Revenge10 min read
A Match, A Gas Line, and the Queen Who Never Smiled
ButterPicks15 views
"I remember the number of our dorm: 2406," I said softly.
"Why that number?" Clementine asked, stirring her tea.
"It stuck," I answered. "It stuck like a bruise."
"I still can't believe you invited us here," Carly said, looking at me the way she used to look at strangers on a livestream. "What is this, a reunion?"
"It is," I said. "And an ending."
"An ending?" Victoria's laugh was quick and cold. "Laurel, you always liked dramatic words."
"Then listen," I said. "Listen and remember."
We had all started the same way—young, tired, and pretending. Back then our dorm had six beds. Back then I was quiet. Back then Julieta sat across from me, reading the same page of the same book every night while everyone else practiced makeup or practiced being louder.
"She read the palace dramas," I told them. "She called herself someone else sometimes. You laughed."
"That was fashion," Carly said. "People do cosplay. Don't make it into a religion."
"She said she was a queen." I set my cup down. "A queen named Xǐ Guìfei. Julieta said it like she meant it."
"Julieta?" Everlee blinked. "She was always so odd. Sweet, but odd."
"Sweet and ordinary," I said. "And then we started to punish her."
"Punish?" Victoria raised one eyebrow. "Laurel, we're adults."
"We were younger," I said. "We were mean."
"Who wasn't mean sometimes?" Clementine said, her voice small. "We were kids who wanted to be better than we were."
"Do you remember the cheating notice?" I asked sharp.
"Of course," Everlee said, folding her hands. "They announced a list. Dozens of names. Everyone joked about it for weeks."
"And one name missing," I said.
"So?" Carly said. "So what? Some people slip through. How is that my fault or mine?"
"You called her 'Xǐ Momo' behind her back," I said. "You called her names. You put her cup in the sink and spat in it. You said mean things on camera. You mocked her single life."
"Stop it, Laurel," Victoria snapped. "We were in a messy place. People—"
"People get hurt," I said. "You hurt her."
"She was always so strange." Victoria looked around as if seeking allies. "She let herself be bullied."
"No," I said. "That's not how it started."
"Then how did it start?" Everlee asked.
"It started with a rumor," I said. "And I started it."
The room went very still. Carly's mouth opened. "You what?"
"I started the rumor about her and the dean," I said. "I told people she slept with Maddox Smith to avoid the cheating punishment. I thought it would make them leave you alone. I thought—"
"Stop," Everlee said. "You told a lie? Why would you do that?"
"Because I thought it would save me." I kept my voice steady. "Because I thought it would move attention. Because I was afraid and jealous and stupid."
"You invented a rumor that destroyed a girl," Clementine said. "Laurel."
"I did," I said. "And then everything fell apart."
"Tell them," Julieta's voice echoed in my head—hers and not hers. I had heard her speak overhead in the dorm the night she claimed to be a Qing consort. "Tell them what you told me."
"I told them she slept with a dean," I said.
"You said what?" Victoria's face blazed like a struck match. "Laurel Roberts, are you saying you said that?"
"I said it," I said. "And you picked it up like a banner."
"People repeat gossip all the time," Carly said. "This was just ... rumor culture."
"Rumor culture kills," I said. "It kills slowly."
"You made her a target," Everlee said. "This is a confession?"
"A confession," I said. "And a promise to tell the truth now."
"No," Victoria said. "The truth is messy. We were all awful. Why bring this back up now?"
"Because the truth didn't disappear," I said. "And because she didn't either."
We sat in silence for a long time. Outside the city was wet and dark. The air in my apartment smelled faintly of gas. I had turned off the vent for the sake of the story—the way the original night had turned off a light.
"Tell us how it ended," Clementine said finally.
"I told the story of her revenge," I said. "But I told it as if it had happened to her. I made Julieta into the avenger. It was safer that way."
"Safer?" Carly's laugh was a blade.
"It was my shield," I confessed. "I put her in armor and carried the sword for her. I watched you fall and I told it like she did it. I whispered her name and pretended to myself that she was alive and scheming."
"Did she do anything?" Everlee asked. "Did Julieta actually take revenge?"
"No," I said. "She did something worse."
"What?" Victoria snapped.
"She died," I said.
"Dead?" Everlee's voice was a small, raw thing. "Julieta died? When?"
"She died the night I pretended not to see," I told them. "I thought I never told anyone. I thought it was my secret."
"You pretended not to see?" Clementine's hands gripped her cup. "Laurel—"
"She woke me up that night," I said. "She told me she had done what I made up—the rumor about the dean. She asked me if it was me who started that lie."
"You mean she knew?" Carly said, but it was a whisper.
"She asked me," I said. "I said, 'Yes.' She smiled that sad thing she did and then..." I let the rest hang. The room held its breath.
