Rebirth15 min read
I Came Back as the Provincial Top Scorer — and I Ran Admissions
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I remember the sound of the phone like a bell in another life. I remember grading essays, changing recruitment scripts at midnight, slipping into the admissions office and thinking in maps of data and metadata. I remember the hospital light, the wrench of metal, and then waking up in a younger body, with a different name on her school file and a province full of expectations riding on her chest.
"Hello?" I said into the receiver, trying not to let my old life show.
"Is this... Ellie Bray's family?" the voice asked.
My stepmother's hand tightened on the arm of the chair. Her face was a mask of hope and calculation. Marco Masson, my stepbrother, sat stiff as a board, eyes hollow. He had been re-taking the university exam all year. He had failed.
"No," I corrected, smooth as a practiced interviewer. "This is Ellie."
"Ellie Bray—congratulations!" the voice chirped. "Your score may qualify you for our first-tier scholarship."
"May?" My smile was soft. My mind, sharp from years in the Peking admissions office, sorted tone and tactic.
"Yes," the voice said. "We can't release final confirmation until the official scores are out. But we want to start admissions protocol."
I almost laughed. Tsinghua's little script. I had written versions of lines like that when I still sat behind the desk at Peking. They loved to pretend they hadn't already seen the grades.
"Fine," I said. "Start your protocol. I’ll wait for your official letter."
My stepmother's eyes had already filled with plans. Her face brightened like a person who smelled money.
"Ellie," she whispered, "if you get the scholarship, we can—"
"—buy Marco a diploma, buy him that boarding school," she finished, hands fluttering. "And a new car for your father and I, and move to a bigger house!"
I let her chatter. I closed the door on the sound and smiled a thin, private smile into my own reflection.
A knock came at the door. I opened it and froze.
He was younger than me by four years, eyes steady and bright behind rimless glasses, posture tidy like someone trained to carry himself politely. He looked almost like a photograph I had once pinned to a folder of promising candidates.
"Griffin Washington?" I blurted, then immediately regretted the sound of surprise in my voice.
"Hello," he started. "I—" He faltered, then recovered. "Ellie Bray. Congratulations. Your score may qualify for Peking University's first-tier scholarship."
His words were mine—mine, years ago. I felt an odd pride and a strange thrill. In the office, we trained scripts until they were comfortable. Hearing one of my own scripts used back at me felt like being reflected in a polished knife.
"Griffin," I said, with a tilt that was half teasing, half challenge. "You sound exactly like someone I used to know."
He blinked, a little hurried. "I—well—thank you. If you have any questions—"
"Do you have many handsome students?" I asked, ridiculous.
He laughed, embarrassed and earnest. "Many. I can introduce you—"
I smiled, but not at the introductions. I was buying time and testing ground.
Then another knock. Saul Krause—older, steady, a Tsinghua man—walked in. A man who smelled of safe choices and practiced warmth.
"We phoned," he said, matter-of-fact. "Worried because the call cut off."
"Well," I said, because it was delicious to make both universities sit around my small table like two parties at court, "I believe in destiny."
"You like one school more than the other?" Saul asked.
"I trust Peking gave me a self-enrollment spot when we met in the mock exam," I told them. "I will think it over."
Griffin faltered. Saul’s eyebrows twitched. Both men were suddenly just men, polite and human. I chose Peking. It wasn't hard.
My stepmother's hand clutched my sleeve afterward like a beggar begging a favor. "Ellie," she urged, "you could ask them to do Marco a favor. They won't always be so strict."
"Mom," I said—calling Manon Schaefer "Mom" made her perch higher in her own head—"this is not a market stall. Universities don't give away places like apples."
"I'll talk to the family friend, the education official," she insisted. The plotting began immediately. A family friend, a donation, a fake credential—she had it all figured out.
I let her speak. I let her imagine with her usual loud and busy greed. I had plans, too.
"Don't you call me a white-eye wolf," she snapped, when I answered bluntly.
"First, I won't be your bank," I said. "Second, I won't be your showpiece. Third—" I put my hand on the new leather wallet I had opened earlier that week, a bank card in my name. "This money belongs to the person whose name is on the bank account. Not you."
