Revenge13 min read
The White Dress, The Coffee, and the Last Star
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I first saw her on the grand staircase, a white dress flowing like a small flag.
"Look," she said, and everyone looked.
She smiled like it was her right to smile.
That smile landed on me like a stone.
"Imogen," Gordon said at my elbow, voice low and warm, "this is my sister."
"Maja," she sang, "this is my sister-in-law."
My name then was a thin thing some other people had once pressed onto me.
I let them call me what they wanted. I let them pretend they did not know me at all.
"You must be careful with her," Gordon murmured to his sister as she looped an arm through his.
"She's mine," Maja chirped.
"She'll behave," Gordon told me, as if my life were a pet he was ordering into a carriage.
I saw them differently, later. I saw what the smile hid.
I remembered a dorm room floor slick with milk tea, my hair thick and sticky.
I remembered the hiss and burn of coffee that had been poured on me, minute after minute, until my skin was raw and red.
I remembered a plastic box with a small snake coiled inside, and a voice that said, "Sleep with it, and you can be forgiven."
I remembered the phone call, the chuckled approval on the other end. "Who dares make Liang family unhappy?"
The man on the line had been polite enough. He had been the one who taught everyone the joke.
"She is a nuisance," Gordon told his father once, standing at the foot of a grand table.
"Fix it," the older man said, and his voice carried, full of money.
They always said money fixed things. I learned that it also fixed faces into masks and closed doors.
"You were always clever," my teacher said when the principal recommended I be expelled.
"I'm only tired," I said.
"Stand up for your classmates," the principal said, and his hands were smooth with the favors of others.
"Imogen, you should be grateful. Your scholarship is generous."
"Grateful?" I asked, and the word sounded like a foreign coin.
"Of course," he said. "It is better to be amiable."
"Why me?" I asked Gordon once, years later. We were on his motorcycle, the city wind pinning my hair.
"You were beautiful," he said, like an answer. "Beauty gets attention. Attention invites trouble. I protected my sister."
"Protected her by ruining me," I said.
He looked at me the way a man looks at a garden he has pruned too hard. "I would do anything for her."
"You did everything," I replied. "You devised it."
He made a small noise, like an animal caught in a net. "I... I only wanted her safe."
"Safe?" I repeated. "Safe by making me disappear?"
He did not answer then. He never answered when the oldest truths were called aloud.
"Please," I told him in a small, dry voice, years later when he first sat at my hospital bed, "please tell me if you helped."
He did. He told me, but not in the way I expected. He told me with a cough and a soft retraction, with the kind of slow, surprised grief that arrives when a person sees his own hands stained and doesn't know when it happened.
"I made...a plan. To scare you. To make you leave."
"Scare?" My voice was a thin wire. "You called it a plan."
"I thought it was necessary," he said. "For Maja. For family. For us."
"Us?" I laughed, and the laugh tasted like lead. "There is no 'us.'"
"Imogen, forgive me," he said and he meant it; or he meant a version of it.
When I said "We should break up," he laughed at first, the laugh of a man who had always believed money could buy every answer.
"Come on," he said. "You and I—"
"Break up," I said, plain as glass.
He did not dissemble then. He lunged, pleading and stunned, his face suddenly human. "Please," he begged. "Don't go. Tell me why."
"I was not your mistake," I said. "But I was your tool."
He went white as if he had been slapped. "I would never—"
"Not say it," I interrupted. "Show me."
He did show me. He showed me his small cruelty. He showed me a network of favors and threats, of money moved in silence, of friends convinced to look away. He had a list, names and edges, and one day he sent their faces to the city's screens.
"Look," he whispered at me the night the video ran across the big squares, "we did the right thing now."
On the giant screens a montage played: people who had hurt, followed by placards—"We are sorry"—and the faces of those who had laughed as I learned what shame could do. There were the girls who slapped me. There were the boys who took pictures. There was Maja, eyes swollen with a fresh, produced grief.
"Are you satisfied?" I asked him as his hands held a ring like a coin of atonement.
"Stay," he said, like a command turned into a whisper. "Marry me. Let me fix it."
I slapped him once, then again, leaving a handprint that felt like a small, certain truth. People stared. A woman across the street took a photo. Horns were a chorus. He kneeled and cried on cement, and for the first time the world looked real, not just a background for his actions.
