Sweet Romance12 min read
I Pretended to Be Broke — Then I Bought a School Bully
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"I think we should break up."
Those five words came in a text that looked casual, like a grocery list. Vince Bergmann sent it, then he pulled the digital curtain—blocked me on WeChat, blocked my number, and became silence.
"Of course he did it the coward's way," I muttered aloud, slamming my palm on the desk so the pen rolled off.
The classroom went quiet and a few heads turned. Professor cleared his throat. "Grace Bonner, would you like to answer the question?"
"I—" I had no idea what the question had been. I let my lips shape a polite nothing, and the silence became a small, hot embarrassment. After class, my roommate Holland Acevedo grabbed my arm.
"Grace, what's wrong? You looked like you were going to explode."
"He dumped me," I said, because confession to a friend is easier than shouting into an empty screen. "Then he blocked me. Like a three-line break up. Can you believe it?"
Holland raised an eyebrow. "Vince? The guy in literature class? But he always seemed so—"
"So boring," I finished for her, trying to push past the sharp heat that rose in my cheeks.
We left Building D and as we came down the steps—I saw him.
Vince stepped out of a pink Porsche, the kind that spends more time gleaming under city lights than on a campus parking line. He came out of the passenger seat, hand in hand with Cassandra Barry, whispering and laughing like a pair of newly bought lovers.
"I get it now," I said before I even knew I was saying it. "He dumped me to cling to a rich girl."
Holland's eyes widened. "No way."
"He'd rather choose a wallet than honesty," I said, spine straightening. The world has that weird generous law: if you pretend small, people will try to cram you into a smaller box. For months I had kept my bank card 'frozen'—a silly pretense to flatter Vince's pride when I thought he liked 'struggling scholars' who had grand plans and empty pockets. I thought I had performed a delicate kindness. He thought I was poor. He chose a real rich girl instead of waiting for future me.
"Grace!" Cassandra's voice came like a smirk across the steps. "Sorry about your loss. But Vince told me he never really liked you. He likes me."
"Sure," I said. "If you want him, take him. Keep his old socks too."
I turned, and I walked away. Pride is noisy when you wear it. But underneath the tapped-out growl of my vanity was a new plan forming—simple, absurd, perfectly suited for a person who had two things: cash and an itch for poetic revenge.
That night I texted my family in the group chat, "I'm back. The rich girl is back."
My father: "Card unfrozen."
My mother: "Buy anything you want."
I grinned so big Holland thought I'd swallowed a peach. When I had tried to be 'humble' before, I had literally frozen my card. I did it because I wanted Vince to feel like a king of the climb. He'd loved the idea of rescuing me. He'd loved the fantasy. Well, the fantasy had expired.
Holland sat on the bed and looked at me like someone waiting for a punchline. "What's the plan, Grace?"
"I'll make him jealous," I said, and it sounded both cruel and satisfying. "But elegantly. I'll buy the best things. I'll show up on his feed like a dream he can't catch. And most of all—I'll buy someone better to stand next to me."
"You mean a new boyfriend?" Holland asked.
"Not a boyfriend," I said. "A project. Dominic Braun."
Dominic—Dominic was the school's notorious 'king of the courts'. He wasn't a bookish genius like Vince. He was not someone you trusted with a thesis. He was someone you trusted to steal the last slice of pizza and to make the gym echo with the sound of a ball cracking the net. He had a crooked grin that seemed to live between mischief and apology; he had muscles that moved the way words don't move. And according to campus gossip, he was broke as a joke. Perfect.
"He's dangerous," Holland said, old worry settling over her features. "Wait. You don't—"
"I can buy him," I interrupted. "If Vince wants to gamble with money, fine. I earned the right to play."
They call me a lot of things. Vanity is a soft cloak for me. But what I wanted most in that moment was to see the man who thought he could drop me like a linen napkin feel a small, gleaming ache. The result was a flirtation with power I hadn't tried yet.
I watched Dominic on the courts that afternoon. He moved with a careless confidence, skin glistening in the slanting sun, sneakers scraping the painted lines. He played like he was leaping over a fence he had built himself. I couldn't help it.
When the game ended and his teammates laughed, I walked up. My heartbeat did a small foolish skipping thing.
