He laughed. "Teacher, Joelle's cheating. She was last once."
"Will you stop?" I said, and suddenly my leg moved faster than it should have. I kicked. The chair toppled and Nico went with it, a tangle of limbs and humiliation.
The room stilled. The teacher's face lost warmth. "Sun—" he began.
"Joelle," a boy called out in a low voice. "Calm down."
Dario followed us to the director's office. "You alright?" he asked after the principal's tirade.
"Fine," I lied.
"You were different in there." He tossed me a pen. "Say yes to my homework help."
"You're pushy."
"I prefer 'helpful,'" he said.
The days sped. I owned the math class. I crushed the debate team in an old muscle memory that belonged to me — to Lennox — and when I stood to speak in front of a hall, voices went quiet like curtains closing.
"I remember this," I told the teacher after the round of applause. "I was here before."
"You were," Ismael Davies said, the debate coach who recognized something in me. "You have the cadence of someone who used to take applause." His eyes were sharp as a scalpel.
"I died," I said. The words slid out and no one else heard the confession. "I came back."
We walked a thin line of rebuilt reputation. The city tests came and — to everyone's horror and delight — Joelle's name rang first across the apps. "Four-city first," a parent announced at a funeral table and then laughed, stunned and proud. Joelle's mother hugged me as if I were the sun.
"Don't let them tell you you're a fraud," she said, tears bright. "You did this."
"Mom, I'm not your—"
"Just let me be happy," she whispered.
At school, the girls who had once jeered began to flatter. Short-haired Livia Olsson made tentative apologies. "I misjudged you," she said, too quickly.
"Okay," I answered, letting the world have its illusions.
I had two goals: find out who lit the fire that killed Lennox Watkins, and stop whoever had taken Joelle's life from being erased into rumor. Then, one night, I found a truth too ugly to swallow: Joelle's friend, Gianna Werner, had a habit of hiding things in her bag.
"Is that a nail?" I said, fingering a small, ordinary metal spike. It matched something I had seen earlier — a pin in a shoe that had been used to create a scene.
Gianna's face went white. "What are you talking about?"
"It looks just like the pin in Song Xiaoxue's shoe. Remember the injury?"
She laughed, and it was a sound that meant nothing. "You think I would—what kind of liar are you?"
The next days were a fever dream. I gathered cameras, I called every surveillance operator at the gate, I begged Ismael for any paper trail. But one truth refuses to stay hidden when you keep picking at it.
The day of reckoning came at the most public hour: the school assembly.
"Joelle Laurent will be recognized today," the principal declared. "And she will speak."
Gianna sat not ten seats from me, her hands clenched. Her face looked like dried paper, brittle with a veneer of composure. The hall was full. Phones hovered like impatient birds.
"May I have the mic?" I asked the principal later.
He hesitated, then nodded. "Make it quick."
My voice was steady. "There's something I need to show you," I said. "I know how the truth looks when nobody wants it. I know how easy it is for a rumor to become the world. But this time, we have proof."
I played the footage. It was simple: a slow, shameful capture of Gianna standing at the top of the footbridge, the camera catching the lift of her foot and the tiny glint of metal leaving her hand. The hall watched, with their mouths half-open, as Joelle — the girl in whose body I lived — took the step and tumbled.
There was a sound that slid through the hall, like paper tearing.
Gianna's eyes went from panic to denial to a shrinking animal's fury. "You can't—" she cried. "That is fake!"
"Is it fake?" I asked, and the footage ran again, the timestamp, the angle, the passersby who had been glancing at their screens. "This is CCTV from the bridge. This is your bag, Gianna. This is the nail you kept in your palm."
She laughed. "You want me to confess? You think I would—" She stopped. For the first time, amusement drained from her voice.
"Why?" someone whispered.
Her shoulders crumpled. "Because—because she was everything everyone wanted. Because I could never—" she pressed hands to her face, whispering like someone reciting a secret that belonged to a volcano. "I wanted in. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be seen."
The crowd closed in on her like the tide. Phones were up. "Confess!" shouted a voice.
"You're crazy," another said.
Gianna's breathing turned ragged. "You think I didn't plan? I planned it so clean—" She choked. "I didn't mean to kill her. I meant to scare her. I meant to scare her and make the others laugh at me for a moment and then pity me. Only—only she fell."
"She did more than fall." I held up the small thread of medical reports and the doctor's notes like they were a rosary. "She tore her neck. She died."
"That's a lie. That's a lie!" Gianna shrieked, and her voice climbed into a place no one could catch.
"Can we get her out?" someone murmured.
"Call the police," the principal argued, his voice brittle.
Gianna laughed then, a bark of something deranged. "Call them," she said. She looked across the hall at the students who had once gossiped with her. "Call them because I'm telling you something else. Do you know who else she was? Do you know I carried the nail because I meant to ruin her, not kill her. Do you know who gave me the idea?"
All eyes swung to Lauren Francois, who had been lounging with an air of insolent prettiness near the back. Lauren's smile fell. "What are you babbling about, Gianna?" she said.
