Healing/Redemption10 min read
Don't Make a Sound — The Night the Pen Broke
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I am Gwen Cameron. I write scary stories in the small hours, because the dark makes the words easier. Tonight, the dark is louder than my stories.
"Don't make a sound! Someone got into the dorm!" Alexandra Roberts texted me out of nowhere.
"Alex? Why are you up?" I whispered, though the phone was on my chest and nobody could hear me.
"That thing should be at your 203 soon. Someone on floor three messed with a pen spirit. I told the teacher. It’s coming down. Pretend to be asleep, okay?"
"Who played with a pen spirit?" I typed back, lowering the screen so the light wouldn't show.
"Clara Aguirre and her crew. They always do stupid things at night."
I felt the cold move through the corridor. My roommate Jaidyn Hartmann snored. I smelled the cheap lavender from her pillow and thought of the line I had been stuck on all week.
"A sound," something said in the hallway, soft and sticky like wet cloth dragged along a floor.
"That isn't footsteps," I told the room out loud, though no one answered.
"Then what is it?" Jaidyn mumbled without waking.
"A gooey dragging. Not a person," I said. My fingers went numb against the phone.
"I thought you were joking," Alexandra sent. "Are you there?"
I didn't answer. The noise moved like the story I couldn't finish—slow, patient, hunting.
I had to think fast. If Alexandra thought pretending to sleep worked, she hadn't tested it on whatever this was. I shut the phone and pinned it under my pillow light as if hiding would help.
"Fourteen minutes," I told Jaidyn. "We have fourteen minutes to get out."
"Are we leaving now?" she said, sitting up like a startled rabbit.
I did the worst thing and the bravest thing: I woke the others without shouting. They blinked at me and followed, clumsy and sleepy and perfect for monsters to catch. Two girls froze in the hall like statues; one was new and looked half-asleep but ready to cry.
"Who's that?" the new girl whispered.
"Vittoria Golubev," I said. "If you don't run, you'll die."
"Run where?" she asked.
"Out. Down. Quietly."
We moved like thieves. I threw a paper cup at a second-floor window to make noise away from us. The cup hit glass and echoed, a sharp bright sound in the dark.
"Did it go that way?" Jaidyn whispered, eyes wide.
"Yes," I answered. "When I open the door, don't breathe. Don't let it hear you."
The thing slid past where we had been hiding. It wasn't a person. It smelled of old paper and iron.
"Help—" someone screamed behind us. A girl in the stairwell collapsed. She was being pulled. I watched the life get sucked out of her like someone emptying a bottle.
"Don't be a statue!" I hissed at the two girls who had frozen. "Move!"
We ran into the school and I pictured every bad idea horror movies teach: never split up, never look back. We did both.
The classroom lights were on. I slid into a desk and pretended to breathe. A crowd of faces turned toward us, surprised and bright like moths. The teacher—Judith Berger—stood by the board in a dress that made her look older than she was.
"Where have you been?" she asked, but Alexandra was already there in the doorway, palms clean and eyes pinched.
"Miss Berger," Alexandra said, "they said the dorm had a problem. I ran over."
"Tell the truth," Judith said. She looked tired, like a page that had been read too often.
"Miss, Clara—" I started.
"Is Clara here?" she demanded.
"No, Clara's—" I swallowed. "She's dead."
The room blinked.
"Dead?" someone muttered.
I didn't know how I knew. I just did. The dead girl's phone glowed on a desk like an accusation. Her last words in a forum post had been one red word: "Help." She had been reading posts, desperate. Someone had filled a page with cruelty. It wasn't the pen spirit that started everything. It was people.
"Did you call her father?" Judith said, voice small. "Anibal Berg—he is at home? Is he—"
"I called," Alexandra said. "He is in the classroom, already. He came when he heard—"
Anibal Berg was a man who could shout through walls. He arrived a broken storm, voice rushing like a canal. He fell apart in public like paper in water. I watched him and felt the heavy truth: the dead girl's father would never get his child back.
Someone knocked and a student burst in, breathless. "Clara's dorm—one of them ran. They played that pen game. It got them."
I had seen the thing in the hall. I had seen the face. But someone else's face slid into my memory: Julianna Bryant. Her posts were buried in the glow of a forum where people typed with knives.
"Who posted the thread?" I asked.
"No idea," said West Pedersen, Judith's son, who always knew too much.
I found the truth the way you find a lost key: by poking until something gives. On Clara's locked phone, I found a thread. The anonymous voice had ruined a girl's life. The anonymous voice spread like a stain.
"She was accused here," I told the room. "They called her a liar and worse. People piled on. She—" I couldn't finish.
"That is why she left," West said. "Everyone knew. The school covered it up."