Dominic smiled; his whole face changed. "Hey. You watching?"
"You play well," I said, and then I added, "Would you like a sponsor?"
He cocked his head. "Sponsor?"
"I mean—money. Rent. Food. A winter coat that isn't a thrift store tragedy. Think of me as a generous benefactor."
He laughed, and the laugh was a grin that made his eyes smaller and sharper. "You serious?"
"Very," I said.
His friends hooted. "Dude! Look at you. You got sponsored by a goddess."
"Stop it," Dominic said, as if he'd never heard the word goddess used so personally. "What's the catch? You gonna make me go study?"
"Just... look good with me," I said.
"Deal." He offered his hand, the handshake loaded with a half-joke. "One month trial. Three thousand a month. Half-year minimum."
"Sold."
We had that absurd, transactional handshake like two people opening a pact book. I wired him some money later that evening. Holland pretended to faint.
The campus buzzed. Within days the rumor spread that Grace Bonner—the woman who once pretended to be poor for love—was now driving a pink G and dating the school bully. Cassandra watched, narrowed her eyes, and smiled like meat smelling flame.
"He's just a toy," Cassandra said once, in that syrupy way. "You'll get bored. He'll get bored. It's not real."
"Maybe," I said, unbothered. "Or maybe he'll eat your scowl for breakfast."
My control of the narrative was an intoxicant. I took Dominic out: lunch at the modern café, a ride in a car that wasn't his, dinners that left him smiling and sheepish. He kissed me in a way that felt like an accumulation of small emergencies. It was messy and warm and terrifying.
"Are you trying to make Vince jealous?" Dominic asked once, when the two of us sat under a huge ficus tree, sharing fries.
"Mostly yes," I said, and meant it only partially.
"Do you love him?" Dominic's question was soft. The light around him turned the ordinary into something private.
I had to be honest. "I used to think I loved Vince. But I used to love the idea of being loved as someone who needed saving. Dominic, you are—"
"You are what?" He nudged me.
"Unexpected," I said. "Messy. Real."
He laughed. "I'll take that."
The months slid by. I took him shopping, paid his rent, and watched the campus change like an audience in a theater. Vince's face sometimes appeared in paths we crossed—quiet, then stormy. Once, he tried to find me in a hallway and I let him find Dominique at my side, leaning like a sentinel.
"Why are you doing this?" Vince snapped when we stepped aside. "You promised you'd wait for me. You froze your card for me."
"You promised to be honest," I said. "You promised many things. When someone picks a pink Porsche over someone's heart, they get what they deserve."
Vince's mouth opened and closed like a man who had swallowed a bitter pill.
But the campus is small and rumors ripple. People watch glamour like they watch weather. Cassandra, who had been Vince's new trophy, started to show the weaknesses of a trophy: she wanted control. She whispered to friends about how I had 'bought' Dominic, about how Dominic would leash me if I didn't lay out more money. She judged.
One afternoon the administration hosted a charity fair on the quad: clubs, student projects, booths. I saw an opportunity. I arranged, through a quiet phone call to my father, to sponsor the student entrepreneurship showcase. I made a lavish donation and had my name on the banner—Grace Bonner Presents. Cassandra came with Vince, arm in arm, both preening. People clustered to see the glamorous couple. Dominic came too, out of begrudging curiosity, and he found me at a corner table, calm as glass.
"What's the plan?" he asked in a whisper.
"Watch," I said.
I stepped up to the small podium when the MC called for sponsors to speak. The crowd tightened, a field of faces. I opened my mouth and remembered how to be theatrical without being cheap.
"Thank you all for coming," I said. "We tried to create a space for real work. I also want to thank every student who has ever been part of someone else's plan. Sometimes people use us. Sometimes people leave. Today, let's talk about honesty."
There was polite applause. I smiled. "I'd like to tell one short story." I told it lightly, telling of someone who pretended to be poor for love. I spoke about pride and pretense. I didn't name names.
Cassandra laughed in a high, brittle sound, and Vince shifted at her side.
"But honesty has costs," I said. "So I've seeded a fund: fifteen thousand to help students who have been used or lied to—people who were treated like romance props rather than real people."
