Sweet Romance10 min read
A Small White Dress, A Camera, and the Loudest Truth
ButterPicks13 views
I have a habit of wearing simple dresses and pretending I don't notice looks.
"I didn't mean to cause trouble," I said before the crowd in the dining hall could finish piling up their assumptions.
"You didn't mean to? You think that's an excuse?" Joann Washington's voice cut sharp through the chatter. Her heels clicked like a warning. She was smaller than me by a couple inches but carried herself like a storm.
"I didn't even know he had a girlfriend," I tried to explain again. "Lucas, I only—"
"Shut up!" Joann snapped. "Do you have any shame? You come into our campus, flirt with my boyfriend, and then act innocent?"
People circled closer. Somebody pulled out a phone.
I didn't panic. I watched the boy with the camera at the stairwell corner.
He had been filming us.
I softened my voice, "Joann, you don't understand—"
"Did I ask you?" she spat.
I closed my mouth. My heart boxed my ribs into tight spaces, but I kept my face steady. I had a white doll-collared dress on; my hair in a half-bun. I probably looked like the textbook victim in the tabloids.
"You're a little rabbit, aren't you?" Joann said to the crowd for effect. "Learn some rules. Keep off men's paths."
People laughed. Someone called out a cruel joke. I nodded along, keeping my face small. The group pushed and shoved; I felt fingers tug my sleeve. My phone vibrated with incoming messages — the cameraman had sent me the video.
He had sent it to me.
I excused myself and walked up the stairwell toward him. He held a DSLR, eyes wide and bright.
"Hi," I said, "mind if I—"
He offered the camera like a peace treaty. I tapped through the footage. He had filmed the whole thing: Joann leading, me bewildered, the crowd's faces. I watched, still calm.
"Next time, try a wider angle," I told him, half-joking. "My left profile is better."
He blinked, then nodded. "Okay."
"Add me on WeChat?" I asked. "Send me that video."
He gave me his phone and I scanned his QR. He introduced himself as Felix Lambert.
That night, after I posted the clip across several campus gossip pages and tagged a few of the big rumor accounts, the world tilted a little.
Within an hour the clip had traction. People added captions sympathetic to me, others added snarky comments about Joann. Some called me a green-tea social climber; others called out the absurdity of campus policing of women's movements. I had started the fire; I grinned, fed it a little.
I texted Lucas Tariq.
"Lucas, did you know? /crying emoji/" I wrote. "Joann made a scene in the cafeteria and accused me of—"
He replied quickly, "I told her I wanted to break up. I didn't expect this."
"Please don't make it worse," I typed. "She could hurt your reputation by making drama. I'm worried for you."
Lucas answered with a half-smile in words: "Maybe keep me, then."
I rolled my eyes and blacklisted him from my head. He could keep his messy feelings. I wanted none of the chaos.
Felix and I began to talk.
"Don't post everything," he warned when I said I would tag the campus accounts. "Some things blow up and stick."
"I want it to stick," I said. "Let people see how she behaves."
He looked almost tender. "Okay. Tomorrow, I'll come down to the dorm."
He came, and our days shifted like a camera set to a new frame. Felix followed me to class, sat at the edge of the room, and looked at me like someone memorizing a favorite painting.
"You sure you don't want to skip?" he asked once when we were both in the lecture hall.
"I have to make presence," I said. "Plus, it's interesting watching you try to be unobtrusive."
He slipped a smile. "I'm not very good at that."
We spent afternoons walking and evenings in vacant top-floor classrooms where the light bent soft across broken desks. We made the impostor's romance official: "Boyfriend" on our avatars, tiny public nudges, subtle couple acts. We kissed in the kind of way that made students whisper and phones lift.
"You're shameless," Felix said once when I'd purposely traced his jaw with a fingertip.
"I'm effective," I replied, and kissed him quicker than his heart could guess.
The rumor about him? The one that said his parents were cruel criminals? It faded as facts came out: his family had no link to the mess the internet attached to them. People love a scandal and often forget names when the next big scandal arrives. But the memory had left a thin bruise. He carried it like a careful child with a scar.
At first, Joann sulked. Then she escalated. She found other girls who wanted to perform loyalty and brought them along. She ambushed another freshman in a restroom. She cornered girls in alleys. Her performance grew crueler and quieter.
I had enough.
I had also learned how powerful a camera could be when wielded without mercy. Felix recorded everything he could. I collected screenshots, chat logs, recordings—little threads of a web Joann had spun.
"Are you sure we should do this?" Felix asked in the dim of the old classroom. "Once it's out, there's no going back."
"We're forcing a mirror," I said. "People will watch and choose. She made her terror public. We make her accountable in public."
He pressed his palm to mine. "Then we'll do it right."
The punishment had to be public.