"Lauren told me," Gianna whispered. "She said, make them look. Hint at a rumor. Make her look dangerous. Make her life crumble enough that she stops shining. She egged me on. She said, 'If you can humiliate her, maybe he'll notice you.'"
Lauren's face went still. "That's nonsense."
"I have the chats," I said, drawing up the thread on the projector. The messages bloomed, a parade of temptation and cruelty: "Do it," "Make it dramatic," "Everyone will pity you." The text had a timestamp, a signature; it was impossible to fake in that moment.
A murmur rolled through the crowd, then grew. Lauren's gloved poise melted into panic. "You can't show my messages!"
"I can," I said. "And I can show the messages where you lied about someone overhearing evidence that was never there." I looked at Ismael, and his jaw tightened.
Lauren's face twisted. "You—"
Before she could finish, someone in the crowd pushed forward. "Ismael! Call the police. Call them now!"
Two teachers gripped her arms. The students circled like a gallery — their cameras recorded everything.
"You're a monster," Gianna said, and it was so soft, it might have been a prayer. "You told me to do it. You told me I'd be seen if I made a spectacle. I was invisible. I wanted to be visible."
Gianna eyed the hall; the eyes staring back were not quite the ones she had expected. "You all laugh now," she said. "But you were laughing when I went to buy the nail. You all said she was pathetic enough to deserve it."
Voices rose. "Shame," someone called. "Shame on you, Gianna."
She buckled — a short, loud inhalation — and then she flailed and clawed at her own face. "I didn't mean to—" The words dissolved into heaves. "I didn't mean to kill her."
"Everyone saw it," I said. "You did."
The cameras would hold that image. The crowd would not let it go. Principal had one hand on the microphone and the other on his phone. He said, "Security, hold her. Somebody call the police."
Gianna's demeanor changed again. The earlier bravado was gone; the small animal inside had been exposed. She tried to plead with faces that had been indifferent before. "Please," she said to the students around her, and for the first time, the words were human. "Please. I didn't plan for this to go that far."
"Too late," whispered someone who had once mocked Joelle's lunch.
There were shouts, and then a press of teachers who shepherded Gianna outside. She struggled and then ceased when the sirens began. Phones kept recording. A few brave students followed, filming. I walked behind and watched Gianna slump on the curb, hands wrapped around her head, while others circled with their devices and their outrage.
Outside, she put her head between her knees and sobbed like someone who had finally accepted gravity.
"Do you know how it feels to be hated?" she asked me eventually, softer. "To live every day in that shadow?"
"I do," I said. "But you made a choice. You chose to fling a life off a bridge. That wasn't pity. That was violence."
She looked up. "Will she come back?" she whispered.
"No," I said. "She won't. But she'll live on in the truth, because the truth is louder than your screams."
The police cuffed her. Cameras flashed. Someone pushed a recorder under her face. "Why?" a reporter demanded. "Why did you want to hurt Joelle Laurent?"
Gianna's eyes were a small, embarrassed thing. "I wanted to be someone," she said. "I wanted to be seen."
The world that had once made her invisible now recorded every tremor as if it were holy.
That day Gianna Werner's fall from friend to criminal was public. She sobbed and begged and tried to bargain with a system that would no longer let her dissolve into gossip. People in the crowd filmed as she was led to a police van. Some cried; some whispered, "I knew she hated Joelle." Many simply watched, as if watching a play where empathy was optional.
It was messy and it was public and it was, for the first time since I woke up in Joelle's skin, the kind of justice that could be seen. But justice has a shape, and punishment must be more than cameras.
Later, at the courthouse that thrummed like a live thing, Gianna's trial was a slow unpeeling. The judge read the footage, the messages, the testimonies. Parents who had once shrugged now clutched tissues. Gianna's expressions shifted: arrogance, defiance, final resignation. When the sentence was pronounced, when the gavel came down, every eye was upon her.
"She will pay," someone in the back whispered. "She will know what it means when everyone hates you."
But the crowd wasn't justice. The court was. The recorded videos, the CCTV, the medical reports — they stacked like bricks, and Gianna had to stand beneath them. She stared at the floor and wept until even her tears were exhausted.
In the end, the public punishment was not just about humiliation. It became a mirror — the mirror where every student who had ever turned away from cruelty had to look at themselves. Teachers gave statements about how they'd ignored the early signs. Parents signed apologies. Students who had laughed were required to attend sessions about responsibility.
Gianna's punishment was raw and public and it lasted long enough for the echo to sink in. She was taken away wearing a gray jacket, and the cameras kept rolling.
"She looks small," someone said.
"She is small now," I replied.
They carried her away. The hall kept a silence that was not peace — it was the space left empty by what had been done.
After Gianna, there was Lauren.
"She told me to push." Gianna's whispered confession had named Lauren Francois as the instigator who fanned the flames. The messages showed her prodding and egging. The school convened a hearing. The parents demanded answers. Lauren's mask of charm collapsed under the weight of the record.