A murmur rippled through the crowd and some faces brightened. Cassandra's smile thinned. Vince's color drained.
"And," I added, soft as a blade, "since this money can be used only by people who were publicly misled—by romantic lies—I'll put forward evidence."
Someone near the stage hissed. Vince's jaw tightened. Cassandra's fingers dug into his arm like talons.
"You mean you'll out them?" said a sophomore nearby.
"No." I tilted my head. "I mean I'll give them the choice. If they've been used publicly as a prop for someone's social climbing or financial climbing, they can claim the support. Proof required. Posts, messages, receipts, whatever."
The silence had teeth now. Cassandra stood straighter, as if to prevent the world from seeing the cracks she tried to hide.
Vince's voice was small when he finally said, "That's petty."
"Petty?" I repeated. "No. It's accountability."
He swallowed hard. People started taking out their phones. Conversations murmur into networks. Cassandra's lipstick trembled.
This was when the punishment ritual began—public, noisy, and unavoidable.
I had not planned to humiliate anyone for the sake of cruelty. But when someone cheats at romance and then walks around as though nothing happened, that's a kind of theft. The quad filled with students pulling up feeds, whispering, watching like vultures. I had given them the game.
A cluster of students came forward—three girls with screenshots, a boy with a forwarded chat. They told stories of being left, manipulated, used as fashion accessories. The crowd's mood shifted to judgment. Cassandra shrank, and Vince stood there like a man seeing his own reflection in a shard of glass. He had been content to play the part until the lights turned hot.
"Do you want to say anything?" I asked him.
Vince opened his mouth, then closed it. The audience's eyes dug into him. He coughed like he had a throat filled with gravel. "I—" he began, and the silence asked for more.
"Why didn't you tell her?" someone shouted—Holland's voice clear from the back.
"Because I... I didn't want to lose what I thought I could have," he said, shame making him small. The crowd made a sound like scoffing and sympathy mixed. Cassandra's friends edged away.
I didn't let him off. "Did you tell her that you were choosing money over honesty?"
He had no answer.
For a long minute the quad was a courtroom with no gavel. People took sides. Some taped the moment, snapped photos, sent them to feeds. Others murmured in sympathy for all wronged people. Cassandra stung—she tried to say, "Vince would have made it on his own," and the words came out thin. She looked at him, waiting for him to heroically deny it. He did not.
Then the worst stage of the punishment came: social currency turning to ash. A rumor is fragile and curious. When the crowd decides someone has done wrong, it's a moment of social excommunication. Cassandra found her name whispered with a contempt that would curl the edges of polite invitations. Vince found his reputation warm and brittle. People stopped smiling easily at them. A girl who had been taking Cassandra's calls all week simply turned her back. Two boys who had shared classes with Vince now crossed the quad to avoid him.
The process of them shrinking was not loud. It was the slow circling away of faces. It was the sudden hush whenever they tried to speak. It was the little clicking of camera shutters like rain. I watched Vince go through the stages: surprise, then denial, then anger, then a hollow, shaking apology that the crowd barely accepted. He looked up at me once—no arrogance, only regret—and I realized I'd traded the sweet revenge for a truth I could live with.
People clapped, some in cadence with the idea of justice, others out of sheer relief that the campus had a moral compass that worked. I sat down, and Dominic's hand found mine. He squeezed, anchoring me.
Later, there were consequences beyond the quad. Cassandra's social invitations dried up, because who wants to be close to someone who uses people as social props? Vince tried to come back later with lines about his mother, about illness and pressure, but the picture had already been painted, and he found doors shut in his face. People were kinder to him whenever compassion was needed, but not the way he'd expected.
Dominic watched all of it with a slow, worried expression. "You hurt him pretty bad," he said once, later, in private.
"He hurt me first," I answered. "And I didn't set out to crush him. I set out to stop being tiny. Besides, he chose to climb with Cassandra like a ladder."
He leaned his forehead against mine. "You could have just driven past the Porsche and walked away," he said. "Why all the fireworks?"
"Because fireworks teach people to look up," I said. "And sometimes, that's necessary."
