Sweet Romance16 min read
The Lottery That Broke Us and the Truth That Fixed Me
ButterPicks13 views
I was halfway through my tray when Drew's phone lit up and he launched himself out of his seat like he'd found a treasure.
"Estrella, I won!" he shouted, cheeks flushed in that silly, boyish way that used to make me laugh.
"Won what? The lottery?" I pretended to be excited. "How much?"
"It's rarer than the lottery!" He shoved the phone at me, grinning in a way I hadn't seen aimed at me for months.
He showed me a post—Lexi Kiselev had tweeted a giveaway for a lucky fan to be her boyfriend for a month. Her social feed had been brimming with heartbreak posts for days; she'd announced a breakup, and her fans were frenzied. Drew pointed to the messages on his screen. "She picked me. She picked me, Estrella."
"You can't be serious." I couldn't help the disbelief. "Lexi Kiselev? Our Lexi? The campus goddess?"
"Yeah." Drew's voice was giddy, full of that small, reckless pride he always had when something made him the center of attention. "She said she wanted someone to be a public boyfriend for a month, someone normal. I messaged her because—well, because it's Lexi. And she replied. She wants me."
"I thought you only looked at that stuff from afar," I said, but my tone was softer than I meant. "You knew I liked her posts."
He nudged me, delighted. "Estrella, you of all people know: if the universe hands you a chance, you take it. It's one month. One little month."
I stared into his eyes. "You do remember I exist, right? Your girlfriend exists, Drew."
He scratched his head, then gave me that pathetic, puppy look that always worked. "Right, right. You said yes to my basketball obsession, right? You can do this for me."
"You're asking me to let you be someone else's for a month," I said slowly. "Is this—some kind of prank?"
He took my hand like we were still small kids caught doing something wrong and begged, "Please, Estrella. Please let me. It'll be fun. And besides—my hero, my one-in-a-million chance. You'd do it for me, right?"
He used one of my weaknesses—my tendency to fall for the scene of grand, silly gestures. He knew which buttons to press. I hesitated and then, because every small promise he made had kept me for a few years, I mouthed, "Fine."
That evening Lexi announced it on her feed with a single picture of two hands intertwined, no faces. "Reward issued," she wrote. "My boyfriend, come claim me."
Drew posted the same picture to his circle with a caption that sounded like a kid who'd eaten too much sugar. "I hit the jackpot. Me and the goddess. Who's jealous?"
People asked, "What about Estella?" but he didn't reply. I watched the comments multiply, watched the likes and the hearts, and felt a coldness I'm still learning to name.
"You okay?" he asked that night when I called him after ignoring his messages for hours.
"It looks like you are," I said. "You look... happy."
"Dude, she smells like jasmine," he said without waiting. "You should have seen her—she held my hand, Estrella. Her skin is so soft."
"Why did you post the photo?" I asked. "Why put our thing out there like it's nothing?"
"It was for the show," he answered, too quickly. "She told me she doesn't want drama. She said she wouldn't mess with what you two have. She just needed someone normal to look like the perfect boyfriend."
"You mean you 'needed' the attention," I said, because that was what it looked like. "Drew, you're my boyfriend. How can you be okay being the fake boyfriend of the campus idol while I sit and look?"
He sounded hurt when he answered. "Estrella, it's only a month. I promise you—my heart, my body, my Wi-Fi password—are all yours. She said it's okay, she knows."
"Okay," I said, and I tried to steady my voice. "If you're sure this is acting."
"You'll see," he promised. "She even wants you to come have dinner with us tomorrow. She said it would be nice if her boyfriend's girlfriend was cool about it."
I went to dinner the next day. Lexi was blindingly beautiful in person—an aura as natural as the sunlight that fell on her sleeve. She surprised me with a hug at the door and called me "so cute." Everything about her was photogenic.
"You're Estrella?" she asked, like meeting characters in a novel.
"Yes." I tried to smile genuinely. Her voice was softer than her public persona. "Nice to meet you."
Her kindness hit a nerve in me. Maybe that was part of what made it worse—her warmth was real enough that my anger felt petty. She told me she only wanted to make her ex jealous, to test a point, to get him back. "I didn't want it to hurt you," she said, and I wanted to believe her. Drew sat next to her like a child who had been given the tallest slice of cake.