"Get out of my life," I told him. "If you don't leave, I will make sure you lose everything."
He tried everything. He poured coffee over his head until the burns made his hair cling to his skull. He shouted apologies to a city that listened like a jury. He set up funds and foundations, donated money to charities. He asked the paperboys to write his contrition on the front page.
I watched him roll the dice he'd placed on his own palm.
"Forgiveness is not a transaction," I told him once. "You can't buy what you've broken."
He made offers. He offered me shares and houses and the promise of a name on an illuminated plaque. Everything he unloaded sounded like the thin clink of coins. I accepted none of it. I took nothing that would bind me to him.
"Why are you so cruel?" I asked Maja another time, at a birthday party where she laughed too brightly.
"Because I can," she said with a child's simplicity. "And because it's fun to see you small."
"Fun?" I asked. "You call that fun?"
She shrugged, the movement of someone used to not being questioned. "You're so wrong about everything," she said. "You always have been."
Her punishment started as a small plan on my part and grew into a public, deliberate dismantling—meticulous, slow, designed to expose the structure that had sheltered her.
"Do you remember the night in the dorm?" I asked the room when I finally called an assembly in a grand hall.
"Yes," Maja said, and a ripple of discomfort passed through her.
"Do you remember the coffee?" I asked Gordon, who sat at the front, his face ashen.
He did not answer. He had learned that silence could be a shield and also a sentence.
I stood up. "You all remember the video on the square," I told a full house: colleagues, journalists, faces that had once been my judges and my witnesses. "You saw the montage of apologies. But I have new evidence."
I had gathered everything—the messages, the photos that had been hidden, the ledger entries, the audio recordings where people laughed as if they were reading scripts. I had collected witnesses, the small ones who had always been afraid to speak. I had found a reporter who would print everything without a bribe.
"Show them," Maja whispered into Gordon's sleeve, "Show them the woman has become bold."
"Show them," I said aloud. "Show them the truth."
I started the screen. The first thing that filled the room was the fold of someone laughing as a cup tipped. Then the hiss and crackle of a kettle being poured over my shoulders in a dormitory. Then the voice of Maja, bright and delighted. Then a phone recording—Gordon's voice saying, "Make sure it's thorough." There was a slow intake of breath in the crowd.
"You can't—" Maja began.
"Stop her," Gordon whispered, but the room had already leaned in.
"Why have you done this?" a woman near the stage cried. "Why would you destroy someone like this?"
Maja's composure faltered. The first thing to break was her smile. "It was a stupid game," she said, small as a bird. "We were young. It got out of hand."
"Get out of hand?" the hall echoed. "You poured coffee?" a man shouted from the balcony. "You posted photos?" someone else called. Laughter, sharp and brittle, because the crowd didn't know whether to laugh or to choke.
I had prepared more: a printed letter from the school's principal who'd sat in the headmaster's office and judged me; a copy of the expulsion notice with a signature that had been bought and paid for; messages that proved a bribe and a threat. The air in the hall tightened as people read.
"I want to ask you, Gordon," I said, my voice small and cold enough to be heard, "did you think any of this would stay secret?"
He had no defense. He kept his mouth closed. He kept his hands trembling.
A woman—Bridget Koenig, a former classmate who had once pretended not to see what was happening—stood up. "You ruined a life," she said, and her voice was small with shame. "I will not clap for you."
Maja's eyes were wet with a sudden, raw vulnerability. "I'm sorry," she cried. "I—"
"Sorry won't fix the scars," I said. "It won't fix the night my mother died."
The room shivered. A few heads turned to an empty chair in the second row where my father would have sat.
Gordon tried to reach for me. "Imogen," he said, in that old, hushed tone. "Please—"
People around him stood and began to record. Phones lifted like surveillance flags.
"Stop recording!" someone snapped, but the phones did not go down. The audience felt, all at once, like a court and a theater opened together.
What followed was not a single act but a series of reckonings. I had lined up consequences to fit the crimes.
First, the company that had pushed the public video gave me a green light: a live interview that would air tonight. The network agreed because they loved truth when it bled into spectacle. I had friends now I had earned: a journalist, Octavio Galli, who had no patience for power, and a host who refused the usual kindness to the rich.