The semester continued. Dominic and I grew from a peculiar contract into something messy and warm. He taught me how to kiss with intention and how to tie my shoe when I pretended I didn't know how. I taught him how to handle a credit card that stops being a trophy and starts being a tool. We bickered about money and found a rhythm. He smoked less because I hated the smell; he started to actually show up early for me. The effort was a better aphrodisiac than any jewelry.
There were nights when I would awake remembering the first impulsive kiss he gave me in the plant garden. "You came for me because of a game," he said once in the dark, tender and half-angry.
"I came for myself," I corrected. "But I kept staying because of you."
His hand closed across mine like a promise. "Don't make a habit of leaving," he murmured.
Time does a strange thing when you're falling in. It stitches ordinary moments together—cooking soggy noodles at two a.m., arguing about which superhero is objectively better, sitting quietly while Dominic explains the AI chip he's designing. Yes—the man who had been a rumor had a secret and serious life: an AI research project that ate his time and heart. I watched him work, humbler than I'd give him credit for. He'd built something beautiful from nothing and stubbornness.
Once, when school was a soft blur of midterms and late nights, Dominic took me to his little lab. He had shown me sketches, half-formed circuits, and now, at the end of a long stretch, he clicked a small chip into a reader and it blinked. "This," he said, "is the thing I wanted to give the world."
He looked so honest there, like a boy with dirt under his nails and stars in his eyes. I felt my chest go hot.
"Will you..." I started, then stopped. Instead I leaned forward and kissed him, long and without calculation. It was an answer to a question he had not yet asked.
The ordinary accumulation of care and little sacrifices folded into something steadier. We went through the ridiculous ritual of apartment hunting with our neighbors—Duke Brewer and Nathan Nunes were part of Dominic's little team, loud and affectionate—and even when small disasters happened (we lost a cherished pot during a frantic move; I cried because pots matter when you are a hostess), Dominic would find a way to bring the laughter back.
The rumors about Dominic's youth—wild nights, other women, the occasional trouble—didn't vanish. People told stories. But I had seen the way he scrubbed his hands before he made dinner for me, the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn't looking. That quiet devotion rearranged my skeleton.
Vince drifted in and out with the seasons of regret. Once he called me in a voice raw with something like honesty: "Grace, my mom's sick. Cassandra only wanted the image. I made a mistake."
"Money doesn't erase the truth," I told him, and the line between us closed.
"Please," he begged. "I was wrong."
"I know," I said. "But I'd like you to understand what you lost. I don't want your pity. I want you to learn."
It was a soft punishment, and perhaps he deserved harsher things. But the biggest public punishment had already been in the quad, where friends witnessed him shrink from his pedestal. That memory lingered like a footprint.
Winter came and with it a nervous, invisible fuse. Dominic had been working nights on his AI chip. He'd saved the project from ruin more than once. One cold evening he took my hand and led me to the lab where he had set up a simple table with wires and a small velvet box. "This," he said, voice shaking with a boy's certainty, "is what I made to be better."
Then he opened the box. Inside was a ring and a tiny casing holding a single microchip—a sweet joke between two people who invented their own metaphors. "Will you marry me?" he asked.
I laughed and cried at once. "Yes," I said.
Years later, when someone asks about the way we started—about the pink car and the pot and the quad—that winter proposal feels like a good ending. We chose each other with ridiculous earnestness. Dominic keeps the chip in a small case on a shelf; sometimes I hold it like a talisman.
"Do you regret it?" Holland asked once over coffee, stirring slowly.
"No," I said. "Not even for fireworks, or for the quarry of public humiliation, or for the way I used my money. I learned to stop pretending to be someone I'm not. I learned to fight back when someone used me. I learned to love with a person who is both a storm and a harbor."
Dominic came in then, smelling faintly of solder and jasmine. He dropped into the chair beside mine and plucked the tiny chip from the shelf, waving it like a tiny flag. "Our chip," he said with a grin. "You sure you don't want the box back?"
"No," I said, and tipped my head so he could kiss me. "Keep it. It belongs to you."
Outside, the pink G idled in the curb—mine and ridiculous and perfect. It was a memory of the woman I used to play, and the woman I had become.
And when the engine purred, Dominic would always say, "Drive me nuts one more time."
"I will," I told him, and smiled.
The End
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