Revenge16 min read
I Woke Up to Do It Right
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up after five years.
The room smelled like hospital disinfectant and cheap tea; my head felt split open. My mother's face hovered near mine—Monica—alive and soft, and my mouth filled with a sound that was part laugh and part sob.
"Are you awake, Emerson?" she whispered, fingertips worried at my forehead.
"I—" I tried to focus. "Mom?"
She smiled like sunlight. "You scared us. You were... fainting again. Rest, okay?"
I hugged the illness, and the memory came back like a blow.
For five years a stranger had lived in my skin. She had watched my mother die in front of me, humiliated my brother, broken my stepfather's heart, driven my family to ruin, laughed while the people I loved fell apart. She had flirted and schemed and sold myself to men who were vultures. She'd ruined friendships I had taken years to build. She had taken everything and had the audacity to call it a game.
I felt something tear inside me. "You won't go anywhere," I said quietly—because, somehow, I knew it wasn't over yet.
Three days earlier something unknown had reached out to me — a presence that called itself a guardian, a firewall. It pushed the body back to me and told me: you can go back, but the traveler hasn't left the world. She's still in the school. Your mission: drive her out. Make her pay.
So I said yes.
I wasn't whole yet. Taking over again was messy. I blacked out sometimes, my emotions tripped switches I couldn't control, and there was a bruise of memory where the other girl had pressed her thumb into my life. But I could see the future like a map, and that was enough.
"Emerson," Amos Fontana, my stepfather, said gently, "take it easy. I've arranged it all. You'll be at Vale Hall Academy next week."
Gavin Mason—my brother—stood quiet in the doorway. He'd always been quiet, steady as a lighthouse. He had been the first thing I heard when I woke: footsteps, the scrape of a backpack, the smell of sweat and autumn.
"You're dizzy," he said in that thin, calm voice.
"Dreamed you're living alone," I lied. "Woke up."
Gavin's fingers were awkward and kind as he patted my head. "Dreams are false. Don't worry."
I held onto him like a lifeline. I wasn't going to let the traveler steal him again.
"Why did she do this?" I asked the guardian once.
"High-level tourist. Random pick," the guardian answered in my head, dry as a modem. "Playtime. She feeds off your suffering."
"Why my life?"
"You were easy to pick. You have someone who loves you. That strengthens her."
Her voice made me cold. She had been a parasite who grew fatter on my pain. I would starve her to death.
The first day back at Vale Hall—an old brick school with arched bridges and a small stream that could have been a postcard—I saw her.
She stepped into the classroom with the entitled smile of someone who believed power came with a crown. Zoya Ferrari. The name stuck to me like a warning.
"Hello, I'm Zoya," she sang, all easy charm.
I watched her with the soft, unassuming face I had used in the world she had stolen from me. I let a smile run over my lips.
She blinked, puzzled. "You look at me like you know me."
"Because I do," I said aloud. "Welcome."
A teacher's voice cut in. "You're the transfer here last week—Loser? No—Zoya, right?"
"Yes." She smiled. "Nice to meet you, Emerson."
She had the kind of beautiful, practiced manner that opened doors. She had money, or something that looked like it. She had arrogance enough to think she could ignore us.
From the first week she set about wrecking everything. She planted rumors about Gavin. She flirted with Brody Cooper, who was easy to manipulate. She slid lies across the desks like venom. Her friends spread those lies in little telescopes and whisper-networks. The class laughed when Gavin refused to defend himself; the class decided stories were truth.
I didn't speak the whole time. I watched. I smiled at the right moments. I let her make the first moves.
One after another, the traveler tried to remake the pattern that had broken my life: she hurled slashes at Gavin's reputation; she made my friends doubt; she fed the worst angels in the school. Each time she moved, I anticipated and countered. The guardian whispered fragments of the past like a cheat sheet.
"Do you think he's dangerous?" Zoya asked Brody about Gavin in chemistry, pretending to be timid.
"He's hard to read," Brody shrugged. "But he looks like he could break you."
I laughed under my breath. "I'm not the one to be broken," I told Brody, quiet as a clockwork.
"You'll find out," he said, not understanding how wrong he was.
I had allies too. Estella Chapman—a woman who knew how the city's social chessboard worked—took a look at the right places when I fed her a location. Leah Beach became my co-conspirator inside the school; she was loud and fierce, the kind of friend who would strike with claws and then cry afterward. Isabel Fournier was the girl we found in the dark rooms—tiny, hollow-eyed—who would later tell us the clues that had been carved into bed slats by a girl no one remembered.
