Sweet Romance14 min read
Not Your Pawn: A Second Chance at Everything
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I died in a lake with the taste of salt and metal in my mouth, and the last thing I remember was Lincoln Carter saying, "You're disgusting, Collins — you don't love yourself." Then I floated above the water and watched my whole life play like a cruel movie.
"I gave them everything," he had said, light as a feather. "Why would I waste a future on someone who doesn't value herself?"
I watched him at the funeral acting like a gentle, broken boyfriend. I watched my grandmother, Adelaide Dunn, march into the school with a cloth banner in one hand and a demand in the other, and then walk out with a ten-thousand-dollar check. I watched him cry to anyone who would listen, and be promised everything—recommendations, favors, protection. I watched myself become the dramatic headline of other people's lives until the crowd forgot the face in the lake.
A voice I had heard a thousand times in the months I hovered—"Stupid,"—came instead from Vaughn Roux every time he passed my favorite bench and tossed the word at me like a flat stone.
"Stupid," he would say, and leave.
I thought I would wait for the ferryman. I thought maybe the afterlife had rules. Instead, three months after sinking, a shove from a current sent me back. It felt like being pressed into warm sand and then opening my eyes into the same plastic chair in Ms. Zimmermann's class where time had frozen.
"Collins Hansen, don't be so afraid. You're still top in the grade. 211 is still within reach," the teacher—Cabot Zimmermann—said, thinking he was reassuring me.
I kept my eyes closed. "I know," I whispered, and my breath sounded huge in the small room.
Someone laughed behind me. "Ms. Zimmermann, Collins isn't afraid of failing. She’s afraid she won't get sold."
A name—Saga Guerin—smirked like she had rehearsed that line for years. The classroom exploded with laughter. I felt my temple pulse. I opened my eyes and spoke.
"I'm not sold."
Saga's face flushed. "Who are you calling sold?"
"Whoever stands up," I said. "Whoever thinks life is a table and they can put a price on people."
"You—" Saga got to her feet. "Don't you dare."
"Then stand up, Saga," I said. "If you want to know who 'sold' themselves, look at the girl who married a life she didn't choose."
"You shut your mouth—"
She grabbed a cup and threw it. It hit her friend instead, spraying blood across the desk. The class fell silent. A warm drop hit my hand. For the first time since waking up, the sensation made the whole thing feel real.
Vaughn Roux watched from the back. He always did, like a storm that hadn't decided whether to rain.
"Why didn't you tell me to stop?" I asked him later, on the lake path, when he came to scowl and then lean against a tree like it was his throne.
"Because you liked drama," he said, smoking. "Because you didn't need saving then. Why would I waste breath?"
I met his eyes. "I didn't like drama. I just survived it."
He did not laugh. "Come to the net café with me," he said. "You owe me for that time I told everyone to leave your book alone."
"Why would I go with you?" I asked.
"Because," he said simply, "you look like you could use a seat where people don't stare."
I went.
The net café was loud, cheap lights buzzing like neon bees. I bought food for the boy who called himself my boyfriend—Lincoln—and then walked back with a tray. On my way, I bumped into Vaughn and his crew. One of the kids with green hair shoved my shoulder.
"What's your problem?" he barked.
"What does it look like?" I said.
Vaughn stepped between us. He didn't hit the boy; he didn't need to. He looked at the crowd and called out in a voice that made the room fall into a hush.
"Which one of you thinks it's okay to touch someone without asking?"
Someone snickered.
"Shut up," Vaughn said. "You think it's a joke? You think you can treat people like things because you have no future? You all are pathetic."
Then he did something I never expected.
He pushed the door open, and suddenly a kid from another school—the thirteen—burst in holding a girl's hand, his face red. He pinched and shoved, and the café erupted.