"Sit inside, Estrella, you can take photos for us," Drew said, guiding me away as if the world wasn't watching.
I took their picture. At the click, Lexi's head turned just so and she almost, for a second, touched Drew as if their cheeks might meet. My chest clenched.
"Estrella, are you alright?" she asked, eyes soft with concern.
"Yes," I lied.
Over the next weeks the "act" became more than an act. Drew brought Lexi breakfast, attended her small events, pushed her into games, stayed close as if everything was natural. He posted their moments: climbing hills, library study dates, late-night gaming streams where he celebrated her victories. He used the tone he never used for me—the adoring, the playful, the proud.
"He's changed," I told my roommate Guadalupe Scott, one day in our shared room, the corner lamp making everything small and private. "He was always so casual. Now he posts selfies holding her hand like it's the whole world."
Guadalupe shrugged. "Maybe he likes the attention. Maybe he likes the novelty. Guys can be idiots."
"He's not an idiot," I said.
That weekend at the amusement park, we had planned a day of childish things. I had an expectation, stupid as it sounds, that Drew would show up, clutch my hand, tell me he was done with the whole farce. He didn't. He received a call, paled, apologized, and ran off with a pretext about a project. I went on the ferris wheel with my eyes misting as the world blurred for a moment.
"Why didn't you come?" I asked him later, voice as flat as metal.
"It was nothing," he said. "Some data error in the lab."
I had learned to read him long ago. When Drew lied, his gaze darted to the bottom-left of his vision, just like anyone who'd practiced deceit badly. He was lying. That afternoon, Lexi posted a photo—one of her with a thin white scrape on her wrist, her hand resting in the crook of a darker hand wearing a watch I had bought Drew. She wrote, "You worry too much," and a slice of the last of my tolerance cracked.
"I can't pretend anymore," I typed and sent him the message that began the end. "We're done."
He called, begged. "Estrella, don't be stupid. It's all nonsense. I'm sorry."
"Sorry buys nothing now," I told him. "You lied to me. I'm not the kind of person who stays when I'm not wanted."
He went on like a small animal backed against a wall—first pleading, then pleading he didn't love Lexi, then promising the most dramatic things. In the end, he left for a week with Lexi on an unannounced trip to Hainan and never once came to explain.
Then Lexi added me on WeChat. Her messages slid between faux-innocent and sharp. "You lost him," she wrote. "You should learn to be less clingy." She told me Drew claimed I'd forced myself on him in the past, that I had told a story about him that was private. When she sent those words I broke down. She turned something that had been private between me and Drew into public mockery.
I decided not to be silent. I called Emmett Cote—the boy I'd met months before at the nursing home volunteering project. He'd been unassuming then, brilliant and kind-eyed. We had crossed paths again and he had defended me against Lexi's online barbs without knowing much. I reached him because I needed something that wasn't infatuation or comfortable complicity. I needed honesty.
"Can we meet?" I asked him. "Right now."
He found me at the back gate as if he'd been waiting for life to hand him a chance. Under the late sun his face had a kind of built-in steadiness.
"Estrella," he said, smiling. "You're wet behind the ears. You look like you need someone to tell you something absolutely ordinary and kind."
I told him everything. He listened as if each word mattered, and when I finished he put his hand on the small of my back like he had done nothing but that for years.
"I don't like Lexi," he said, blunt as a door slamming. "And I never did. I broke up with her months ago. She played me once with something called a bet and it went on. I cut it off. I won't be messed with."
"You don't even... why would a campus star waste time on that?" I asked.
He shrugged. "People like drama. People like proof they're wanted. I thought after it stopped we'd be done. But when you called me, I saw you and something got stuck."
"I don't want to fall into another mess."
"You won't," he said. "I'll show you something steadier."
Emmett was different. He began small—morning coffee, study notes, walking me back to class when the wind teased my hair. He brought me pastries that I liked and remembered my preference for lemon over berry. He didn't feel the need to post our photos. He made me feel seen with the ordinary things: he learned my timetable, he waited when my bus was late, he tutored me when I had a tough assignment.
One evening he knocked at my door, breathless. "I can't stand seeing you left alone," he said. "You're my friend—my girl, if you'll allow me to be so bold. Will you give me a chance?"
