Revenge13 min read
Second Chances, Sharp Truths
ButterPicks14 views
I opened my eyes to pain and a cheap spring mattress and a ceiling fan that smelled like a summer afternoon from ten years ago. I blinked and the world slid into place: the sticky heat, the smell of instant coffee from the kitchen, the faded poster of a biology olympiad pinned crooked on the wall. I touched my temples. The scars weren't there. The memory of metal bent around metal, glass blooming red—gone.
"Patricia? You okay?" My father sounded younger. His voice carried the soft, tired hope he always used with me.
"I—" I looked at him across the room. Lee Freeman looked like the man who'd driven me to the worst days of my life and the best ones too: tired, a little thin around the jaw, and fiercely proud of the small things. He had the same embarrassed tender smile at the tip of his mouth when he thought he had to reassure me.
"Headache again?" he asked as if he knew me. Then, softer: "We can still go to the school meeting."
"No." I laughed without humor. "Please tell me it's not 2011."
He blinked. "What are you talking about, kiddo?"
But I already knew. The calendar sticker on the old car's window read 2011. The test of the universe wasn't a mystical voice. It was a cracked driver-side mirror and a bright dangerous highway and a life that refused to stay buried. I touched the back of my hand and felt the pliant skin of a body ten years younger, and then I remembered: the car that hit me, the hospital, the whispered condolences. And every memory after the crash like a badly cut film.
"It's 2011," I said out loud. "We're going to 临江... I mean—"
"Lin's school?" he said in a tone that put that name into our home long ago, even if his surname was Freeman and mine was Xiao. "Lin. Your mother. She would have liked—"
The name he used for me—my given name, quiet and old-fashioned—felt like an anchor.
"Don't get me wrong," I said. "I'm not asking to go. But Dad—did we really give money to 临江?"
Lee's hands tightened on the steering wheel. "It was everything I had. Fifteen thousand, I told you that. I wanted you to have a better school. Your mother—"
"She didn't deserve this," I cut him off gently. "She shouldn't need to chase other people's good eyes."
He laughed, a short, embarrassed sound that made my throat ache. "Shan—" he started, the nickname used and then swallowed. "Shan, don't worry. We'll make it better."
We were on our way to 临江 High School for a parent interview that felt like an audition. I remembered the old version of me—a burned-out teacher of life who had built a small reputation coaxing students out of "can't" and into "can." I had survived years of coaching, of seeing what raw talent could do without someone to call it out. I had also learned the place where money and education tangoed was often filthy beneath the surface.
The mouth of the office smelled like lemon disinfectant and outdated confidence. The vice principal's smile had been practiced to a professional degree.
"Mr. Freeman, we are honored by your contribution," he said, eyes skimming a folder as if he could burn the smell of paper into his expression. "But students must meet our standards."
I laughed in my head then laughed aloud.
"Excuse me," I said, before Dad could nudge me into silence. "What standards? If standards mean the same teachers teaching the same kids, how is that fair?"
The vice principal's grin faltered. "We accept many forms of excellence," he said, which was to say: we accept money.
"And if I can prove I deserve to be there?" I asked. "Will you accept me on merit?"
The man looked at my father, who looked like a man who had paid in hope and would drown in it if necessary. "We have an entrance check," he said carefully, then, slicker, "Or there is... another route."
"Fine." I took the test he offered me, the biological Olympiad-like page they wanted me to fail on purpose. I wrote without hesitation, then stood and walked out before their decision could be packaged.
"You're mad," Dad said as if that explained everything.
"I want them to need us less," I said.
We didn't get in by money that day. We walked out instead with something better: an annoyed vice principal and a paper in my bag that smelled faintly of victory. Word moved faster than worry. At the gate, when the old principal, Fergus Carson, entered the classroom on a pretext and held up that same sheet of paper, the world shifted.
"Is this yours?" he asked, and when everyone turned, I met his eyes.
"Yes," I said, careful.
"Would you consider training with 临江?" he asked, and his question wasn't a trap. It was the conscience of a man who'd taught under fluorescent lights long enough to know when a child with raw hunger was in front of him.
"Only if fairness follows," I said.
"Fairness can be taught," he said.
When the class clapped and the rumor rose like a swarm, I didn't expect the prize to come as a summons. The school wanted talent. The old principal wanted balance. The vice principal wanted cash. And I? I wanted to change a margin.
