Sweet Romance12 min read
The Breakfast Bag, The Black Umbrella, and the Practice Book
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I remember the second year of high school like a sunburn that never really faded. The classroom was hot; the fan above us whirred like an impatient insect. I sat at my desk with an English workbook open, mouthing words I knew by heart.
"Why is she still studying during break?" someone behind me whispered with a laugh.
"Look at her, playing the good girl again," another voice said, cruel and sharp.
I kept my eyes lowered and continued. I had learned how to make silence my shield.
"I'll say it again: she's an act. The type who makes me sick," Francoise Mathieu said loudly enough for half the row to hear. She slapped her hand to her chest like she had been injured by my innocence.
"Don't be mean," Aubree Eriksson hissed from a few seats away. Aubree always had a way of sticking up for people who didn't ask for it.
"She can't see me. Why would I care?" Francoise scoffed. "Come on, it's funny."
I kept reciting words under my breath. A few girls snorted and giggled; they loved a small cruelty, and they loved watching anyone smaller than them flinch.
"Stop it, Francoise," Aubree said when the laughter grew. "That is enough."
Francoise rolled her eyes, but she didn't stop. "What, you defending the model student now? She's not even popular. Show me something worth copying."
"I want to study," I said very quietly when there was a pause. My voice startled me.
"Study?" Francoise repeated. "Give me a break."
I looked at her, at the set of her mouth. The insult was meant to be a performance. I was used to performances in my life—mine and everyone else's.
A few weeks later there was an exam. Francoise was seated next to me. She leaned over and said, "Hey, top scorer. Mind if I glance at your paper?"
"No," I answered.
Her face went red with rage. "You dare—"
"Don't," Aubree muttered from the back. I heard doors open and close as other students let the scene unfurl like a small play in the middle of math class.
Later, when the scores came out and the teacher read them aloud, everyone realized which of us had what. I had first place again. Francoise's family money couldn't buy answers. She left the score sheet with a new target printed on her forehead.
"She's the same as those kids from last year," Francoise whispered bitterly one afternoon. "They looked down on me. Now I have to prove them wrong."
"You'll get used to being behind," someone else said. They meant it and they didn't.
By then, Aubree had stopped whispering when people were cruel. She wasn't fearless—no one can be fearless at sixteen—but she had the kind of stubbornness that sided with justice more often than with safety.
One rainy Monday I sat alone in class at lunch and opened a small paper bag set on my desk. There was a steaming breakfast inside: an oily bar of fried bread, a wrapped sausage, and a small carton of warm soymilk. I frowned. I hadn't asked for anything.
I had a message pinned on my phone from someone labeled "F." The first time they had added me I had refused. Then they kept sending friend requests until I accepted just to stop them. I regretted it and felt trapped in a kind politeness I couldn't afford.
I typed, "I don't want this. Take it back."
The reply came quickly. "Don't want it? Then throw it away."
So I did. I put the food in the trash and sent the money back. The sender did not reply immediately. For reasons I could not name, I felt a small flare of satisfaction at the exchange. I felt less owned.
"Who put breakfast on your desk?" Aubree asked later when she noticed.
"Someone," I said.
"That's Garrett Campos," she said. "My brother. He does things like that. Don’t be rude to him."
Garrett. The name meant nothing to me except for a boy who had given a stranger breakfast. I had first noticed him on the basketball court—the way girls shouted his name like a song. He was the kind of person who made sunlight look ordinary. He had a brotherly tie to Aubree that made him visible, even when he didn't mean to be.
"He's a friend," I said, but my voice didn't reach the corner of the room where the laughter often began.
If someone had asked me then whether I liked Garrett, I would have said no. I would've said he was merely kind in a way that complicated me. I would have lied because I didn't want kindness that came like an obligation.
Aubree's family home was warm in a way that made me ache. "Make yourself at home," Aubree's mother, Ethel Dickerson, told me. "You're like family."
"Thank you," I said. Those were small words that tasted strange in my mouth.
Garrett stood at the entrance with a basketball and sun-streaked hair. "Where's my sister?" he asked with a boy's casual impatience.
"She's fine," Ethel said. "She's upstairs. Go wash that sweat off."
