Revenge13 min read
The Wristband and the Spotlight
ButterPicks18 views
I woke up to my face throbbing like someone had smeared chili across it.
"How bad is it today?" I muttered into the mirror.
"Bad enough you'll want to hide," Alfredo Ferrara said over the phone, his voice sharp but worried. "Do you want me to come?"
"I'll manage," I lied. "Just bring the pears."
"Your father will hate me for bringing pears," he snorted. "But okay. I'm five minutes away."
I am Lila Simon. For most of the past three years, my face on glossy posters and on-screen had been the one people called "an idol." For the last week at Upstream University, I was the girl they spat on.
"You're on the ugly list," someone had typed into the group chat that morning. "Top ugly of the freshmen."
"She literally looks like an allergy ad," another message said.
I pressed my palm to my cheek. The skin was angry and blotchy where an ill-advised new cream had gone wrong. I had thought—stupidly—that I could hide it under a hat and a mask, experience "real school" for once, show my fans that the world wasn't all filters and makeup. I had not meant to become their target.
"Is that her?" someone whispered outside the dormitory bathroom door.
"Yeah. She thinks she's special."
"She gave him a tissue on day one," another voice sneered. "Gross."
"They say the rich boy likes her," the first voice said. "She must be trying to flirt."
I stepped up onto the toilet seat and, with one practiced hop, vaulted out of the window like an idiot in a romantic drama.
The boy from the men's bathroom—Jonas Hawkins—took one look and bolted. "Keep it moving!" he yelled before he turned and ran.
"Wow," I said. "Real charm."
"Stop talking to me!" another voice called. "We don't want your kind of attention, ugly."
I shook the dust off my jeans, wiped the sun and humiliation from my shoulders, and walked to the drill field where a sea of camo and discipline waited.
"You're late!" the drill sergeant barked in a voice that pretended it had no favorites.
"I was detained," I said, pointing toward the girls' restroom. "Someone locked the door on me."
The sergeant's jaw tightened. "Discipline first. Three hours at attention."
"That's not fair—"
"Silence," he said.
I planted my feet and straightened my spine. My name is Lila Simon, and pride doesn't come off me like a cheap dress.
Someone kicked me from behind. "Stand still, ugly!"
The world narrowed down to heat, the sun, my ragged breath, and the murmurs of girls who had decided I didn't deserve air.
I fell forward when the sergeant used his boot like someone who didn't like me very much. "You can't even stand properly," he snapped.
I lay on the gravel and tasted metal. My face burned up, the allergic rash flaring like a map of shame. Girls snickered. A boy nearby coughed out, "She thinks she's an idol."
"She is," Jonas muttered. "She—"
"Shut up!" someone hissed back. "Don't make this worse."
I stood up slowly, fingers gripping a fistful of sand. For a second, my hands just trembled. Then the desert inside me caught fire.
"That’s it," I said, and I launched a fistful of grit right at the sergeant's face.
The chant of laughs stopped.
"You want a fight?" I asked the cluster of girls who had been putting me through hell. "Fine."
Two hours later, Jenn Kaiser—the head girl, the one whose father owned buildings and funded trophies—was flat on the ground, face streaked with mascara. Her "limited edition" leather bag lay in the dust, wide open and covered in sand. Her friends shrieked. The sergeant's face, red as an oven, was on me. "You will be punished!" he barked.
But the school didn't want punishment for the bullies. It wanted to make me an example.
"You write an apology and clean the toilets for a month," Mr. Wolfgang Ibrahim, my homeroom teacher, said, arms folded as if he had been waiting all his life to be cruel.
"You're being unfair," I said. "They locked me in a bathroom."
Mr. Ibrahim shrugged. "We couldn't find evidence."
"You had the footage," I said. "Ask the maintenance desk."
"We will not accept stories. You are late, and you're being disruptive," he said, and the word 'disruptive' was flavored by money and contempt.
"Fine," I said. "Then I will clean them. But I'm not apologizing for something I didn't do."
Alfredo came right away. He pedaled up on a clunky twenty-eight-inch bicycle like someone who'd stolen a farmer's cart.
"What's with the bicycle?" I asked when he arrived, a sack of pears in his hands.
"It was easier to blend," he said. "Besides, the farmer waved."
I smiled. He can be ridiculous and it is one of the best things about him. "You brought pears. You're a saint."
"You're welcome," he said. "Now. That teacher—"
"They're all terrified of Jen's father," I said, thinking of Jenn Kaiser. "He sits on the board. The administration always acts like they owe him rent money."