He had a quiet confidence that did not need to advertise or perform. I said yes.
When Drew resurfaced at the gate of our dorms, drunk and reckless, he lunged at me first as if he could reclaim what he had tossed. Emmett stepped in between us without flinching.
"Estrella, you okay?" Drew asked, voice thick.
"Not with you," I said.
Drew grabbed my arm. "Please. I messed up. I didn't know what I had."
Emmett's hand went around Drew's shoulder with the kind of strength that didn't yell. "This is my girlfriend," he said. "Hands off."
"What? No," Drew spat.
They fought. It wasn't graceful. It was noisy, ugly, the kind of fight two people with shared history have—familiar fists, the smell of sweaty anger. They toppled, and Emmett's head struck the edge of a stone planter. Blood steamed from a wound. I remember the sound more than the sight—Emmett gasped, then grunted.
"Get away from him!" I screamed, pushing Drew off and checking Emmett's temple. He was spattered with blood, dazed. Drew retreated, a blur of shame, rage, and foolish heroics.
We went to the hospital. Emmett's wound was stitched; he laughed to hide his nerves. Later, alone in the waiting room, he took my hands warm in his.
"You were brave," he said.
"You nearly got your head split open."
"I would do it again."
That night, while Emmett slept with his head on my lap, Drew appeared at the doorway with a small, desperate hope in his eyes.
"Estrella," he begged softly. "I didn't mean for it to go like this. I'm sorry. Give me another chance."
"What for?" I asked. "So you can run away with her again when someone else calls?"
"I'm not like that."
"Then stop proving it multiple times. Show me consistency."
He reached out and nearly touched my face. I felt nothing.
Three days later Lexi stormed back, more furious than I had ever seen. The campus had rejected the idea that someone could be above consequence forever. She started a smear campaign, but attention doesn't always mean immunity.
She came to the stairwell, eyes glassy with fury. "You think you can have him? You think you can take what is mine?" she hissed at me as I walked by.
I turned, tired. "He's not yours."
"You stole him!" she spat. "You used him as bait."
"You're the one who used people as props."
Her voice climbed into shrillness. A crowd gathered, as crowds do. Faces that had once watched her with admiration edged closer, hungry for spectacle.
And then she did the thing that broke a quiet fragility in all of us—she uncapped a bottle and flung its contents at me.
Time fractured. The liquid shimmered midair. I blinked and recoiled, but Drew moved like he had a hair-trigger. He threw himself forward and shielded me. The liquid splashed across his sleeve; some of it soaked through to his skin in a pattern that would have been ugly if not for the worse thing: Lexi's hand looked unsteady as she stood there, breathless.
We smelled acid—sharp and metallic. I screamed.
"Call security! Call an ambulance!" someone shouted.
Drew's arm smoked a little where the liquid had eaten at the fabric. He swore and gripped me. It was a terrible moment of clarity. My mind was clean and cutting: she had tried to ruin me, and Drew had taken the cost.
In the hospital Drew's arm was treated; the doctors said he was lucky. It wasn't deep enough to scar him permanently, but it left a sore memory and a bandage that became a small object I couldn't look at without thinking of that second.
Lexi was taken away by campus police. For a brief, stunned moment I thought she'd been stopped. Later, I learned that she had been sent off-campus to her family with a recommendation to take a leave of absence. She was supposed to be out of sight, but the world isn't tidy.
She returned to campus after a few months, fed up with the isolation. Her comeback post claimed grief and recovery, but the campus had changed. People who once cheered her had watched her throw vitriol, had watched her attempt to burn a person. Lives have a way of checking the price of their wagers.
That's when the punishment happened—the public, irreversible humiliation she had once tried to mete out to others, served back in full measure.
It began at a student council assembly. The dean had called it in a formal way: "Open forum—community review." The hall was full. Students packed the benches and overflowed into the aisles. Cameras—those phone cameras that never sleep—tiled faces in the crowd. Lexi sat at the center table, dressed in a plain sweater that made her look smaller than any of her glossy posts.
"Why are we here?" she asked with a brittle smile.
The dean's voice cut across like a bell. "We've called this meeting because the community must speak. There are allegations—the attempted assault, the public defamation, the chain of manipulations. Rather than let rumors float, we will present facts, testimonies, and evidence."