She tightened, pinched my wrist hard enough to mark.
"Ellie," I said slowly, letting the shock of my coldness land. "You want that scholarship? Stop counting on goblins and start being useful."
She flounced and whimpered, and then pretended to collapse. People gathered. She lay on the floor clutching her chest like a tragic actress. Marco looked keen with opportunistic worry. Someone called an ambulance. My father, a frightened man who had let his wife's plans become more real than our family, returned and hit me once—one hard slap that tasted metallic and familiar.
"You apologize to her!" he barked.
The hospital room was small, and my throat hummed with a tension I did not let loose. When Manon was wheeled into ER, she put on a show for the waiting cameras of neighbors and gossip. I watched and planned. Violence or drama, if you understand how to read them, reveal weaknesses.
After she was admitted, after the perfumed nurses fussed, I walked out to the stairwell and opened the bank card. I transferred funds that night from the scholarship account to a string of small anonymous accounts. The money moved like water. I bought a red sports car and flashed it in a way that made their faces itch.
"Are you serious?" Marco asked when I roared out of the driveway. "You spent the scholarship money?"
"Not the scholarship," I corrected. "My piece of it. I am not your ATM."
The car was a bright, sharp answer. It was also bait.
My plan required more than a flashy ride. It required the injured pride of a bully with power. It required her making a bigger mistake. The bully's name was Carlotta Watkins: popular face, wealthy father, bite behind that pretty smile. The girl who had been my tormentor, who had carved into the old body I now wore, was still the same. I had known bruises and marks on this body when I first woke. I had mapped the names that had caused them. Carlotta's presence was a blister I intended to burst.
A few days later she found me as I was returning the library book I had never checked out. Her nails were sharp, her friends like masks.
"You cheater," she hissed, loud enough that people turned. "You stole the test."
I let the crowd gather. People love a spectacle. I let her make the accusation, loud and public.
"Call the police," I said, calm and small, the voice of someone trained in interrogation.
Someone recorded. Someone livestreamed. Carlotta fumed, "My boyfriend broke up with me because of you!"
"Who told you that?" I asked.
She shrieked and tore at my sleeve. I pulled away. The long nails scratched my face. I grabbed a fistful of hair and pushed her down until the pavement scraped her pride.
Two men came rushing. A crowd tightened. I stood over Carlotta and said, "Call the police."
They did. I stepped back with deliberate calm. I handed a phone to Griffin, who had arrived on cue. "Photograph everything," I told him. "Record her admitting she lied."
"Ellie—" Griffin stammered. He seemed hesitant about being pulled into a street fight, but he obeyed.
When the officers arrived and sorted the scene, Carlotta shoved the story further into drama. "She assaulted me! She slapped me! She made me the victim!"
"Miss Watkins," the officer said, stern. "We have witnesses saying you started the attack and were using your nails to injure. We also have a video that contradicts your statements."
Someone near the curb had uploaded a shaky clip—an old man with a phone who liked disputes. The police took her in for questioning. The narrative began to crack.
But I wanted more than a dressing-down. I wanted her to fall in public and for that fall to reveal the rotten wood beneath her family's power.
Kate Chandler, my lawyer friend, moved faster than a rumor. She filed defamation reports and pulled every thread. Carlotta's father, Raphael Lemaire, was not just a wealthy man—he controlled a network of school administrators. He was someone people feared.
When the scandal reached the education bureau, the story exploded. Our local news picked it up. The comments were a jab of public judgment. The education bureau opened an investigation not only into my alleged cheating but into the entire web of corruption around Carlotta's family.
What came next was a sequence of exposures that tasted of iron and reveled in sunlight.
Public Punishment Scene: The Education Office Conference
The day the education bureau held a press conference, the hall filled like a theater on opening night. Cameras and phones bobbed like a sea. Raphael Lemaire sat at the dais, hands limp, face an engineered calm. Behind him, the bureau's banner dangled like an accusing flag. Reporters' pens clicked in a rhythm like knives.