I stayed in the doorway, small and careful. I had spent months floating and witnessing the worst of people. Now I could act. Before I could decide what to do, I saw photographs flash across a laptop screen—pictures of a boy's hand on a girl's waist in the café, a phone video of a side-pocket mirror, snapshots of him laughing as other girls looked away.
The photos were mine. I had taken them when I used to think I could trust.
I had posted them, anonymously, into the school's forum before buying anyone's dinner, because I had expected the worst and wanted to stop it. In the photos, Lincoln Carter looked like a smiling thief.
The thirteen's leader slapped the boy—Lincoln—once, then twice. "Tell me it's not you," he hissed.
Lincoln's face went white. "It's not me," he said.
"Isn't he?" the thirteen demanded, scrolling.
The crowd clustered. Someone shouted, "Is that the boy who dated Collins?"
More people pulled out phones. The café turned into a theater.
"Is it you?" the thirteen barked.
Lincoln stammered. "It—it's a joke, it's—"
The leader of the thirteen read aloud: "He takes pictures of girls' skirts, sells them to himself for a laugh." The sentences were harder than anything I had thought to say.
Lincoln looked at me like I was supposed to be his alibi. "Collins, tell them I'm your boyfriend. Tell them I'm a good guy."
I could feel it—the old Collins would have twisted herself into knots to make him free. The dead Collins watched, hungry and cold for justice. I was different. I had seen what he did to me from the outside. The taste of water, the silence after the crowd left me. The only thing rising inside me was a clear, bright anger.
"Tell them," I said. I raised my voice. "Tell them you edited my university choice."
He blinked. "I didn't—"
"Yes, you did," I said. "You changed my application. You put me into a school far beneath my level because you wanted me to be close and controllable. You told your friends you would 'conquer' me. You called me pathetic to my face. You said you'd get me to call you my everything and then you would break me so hard you wouldn't know yourself again."
The café leaned in. I found that speaking didn't feel like an act of violence but like turning on a light.
Lincoln's smug mask cracked. "That's not—"
"Isn't it?" I pressed. "You posted your conquest online later. You pretended to care. You smiled while my life slipped. You promised my family and stole my future."
He tried to laugh. "It's not like that. You don't even remember—"
"I remember enough," I said.
The leader of the thirteen read out messages that Lincoln had sent to others: "Just make her think it's love. Then I'll decide." The messages were like cold proof, like skeletons pulled into the daylight.
Lincoln's mouth moved on its own. "You can't prove that. That's slander."
Vaughn stepped forward. He didn't shout. He didn't need to. His presence was like a verdict.
"You're a liar," Vaughn said. "And you took something from her that you can't give back."
For the first time, Lincoln's face showed fear.
"Collins," he begged, voice cracking, "people will laugh. They'll say you lied for attention."
"Go on," I said. "Let them say it."
Phones started to point. Someone recorded with trembling hands. A girl I recognized—Veronica Parker—put a hand to her mouth.
"What did you say to her?" Veronica asked.
"I loved her," Lincoln said. He sounded desperate.
"Then why didn't you fight when they pushed her book?" someone shouted. "Why didn't you stop them?"
He opened his mouth but no sound came.
"How much did you get promised for silencing her family?" Saga said, her voice poisoned.
Lincoln's jaw clenched. "I didn't—"
A chorus of people came forward with memory and proof. A boy, George Guzman, lifted his wrist and showed a message where Lincoln had bragged. A teacher who had watched said, "We asked, and he lied."
Lincoln’s face began to crumple. He sobbed, loudly now. "I'm sorry. I didn't know—"
"Know what?" I asked. "Know how it tastes?"
He looked like a child who had been found under a table with the cookie jar emptied. He tried to step toward me, like a penitent, but someone shouted, "Don't touch her!" and hands rose.
The thirteen's leader pushed Lincoln to his knees. "Get on your knees and say what you did."
He did. He said, "I changed the form. I wanted her to be mine. I posted the pictures. I lied."