And there was a web of monsters. Viktor Allison ran an exclusive underground ring—"The Parlor"—that trafficked children to rich men. Harrison Ash, his son, was soft-voiced and cruel. Zander Rasmussen was a public figure by day and a private Ravisher by night. Colt Yamada ruled the schoolyard, his bravado papered over a rotten center. Brody Cooper chased girls like trading cards.
"You must have known where to start," Leah said once over cheap coffee.
"Memory," I said. "And someone gave me back a shot. I will not watch them laugh at my family again."
Leah grinned. "Then let's make them regret breathing."
We started small: rumors turned into evidence. Brody's petty games were recorded; College of Records revealed a money trail; Estella found receipts that linked one of the rings' customers to a local nightclub—Candice—whose bouncer was too stupid to keep accounts straight.
At school, I played my part. I was quiet and kind in public. I fed Brody false confidences that made him stumble. I baited Colt with carefully worded compliments he couldn't refuse. I let Zoya think she had won. She never did.
"You're different now," Zoya snapped once in the hallway. "You act like everything is fine."
"Everything is fine," I said sweetly. "You should try that face sometime. It suits you."
She goaded. I answered with a smile that said more than words. Inside, I was counting down.
A month later, the first major break came: a property accident that had started Amos Fontana's business bleeding to death was linked to a competitor—Gage Gutierrez. I had sent a proof-of-transaction to my stepfather in a secure envelope. Gage's men were arrogant; they didn't see the trap until officers showed up. It was a small win, but it saved Amos a company, and for the first time since I woke, my family could breathe.
We turned our attention to the Parlor. Estella, who had been coy and cold toward me at first, took another look at the arranged address I fed her—an unmarked building by Maple Street that hid a red gate and an elevator that stopped at a floor that didn't exist on ordinary blueprints. Her eyes went hard when I told her the room numbers.
"Do you have any idea what you're saying?" she hissed, tapping ashes into a saucer.
"I do," I said. "Doesn't mean we won't do it."
Leah and I met with Cameron Rahman, a police captain who didn't care about politics as much as he cared about getting men who hide behind money into cages. He'd been hunting a lead that was always one step behind a lid. I handed him maps, names, audio snippets. He raised an eyebrow.
"This is dangerous. If you want to burn the Parlor, people will die," he warned.
"They may already be dead," I whispered. "Help me make sure they're alive first."
And so the plan started like a clock. We fed deputy threads to rival families, leaked scandals to the right journalists, and created pressure on Viktor Allison. We nudged the city to look. Esther Chapman had connections who could press for divorce and division in the Rasmussen household—an act that would tear Zander into pieces.
"Why the Rasmussen attack?" Leah asked one night.
"Because Zander is the greedy heart," I said. "Make him desperate and he'll make mistakes. Make him make mistakes and his world will crumble."
"Do you ever sleep?" she asked.
"Not if they're awake," I answered.
At the school, Zoya grew paranoid. Her smile shrank sometimes, flash-quick, like a screen glitch. Her allies deserted her. Brody got caught in his own lies and was suspended. Colt's father's business became a scandal and left him jobless and petty. Gavin kept his head down and kept first place. That's what he did—he wore kindness like armor and brilliance like a shield. I watched him, and every time his shoulders relaxed, I felt the traveler shrink.
Still, the Parlor was the breeder of nightmares. The night we moved in to rescue girls, it wasn't just police lodging a plan; it was me and Leah and Isabel and the tiny carved notes beneath the bed slats—the kind of instructions only a child would leave to keep another child alive.
"12:00 to 13:00—they say it's feeding time," little notes read.
"Hide the water in the mouth, it'll be put into the drink. Do not drink it all."
"Don't light the incense. Wet it."
The notes were childish and brilliant. Many had been written by one girl, a memory the city had forgotten—her name was the one we would honor: the girl carved into Isabel's memory. We named her in whispers: the one who had taught others how to survive. She was gone, but the words remained like a map.
On the night the raid happened, I let them think I had been drugged. I let Harrison Ash's crew move me like a parcel. I was supposed to be the bait; the police would roll in. I lay in a bath that smelled of jasmine and talc, listening to the men outside laugh.
"She's pretty," Harrison murmured. "Tonight she'll learn her place."