"Then we'll make it impossible to ignore," Alfredo said. "We'll make it a spectacle."
He did not mean showy in a way that crushes fragile people—he meant a spotlight. He knows how to use cameras.
We left the office like civilians walking out of a courtroom. Everyone watched, gossiped, and avoided me like standing water. The freshman group chat filled with "She must be lying" and "We can't be friends with someone rude." The rumor of my dad pedaling a cart down Main Street had already metastasized into an epic about poverty and delusion.
By the time I went back to the dorm, someone had removed everything from my room and chucked it into the corridor. My books were soaked, my clothes dirtied. A girl in a pink dress—Raquel Barry—had been shoved into the same pile of humiliation.
"You can't stay here," Jen said, voice sweet as poison. "You don't belong."
Raquel clung to my sleeve like a frightened thing. "I tried to help," she hiccupped. "I shouldn't have."
"You did the right thing," I told her. "You won't be alone."
I called a guard. The guard shoved us away. I called Alfredo, and he came back with muscle and a phone camera. "You want them gone?" he asked.
"Yes."
He called someone with brass. A security guard unlocked the door, hands trembling at what might happen to him if he refused. Then the fun began.
I asked the guard to let the other girls see what happened if someone dared to mess with me. He did not get it, so I pried open the room and let them behold the result. Then, with dramatic flair probably learned from too many film sets, I told the guard — loudly — to hose down the beds of those who had trashed mine.
Roommates shrieked. "This isn't fair!"
"Who is fair?" I asked. "You wanted to see order? This is the law of cause and effect."
I tossed Raquel my last clean wristband—a cheap little string I wore for luck—and promised, "I'll look after you."
She clutched it like a lifeline. "You really are… are you really Lila Simon?" she asked, trembling.
"Yes," I said. "But not the story you think."
The rumor mill churned faster. The dorm corridors filled with quiet whispers. They had pictures of my "cheap life" and details of my father's "cart." I yawned. If this is what they wanted for drama, they'd have it.
"Let's make a deal," I told Alfredo later on the phone. "I'll play their game if they play dirty."
"How do you want to play?" he asked.
"I'll let the school think I'm playing small," I said. "But I have a better plan. Put together a campus audition. Let everyone fight for what's on stage. We'll make it open. And you—call the director. Let him see real talent."
"It could blow up," Alfredo said.
"Good," I said. "Then it will explode in their faces."
The selection for the school's "MV" shoot became a war zone of pay-to-play and favors. It was corrupt down to its bones. The homeroom teacher put a contract in front of me—an outrageous clause that I must perform as a phantom singer for a richer girl's spotlight. Fifty thousand dollars promised. Fifty thousand to pretend while the real talent stood at the edge and whispered that the world was not fair.
"Sign this," Mr. Ibrahim said, like a man trying to seal a coffin.
"You want me to be your mouthpiece for fifty thousand?" I asked. "Make it one hundred."
"Greedy," he said.
"Better to be called greedy than silent," I said, and I left the contract on the desk.
It should have been taken as a joke. It wasn't.
Auditions day arrived. The auditorium was a buzz of silk and perfume. Reporters' cameras circled like scavengers. Many of the performers were polished mannequins fed on money and coaching. Jonas Hawkins sat in the front row, clean and composed, with a face that people called "calmly pretty." He flicked his eyes at me and looked away.
"You're in the way," someone muttered.
"Not today," I thought.
I signed up for the choir. Jonas tore up my form with a look of disgust. "You don't belong here," he said out loud. "You should go."
"I belong where I want to belong," I said.
"You're trying to be an idol," he scoffed. "You're only pretending."
"I don't need your approval," I said, and then I sang.
No backing track. No choreography. Just my voice, honest and raw. The room tilted. People stopped.
"Who is that?" a teacher whispered.
"That voice..." Jonas's jaw dropped. "Impossible."
The head girl's face, Jen Kaiser, fell. "She can't sing that well."
"Oh, but she can," a woman in the audience said, and then a ripple of realizing came through the crowd. My fans, who had crept in, started a chant. "Lila! Lila!"
Jen's face twisted. "It's fake," she snapped. "She's using tracks."
"Show your proof," I said. "Or listen."
She couldn't do either. The auditorium had shifted. The cameras found my face, and I stepped from behind the curtain, mask and hat removed. I looked the way my face was that week—no makeup. Red and raw. I wasn't trying to make them comfortable.
"She's Lila Simon!" someone yelled.