We were two schools' obsession that summer: 临江 and 七中. Fortuna, after withholding, threw a coin: I joined the temporary training, sat next to a shy, long-lashed boy with tear marks like ink under his lower lids. He didn't speak; he watched. Later he would be the sharpest knife in a drawer full of spoons. His name—Johan James—seemed too measured for his sudden, total competence.
"Do you like biology?" I asked him the first time we studied together.
He looked up at me like a man watching the weather change. "It likes me back," he said, and then turned the page like a metronome.
We practiced. I taught. He surprised. The room filled with other names I didn't care for: Khalid Berry, loud and rich and insolent; the smug king of casual cruelty. He kept a necklace of small jokes to stab with. He loved money and the way it made people bow.
"Small hometown girl won't win," Khalid told me once, loud enough to be cruel and small.
"I don't plan to win for the town," I said. "I plan to win for myself."
"Pitiful," he sneered.
"You'll be pitiful if you can't handle being beaten," I replied.
He had the stupid arrogance of men who believed chances flow only for those who buy seats. And he would be my first test.
When the mock exam came, I pulled a wager he couldn't resist. "If I top this, you withdraw from the contest," I said, and he smirked and agreed on the spot.
"Then get ready to kneel," he told me.
"Is that a promise?" I asked. "Or a threat?"
"It's a promise," he said.
We all did the test. The room was a thin drum of breathing. Jasper Braun, the young teacher who'd given me my first test, graded with a face of someone who'd seen miracles before breakfast. He read off names and scores, and the room shrunk to the size of the paper in his hands.
"First place," Jasper said, "A tie: Johan James, and—Patricia Xiao. Full marks."
The air snapped. Khalid's face dropped. He stumbled, and then, in a show almost theatrical in its smallness, he accused me of cheating.
"You're mad," I told him. "Explain."
"You can't have my first," he said. "You must have cheated."
I answered calmly, told Jasper the thought process behind the problem. Johan, who usually didn't speak, spoke then.
"She was right. There was an ambiguity. Recent research made D valid," he said, meaning the kind of knowledge that comes from reading, and from wanting.
"So you're both tied," Jasper said, and Khalid's face dissolved into a concentrated, private rage.
He couldn't take losing. That night he showed the worst of children who have grown into bullies: he spread rumors, hired petty men to block study paths, to threaten, and once, he sent a group to our way home.
They hit Johan and me. I felt the punch like a bell and then black. I saw blood and the streetlamp's halo and then another kind of black.
I woke in a hospital later with a nurse telling me my name and a detective asking questions as if they could be folded into neat answers. I saw Johan sitting in a chair with his arm stitched, and I thought I remembered his face from a paper I had seen once—the kind a frightened family keeps at the bottom of lockers.
"You were lucky to have her," the detective, James Teixeira, said to Johan. "You both were."
"Did you mean me?" I asked.
He only said, "Not now. Get well."
We recovered, and the incident became a knot that tied our futures. Johan and I grew closer by inches that felt like miles. He was taciturn but bright, and sometimes, when his eyes held a wild light, I felt he was trying not to break open. I would later learn why.
Months passed—or perhaps a destiny's minutes collapsed—and I learned the taste and shape of time again. I learned to hide the pills Maureen gave me and to test them privately. The white tablets tasted like betrayal. I had them tested. The results were quiet thunder: opiate traces far beyond therapeutic amounts. Someone had been trying to dull me down, not by accident but by design.
"Why would she—" I said to my father, who came home after arguing with Maureen once and with the set look of a man who had finally decided to choose his daughter.
"She thinks control is better than love," Lee said. "She thought a quiet house is—"
"It's worse than that," I said. "It's criminal."
We collected evidence quietly: the pharmacist's receipt Maureen had faked, the emails she'd sent to providers, the payments. We kept careful notes. We pretended to be blind while sharpening daggers.
You want the public punishment? You asked me to remember the rawness. I'll not only remember; I'll make it clean and visible.
There was a board meeting at my old feeder school, where parents gathered like weather-beaten flags. The community center's hall smelled of boiled tea and school banners. People from 临江's parent network were there, including Maureen Valdez and Bianca Burke, looking proud and smug in the same breath.
I had asked Luke—no, Lee—to put aside his shame. He agreed to stand. Jasper came as a witness. Fergus Carson, the old principal, sat in the back, his face a map of tired hope.
"Thank you for coming," I said into the microphone when my turn came. "I had hoped to keep this quiet. But some things are better aired in the sun."
Maureen's face creased. "Patricia, what gossip is this?"