Second, the board at Gordon's firm announced an inquiry. I sent them the ledgers. They were good accountants; numbers scared them. They convened in a room upstairs, lights wired like interrogation lamps.
Third, and most deliberate, I had arranged a public restitution—much like the spectacle he'd tried to create for my redemption, only truthful. Gordon sat on a small stage in the city's square. The camera rolled. The city hummed.
"Please," he began, his voice raw. "I am sorry. I—"
People in the square had brought banners. Some were supportive. Some were not. Someone in the crowd started to chant, "Justice, justice," a childish drum that grew.
I had thought about what would hurt the most. I thought about making him feel small the way he had made me small. I had thought about turning his performances into humiliation, but I wanted more than humiliation. I wanted consequence.
"Show them the footage," someone in my team whispered. They played the dorm footage, the recordings of laughter. It landed like wet cloth on the faces in the crowd.
Gordon pressed his hands to his temples. "Please," he said. "I will pay. I'll create a fund. I'll—"
The city didn't want charity—it wanted accountability. The board asked for his resignation. His father called him and said the word "damage" like a verdict. The firm's stock fell the next morning.
Maja, meanwhile, faced something different. Her company—set up by her as an ornamental thing, a name in the financial reports—collapsed when the auditors unearthed the shell contracts she'd signed and the loans her brother had quietly shifted. She tried to stand proud at headquarters but the doors closed, and she found herself outside with a cardboard box of her desk toys and a recorded apology that no one played for pity.
"You're so small now," someone in the crowd told her, and the phrase stuck. She tried to laugh and couldn't.
Gordon came to me after one hearing with his face marked, not by physical burns that could heal but by a shame that edged his features thin. "Imogen," he whispered. "I have nothing left to offer but these apologies."
"You have somethings," I said. "You have your life. Learn to live with what you did."
He crumpled. "I don't know how," he said, and for the first time he admitted it.
"Then learn," I replied.
A punishment is not only the fall. It is the watching. It is the recognition. It is the small, terrible private moment when the powerful discover they are human and not above consequence.
Maja's hands shook when she signed over the company. She had no defenders left. Her father called and hung up. Friends that had texted in the past telling me to "get over it" stopped answering her calls. Her shame was social and financial, a double loss. She rode the worst wave—loss of privilege and the prying eyes of everybody she had once used as a stage.
When the public hearing ended, someone in the hall whispered, "She looks like a child." And she did. She looked very small when the lights were turned down.
But I had not wanted them destroyed for spectacle. I had wanted them accountable, to see how far a life could shrink after a single string of decisions. I spent years building a case, building evidence, and building friends who would stand against their moneyed gaslights. I had learned to make my voice a tool.
"You wanted me gone," I said to Gordon in the quiet of my apartment months later. "You succeeded. You made me a ghost."
"I thought I could fix it," he said. He sounded thinner. "I thought I could make it right."
"You cannot erase what you did by crying on a sidewalk," I said. "You can only change who you are."
He looked at me like a man who had been taught a new language. "Then be with me," he begged. "Let me prove—"
"No," I said, flat and certain. "Not even for our child if there were one. Never for your money. Never for your name."
He had tried to bind me with promises and papers. I had refused each. His giving was always conditional—and I had no interest in conditional kindness.
Time did strange things after that. He tried every gesture to win me back. He created foundations with my name in the title and sent armored cars of donations to children's hospitals. He spoke in public about "mistakes" and "learning." He bought a place in the suburbs and gave money to schools.
I watched as he reorganized his life around remorse.
Sometimes I pity him. Sometimes I feel nothing but a hardened, still grief. I learned that pity does not remove what was done. I learned that grief is not a currency.
"And you, Imogen?" Ezio asked me years later, standing at my little school behind a plate glass window, looking at the children. He had been there through none of those years—he had been the boy who had given me a milk tea once in school and then looked away when the world shifted—but he had come back like a tide.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Do you have peace?" he said quietly. His voice was soft like a sheet of glass.
"I teach," I said. "I bake bread. I help children learn their letters. I have found small boundaries and called them home."
"Is that enough?" he asked.