We planned for a town-hall-style event, a student assembly, a blatant and unavoidable exposure. The school was still sweating from the mess with a higher-up—an incident I'd quietly amplified before—which made the administration twitchy. They wanted to look decisive.
I wrote an anonymous tip to a major student channel and cc'ed a few of the faculty who cared about campus safety. They responded, interested, urgent. The administration called for a "student hearing" in the main auditorium. They expected petitions about lighting and safety. No one expected the truth we were about to stage.
On the day, I wore the white dress again. I walked into the auditorium with Felix at my side and rows of students smelling of coffee and curiosity. The place buzzed low.
"You're going to be okay?" Felix asked under his breath.
"Watch me make a mirror," I said.
Joann came in late with a group. She walked like a queen arriving to take a bow. The microphone thudded each time she tapped her heels on wood. The auditorium's lights were bright. The chairs filled around us like witnesses.
"Who called this?" she hissed when she spotted me. "This is a waste."
"Are you ready, Meredith?" Felix asked quietly.
"I'm already ready," I replied.
The hearing began with perfunctory speeches about safety. Then a student leader introduced "an anonymous report." The room turned toward me.
I stepped to the microphone.
"Good afternoon," I said. "My name is Meredith Atkinson. I came here because the campus needs to see the truth."
A few murmurs — surprise and confusion.
"Joann Washington," I continued, looking straight at her, "has led a campaign of intimidation and public shaming. She and her group have physically harassed freshmen, cornered others in private places, and used social networks to humiliate those who cross her." I let the video play.
Felix cued the projector. The screen flashed to life. Footage from the dining hall, the restroom, a cornered freshman in an alley, snippets, timestamps, messages that read like threats. Joann's voice came through raw, coaxing others with lines of shame. A chorus of faces; at least a dozen girls, one by one, spoke into pre-recorded clips about being bullied, harassed, forced to delete social posts, or pressured to apologize to Joann.
The room shifted; you could hear the moral wind pick up. Students leaned forward. Phones went silent. Some faces grew red. Others paled.
Joann's eyes widened at the first clip.
"That's edited!" she shouted. "That's fake!"
"Is it?" I asked. I played another clip: Joann leaning in, saying, "Don't think you can flirt with my man and get away with it." The audio stopped on her voice. The auditorium held its breath.
Her applause line of defamation flagged now as evidence; the room turned from amusement to revolt.
She stood up, voice rising. "You're lying. Meredith, what are you doing?"
I read from my folder. "We have chat logs. We have witnesses who will speak now. We have posts showing organized attempts to shame students. We have one girl here tonight who was pushed in the halls. She will tell you what happened."
A hush. A spotlight found a shaking freshman at the edge of the crowd. She rose and walked, small and white-knuckled, to the microphone. "She cornered me," she whispered, then louder. "She called me names. She shoved me to the wall and called me a slut. She told the whole class not to talk to me."
Audience reactions crackled. Someone slammed a palm to a desk. It was not applause. It was a waking up.
Joann's expression moved fast. At first she was smug. Then defensive. Then incredulous. Then taste of fear. Her attendance had been built on others' silence. Now that silence shattered as clip after clip revealed her pattern.
"You're setting me up!" she cried. "I— I was protecting what's mine. I was standing up for myself!"
"You were hurting people," the freshman said. "You don't get to call it protection."
I felt eyes on me, some warm, some cold. Felix's hand held mine tight.
"Do you have anything to say, Joann?" the student council president asked.
She tried to smile. "This is petty. College is full of petty people. I'm a campus leader! I have responsibilities."
A hand raised in the audience. A girl I recognized got up. "You told me to apologize to you for wearing that dress," she said. "You said I'd cause trouble at home for my parents. That wasn't leadership."
A ripple of voices now, questioning, testifying, calling out.
Joann's face had turned as if she had been dunked in cold water. She shifted, tried to call for order. "This is harassment," she said, voice shaking. "Stop lying."
"Why would we lie?" someone shouted. "We recorded you."
She looked at Felix, who stood calmly. It ignited something hysterical in her. She moved toward the aisle and started yelling, fingers clenching, then pointing at me like a carved accusation.
"You do this for attention!" she screeched. "You put me on the internet!"
"Who started the internet video that humiliated a freshman last week?" I asked softly. "Who orchestrated the threats? You did."
Her mouth opened and closed. Denial flickered across her face then rage. "I did what I had to," she said. "Everyone gives you attention. You think you're special."
"You're the one who made fear a campus policy," Felix said into the hush, his voice calm as shutter clicks. "You made people afraid."
At that, Joann's expression cracked. She stumbled back, sweat beading, as if all the supportive air had been popped. The audience shifted from curiosity to judgment. People rose up, some shaking heads, some crying softly. Someone called out, "She needs to own this!"