He doesn't know the meaning of the word "place." I know now that place is choice. I chose to act.
I snapped a needle into Harrison's neck when he leaned over me to scold as if I were a badly behaved toy. He fell with a wet, surprised sound. I opened doors. Babies and children and girls pressed against me and whispered with broken-thin voices: "Is it you? Are we out?"
"Shh," I told them. "Follow my lead."
I found the little girl under the bed with the bell-strings on her wrists. "Did you find the key?" she mouthed.
"I found it months ago," I lied, because it was true in a way. I had everything now, and the police streamed through the corridor like light finding cracks. We moved like ghosts.
We left with girls held to our chest. The Parlor's bosses were stupid with terror. Viktor tried to burn the place while the daughters left; Harrison Ash shoved him, and in the chaos a fire alarm bellowed and sirens came that weren't his to control.
The press arrived. The world watched with quiet, shocked mouths as the police pulled men out in cuffs. They dragged Harrison Ash in front of cameras and handcuffed him. He was small and pale and had been a prince in an ugly court; now he was a prince of nothing.
Viktor's fall was the start.
But Zoya—she remained a problem of a different kind. She wasn't a trafficker. She'd used the Parlor as a playground, but she had also been the engine in the schoolyard. Her cruelty was softer, chiselled into the casual cruelty reserved for girls who thought they owned people's lives.
"Why did you pick us?" I asked her when I forced a confrontation in the light-and-noise of a school assembly the week after the Parlor arrests.
"You used to look like me, didn't you?" she sneered. "You think you're better now?"
"No," I said. "I know better. I know what you did."
The auditorium was full. A hundred faces. Teachers. Parents. Cameras from local news. The principal had, curiously, allowed my request to speak.
"Everyone," I said into the microphone, voice steady. "You watched what some men did. You helped them by looking away. But what matters is not only them. It's who enabled them. It's who flattered them."
Zoya's mouth was a thin line. "What are you talking about, Emerson?"
"Your lies," I said. "You tore at Gavin's reputation, at my family. You recruited boys. You used a girl's death like a badge."
"You're insane," she spat.
"This is not about revenge," I told the room. "This is about showing you how the cruelty operates. Listen."
I played recordings. "Zoya and I discussed how to get Brody's attention," I read from a file. "Here is a clip of Zoya laughing while planning to spread a rumor."
The auditorium hummed. Phones bloomed with light. The audience turned their faces like flowers at the sound of rain.
"Why should I care about rumors?" a woman in the third row cried.
"Because rumors are an engine," I said. "They roar into friendships and grind them to dust."
Zoya stood. She tried to regain control.
"You're twisting things," she cried. "I'm the victim—"
At that, Leah stood.
"You're a parasite," Leah said, her voice like a blade. "You thought you could take our lives for sport."
"How dare you," Zoya screamed. "How dare—"
"Don't," I told her. "Just listen."
"She took my friend, too," someone else from the audience said. "My daughter had a crush on Brody. After she left school, she... she never came back."
The crowd shifted. Zoya's eyes darted. She could feel the room closing.
I had the police chief open a sealed file. It was enough to show how Zoya had been communicating with Viktor's circle. Evidence isn't always nails and cameras; sometimes it's the social web, the buttons you press. Zoya's expression changed across a spectrum: arrogant, smug, then frightened, then a small animal that realizes it has been enclosed.
"This ends," I said. "Not because I want to hurt you—" I stopped. I had wanted that once. "It ends because you don't get to keep hurting people."
They removed Zoya then, but not privately. The school had already documented enough to suspend her; parents recorded everything. The press took over and asked the questions I'd long wanted to say. Her support evaporated.
But the larger, more delicious punishment—the public downfall of Viktor Allison, Harrison Ash, and Zander Rasmussen—was planned for the company's annual gala. The city was full of cameras. The shareholders were all there, champagne in trembling hands. I was allowed because my stepfather insisted on attending; he was also one of Viktor's business rivals.
"Tonight," I whispered to Leah, "we will not only lock a gate. We will blow the gate open."
The gala was the right stage: affluent faces, speeches about philanthropy, a band on a stage that pretended to play. Viktor sneered down from the dais; he was confident as kings are confident before the guillotine.
Cameron Rahman and his team had been patient. They had tangible evidence: transaction logs, logs of men who visited The Parlor, witnesses who had been bought their silence and then turned. Estella delayed her move until the divorce papers were public, which made Zander rush to save face.