"Mr. Lemaire," a journalist began, "you were accused by a student and later found to have influenced exam placements through donations and favours. How do you respond?"
Raphael opened his mouth and mumbled talk about 'misunderstanding' and 'processes.' His voice was brittle. He had rehearsed these phrases until they felt human. He looked at the rows and tried to find allies. There were none.
"Sir," another reporter cut through, "we have documents showing payments from your charity to the schools where your children enrolled. We have recorded messages where you asked principals to reserve spots. We have testimony from a principal who says you promised 'consequences' if he refused."
A murmur ran through the crowd. Raphael's face twitched. He went still, the practiced mask cracking.
I had a seat skirting the dais, hands folded, and I watched the unspooling. His followers were thinly present: a few aides who refused to meet my eyes. His power had been built on the quiet shame of small favors and backroom deals. When favorites become public, those who helped you stand wither.
"Mr. Lemaire," the chief investigator said, and the room tightened, "suspend all positions pending review."
"That's impossible," Raphael said. He sounded small. "I have devoted my life—"
"You have misused funds," the investigator said. "You have coerced staff. You have affected admission outcomes. Emergency hearings will be scheduled."
People around me whispered, and where whispers go, judgment follows. A group of parents marched forward, led by a woman with red eyes. "Our children were denied fair competition," she cried. "You stole chances from our kids."
Raphael's mouth moved, and then he collapsed into a chair like a deflated man. He tried to deny, tried to threaten, tried to say he had only wanted to help his child. His hands shook as the investigators read out specific bank transfers, text messages, and voice notes. The microphone recorded his stammer. Cameras watched every color bleed of his face.
"Your allies are retracting statements," the investigator read. "We are freezing accounts linked to educational funds and initiating criminal investigations."
"You're ruining me!" Raphael said suddenly, the arrogance crumbling into panic.
"You're the one who thought you could break the rules and never face a crowd," I said aloud, before I caught myself. The microphone did not pick me; the recording already had enough.
He tried to stand and shout, "This is politically motivated!"
A mother in the back rose. "We know your type," she said. "You traded places, purchased honor, and then called us ingrates when we asked for fairness."
The crowd leaned in. Cameras found her face and held it. The viewers online surged. Children in the audience clutched their parents' sleeves. The scene had the slow, irreversible logic of a trap closing.
Raphael's reaction changed in a visible arc: arrogance, to irritation, to panic, to pleading.
He tried bargaining first. "I can return the money. I can resign from the committee. I can..." His voice cracked.
They read the list of him offering jobs to principals in exchange for reserved spots. They played a voice of him instructing a staffer to 'ensure placement.' They showed a ledger.
"Did you ever think about the kids?" someone shouted.
Raphael blinked, like a man trying to recall a language he'd never spoken. "I—"
Then he tried to shame the mothers into silence by insisting on his charitable public image. His words slid like wet stones and made no sound. The world that he had built on private favors was crumbling, and public attention was the dynamite.
The room's energy turned. Where earlier there had been reporters' polite curiosity, now there were shouts. "Arrest him!" someone shouted. "Prosecute!" rose another voice.
Raphael's aides slumped. One young man ran to the dais and shoved a folder into the investigator's hands, a folder of bank statements and admissions quotas. The investigator's face went hard.
"Due process," the investigator said. "But your positions are suspended. Public hearings will follow."
Raphael's face buckled. He stood and, for the first time that day, begged. "Please!" he pleaded. "I can— I'll return everything. I'll—"
The crowd's reaction was a visceral chorus: witnesses snapped photos, people hissed, some applauded. A reporter remained merciless, asking him to name the principals who took money. He refused. He said he had been acting out of love.
A teacher, one of his former allies, stood up and walked to the microphone.
"You taught us to do better," she said quietly. "You taught children to be honest. You taught us to hold the line. But you took it upon yourself to corrupt the line you asked us to draw."
"Say something!" Raphael demanded.
She did.
"I am ashamed," she said, and her voice was steady like a gavel. "Because we failed. Because for years, we let a man like you think he could buy our silence."
The applause that followed was not the polite clap of propaganda. It was a break, a sound like a window shattered.