"She cut her throat," I said. "She used a craft knife and she cut her own throat in front of me."
There was a noise—a chair scraping, a hand slapping a table. Victoria's face drained.
"You saw that?" Victoria said. "You saw her kill herself and you didn't stop?"
"I was frozen," I said. "I heard the spill of blood and the quiet. She let it be. Then she fell. I thought if I told anyone the truth they'd blame me and us and the whole world would fall. So I lied. I told stories. I built a ghost of revenge that helped me sleep."
"You told a story so you could sleep?" Everlee said. "And we believed you."
"You believed me because you wanted to," I said. "You wanted to be innocent. You wanted her to be the monster, not you."
Carly's fingers trembled. "So everything—the online pile-on on Victoria, the ruin of her father's job, the photo you claimed to have—"
"It wasn't all her," I said. "Some of it happened. The internet did its thing to Victoria. She lost her father's reputation because of pictures and posts she made herself, but then someone dug and found the truth of his corruption. The pile-on was real, but the exact way we told it... I rounded its corners into a story where Julieta was the mastermind."
Victoria's laugh came out raw. "So you turned my humiliation into your novel."
"I turned everyone's guilt into a cover story," I said. "But the worst is what I did next."
"Next?"
"I helped Julieta die."
The word made the room cold. Nobody moved.
---
When Victoria Belov first went on Weibo and was torn apart, the campus felt like a pressure cooker. I will describe that day because I promised to tell the truth, and the truth is ugly and public.
"You saw her posts?" I said to the women later, my voice low.
"She deserved it," Carly said at first. "Her arrogance—"
"Stop," I snapped. "Listen."
It began with a repost—a careless comment she made under a news story about a girl who had been kidnapped and later found. Victoria had written something dismissive and cruel. "If she was smart she'd have been born rich," she wrote. Someone took a screenshot.
"Then the screenshots blew up," I said. "Students shared them, people outside school saw, and the outside saw the private pictures—vacations, luxury dinners, brand names she could not have afforded legitimately. People started to dig."
"Her father's name surfaced," Clementine said. "An official, they said. A scandal."
"Yes," I said. "People went from anger at a careless comment to moral fury. They wanted blood, even if the blood was symbolic."
"She was dragged," Everlee said. "Dragged in public. Her feed flooded with messages. Brands dropped her. Her family was asked questions on the record."
"It was worse than being fired," I said. "It was the kind of punishment where noise becomes a verdict. Students who had supported her turned mean and loud. Strangers called her home. A crowd formed near the administration building. I watched it swell."
"Did she beg?" Carly asked, voice small.
"She did," I said. "She cried in our dorm. She screamed that an account was fake. She pleaded that no one had the right to take everything she had. But the internet had already decided. People outside our small world wanted to punish the symbol of someone who bragged about wealth. The symbol was Victoria."
"Her face changed," Clementine said. "She looked guilty and frightened."
"She was frightened," I said. "And then the worst part: the way her classmates—real faces I knew—waited for her to fail. They lined up to humiliate her. In the cafeteria someone tossed soup on her shoes. Down the stairwell someone shouted her father's crimes. A professor refused to comment."
"I saw her mother that week," Everlee said. "She looked old beyond her years."
"She came to the school office and tried to explain," I said. "A woman with smudged makeup, asking for mercy. She was photographed by a student and the photo was posted with a caption that made the rounds. People took screenshots and turned them into evidence of a fall."
"Did the crowd change?" Carly asked.
"It did," I said. "At first they were angry. Then they were triumphant. Then someone started recording everything. Phones out, chanting. Voices would say, 'This is what happens to the braggers.' People applauded when security led her away. Everyone wanted to be the ones who exposed her."
"She cried 'You weren't there for me!'" Victoria said, voice breaking.
"She did," I said. "And it should have mattered. But when a mob grows, it changes its mind about mercy. It wants to see ruin. It keeps asking for the next blow."
"How long did it take?" Clementine asked.
"A week," I said. "But that week felt like a life. The worst thing was not the tweets or shares. It was the silence of people who could have spoken up and didn't. The silence filled the air like smoke."
"And Victoria?" Carly asked.
"Victoria lost friends, sponsors, and her father's stability collapsed under investigation," I said. "She was humiliated publicly in the way our culture makes an example. People filmed her walking across campus and posted it with triumphant captions. She begged, 'Please, this is my family—' and the crowd cheered louder. I watched her dignity strip away like clothes."
"Did she break?" Everlee asked.
"She did," I said. "She came to our dorm later and, for the first time, it was clear she was small. Her face was bruised not from hitting but from the blows of a thousand words. She said to me, 'Why won't you say I didn't do it? Why won't you say something?' I wanted to, but the story I had been telling was cleaner when Victoria was the villain."