The auditorium of the café had filled into a larger crowd. Someone shouted, "Expose him!" and the forum thread lit up with unread comments, screenshots, and the word "disgusting."
I stood there, watching as the person who had haunted my last months on Earth shrank into a heap of pleading.
"No," Lincoln said suddenly, lifting his face, voice raw. "I didn't mean for her to die. I didn't mean—"
Everyone in the room heard the word. Someone laughed. "You didn't mean for her to drown? What was the plan then? To ruin her life and keep the body for later?"
He started to crumble, eyes flicking to every face he had toyed with. "Please," he begged. "I'm sorry. Please. I can fix it. I'll tell them I lied. I'll switch my major. I'll—"
"Get up," I said.
He obeyed like a puppet. He looked at me only once and saw no softness. The weight of three months of watching everything and feeling nothing meant I had no mercy left for him.
"Everyone," I said, and my voice shook. "He changed my life. He told lies to my grandmother so she would choose money over my future. He pretended to love me. He posted things about girls he wanted to break. He told people to pity him and he played at grief while he celebrated with the girl he left me for. He is a liar, a coward, and a thief. He stole my future."
Faces turned, some with anger, some with disbelief. People recorded and typed; the thread in the forum overflowed with new entries—screenshots, accusations—like a sudden ripple across a dark lake.
Lincoln dropped to his knees again, crying. "I'll go, I'll leave town. I'm sorry. Please—"
"Sorry is nothing," said Jefferson—no, George Guzman—"you should watch your future burn, and you will."
He did.
They filmed him being walked out in the bright light. Teachers called his parents. Students spat words that would not leave for a long time. The thirteen’s leader took his phone and posted another picture. The comments were terrible and cleansing.
At one point he looked up, crowed like a wounded animal, and tried to twist the story—"She pushed me," he shouted—"She wanted attention." He staggered, denying, then clung to a final lie.
"You're going to lose everything," someone shouted. "You'll have to leave school. Your scholarship is gone."
"Please—" he begged again.
"Why didn't you think you'd be punished?" Vaughn asked quietly.
He could only shake.
When they finally dragged him out, the crowd did not cheer. They recorded, they whispered, they judged, and they watched a boy who had once played at being golden become a ruin in public. He staggered into the sunlight and the world took a long time to close the door behind him.
Later, the school principal, Benito Clark, called an assembly and read out the school's policy—clarity and judgment, consequences for violations. Messages flew through group chats. Anonymity slipped into evidence. People spoke to each other, furious and relieved in turns.
But Lincoln's collapse was not a private thing. The forum exploded. Screenshots made the rounds to every group. His faces were shared; his betrayal had no stage to hide on. He went from being "Lincoln Carter, someone's boyfriend" to a public shame.
He tried to write posts and apologies. People posted receipts. His thread had people spitting questions like "How could you?" "Did you think you were free?" "Why did you touch her?" and "If you loved her, why?" He begged for forgiveness in private messages; they were copied and pasted across channels, mocking the sincerity of them.
He lost the safe corners of a world he had assumed would protect him. He tried to apologize to my grandmother and she laughed. People who had once pitied him hissed.
When the dust settled, he had been screamed at, hit, shunned, and followed. A video of him standing in the rain with his hands over his face went viral among the students. He called a local television reporter, who asked him the same question again and again, forcing the lie out of him until he could not speak.
The process took weeks. He lost his reputation, his friends, and a lot of promises he had been given. Some teachers quietly documented, filed it away, and used it to protect others.
He ended up at the edge of our town with a face that looked like someone who had been too soft to be a man. He was not arrested, not formally punished by the law—none of that was the point. He was seen. He was known. He had to see himself become small in the eyes of many people he had thought would save him.
While the world watched him fail, I began to rebuild.
I took the materials that Alaric Lopez lent me. He was brilliant and awkward, the kind of person who had always been a step ahead in competitions. We rearranged math problems until they looked like clean machinery. We rehearsed proofs until they fit like a glove. He laughed a lot at my old jokes and looked pleased when I corrected him. He taught me what he could; he told me to speak with a clean mind and a clear plan.