Raphael sank back into the chair, a broken monument. He pleaded, he denied, he cried a little. The more he tried to reclaim his dignity, the more the crowd stripped it away. Cameras captured the arc, and online the footage went viral.
The punishment was not just legal. It was the slow, public uncovering of a lie in front of people who mattered: the students he had cheated, the parents he had used, the officials who had closed ranks. His allies left the dais one by one. Someone stole his smile. He tried to raise a hand, and a roomful of people hissed like a stadium booing a bad actor.
When the press conference ended, he had nothing but the papers in his lap and the gawking, relentless light of public judgment. The education bureau promised follow-up actions. The governor ordered an independent review. Raphael’s phone started ringing, but who would answer now? His empire of favors had become his indictment.
For me and for the students who had been robbed, it was vindication. For him, it was the slow collapse of a life built on tiny corruptions that had crept into an entire network. The public watched. People took photographs, recorded the moments, and posted them. His face was flattened across social media, and the comments were merciless.
After the press conference, people did not forget the sound of the room. They remembered how he had begged and how the mother had said, "We want fairness." They remembered the teacher's quiet shame and the way the investigator read the ledger like a verdict.
Raphael's fall was not instant. There would be lawyers and appeals. He would claim misunderstanding and blame the press. But the most human thing of all had happened in that bright hall: he had been shown, standing, to be ordinary and fragile. That was punishment enough for the many watching.
End of public punishment scene.
After that press conference, the dominoes fell. Carlotta Watkins' father lost positions. Carlotta herself had to face a criminal inquiry into charges of harassment and tampering with exam evidence. The news called it "the case that toppled a network." People who had hidden in the shadow of his power now had to face the light.
My stepmother, Manon Schaefer, had her own public unraveling. The bank records we had traced showed transfers from her accounts to shell companies, to buy fake diplomas and bribe school officials. The neighbors gawked and whispered. She argued in hospital corridors and then found herself being videotaped signing papers that admitted purchases for 'admissions facilitation.' When the local housing board heard about the forged deeds she had planned to claim, they froze her plans. The creditors came, and her safe, once full of plans, opened out empty as a bird's nest.
Marco Masson, my stepbrother, had siphoned the funds and lost them to bad bets. He blamed everyone and himself, in that order. He found loan sharks at his door. He called my name begging for help. I let the calls ring.
Marco barged into my room once, eyes wet. "Ellie," he said, voice small, "I lost it. I—I need you."
I watched the boy who had been bullied into a gambler stand there and realized something: his greatest crime was not ambition but entitlement. He had been taught that someone else would always pay. I watched him receive the consequence of his choices.
"Marco," I said quietly, "take responsibility. Stop asking me to fix what you broke."
He pounded the wall with his fist and then sank to the floor and caught himself in a fit of ugly, useless sobs.
Public exposure had different faces of punishment: humiliation, debts, stripped power, and the slow isolation of people once used to being obeyed. For some, it was legal. For others, it was social. For all of them, the punishments were in public.
In the weeks that followed, I sealed my position at university. Peking processed my acceptance. Griffin walked me through campus like a proud, shy friend. Hudson Esposito—the second-place student who had become my unlikely friend—sat in my passenger seat and joked about the car like a kid.
"You spend scholarship money on a car?" he asked, eyes wide.
"It's called symbolic investment," I said. "It draws attention."
He laughed and then grew serious. "You're different," he said. "You carry something in your chest."
I did. Old life and new life braided into a single thread. I knew how the admissions machine worked, and I used that knowledge not as a bureaucrat but as someone who had been hurt and wanted to fix the world.
"Why do you help me?" Griffin asked one night in the library after a recruitment talk went perfectly.
"Because your kindness is quiet," I said. "Because you correct names when people mispronounce them. Because you do small things that are big to me."
He looked at me and smiled like a sunrise. "You have the strangest reasons."
We were careful with each other. We had small, electric moments that felt like gifts: a hand brushing mine over a stack of forms; his jacket draped over my shoulders on a cold evening; the way he corrected the pronunciation of my name in private. Once, he stepped in front of a cluster of nosy parents and said simply, "She gets to make her choice in peace." The words were small, and the pressure they relieved was vast.