Joann tried to grab at her phone, probably to call friends, to orchestrate counter-accusations, but hands in the crowd reached and blocked. A group of girls started chanting, "Stop the shame!" It sounded small at first and then spread.
She tried to make a last stand, voice thin and loud. "You don't know what you did—"
A faculty member, who had sat silent until then, rose. "Joann Washington, the patterns here are clear. Harassment, coercion, and organizing public shaming are violations of our conduct code. We will suspend you pending investigation. You will have a hearing." The words thudded like a gavel.
Joann's reaction was cinematic: first disbelief, then fury, then pleading. "You can't do this! I— I have so much at stake! People will—"
"Enough," the president said. "This assembly is adjourned. Please leave the stage."
She stumbled down the aisle, her heels lost their rhythm. Students whispered, some pointed their phones to film. Everyone who had been afraid earlier now watched.
The worst came next for her.
Outside the auditorium, a swarm of cameras and phones greeted her. People recorded her flailing attempt to explain. A dozen students marched up to her, voices unkind now with newly acquired courage.
"You set us up," one of them said coldly. "You told me to drop out that semester."
"You threatened my scholarship," another said. "You called my mom a liar."
Joann's face went from pale to red. Her voice went high and thin. "Please!" she begged, "Stop! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" She started to cry—a sound that once would have commanded sympathy.
Instead, students circled and read aloud messages she'd sent, images she had posted, receipts of threats. They played the clips Felix had captured. They recorded her pleas, posted them live. The scene was not theatrical mercy; it was the public mirror she had built now broken and hung for everyone to see.
"Why are you doing this?" she pleaded, as people recorded her voice. "I'll— I'll apologize. Please! Don't ruin me!"
Someone uploaded the clips to the main student channel. Within minutes, the clip of Joann begging, surrounded by students reading her messages aloud, had been shared. Comments streamed like a tide: outrage, disbelief, support for the victims.
Her composure, which had once been her armor, collapsed into a small body splintered by exposure. She transported through all the classic stages: defiance, denial, then a thin desperate pitch for sympathy. A few tried to help but many stayed as witnesses. Some clapped, some snapped pictures, some recorded the scene with professional detachment.
She tried one last act—she reached for a bystander's phone and laughed nervously. "Delete that, delete that— I'll give you money—"
The crowd's reaction was immediate and merciless. "No," someone said. "You can't buy silence."
The shame that had once bred fear in others now ate her. She fell to her knees, voice cracking, asking, "What do I do? What do I do?"
I stood back. I felt nothing like triumph. The sight was ugly. But it was necessary.
Joann's collapse sent ripples across campus. The administration announced an investigation, introduced mandatory workshops on harassment, and posted a message promising accountability. A few days later, Joann was suspended. She had to face the consequences and the recorded pleas that made no one feel especially merciful.
Public shaming isn't pretty. Watching someone's confidence dissolve feels like watching someone drown. But watching others stand up felt like sunlight finally forced into a locked room.
After the storm, life quieted into a new rhythm. More girls spoke up. It was quieter now but steadier, like a stronger foundation finally set.
"You did it," Felix said one late night, his voice both proud and gentle.
"I had help," I said. "And we used evidence, not rumors."
We kept living our small loud romance. We kissed on steps and whispered plans into the hollow of empty classrooms. Felix was tender in ways strangers don't expect.
"Do you remember that first video?" he asked once.
"You mean when you filmed me like a subject and I critiqued your angle?" I teased.
He laughed, bright and quick. "You told me your profile was better."
"I still mean it," I said. "Profile, attitude, everything."
We grew into a pair that people accepted slowly—picture-perfect in its own messy ways. Students still whispered about our early scandal, about the auditorium moment, about Joann's collapse. Rumors are charms that can be both poisonous and healing.
One evening, after a long day, Felix and I walked through the quad. Lanterns glowed. A few students waved. We stopped by the library window and watched our faces reflected together in the glass.
"You okay?" he asked, tracing circles on my palm.
"I am," I said. "Because we did the right thing."
He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. "You did."
I smiled at the reflection in the glass. Our shadows were close, shoulders touching, a small photograph of two imperfect people choosing each other.
Outside, a handful of students passed, laughing about something trivial. Inside, the campus had changed a little: less tolerance for public bullying, a more watchful compassion. The scar from Joann's reign stayed, but it taught people the cost of silence.
Felix kissed me then—soft, steady, entirely present. The sound of the campus at night was like a film rolling to its last scene.
"I don't want this to be routine," he murmured.
"Then we won't let it be," I said. "We'll keep making mirrors when it's needed."
He smiled, fingers weaving with mine. "Promise?"
I laughed, a quick, honest laugh. "No stock promises. Just doing."
We walked on, the night folding behind us, the camera bag bumping his hip like a reminder that we had found our frames and chosen to use them together.
The End
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