"Who are these people?" I demanded. "Show me their names."
West hit a button and the screen threw light across faces. Voices I couldn't name at first were suddenly names in my mouth. On the list were student accounts that matched real people here.
Fleming Picard. Cash Hartmann. Hudson Ibarra. They laughed, reading other people's pain like a sports score. Their faces stayed bright until the screen pointed their names at themselves.
"What is this? This isn't true." Fleming's smile cracked.
"You're kidding," Cash said. "You have no proof."
"Do you want proof?" I asked. I had been scared into motion by a dead girl's last wish. "You put filth on the internet. You feed a rumor mill. You hurt someone until she looked like a monster to the people who mattered most."
"Prove it," Hudson said.
I had the proof. Clara's phone showed every call she made to the emergency numbers, every unanswered attempt. It showed the time she went to bed. It showed the way her light went out. It showed the forum thread and the accounts that pushed her, and then it showed what those accounts were tied to: the real emails, the logins from school computers, the editing fingerprints. It was messy but damning.
"Stop!" Anibal roared. "This is my child. If you say—"
"His child?" I snapped. "Your child slept through this and left others to get hurt. Clara's father is right to be angry at what the posts did. But the people who wrote them have to answer, too."
The only light in the gym that day was the projector. The whole school was there—students, teachers, parents—because a rumor had died and everyone wanted to know if it was true. I stood at a podium that felt too big for me and fed my fear into words.
"These accounts," I said, "are not harmless. They are not jokes. They are knives."
On the screen the usernames melted into faces. The gym went silent.
"Cash Hartmann," I said. "You called her a slut. You posted pictures that weren't hers."
Cash turned pale. He denied it, mouth moving too fast.
"Show me where I said that!" he barked.
"I will," I said. I clicked. The posts lined up like a string of teeth. The audience leaned forward. Cameras in phones lifted like trees in a storm. I could see the crowd's mood shifting.
"Fleming Picard," I went on, "you started the rumor at 11:06 PM from your dorm. You used the school's unsecured network. You thought no one could trace it."
"It was a joke!" Fleming cried. "It was just—"
"Jokes kill," I said.
Hudson Ibarra's face flushed the color of brick. He had typed comments that hammered at a girl's self-worth. "I didn't know—" he said.
"You did," someone said from the back.
"You thought it was anonymous," I told them. "You thought it was invisible. You thought there were no people at the end of each username. That's why this is public."
Murmurs rose. "Shame!" someone shouted. "Disgusting!" another voice said.
Then Anibal Berg stood. He had been a storm in tears. He was a man who wanted someone to pay. He walked to the front and held up his shaking hand.
"These are children," he said. "But they are not beyond punishment. They do not know what they have taken. Let them see."
He told the principal to call the parents. He told them to suspend. The principal fumbled but did it. The school said it would cooperate with the police. The air in the gym changed; the students who had been quiet looked at the accused as if at an insect under glass.
"Look at me," I said to the boys. "Look at what you made."
Fleming's denial became spluttering, then anger, then the long fall into pleading. Cash bit his lip until blood shone. Hudson's knees wavered. Their faces did everything a guilty person's face must do.
"You're ruining us!" Fleming shouted. "You're ruining our lives!"
"Not like you ruined hers," someone in the crowd answered.
They begged. They tried to lie. They tried to point at each other. The teachers closed ranks. Judith Berger had an expression like a blade.
"Everyone who saw this and didn't speak is complicit," Judith said. "You with your phones, your laughs: you will write apologies. You will do community service. You will undergo counseling. This school will not be a place where people destroy others in the dark."
The crowd did not let them off. Phones were raised to record their humiliation. They were not physically hurt. They were, instead, stripped of their careless safety.
"Fleming," I said quietly. "Say you're sorry and mean it."
Fleming looked at me and at the faces in the gym and then at the floor. His shoulders sagged. The shame flooded his face until he was a child again.
"I'm sorry," he said, voice small. "I'm so sorry. I didn't... I didn't think."
"Apologies are not enough," Anibal said. "You will spend weekends with Julianna's parents, working on the farm. You will read what you posted aloud in class. You will learn what it means to destroy someone with words."
The crowd approved. Cameras clicked. The punishment was public and slow. It was hands-on: every weekend Fleming and Cash and Hudson would sit in a classroom and listen to adults they had hurt. They would be watched by teachers and by Judith. Their social media accounts were restricted. They were humiliated, yes—no one clapped for that—but it was not just shaming. It was required hard work: apologies in front of the people they harmed, a weekly journal to read aloud about what they had done, a reparative project to help other students understand the damage of online cruelty.