"It's not gossip." I slid the test results onto the table. "These are lab reports. These are hospital records. These are receipts showing Maureen Valdez purchased high-dose analgesics and asked a third party to administer them to me via my food and drink."
A hush fell like a net. I locked eyes with her.
"What proof?" she said, voice brittle.
"The chemist you ordered from sent a confirmation email to an address you used. The bank transfer came from your account and your daughter's pocket money fund. We have a signed confession from the temp housekeeper who disposed the pill bottles. Jasper witnessed the time you put a cup in the fridge outside my reach, and the CCTV at the corridor shows you handling my water bottle."
Someone gasped. The room churned.
"What are you accusing me of?" Maureen's voice shook between outrage and fear.
"That you attempted to injure me physically and to control me chemically," I said. "That you conspired to hurt me because I threatened your family's illusion."
"That's a lie!" Bianca screamed, her voice thin from practiced theatrics. "She's lying to ruin me!"
"Do you deny paying the chemist?" Lee said quietly. "Do you deny sending the message?"
"Lee!" Maureen tried to cut him off.
He didn't. He read the bank messages I had printed. He read the transfers that coincided with the days I spent out of the house, dizzy, confused. He read everything like a man finally given the right life to hold.
People in the room had phones up. Some recorded. Some were weeping. Others whispered. The temperate murmur of the crowd swelled into a chorus. "Oh my God." "How could she?" "But she was so nice."
"Do you have anything to say, Maureen?" I asked.
She was losing her composure fast. She shifted from fury to denial. She tried the classic "It's me against her" script: "You don't understand the pressure we had," she said. "I was protecting my child."
"Protecting your child by poisoning another?" I echoed.
At that, Bianca turned the volume up. "You think you can shame us? She wants Daddy all to herself!"
"Bianca," I said. "You were the one who turned up the hot water in the shower. You were the one who bragged about how you made sure I couldn't study. You recorded me in the bathroom and said you'd show him a 'lunatic' daughter so you could get more sympathy. Which part makes you proud?"
She stammered. "You—"
"You bought private classes under false guarantees," I continued. "You salted the timeline for my contest training. You paid school goons to rough us up. You believed money could buy the future your child deserved."
People were recording, calling others. A mother near the aisle covered her mouth with both hands. A father I didn't know crossed himself in shock.
Maureen's face altered. The practiced mask of command slipped, and behind it, the raw face of a woman afraid of being exposed showed.
"You're lying!" she wailed. "You—"
"Bianca," I said softly, "write down the dates you met Khalid Berry and the men who beat up Johan and me."
When she hesitated, the hall dissolved into louder murmurs.
"She paid them!" someone shouted.
"Enough!" Maureen screamed. She lunged toward me, or at least toward sound, but security—parents who'd had enough of secrecy—grabbed her and held her back. They didn't physically hurt her; they simply removed the stage on which she could posture. She clawed for my throat with words. "I did what any mother would do!"
"Any mother?" I asked. "Would any mother poison another woman to secure a child's place? Would any mother hire goons? Would any mother lie about a child's grades? No. That's not a mother. That's a criminal."
At that, someone in the crowd whispered, "Call the police." Another voice, firmer, said, "We can't let this go unaddressed."
A dozen phones were up. Someone filmed every movement. The room was full of witnesses now, proper witnesses. Maureen's face moved through anger to disbelief to the slow, dawning calculation of someone who suddenly realized mid-performance that there was no exit line left.
"You'll regret this," she snarled, glaring at my father. "You'll regret making me look like this."
"Maybe," Lee said. "But I'm done regretting my daughter's pain."
By then the principal, Fergus, had stood up and walked to the stage, his presence like a bell. He spoke quietly so the hall leaned. "We will bring this to the police," he said. "We will ask for the suspension of any parental privileges related to this school. We will also investigate collusion with private tutors and those who arranged the assault."
Maureen's mouth opened into a thin grin that tried to be brave and failed. "You'll ruin me," she said, and the hall hummed with people who had already decided where their sympathy lay.
"Maybe I will," I said. "Maybe it's a necessary ruin."
People began to shout things now: "Signs of abuse!" "We won't let kids be silenced!" "This is bigger than one family!"
The crowd swelled into a tide of public opinion. People took sides. Mothers who had once served on the PTA who'd been quietly complicit lowered their heads. Some stood up. A woman I had barely spoken to—Annie Hoffman—walked down the aisle and took the microphone.