"She lied to us," Jen cried. "She used us."
"You're the liar," the crowd answered back. "You used us."
I watched as the first domino fell.
Alfredo and I arranged a live feed to the campus site and to the director's office where Angel Meyer sat, cross-armed and impatient. The story I had planned spilled across screens. My manager had sandwiched the truth—video clips, the bathroom lock footage, the contract, messages from Jen's clique—into one undeniable reel.
"Everyone watch," I said into the microphone. "Watch how easy it is for the administration to turn on a student."
It took half a minute. Then the city whispered became a roar.
"How could you?" old Principal Eduardo Durand shouted, standing up like a man who had been put on the wrong side of history. He had been my mentor years before. He lifted his cane and pointed at the vice-principal. "Penn Wagner, you let this happen."
Penn Wagner sputtered. "We—"
"Where is your conscience?" Eduardo continued, voice shaking. "You chose profit over student welfare."
Someone in the crowd hurled a plastic bottle. It hit Penn squarely in the chest and rolled to his feet. He looked at it like it had bitten him. The cameras were a thousand knives.
"Don't touch me!" Penn barked, then started to gather himself to speak. "This is slander!"
"Proof is on the screen!" Alfredo shouted from backstage. "Slander? Watch the footage."
"Pull up the bathroom feed," I told Angel Meyer. "Now."
The footage stunned half the room into silence. There it was: two girls closing the bathroom door, the sound of bolts, and me pounding the door. The timestamp told the whole story. The clip ended with a conspiratorial smile from one of the girls—Jen's friend—just before the bell.
"That's them," someone said.
Jen's face had gone dead. Her glossy skin paled under the stage lights. Her little kingdom had been built on rumors and bribes and the illusion of power. Now that kingdom had been exposed.
The punishment scene that followed was not about retribution by me alone. It was a public peel—slow and undeniable.
"Jen Kaiser," I called, voice steady. "Do you have anything to say?"
She opened her mouth and closed it. "I didn't—"
"You did," I said. "The footage proves it. Your father funds this school and you used that to decide who gets to breathe the rarefied air. You made deals. You told them to throw out my things. You put rewards for hurting someone."
People around her began to speak. "She promised money if you humiliated her," one girl said, voice trembling.
"She bought followers for her club," another whispered.
"She forged signatures," someone else added.
The tide turned. I watched Jen's eyes move from me to her friends and back. Her grand expression of calm cracked. The girls who had been with her started to inch away, avoidance written all over their faces.
"You're lying!" Jen yelled.
"Tell that to the footage," I said. "Tell it to the teachers who signed that contract. Tell it to the parents outside."
"You're ruining my reputation!" she screamed.
"You're the one who ruined the school," shouted a parent in the crowd. "You put money above the students' safety."
Her father, Penn Wagner—no, wait, I had called him Penn Wagner on stage—was not here. He was walking out with his phone when he saw the trending notifications and then he hesitated.
"All the sponsors are calling," an administrator hissed. "This can't be good."
"This is beyond 'not good'," Alfredo said. "This is criminal. You bribed security; you tampered with student housing."
A woman in the back—one of the teachers—stepped forward and held up a stack of receipts. "Expense reports," she said. "Payments. It's all here. You've been using school funds for private favors."
Jen's fans were evaporating into thin air. The gossip that had fed her now gnawed its own tail and turned on her.
"People," I said calmly, "I didn't come here for revenge. I came to stop the sickness."
"You're a hypocrite!" Jen screamed. "You hid who you were!"
"I hid so I could see who you were," I said. "Thank you for making it simple."
Then everything speeded up.
The principal—Eduardo Durand—had usually been a quiet old man. But he rose, lifted his cane, and—like a judge—declared immediate actions that shocked the room.
"Penn Wagner," he said, voice cracking with something between rage and hurt. "You will step down pending an independent investigation. Mr. Wolfgang Ibrahim, you are suspended. The security team that ignored harassment—suspended. Jen Kaiser—"
"Please!" Jen begged. Her voice had dropped into a kind of petulant panic. "You'll ruin me!"
"Ruin you?" a mother shouted back. "You ruined better things than yourself. You ruined people."
The crowd closed in. Cameras flashed. Texts were sent. The news played across phones. It was one thing to say "justice will be done"—it was another entirely to have an entire auditorium and live feed and campus media hold the verdict in its hands.
Jen's expression moved through stages: arrogance, denial, confusion, then panic, and finally the glassy desperation of someone who had been stripped of the world they assumed was theirs forever.