At first they denied, then they shouted, then they tried to bargain, then they crumpled. Their faces changed from smug, to shocked, to frantic denial, to a brittle attempt at excuse, and finally to a hollow surrender. The crowd reacted with whispers, with angry hands, with phones held high like torches. People took photos. People judged. People recorded everything. It was perfect for the internet: their fall, their pleas, their faces.
"Why are you filming?" I heard someone ask. "For what?"
"For evidence," Judith said. "So the world can see that words have consequences."
After the assembly, when the cameras still hummed in pockets, a teacher asked me about guilt and justice and what we should do. I only knew one thing for sure: we had stopped one cycle of cruelty by meeting it with a public, focused response. The humiliation was not revenge. It was accountability. And the students who had hidden behind anonymity learned how to feel shame.
"You saved us," Kumiko Bolton said to me later, voice small. She had been in my dorm that night. "You told the truth and didn't hide. You made them face it."
I didn't feel like a savior. I felt tired in a whole new way.
"We still have the girl," I said. "Julianna."
Julianna Bryant had been the one who became the ghost I couldn't look away from. Her life had been stripped by rumor. Her death was not the end of the story, but a beginning.
"She asked two favors," Kumiko told me as we walked through the empty courtyard. "One: tell the truth on the forum. Two: let her see her family again."
"Can we do that?" Vittoria asked.
"We will try," I said.
Julianna's request was small and heavy. We found her old house by noon. The white walls looked the same. The front garden had a place where a jasmine used to grow. Julianna had loved jasmine. I carried a small flower and thought of the thin line between life and the memories left behind.
"Will she be angry?" Kumiko asked, voice trembling.
"Maybe," I said. "But she also needs to see."
We placed a tiny jasmine on the table. Her parents came in and sat like people trying to remember how to be upright. They cried when the flower moved as if breathed, and they thought their child had come because the blossom turned toward the light. They laughed through tears. "She is home," Julianna's mother said.
It was a small kindness, a last glance. When the jasmine shrank and dried, I felt the last of her leave. A piece of me felt empty and at the same time relieved. Someone who had been abused by words had been shown to be human again.
Back at school the punishments unfolded. The guilty students worked on the farm with Anibal and Julianna's parents. They read their posts aloud at assembly and learned to feel the weight of what they had done. The crowd's reaction was not always kind. There were threads and videos that tried to humiliate them further. I would not defend all of that. Public accountability can become a mob. But it was not the same as the dark anonymous cruelty that had killed Julianna. The school tried to steer the punishment toward learning rather than spectacle. It was messy. It was necessary.
"Do you ever loop back?" Kumiko asked me once, weeks after.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You were different the first night. You did not do what the thread said. You changed it. I wonder if you had done other things would things change."
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe."
"Are you still writing?" she asked.
"Every day," I said. "But now I write differently. I write to keep people human."
The nights that followed were quieter. The thing that had crawled in the hall did not return. The pen that had broken in my hands had left a red mark on the paper that spelled "behind." It felt like a warning. It was also a promise.
"Why did you help me?" Julianna asked me once in a corner where only I could hear.
"I wrote it down," I answered. "I told the truth."
"Will you remember me?" she asked. Her voice was a wind that smelled like jasmine.
"I will," I promised.
At graduation when the assembly was over, I walked past the old gym. A pile of small gifts had been left on a table, and by them, a small vase with a jasmine a little bruised but fragrant. I put my hand on it and smiled, thinking of the night when the pen broke and wrote the word that made me turn around.
"Don't make a sound," Alexandra had texted me the night it began.
"Why did you send that?" I asked her months later, when she sat across from me in the courtyard.
Alexandra's face was paler, but she was not empty like before. "I didn't send it," she said. "It sent itself."
"Then who was it?" I asked.
She looked away. "We all have things we did in the dark," she said. "I didn't think the internet could hurt someone that much. I was wrong."
Her eyes were full of regret, which is not the same as punishment. But I had seen punishment that day. I had seen the boys change their faces in public. I had seen parents cry. I had seen a jasmine bloom and dry.
"Do you think it was enough?" I asked.
"I think we did something," she said. "Not everyone will change. But some will."
The loop that had trapped me that first night broke when I refused to follow the script. I went upstairs instead of staying under the covers. I read a dead girl's posts and found the people who had hurt her. I put the truth in the light.
The pen that had broken was now a warning I kept on my desk. Sometimes at night I would pick it up and run my thumb over the red words that bled into the paper. "Behind." It reminded me to look back, to see what we left in the dark, to fix it before it becomes someone’s whole life.
When the jasmine wilted finally on the table and turned to dust, I swept it into a small box and wrote Julianna's name on the lid. I placed the pen beside it.
"Goodbye," I told her, because some promises are meant to be kept.
The End
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