"Do we really do it here?" Leah asked, fingers tapping her champagne flute.
"Yes," I answered. "Public kills arrogance. Arrogance doesn't survive when the people who applauded you stand and say they've been betrayed."
I walked up when Viktor adjusted his cufflinks and spoke of "responsibility." I took the microphone off the table.
"Do you remember the little carved notes, Mr. Allison?" I asked, voice clear.
He turned, annoyed. "Who gave you access—"
"I did," I said. "And the police. And a girl who hid under a bed and scratched the words. She taught us how to survive. She is gone, but her words are not."
Cameras pivoted. The room went rigid.
"Your clients," Cameron Rahman announced, stepping forward in a police uniform that didn't belong in a ballroom, "include some of the city's most public figures. We are executing multiple arrests tonight."
"That's preposterous!" Viktor cried, but the room had shifted. Phones rose and the audience stopped being an audience and became a jury.
Zander Rasmussen—whose luxury watch had always told him the hour of someone else's subservience—was called out. His face drained. He stood, blustering.
"You're making a mistake," he said, voice breaking.
"We are not," I said. "Do you know what it's like to hold the hand of a child and listen to her carved instructions to survive? Do you know what's it like to be the sister who watches?"
Zander's posture crumpled like paper. The crowd watched a man become a rumor.
Harrison was taken at the edge of the stage with a shaking script in his pocket. Brody was dragged out in cufflinks and schoolboy swagger that looked ridiculous in the glare of cameras.
The punishment scene lasted a long time. Not because it was violent, but because arrogance is a performance and audiences relish the collapse of a performance. It didn't go the way of a lynching; it was legal, loud, and public. The police read their warrants. The victims spoke into microphones—some small, some shaking—and named the men who had thought themselves above consequence.
I watched Viktor's face change: from entitlement to disbelief, to fury, to denial, to the sudden, terrible slippage that comes when a man realizes his banked respect is worthless. He stammered.
"No—this is—false," he said. "You're colluding."
"You're in handcuffs," someone snapped. The reporters applauded like they'd been delivered a feast.
Viktor's voice cracked. He stared at me, then at the crowd, then lowered his head like a man hit blind by truth. He tried to deny, to accuse. He begged for privacy. He bartered. He tried to buy silence.
"Remember those girls," one mother shouted. "You ate their lives like dessert and then pretended you were charitable."
The room reacted with emotion—a lattice of gasps and camera flashes. Some people whispered, some stood and left, some wept. People took videos. A father fell to his knees and hugged his daughter. A woman hammered a walking cane into the table and laughed until she cried.
Harrison at first looked like he would fight; then he realized there was nowhere to throw his pride away. He watched as men he thought untouchable were taken away. He went through denial, fury, pleading, collapsing to the ground and later asking for mercy. The cameras caught every face, every change. It was not a savage scene; it was a slowly collapsing building and we were all watching it fall apart.
Zander tried to call his connections. They didn't answer. His eyes, once sharp, flooded and blurred; he was dragged past the buffet table, and a dozen people's faces registered the moment they'd been close to a monster. Someone in the crowd screamed "Rotten!" and a hundred heads echoed it.
In the middle of the collapse, Zoya Ferrari walked in—she had been summoned by the men who wanted to buy back their image—and stood on the fringe of the room with the flimsy air of someone who didn't yet understand she had been replaced. She saw Viktor in cuffs and she lost the last of the small cruelty she'd held.
"You don't understand," she whispered to me.
"You understood this well enough to hurt us," I replied.
She began a shrill litany: "You never forgave me. You stole my life back. You set me up."
"All I did was take back what you stole," I said. "You made choices. You hurt people."
Zoya's face moved through disbelief and then panic. She lunged at me. Security pushed her down. She began to shout things about high places and "they'll get you back" and other frightened, childish things.
"Stop," I said. "How does it feel, to be watched by the world you used to watch?" My voice was small, but it cut clear.
She was dragged away. The last I heard of her was a small scream and then the locking of doors. For a while she was in humiliation and in public shame and in a public hearing we had arranged to let people watch the truth come out. That was the essential punishment—unmasking the pretense in front of everyone she'd once amused herself with. Cameras caught the slow changes across her features: elation—> suspicion—> anger—> denial—> broken pleading. People recorded, some applauded, some recorded for evidence. It was exacting, and necessary.