Vaughn changed too. He tidied his hair. He put on straight clothes I sometimes liked, and he stopped saying "stupid" in the same way. He started to say, "You can do it," and sometimes left me a bottle of soda on the table with a note: "Go get it."
"Why do you care?" I asked once.
He shrugged, pretending he did not care. "Because someone irritated me enough to fight for."
"Because I fell in a lake and came back?" I teased.
He gave me a look like he could swallow a lake. "Because you're stubborn. Because you're going to be dangerous."
We built a study group like a fortress. Vaughn turned his gang into a "study squad" and posted rules—no phones during drills, no leaving without finishing a practice test, no excuses. Saga Guerin and Veronica Parker, and even some students I had once seen as enemies, came. The room was noisy. It was alive. It was mine.
Months went by like workdays in a foundry. We ran mock tests, dissected past papers, and learned to translate pressure into method. I learned not to waste my tears on things I couldn't change. When grief came, I'd squeeze a pen until my knuckles ached and write it into solutions.
People noticed.
Cabot Zimmermann would peek into the room and smile like someone who had remembered why he chose to teach. Benito Clark would announce school competitions and surprise us with banners. Alaric arranged extra problems, Vaughn scheduled drills, and I took every test like I had a debt to pay—except that the debt now read like a promise: to myself.
I raised my hand in class in ways I hadn't before. I corrected the teacher's phrasing when I saw an easier path. I explained with patience instead of fear.
"You're different," Saga said, one day, face softer. "I was mean, and I am sorry."
"Apology accepted," I said. "You can join our group if you show up and try."
She blinked. "Really?"
"Really," I said.
Her smile was small. "Thank you."
The months turned into red-marked calendars, into the smell of mushrooms in the little kitchen where I had learned to survive. I saved money by collecting empty bottles, by hawking old books, by tutoring kids for hour wages, and by learning to keep my head down when the house was a battlefield.
Adelaide Dunn still loved to count and trade favors, but when I told her I would help with the debt she had acquired—twenty thousand in silly loans she forgot to read—she tried to charm me. I smiled and gave her a plan: pay it herself with help from the community. She blustered. I moved to the school dorm.
In the dorm I slept on a wire bed and woke to alarm clocks that smelled of detergent. My life tightened into schedules and formulas and small mercies. Vaughn would drag a chair into the hallway to keep me company and then scowl when I smiled at him for nothing.
"You promised," he said one evening, offering me a steaming fried pancake and two eggs. "You never eat right. You promised you'd come here."
"Promise what?" I asked.
He looked at my hands, then away. "Promise to be here. Promise you won't leave again."
"That's happening anyway," I said. "I'm not going back."
"Good," he said.
We studied late, slept little, and argued about math like two old soldiers. When it came time for the major exam, I did the thing I'd never done: I wrote as if a future me was reading the lines and smiling back.
The test was different this time. The questions were not the same as my first life. I answered with a steadiness that surprised me. When the final bell rang, I felt like a person who had completed a long shift and now had to wait to see if the work had paid.
The results came like thunder. We had prepared for all their little storms, and then the sky opened.
I was first in the school. I was second in the district. I was offered a chance to apply to the best programs. Offers came unexpectedly: letters, phone calls, agents of college bureaucracies who said, "You're remarkable."
I chose carefully. I chose a path that matched my stubborn heart and my appetite for questions—because I wanted to be the one who picked what she loved, not what anyone else decided for me.
"Why not Tsinghua?" Alaric asked, stunned when I announced my choice.
"Because I want to study where my subject is stronger," I said. "Because I want a future that looks like me."
Vaughn snorted. "So boringly principled."
"What's wrong with boring?" I said.
He laughed, and in his laughter I heard something like pride.