Garrett looked at me for a long moment. I felt a curious lightness, like a window opened somewhere in my chest.
"You're Chloe," he said, and I felt my name land like a bird.
"Yes," I answered.
"Nice to meet you," he said, and his voice was as ordinary as a promise.
From then on, small things happened. Garrett would stand by the water fountain and offer me a bottled drink. He'd pass my desk when he had a spare note and say, "Good luck," like it was the secret wish of the day.
We began to exchange messages. He was the one who had been labeled "F." He had sent breakfast, milk, notes, simple reminders that someone was paying attention.
"Why are you being nice?" I asked once in a message.
"Because it's what I do," he replied. "And I like seeing you sit up straighter."
I laughed at the sentence and felt something soft in my chest. "Stop messing around," I replied. "You don't know me."
"That's the point," he said.
Weeks went by. I kept my life small—class, studies, home—and I kept my walls high. My father, Hank Shaw, came and went with pockets that were often lighter than his promises. My mother, Ethel, toiled in the kitchen and wore exhaustion like a fine cloth. My younger sister, Lea Bittner, retreated into silence in ways I hadn't known how to reach.
One night I texted Garrett: "Do you think my sister will be okay at that boarding school?"
He replied almost immediately: "I'll look after her if she needs it."
"I don't want to trouble you."
He sent a photo of a small stuffed rabbit and typed: "It’s not trouble."
The truth was that troubles were my family. The truth was that I was used to holding them under a thin sheet and pretending they were asleep.
At home that night, I heard them argue again—my mother and father. "You're spending on her again," she shouted.
"I'm doing what I can," he answered. He had the face of a man who'd given little and expected less.
"Who is she?" she cried suddenly, and the room grew small. The scream was sharper than the rest.
My stomach dropped. The conversation turned like a knife. "She is nothing."
"Nothing?" My mother gasped. "You have pictures, marks of another life on your phone —"
He laughed. "If you care to search, there are worse things than me living a life."
I remained on the couch in my darkness, hands numb. It felt like someone had lit matches in my chest.
"Those animals outside will laugh at us," my father sneered. "You wanted vanity and got it. You are a fool."
"Don't say that in front of the girls," my mother cried, but the words spilled out like poison.
That night I did not sleep. I thought of the word "nothing." I thought how it had been used to describe me sometimes, and Lea other times. I understood then what my mother meant when she said "if not for you," but she said it to me, strangely, with ache.
When winter came, I found myself running at the track after class. The school announced exercises, competitions, and the boys laughed and the girls made a fuss. I ran anyway, because running made my brain unclench.
Aubree shouted my name, bright and loud. Garrett stood at the edge with his tall shadow, looking like a post I could lean on for a minute.
"You can do this," he said simply as I circled the track. When I pushed, someone in the stands began to clap. I ran because applause made me new in the moment. I ran until I stepped over the finish line and the world slowed to a painful sweetness.
"You did it." Aubree's hand squeezed mine. "Third place, Chloe!"
The class gathered around me like applause after a performance. They were kind—simple kindness, clumsy but generous. I felt something like belonging.
I sent Garrett a picture of the practice book reward. "Third place," I typed.
"I saw," he wrote back. "You were brilliant."
"Who are you?" I asked again, childish and impatient. His answers were always teasingly incomplete. "I'll tell you later," he replied. He liked to keep things slow like a season.
At home, my father grew bolder. He had a voice for humiliations. One afternoon a neighbor's festival brought the town together. The square by the market was full of people; lanterns bobbed like questions above us. My father stood on a temporary stage near the bandstand to throw his voice into the evening. I went because my mother insisted we go together, because sometimes public places were safer than lonely rooms.
I had no idea I would be the one to change everything.
Someone in the crowd passed a file to Aubree’s mother. It was a folder of messages and photos. When I saw my father's name on the top of a stack of printed chats, my mouth went dry.
"What is that?" I asked.
Aubree’s mother drew breath. "This belongs to Hank Shaw," she said. "He has a second family, with proof."
At the same moment, a woman stepped forward from the back of the crowd. She held a child in her arms—a child who looked like the boy in some of the photos—and she pointed. "That is his name. He promised me things."
My father, who was standing on a platform delivering some small speech, stiffened. His face went from color to ash. The music stuttered and the crowd quieted like a tide.