Viktor's sentence was the legal one; the Gala had become the stage for moral justice. He tried to bargain; he pleaded. He was led off in public, his empire evaporating in hours.
But the punishment scene that mattered most to me wasn't just the Gala. It was when Brody—who had spread lies that hurt a quiet girl so badly she left town forever—was confronted by that girl's mother in the school cafeteria in front of the entire campus.
"Do you remember her?" the woman asked, calm as a courtroom. Brody's mouth twisted. "You said she was worthless."
He turned red. "I— I didn't mean—"
"Did you ever try to help?" the mother asked.
"I told the truth," he stammered.
The truth is not what he told. People gathered. The boys who had cheered him now flinched. Brody's entire persona fractured like a cheap mug. He knelt and tried to beg; students filmed. The humiliation was a slow burn: he lost privilege, lost friends, and his father got a call from an investor that ended their plan to keep him in the family business.
Each bad man had a different downfall. Viktor went to jail; Harrison to juvenile detention and then a worse kind of exile; Zander Rasmussen's reputation was shredded and his house foreclosed by companies that didn't want the smell of him; Zoya was cast into legal custody and social death, her friends deserting her in real-time. Brody was stripped of adolescent privileges and left to rot in the school he had once ruled.
Each mattered. Each reaction was different. The crowd's reactions varied: cameras, phone videos, shocked silence, applause, disgust, tears, people recording to remember. Some stood and cheered as if it were a play; some quietly turned away.
I felt nothing triumphant. The public punishments were necessary, surgical in a way. They hurt the guilty where they already lived—among crowds that had cheered them. That kind of exposure is worse than any private beating.
After the fall, life resembled something that could be rebuilt.
Monica slept easier. Amos started the slow process of repairing his company. Gavin—Gavin gave me a look one afternoon that said everything without words: you did this. I gave him a small, foolish smile and a can of orange candy.
"You can't do this again," he said once, late at night.
"I won't need to," I answered. "Not like before."
The guardian whispered: your debt is paid, but remember: darkness does not vanish entirely. It just shifts. The chance to be safe had been given to me by a boy who had given up his luck—Gavin had not known the meaning of "luck" the way I did then. He had given his protection away in another life. He was the one who had made the bargain for me to have another chance. I learned that the gifts people give you, freely or unknowingly, are more than kindness. They are currency.
"You should go home," I told Gavin the day the news cycles cooled.
He hugged me. He smelled like summer and homework. "You did what you needed to do."
We buried the dead in small ways: memorials, small poems, and by making sure the rescued girls could sleep in beds that belonged to no man but them. We visited Isabel and her wide quiet eyes. We took care of the little girl from the cabinet: she laughed about bells, and once whispered, "Small smile," pointing to the tiny fake smile scratched in the wood under a bed.
"She left us a map," the girl said.
"She did," I answered.
The city punished many men. The law filed charges. The court process was slow and mundane, but the public humiliation had already done what it could: it removed the pretense. And for those who had truly suffered—people like Eleanor—there were quiet apologies long overdue. I couldn't bring back every friend. Some graves would never be reopened. But we had kept others alive.
One night, after everything had calmed, I found myself walking beside the old stream of Vale Hall, where the bridge was polished by a thousand footprints. Gavin walked with me, and the sky was a spilled bowl of slow stars.
"Did you ever think you'd be the kind of person who'd fix things?" he asked, plucking a leaf and rolling it between fingers.
"No," I said. "I thought I'd be the kind of person who obeys the world."
"Well," he smiled, "you do both."
I stopped and touched my palm, where once another had lived. "People think something dramatic is revenge," I said slowly. "But the real thing is repair."
He looked at me, eyes bright. "You repaired a lot."
We stood on the bridge and didn't speak for a long time.
When we did, I held a small scrap of wood in my hand—the board Isabel had shown me when she'd been rescued. Under it was a little drawing of a smiley face, scratched in a child's hand.
I slid it into my pocket.
At the end, when headlines quieted and the arrests entered the files, when school resumed and quiet replaced the echo of police boots, I learned a secret the guardian had hinted at: someone in the dark had sacrificed his fortune, his luck to give me a chance.
There is a moment in every life you cannot trade back—once you see what people are capable of, you have to choose what you'll be capable of in response. I chose to be someone who wouldn't let pain be an art.
The last thing I remember before sleep takes me sometimes is that small carved smile under the bed.
A child's doodle to say: go—do right—and don't look back.
The End
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