I also felt the sweet sting of Hudson's cheerfulness when he teased me about my driving. "You go fast on purpose," he accused. "You like making people look up."
"Maybe I like them to look," I said, and the smile that reached his eyes was a small victory.
There were other moments: when I caught Griffin watching me from a bench and his eyes softened like melted tea; when Hudson took my hand to steady me on a crowded metro; when Kate Chandler stayed up all night pulling legal threads and then waltzed into court in her sensible flat shoes and a grin of triumph.
There was justice. There was heartbreak. There were lessons and small intoxicating joys.
On the morning we watched the sunrise together, the city was calm. I stood with Griffin, Hudson, and a few close friends on a low hill outside the city, a place where the train tracks curved and the sun came up like an oath.
"Thank you," Ellie—no, I—said to the people around me.
"You saved me," Zhao Xiahe—my borrowed name, the contours of a life I had inherited—said to me with the quiet, grateful voice she had hidden for years. I had changed her life, but she had also changed me. My old life had given me tools. This life had given me cause.
"Don't thank me," I replied. "Thank the truth. Thank people who refuse to let the powerful take everything."
Griffin handed me a thermos and then, a little awkward, said, "You were the one who told me to be brave. You were the one who made calls, showed documents, made people answer."
"I just remembered what to do," I said.
The sunrise burned the shadow away. It warmed my cheeks in a way that felt like being absolved. I felt that old, sharp love for the work I had left behind, but now it was married to a new compassion, and the strange, private sense that if I could do it once, I could keep doing it.
"What's next?" Hudson asked, squinting at the bright line.
"Next," I said, "we make sure they don't do it again."
I had a long list of reforms in my head: clearer oversight of admissions, transparent ledgers, anonymized scores, stricter penalties for meddling parents. These were not romantic things, but they were the ground on which people could grow.
"Will you stay?" Griffin asked.
"Yes," I said. "Because someone needs to be in the office who knows both worlds."
He smiled. "Good. Be our queen of admissions."
"Don't call me that," I said, then let my smile be soft. "Call me Georgina if you must. It's a long story."
We sat in the light and watched the day begin like an honest confession.
Later, when the city hummed and the school year rolled into plans and deadlines, my bank card still had the numbers of my new life. The red car gleamed in the parking lot like an exclamation. The name Ellie Bray was on official paperwork, and Georgina Lang—my true self in memory—stood behind her with a file folder full of policies and the open, steady heart of someone who had been given a second chance.
And when people asked me why I had to make it public, why I could not simply forgive and let the night cover things, I said: "Because hiding the rot only lets it spread. Because the people who were hurt needed to see the truth."
Griffin squeezed my hand. "Because you care," he said simply.
"Because I remember," I replied, thinking of the desk lights and the forms and the cold hospital, and the way the needle of my life had been rerouted into new tracks.
When I closed my file that night, I put the little bank card into the deepest drawer, under a pile of old forms. The small square of plastic felt heavy and light at once.
If anyone ever asks what I brought back from my old life, I'll say: a memory of how systems bend and who breaks when they do. And a stubborn belief that if you know how to pull the threads, you can untangle the whole rug.
We had made them pay in public: a press conference, a court, a school board hearing. Raphael Lemaire apologized into microphones that recorded nothing but his ruined voice. Manon Schaefer watched her plans crumble into debts and hospital bills. Carlotta Watkins was forced to confront the evidence she had tried to hide. Marco Masson ended in a room with loan letters and his own pounding regret.
But most of all, we had made a change that could not be undone by money alone. People saw the ledger. People saw the camera footage. People watched officials called to account. And moments later, as always, the sun rose and lit the city in the impartial way that truth can.
I slid the bank card back into my wallet and closed my drawer. Outside, students streamed past the entrance to Peking like a river. Griffin straightened his tie. Hudson yawned and stretched and then looked at me with a grin.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," I answered.
And then we stepped into the pile of morning light, and I let the past and the present walk together for the first time.
The End
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