"You're a liar!" she repeated. "This isn't fair!"
"I think it'll be fair to let the law and independent investigators decide," I said. "But first, apologies. A proper public apology. And then: restitution. You will fund the programs you stole from. You will publicly announce your privilege and how you'll fix the damage. And if you refuse—"
"If I refuse?" she asked, breathless.
"Then we will make sure the viewers, your sponsors, and the parents know everything. The recordings. Your payments. Your messages."
She flinched. Her friends began to whisper and break ranks. One of them—who had been most loyal—threw the fake wristband she had been wearing at Jen and said, "I don't want to be part of your lies anymore."
The sound of that plastic rising and falling in the air was almost like an exhale. It landed at Jen's feet like a verdict.
"Please!" she kept begging. "My dad—"
"Your father will answer for himself," Eduardo said. "The school will not protect corruption."
A handful of parents started filming. Others shouted, "Lock them up!" Not literally—mostly for the cameras and the catharsis of counting noses and naming faces.
Within an hour, the vice principal's office was empty and a dozen reporters were live-streaming the campus lawn. The clip Alfredo had pushed rippled across platforms. Screenshots of the bathroom lock, the damaged dorm, the forged contract, and the receipts were posted. The online tide moved like a hungry thing.
Jen tried to rally her defenses—fake sobs, dramatic fainting, threats in text messages to people in the crowd. Her bravado peeled away under the glare of phones and public anger.
"You're being watched now," I told her softly. "Do better. Or be watched with shame."
She had a final look at me—equal parts hatred and pleading. Her lips trembled. "You're famous," she hissed. "People will always care about you."
"People will care about the truth," I said. "And many of them care about real people more than they care about curated images."
People around us—students who had watched and whispered—had their faces turned in a new direction. They were no longer afraid of being punished by popularity. They were seeing something they could live with: the idea that merit might, sometimes, win.
For Jen, the punishment was public humiliation, removal of the platform she had used to harm others, and exposure that would not let her pretend everything was fine. The girls who had taunted me were ashamed and fled. A few tried to rationalize. Most had the good sense to be embarrassed.
I did not gloat. I reminded everyone we needed to fix the structural problems. We needed counseling for the victims. We needed funding for community programs. Alfredo and I set up auditions and a fair process for the MV, inviting people like Raquel and the kids who had practiced in empty parking lots.
Months later, Jen's reputation had cratered; her father paid for some emergency PR and tried to soothe the sponsors. He called my father—to ask for discretion, for favors, for silence. My father, Benedicto Brantley, who sold pears and had a laugh like he was giving the world a gentle scolding, said one sentence and hung up.
"No," he said. "He can keep his money."
The school announced reforms. Mr. Eduardo Durand retired in a small, dignified ceremony where he used his cane like punctuation. The vice principal was replaced. The homeroom teacher left quietly with a cardboard box and an awkward handshake.
I stood on a small stage at the school's new performance center and watched Raquel and a hundred others sing like they were storming the sky.
"You're sure you want to do this?" Alfredo asked, elbow resting on my shoulder as he watched the livestream.
"I'm sure," I said. "People earned this."
Jonas Hawkins, who had been indifferent and quick to judge, came up to me later with a nervous smile. "Your singing—wow," he said. "No excuses."
"Thanks," I said. "And thank you for not running that day."
He flushed. "I was a coward," he admitted. "I thought—"
"People will surprise you," I said. "Sometimes for the better."
One night, months after everything, Raquel sent me a text. "What's the skincare you used?" she asked.
I laughed. "I don't want to re-live that mistake," I wrote. "But I will tell you this: don't spend your life worrying about how you look for other people. Spend it making what your hands can make and what your voice can sing."
The MV turned out well. I made sure every kid who put their heart into the performance got a camera card, a credit, and a shot. We donated funds to scholarships and to a studio for kids who trained in the rain on the back field. I built a small foundation to ensure talent would not be invisible any longer.
And once, when a fan asked me in a live Q&A, "Lila, has anything changed since you went back to the stage?"
I smiled and held up a worn string wristband—pink and faded at the edges. "Yes," I said. "I still wear this. It means I promised to stand for others. It means I'm not the kind of idol who forgets what it feels like to be pushed out. It means I keep my name honest."
It was a tiny ending and not the end at all. But when I looked at the faces around me—the kids who had once been invisible, the ones whose dances now had light—I knew it was worth every fight.
The End
— Thank you for reading —