"Is this true?" someone shouted.
Several phones flashed up across the square. People had printed messages. Someone else began to record. Another person pushed forward and asked for explanations. In a sea of faces and red lanterns that bobbed like small suns, there was the double life of a man in a thin suit.
"My God," a woman whispered behind me. A teenager recognized my father and gasped. The neighbor who had laughed with him the day before stood, mouth open.
I felt like I was watching a slow-fall, a man in a suit losing the muscles that held his performance.
"Answer him!" someone demanded. "You betrayed us!"
My father laughed at first, a thin, terrible thing. "You're making a scene," he said, stumbling for the script he always used when he was embarrassed, trying to control the crowd like an amateur magician. "This is nonsense."
The woman who had the child in her arms was no longer quiet. She stepped into the light and read a message aloud. "He told me 'I will leave her, I will do better,'" she said. The voices in the square followed her rhythm: disbelief, anger, the rustle of judgment.
"Shame," another voice said. Phones were held up, videos recorded. People craned their necks. I felt a pressure building like a storm.
He tried to flee. He tried to control it with the only trick he had: charm. He reached for someone's arm and laughed too loudly. "Don't be ridiculous," he tried. "This is private."
But the crowd had crossed some invisible limit. A group of men stepped forward and pushed the folder across a folding table between them like evidence in a trial.
"You," the woman said, pointing at him. "On these messages you said, 'When I get the money, we'll be gone.'"
The square bristled. Someone said, "He lied."
Another person murmured, "He used them."
My father’s face shifted from bluster to the thin panic of a trapped animal. He looked at my mother as if seeking an ally. "Ethel—" he said. His voice was now small.
The crowd circled him. Someone pulled out a printed sheet; the voice on the loudspeaker read message after message linked to his phone number. The air smelled like roasted corn and fear. A woman pushed her way to the front and threw a paper at his feet. "How do you stand there?" she spat. "How do you look us in the eye?"
I moved without thinking. I stepped forward, too. I had rehearsed this step in my head a hundred times—how I would say something sharp, a single cold sentence that would feel good to say, something that would remove the nausea waiting in my chest.
"What do you have to say?" I demanded. The microphone reached toward me like an accusation.
He turned to face me. The crowd fell into a hush that felt like a held breath. Garrett was at the edge of the square, his tall silhouette a border between me and the rest of the world. Aubree had her hand on my shoulder to steady me.
My father opened his mouth and said, "Chloe, this—"
"Did you lie to that woman?" I asked. "Did you tell her you'd leave us when you never meant it?"
He looked at the ground. His shoulders shook. For a split second he looked like a small, defaulting man beside something he could not buy off.
"I did what I had to do," he said finally. "I—"
"You told her you'd leave me," I said. "You told her you'd pay for her apartment. You told her to wait while you took care of 'one thing' at home. You told her you were making plans. Did you ever plan to leave?"
He shook his head in a frantic denial. "No. It's not—"
"Then you used her," the woman with the child said, voice breaking. "You used her money, you used her trust."
My father's face bled color. He slid down to his knees on the worn wooden platform. The sound of his suit against the wood was like a punctuation. He had always had a posture that protected him; it had vanished.
"Please," he said, voice small. He reached out toward my mother as if he could stitch the world back together with a hand gesture.
"Get up," someone yelled. "Stand!"
He tried, but the crowd pressed in like tidewater. Phones zoomed in on his face; videos began to stream. Someone laughed, cruel and bright. Someone else recorded him stumbling, then falling into a heap of shame.
"Public!" someone shouted, and the crowd complied. The woman with the child held the camera up to him like a mirror and played one of the voice messages. His voice was unmistakable, promising things and counting out dates. The square repeated the words like a chorus.
"I thought—" he began.
"You thought you'd get away with it," the crowd said.
"You thought because you were good at hiding you could hide from us," a man exclaimed. "But we see you now."
My father slid his hands across the wood, terror hollowing him out. He looked up at me with an expression I had never seen: not anger or insult but the gaunt fear of a man whose whole life had been measured and torn down in a single evening.
"Please," he begged. "Please, Chloe—"
"Get up," I said.
"No," someone else said. "Kneel."