"People filmed that too," Clementine whispered.
"They did," I said. "Later the professor who had defended her was condemned for bias. The dean's office refused to open a formal complaint after the initial outrage. Pity turned into punishment. And once the Internet had decided, the world outside our campus pressed its thumb to it."
"That was a punishment," Victoria said, letting the word hang. "Public and noisy."
"It was," I agreed. "And I had lit the first match of that conflagration. Not with a post—my lie was smaller then—but my lie was a spark in a room full of people waiting to be burned. People piled evidence on top like wood. The flames came faster than anyone expected."
"Why tell us this now?" Carly asked, voice a thread.
"Because that punishment was not justice," I said. "It was spectacle. And in the end, the spectacle hurt real people. It hurt Julieta most of all, though not in the way we told ourselves."
---
"Then there was you," I said, looking at Everlee. "And Carly."
"What did you do to us?" Everlee asked.
"I made a fake test," I said. "I Photoshopped a lab result and set it where you would both see it."
"You made a fake AIDS report?" Carly's voice was a serrated thing.
"I did," I said. "I wanted you to feel fear on the same scale you had put on someone else. I wanted you to see the hole a rumor makes."
"You blackmailed us?" Everlee said, eyes wide with horror.
"No," I said. "I showed the test and you reacted with the terror you had sewn. You began to scream and beg. Everlee, you ran to the balcony and jumped."
"I jumped," she said, voice thin. "I thought I was dying."
"You survived," I said. "The fall did not kill you. You broke and then you broke again. Carly lost followers, then her brand deals. You two attacked each other until both of you were gone from school."
Carly buried her face in her hands. "It felt real," she sobbed. "Everything did. I thought I had done the worst thing in the world."
"You did terrible things," I said. "But that does not mean you deserved to suffer the way you did. I regret those acts. I thought I was punishing villains, but I punished people."
"Villains?" Victoria's voice had a new edge. "We were teenagers. We were cruel. But villains—no."
"I know," I said. "I know that now."
"Then why—" Clementine began.
"Because I was scared," I whispered. "I was small and wanted to survive. I made her into a legend because legends were easier to face than guilt."
"You said Julieta died," Everlee said. "But we thought she disappeared. We thought she left. How long has she been gone?"
"Eight years," I said. "Eight years ago."
"Eight years," Clementine repeated slowly. "We graduated five years ago."
"There are numbers that don't add up when guilt sleeps," I said. "But the most important thing is this: what I did then, I finished now."
I walked to the kitchen. The gas line hissed faintly, and my hands were steady. They were shaking on the night I saw Julieta die, too—except then I could not move. This time I would finish what I had promised myself in private decades of nightmares.
"Why are you doing this?" Carly whispered.
"Because the story needs an ending," I said. "Because silence will not fix things. Because we owe Julieta the truth and we owe each other a reckoning."
"No," Victoria pleaded. "Laurel, don't—you can't—"
I struck a match.
"Stop!" Everlee cried, pushing toward me. "Please!"
The flame flared and the room smelled of sulfur and something older: regret.
"You shouldn't," Clementine cried.
I looked at each of them as if they were the faces of the past I had been avoiding. Each had been cruel, each had been scared, each had been small and human.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For everything."
"You can't be serious," Carly sobbed.
"I am," I said.
I walked back into the living room and closed the windows. The apartment held its breath.
"Laurie—" Victoria reached for me.
"Don't call me that," I said. "Call me what I was. Call me the girl who started it."
She grabbed at my arm. Her fingernails left pale crescents.
"You're insane," Clementine whispered.
"Maybe," I said.
In the corner of the room, a keepsake sat on a small shelf: a cheap plastic crown Julieta had once taped to her book, a relic from a costume. I touched it before I lit the match. I whispered, "Julieta, I'm sorry. This is for you, and for me."
Then I struck the light.
The flame took, thin and honest. Gas filled the corners. The sound of our breathing seemed as loud as thunder.
"Please!" Everlee sobbed. "You don't have to do this."
"This ends us," I said.
"No!" Carly screamed. "Open the window! Open—"
A voice came from the hallway—Maddox Smith, the old dean, drawn by the noise. "Is everything all right?"
"Everything will be all right," I said. I had lied for so long. Now I told the deepest lie: that burning would be a relief.
The match guttered.
The last thing I saw was Victoria's face, a patchwork of anger and fear, and Clementine's hands reaching as if to save a puppet, and Carly's tears making tracks down her face like a map.
The flame went out, smothered by the air that would soon become thick and quiet.
"Forgive me," I said. "Forgive us. Forgive Julieta."
The room turned slow. The world dimmed like the theater curtain falling on a play no one wanted to watch.
The End
— Thank you for reading —