"It is enough," I said, and I meant it. The nights came still and the days came mattress-firm, and I woke sometimes with a sharp hunger for something bigger, but mostly I kept a garden: children, small routines, clean classrooms. I kept a broken watch that ticked in my drawer and a tin box of notes Ezio had once given me when we were children—little scribbles that smelled of dust and school glue.
"Do you forgive?" he pressed.
"I forgave myself first," I answered. "Forgiveness is not a pardon for them. It is a place I built to stop bleeding."
He nodded like a man who had swallowed medicine that tasted bitter and decided it might work.
Years later, Gordon sent a message I did not open at first. He had a tone like a man who had been stripped down and asked to remember how to be useful. He had bought a tile in a public schoolyard and named it for me. The tile read: "For those who survived."
"Why?" I asked him when we finally spoke over the phone, a strained, careful thread between us.
"Because you were truth," he said. "And I needed to make something that would not be my vanity."
"Then make it useful," I replied.
He did. He donated to a foundation that actually built schools for children who could not afford a single piece of paper. He stopped trying to own my name. He let it be a thing in the world.
As for Maja, she left the city. She changed her hair, her smile, the way she walked. The world is a sea that erases shapes slowly. People forget if you give them time. Maja tried to rebuild in a smaller town, teaching kids to draw, learning to live with things that were not all about her.
I did not watch their falls for sport. I watched because I had to keep a ledger of truth. Sometimes I hate myself for the ledger. Sometimes I think the ledger kept me alive.
Once, in a late night when the wind smelled like chlorine and frying oil because one of my students was making pancakes for a class fundraiser, I looked up and saw a bright dot where the sky was pinched between buildings.
"That star," Gordon wrote me in a message that was no longer theatrical. "I bought it and named it for you once. I failed you then. Can it mean something else now?"
I remembered his talk of buying a star in another life, the childish vow to fix everything with a token. I smiled to myself.
"Keep the star," I wrote back. "Let it shine. Let it be something you learn from. And let it not be for me."
The last scene I remember is simple: a small opening in my chest where anger used to live has become something else. Not quite warmth and not quite the old bite. I teach children how to fold paper and read aloud. I sometimes show them the photograph of my mother's hands and tell them about her laugh.
"Why do you teach us?" one small boy asked once.
"Because words can save you," I said. "Words and other people."
He smiled shyly, like a promise.
Outside my window, a plaque reads: "Hope School, funded in part by a foundation for survivors." The plaque has Gordon's name on it, carefully small among others. The tile at the playground is duller than new, and it says only, "For those who survived."
I keep a little box on my shelf. Inside, I keep a cracked white dress button and a dried piece of paper—the torn corner with the words "歼婊 plan" scratched as a joke and a pain, an old map of cruelty. I put it there to remind me I survived a long war of small cruelties that had names and phone numbers and clean shoes.
"Do you ever regret anything?" Ezio asked once.
"I regret the child that died in the silence we made," I said. "I regret that I thought revenge could be a salve. I regret that I listened for too long."
He said nothing for a long moment. "Then why not forgive them fully?" he asked.
"Because forgiveness is a house," I told him, "and you build it slowly, room by room. There are rooms I will not open. There are rooms I use daily."
In the end, the last image that stays awake in me is small and precise: a child on the playground, hands muddy with paint, looking up at the same dull tile and laughing. I stand on the sidelines and feel the thrum of a life that does not belong to my past mistakes.
The city still whispers the old headlines. Gordon still gives money and Maja still sends postcards from a distant village. I keep my letter box clean. I keep my students' shoes in neat rows. I keep my own name small and careful.
"If you ever think you can buy peace with money," I told Gordon in one of our final meetings, "remember the tile you wear is not for your vanity. It is for children you did not know."
He listened like a student. "I will not forget," he said, and I believed him enough to let the word mean something.
I wander past the playground sometimes at dusk and see the tile warm in the sun. A small hand traces the letters—"For those who survived"—and the child laughs with no idea of the cost behind the words. It is the best kind of theft: life stolen back from shame.
The night I close this chapter, the crooked watch in my drawer is wound tight. Its tick is soft and steady. I tuck the thin, stained piece of paper—the old plan—into its frame as if sealing an injury. The watch keeps time. The city keeps moving. The star someone bought once still names itself in the catalogs of the sky. It can be a silly thing, or a sign. I leave it to the night.
The End
— Thank you for reading —