He was already on his knees. The order had been given and the crowd felt empowered. For a moment, my stomach clenched with a dizzying vendetta—the knowledge that power finally had a place to go.
My father began to pray quietly, hands folded like a child. People around us murmured. "Look at him kneel," someone said. "He got what he deserved."
Phones recorded his pleading. A teenage boy laughed and held his phone up to his friends as if presenting a trophy. A woman took pictures of the woman with the little child and posted them to social platforms. Someone else clapped. A child in the back tugged at his father's sleeve and said, "Is that what cheating looks like?"
He tried to stand then, to make a show of dignity, but his knees wouldn't hold him steady. He slid back onto the platform and remained there, wracked with a kind of sob an audience can feel as contempt.
"How do you feel?" Garrett's voice asked from the side, direct and calm like a verdict. He had come to the square, and his presence thinly split my attention. People quieted at his approach.
My father looked at him and said, "Garrett—"
"Are you proud?" Garrett asked, and the microphone near him caught the question so everyone heard.
"No," my father said, and for once his voice had no pride to puff it up. "No, of course not."
"Then stand and face the people you lied to," Garrett said.
Heard like that, the challenge was a line drawn. My father could not stand. The square buzzed with phones and whispers.
I stayed at the edge of the circle and watched my father, who had always been loud and certain, shrink. The way he tried to explain himself and failed made the square feel thin and summer-hot. People stepped closer. Some yelled. A few cried out for his arrest; others demanded reparation.
When the crowd dispersed, it left behind something that could be felt like a used stage. Someone had taken his life of lies—his practiced roles—and publicly unfolded them. My father, still kneeling on the platform, looked like a man stripped to his bones.
The footage later lived online for days. People talked. Phones had saved the exact tremor in his voice when he said my name and begged forgiveness.
He apologized at home later, in the private light of our kitchen. It sounded small there. He asked my mother to forgive him and promised to stop. He promised to change.
I listened through the walls and thought of the public square, the child's small hands, the woman who had lost illusions and the way millions of eyes had watched a private betrayal named in daylight. I thought of Garrett's steady voice that had made the crowd listen.
After the public shaming everything shifted. My father went into a kind of penance. He stopped going out with the men who used to laugh at afternoons. He began to hand over money to my mother, and for a while he stayed home. It was messy and human and, beneath it, political—a cleanup of what had been broken.
The public punishment did not fix everything. It did not make our house safe. It did something harsher: it took our family off the stage of private pretenses and made us naked in the eyes of the town. People glanced at us on the street in ways that were curious and condemning at the same time. There was satisfaction in the exposure and sorrow too, because shame is shared once it is public.
And Garrett? Garrett walked back into my life like a constant tide. He did not parade or flaunt his involvement. He simply stood near when needed.
Weeks later he stopped by with a small paper bag with a warm roll. "I brought breakfast," he said quietly. "For you and your sister."
I took the bag. "You didn't have to."
He shrugged. "I like to."
"What do you want from me?" I asked him once, late at night over text.
"Nothing," he replied. "I wanted to help."
"Why?"
"Because I think you are good," he wrote simply. "And someone ought to tell you."
That was the last of the big scenes. We returned to our rhythms—the small wars of school, the comfort of study late into night, the small triumphs like the practice book under my arm. I held onto the practice book like a talisman, like a small proof that my efforts made a difference, that I had something of my own.
Aubree and I walked the path between classes, voices overlapping with easy chumminess. Garrett sometimes joined us, sometimes not. Lea grew into herself with small slivers of brightness—sometimes allowing me to touch her hair, sometimes simply smiling. Little by little, our lives rewove from the torn fabric they had been.
One evening when I opened my drawer, I found the practice book sat neat and small, the spine marked by the ribbon of the event. I opened it and read the margins I had once penciled: "Third place—keep going." The ink had smudged.
I closed the book and placed it under my pillow. I do not know what tomorrow will ask of me. I only know the weight of small, honest things: a practice book folded to my life, a black umbrella Garrett shared with me in the rain, a paper breakfast bag now empty on my desk.
I wind the memory like a watch. The seconds tick past.
"Don't rush," I tell myself out loud.
The watch ticks. The black umbrella waits by the door.
The End
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