"I had suspected," she said, voice shaking. "But I didn't want to think the worst. She pushed me away the same way she tried to push Patricia away." She named the truth quietly and therefore gave it a home.
Then came the crescendo: someone from the back—an older man who'd run a small clinic at the school—held up his hands and said, "I remember when I saw Patricia faint in class. Her chart had unexplained irregularities. I asked and was brushed off."
The statements piled up like cleared debris. Everything that Maureen had relied upon—her social connections, her performance as a supportive parent, her patronizing smiles—crumbled. The crowd watched her like a spell breaking.
Bianca, who had shrunk into herself as if the room had become too bright, suddenly tried to flee. People who had recorded her mischief in whispered videos earlier found themselves posting them. Someone found a folder of screenshots where she had posted mocking comments about me. They projected it onto the wall.
Her composure shattered.
"How dare you?" she cried. "How dare you use my life?"
"You used mine," I said. "And you used my father's. You took our money and gave us sickness. You made me smaller because you needed to be bigger."
She was silent then—only a wet quiet.
Police arrived. James Teixeira—the detective who had interviewed us earlier—came in and spoke to Fergus and to Lee. "We have enough to start a formal investigation," he announced.
Maureen had reaction patterns all the way from fury to bargaining to collapse. First she tried denial: "This is slander. She is making things up because she wants money." Then she turned to pleading: "Let me explain. I only wanted—" She clutched at her chest and tears spilled out like rain on dry earth. "Please, don't take my daughter from me."
The crowd watched, half pity, half hunger. People felt vindicated in a way they had denied themselves for years. They had watched the family's performance of harmony and had not wanted to interfere. The public airing allowed them to step into moral clarity without shame.
An older woman in the front stood up and said—clearly and loudly—"No more. We protect our children. We do not sacrifice one for the vanity of another." She started clapping, then others joined. A slow, growing applause began, which was not for me; it was for the idea that truth mattered enough to be pursued.
Maureen's face broke into a kind of animal fear. Her voice became a whisper: "You don't understand how much I did for her."
"You did the wrong thing," I answered. "And you'll answer for it."
Bianca collapsed into her mother's arms and sobbed. It was not the same as repentance. It was a child's panic in the face of the collapse of the only power she had.
The police escorted them out. Mothers clustered to share looks. The news circulated by noon. By evening, the parents group chat that had once discussed only tutors and lunchboxes talked in parentheses about justice.
That public punishment was not the end of it. Maureen's reputation evaporated in front of a hundred witnesses and hundreds more online. Her social invitations stopped. The PTA that had once welcomed her elbowed her out like a bad smell from a room. Bianca's supposed path to advantage screeched and slid on the tracks she had been laid for it. The small comforts they had rested upon collapsed.
When someone in the crowd raised a hand to ask if I felt vindictive, I answered simply: "No. I feel free."
The rest of their punishment would be legal and painful—charges, scrutiny, and the slow uncurling of social exile. But the worst part for them wasn't the legal file. It was watching the people they'd considered their audience withdraw slow, pointed, and final. People who once blinked at their niceties now turned away. Friends who had pretended not to see called to say they'd been wrong. The house eventually emptied of invisible guests.
After everything, the community gathered to mend what could be mended. Fergus kept his steady, grave voice. Jasper taught with more care after that—more sensitivity to the kids who died invisible on the inside. Johan stayed by me like a calm current, and we built a small world from the pieces left.
In time I went to Beijing. I studied. I taught. I saved more than one child from a future I knew could be planned in someone else's darkness.
And once in a while, when the city faded behind the train and the wind smelled like river and paper, I would remember that hall and the sound of the crowd choosing truth. I would remember Maureen's face when the lights came on and the way people turned away from her.
"Do you regret exposing them?" Johan asked one night when we sat on a bench overlooking a street of slow taxis.
"I regret that people needed so much proof to believe," I said. "But not that I did it."
He reached and took my hand. "I'm glad you did."
"Me too," I said.
We had both been given second chances—me because time looped and offered a way to fix past mistakes, him because someone finally stopped his mother from leaving him alone with hatred. We didn't need dramatic promises. We needed a life that let us live beyond revenge.
"Promise me one small thing," Johan said, a smile touching his mouth.
"No long vows," I warned.
"We'll keep teaching," he said. "We'll keep telling people the truth."
"I will," I answered.
And when I finally, long years later, looked back at the community center's banner, my heart didn't thud with triumph. It settled with the quiet warmth of a lamp left burning where someone might one day need to see by it.
The End
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