The day I left, Adelaide tried to say something about "family duty" and "pay your debts." I looked her in the eye and told her the terms.
"You raised a thief and I will not be your second robbery," I said. "I will send you money for the debt you took on. You will be human to me again only when you stop pretending my life belongs to you."
Her face went red and then white. She never understood dignity because she had made a business of trading mine. She took the transfer grudgingly, and then she sat in the denial of it like a child who had lost a toy.
I walked away without looking back.
On campus, everything smelled like possibility. Alaric whispered solutions in the margins of old books. Vaughn stood at the gates like a ridiculous tower, waving as if to make sure I got through. We promised to keep each other honest. We promised to be men and women who chose.
When my birthday came the next year, Vaughn stood in the doorway of my small rented room with a cake shaped like a gaming chair—a joke we'd made months ago.
"I promised you'd eat it," he said, embarrassed and delighted.
I laughed until I cried and then kissed his forehead. He was stunned, and then he pushed me gently away, saying, "Not fair, you stole my moment."
"Then do it right," I said. "Say what you want before I die of embarrassment."
He straightened, took a deep breath and then did something neither of us expected. He got down on one knee, not because of the old stories, but because he had made a habit of doing the brave thing lately.
"Collins Hansen," he said, voice raw. "I don't have lines written. I don't have a perfect future. I have a stubbornness like yours and a terrible past. I want a future not because of you, but with you. Will you let me be beside you?"
For the first time in my life, I wanted to be chosen because of who I was.
"Yes," I said. "But you must ask properly on my birthday."
He pretended to be annoyed. "That's what I'm doing, idiot."
We both laughed. The cake was ridiculous, sweet, and unbearably small. We ate it anyway.
People who had hurt me tried to come back with apologies. Lincoln posted videos of himself in rain trying to "learn." Adelaide sent a string of messages. My brother, Dempsey Carpenter, emailed once asking for money and then stopped when he didn't get it.
I did not allow them back easily. I had seen what mercy does to a person who uses it like a leash. Instead, I let them see what their choices had cost them: I refused to be their backup plan.
I also learned the art of forgiving and not forgetting. I forgave myself for the times I had been too soft and for the nights I had surrendered to the water. I forgave myself because I had been hard-wired to survive in whatever way the world had taught me. Forgiveness did not mean returning, it meant setting the boundary and holding to it.
Years later, when I walked back to the lake, Vaughn at my side, he said, "You did this. You turned a ghost into a school with friends."
"I had help," I said.
"But you made the order," Vaughn said. "You made the plan."
We stood at the lake and listened to the water. A small bird landed on the rail and began to wash its wings. There was a sound like a second chance.
I took a plastic bottle from my bag and opened it before he could ask. "For old times," I said, and handed it to him.
He laughed and twisted the cap. "You and your sodas."
"One day," I said, thinking of the small plastic bottle I had given him in the net café and how he had drank and then left a half-empty can on the desk like a talisman, "I'll teach you to choose the little things that make home."
He kissed my forehead and said, "Then don't forget to drink yours."
We watched the water move. The sun slid across the surface in hard, bright beats. The lake had once taken everything from me; now I stood at its edge like a woman who had closed accounts and opened new ones.
"Remember," Vaughn murmured, "you are not the girl who drowned."
"And you're not the boy who spat the word 'stupid' at me," I said.
He grinned wickedly. "I retired from insult."
"Good," I said, smiling back. "Your retirement pay better be generous."
We laughed. In my pocket, there was a small piece of plastic: a student ID, a plane ticket to real study, and a memory of a Coke bottle that had been given and returned a thousand times.
And that is the thing I kept: the Coke bottle in the net café, the simple, small kindnesses. They were the only things I wanted to carry forward. I had crossed a lake, crossed a life, and crossed back to where I had power.
"Ready?" Vaughn asked.
"Ready," I said.
We walked away from the lake together.
The End
— Thank you for reading —