On a bright Thursday, the same hall filled again, but this time the city press had come. I stood on stage and showed Lauren's private messages, thread by thread: "Make it dramatic," "Do you want a scene?" "Everyone will notice you." The messages had the scent of cruelty dressed as cunning.
Lauren's punishment was different. She was not hauled away on the same day like Gianna. Instead, the school held a public restorative session. Parents, counselors, students, and teachers crowded the auditorium and watched as Lauren was required to stand and face every student she had poisoned with her words. She was asked to read the messages aloud and explain her motive. She stuttered and then, when prodded, admitted to wanting status, to wanting the thrill of control. She was given community service, ordered to apologize publicly, to sit through months of counseling, and to assist in programs about student safety.
"You're going to learn how to rebuild what you broke," the principal said. "You are going to listen."
Lauren's public punishment was a coronation of accountability rather than a single act of exposure. She was forced to stay present while others spoke of the damage. She had to hear Joelle's mother speak and record it. She had to answer questions from those she had hurt. The pain was slow and precise. It was an education in what cruelty costs.
Both punishments were different: Gianna's immediate, ugly fall into criminal consequences; Lauren's long, official unmasking and enforced repair. The crowd watched both unfold and recorded every moment. Rumors turned to records. Friendships strained into new shapes. The school changed, because people had finally been made to face what they'd helped create.
But the court and the public meetings didn't spit out a miracle. They only made the truth visible. That was enough to let me breathe.
"It didn't bring Lennox back," I told Dario one night. We sat by the river where the city lighted itself like tiny offerings. "It just made sure people can't say the truth was hidden."
He took my hand. "That's why it matters."
"Is everything fixed?" I asked.
"No." He squeezed. "But we won't let them forget."
High school simmered on. The exams came. I sat in a uniform that was not mine and wrote an exam as if I'd always been Joelle. When the final tally came, it came down to numbers and not pity. I kept my promise: every test I took, I took loudly and honestly.
People changed. Some genuinely did. Song Xiaoxue, whose pretty sameness had once been a weapon, came up and said something that surprised me.
"I was mean," she said. "I didn't see." Her voice shook. "I'm sorry."
I forgave her in a way that surprised even me. Forgiveness isn't forgetting.
I had more to do. There were old bones to unearth: a past explosion that had taken Lennox's life. There was Lauren's thread with a boy named Gu — a poor student who'd vanished into rumors of improvised experiments. There were the grown-up influences who'd whispered secrets that became fires. I followed them like a detective on a stage.
Ismael Davies, the debate coach who had once told me there was something familiar about my cadence, finally sat me down and said, "There is evidence you won't like to hear."
"Tell me," I said.
He told me old names, old grudges. He told me how clues had been buried under convenient tragedies. He told me there were people who had lied to save their faces and people who had lied to manipulate others into fatal desperation.
We raked through logs and letters and the voices of people who had once whispered in other rooms. Lauren's messages were one set of coals. The bomb? A boy named Gu who had broken under pressure, who had been cornered by the idea of exposure. Who had been held up as a golden child and thrown from the pedestal. Then there were the adults who covered, who flattered themselves into keeping secrets.
A year spun by. I moved from Joelle's room to a dorm in a university city that had once been a mirror of my old life. People called me Sun? They called me Lennox? They called me Joelle? Names are shivering clothes. But the thing under the clothes — the habit of saying, "No one who dies like that disappears untouched" — that stayed.
"Are you still angry?" Joel asked once, in a study corner.
"Yes," I said. "And no. Mostly, I'm patient."
"Good." He smiled with a softness that wasn't cold now. "Be patient with us."
Time doesn't heal so much as it gathers the evidence into a neat pile. Gianna went through courts, Lauren through counseling, the school through a kind of public examination. People recorded their apologies. The press wrote and rewrote the story. Some tried to erase the fact that Lennox once existed; others insisted Lennox had existed and deserved to be understood.
At graduation, I stood on a stage that smelled faintly of cheap polish. I had learned to be patient, to expose, to demand repair and to make space for it. I had learned to speak truth without being savage.
"Once," I told the new kids arriving at the old high school for a talk, "I believed my value was only what the world shouted out loud. I thought the top would save me. It did not. The only thing that saved me later was that I refused to let someone else make their cruelty into my silence."
When I said those words, I thought of Joelle lying in a hospital bed, of Gianna crying on a curb, of Lauren's hollow smile. I thought of Lennox, of the hands that applauded my name years ago and then forgot, of the stage burning, and of the way a life is stitched through name, memory, and the people around it.
I turned and looked at Dario in the crowd, at Joel in the second row, at Ismael with his lined face, at the mother who had once refused to see and then had to stand up and apologize. The world had been messy and public, but finally honest enough for me to breathe.
"I won't forget," I said quietly.
"You don't have to," Dario answered. "You only have to live."
I let the applause wash over me. It didn't heal everything, and it wasn't supposed to. But the truth sat there on display like a medal. I traced it with my thumb and, for the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to smile without thinking it might be the last.
The End
— Thank you for reading —