The first piece of evidence was a video. Someone had filmed the stairwell. The footage showed Lexi standing, bottled fluid in hand. There was even a shaky shot of the liquid catching the light. The room replayed the slow moment, the bottle arc, Drew's jump, the splash. There was no music, nothing to soften it. The auditorium swallowed the sound of whispers.
"That was our starting point," the dean explained. "But there is more." He tapped the microphone and called the campus safety officer. The officer presented an array of messages—Lexi's exchanges with a production assistant, a supplier's invoice for an abrasive solution, a string of posts where she asked someone to arrange "an unforgettable scene." The murmurs turned to a stir; I felt every head turn as if the room was a single neck.
Students who had been Lexi's closest allies that year filed forward. One by one, they told their stories. "She asked us to be part of her plan to get attention." "She told me to pick the place and time and make sure it would hurt her rival." "She said drama was necessary." Each testimony came with a face that had watched her in private; each face no longer matched the public cheerleader's image.
"Lexi," the dean said, "do you have anything to say?"
Her voice at first was a thin thread. "I—" She tried to craft the lines she used in interviews, smooth and contrite. "I was—overwhelmed. I didn't mean—"
"No," someone shouted. "You meant every word."
Another student stepped up with more than words. They had obtained lab receipts. They presented evidence that Lexi had purchased corrosive substances weeks earlier under a false name and had arranged to meet with a student who claimed he would act as the "instigator." His face blanched when cameras pinned him there. He spoke through shaking lips and admitted his role.
The more layers we peeled back, the more Lexi's performance unraveled. Her expression changed: first a flash of feigned composure, then a bloom of surprise at being stripped, then denial. "You're lying!" she barked at the students. "I didn't—this is a set-up."
"Is this not what you wrote?" another student asked, holding up what looked like a printout of a chat thread. Her mouth opened, closed, opened like a fish.
The room's reaction moved through stages. Shock into anger. The phones lit with live videos. People recorded, uploaded, and streamed the scene, and suddenly Lexi's face—once a curated image across millions of screens—was a burning thing splashed across the feeds. The comments poured faster than the dean could speak.
"I can't believe it," murmured a girl in front of me.
"She used us like props," a boy whispered, near tears.
Her supporters shrank into themselves, faces reddened with embarrassment. Hands went up—former fans, friends who felt deceived—asking for consequences. The dean listened to the students' request for accountability: suspension, public apology, undertaking community service for harm caused, formal removal from any ambassador or leadership roles.
When Lexi realized the crowd had turned, her reaction traveled fast. Her confident shoulders flinched. She tried to pivot to victimhood—"I was young; I made mistakes"—but the transcript of her messages and the receipts told a story that could not be reframed by tearful monologues.
We had to listen to Lexi's change in expression: at first smug, then faltering, then an ugly scramble into denial, and finally the breakdown. "You're all so cruel," she whispered. "You don't understand how lonely I was."
"Then you should have asked for help," a girl shot back. "You didn't—you weaponized our trust."
The punishment wasn't a single moment but a slow unwinding in public. Community leaders voted to suspend her from campus privileges for the rest of the year. The student paper printed a piece with the headline "Betrayal of Trust" and the images from the stairwell became permanent in the archive. Her sponsors—local brands who had once courted her—announced they were ending their partnerships. Friends who had once smiled at her posts deleted them and left with hollowed expressions. Social clout dried up like a bird losing a plume. The hum of likes and hearts that had once padded her days fell. Instead of followers, she had faces in a crowded room that watched her, now tiny, carefully removing her mask.
The worst moment for her was when Drew, finally sober to the truth he couldn't avoid, took the stage and told the assembly what it had been like to see her in private messages—her instructions to stage everything, the thrill she derived from causing pain cloaked as performance. His voice trembled but didn't break. He said he'd been ashamed he only had noticed after it had gone so far. He told the crowd he had been complicit through silence. He said he was sorry to Estrella.
The audible intake of breath felt like an ocean. Lexi's face crumpled. She reached for the microphone with hands that no longer had the practiced curves of command. "I—" she began.
"You used people," someone called. "You used me. You used all of us."
Her public unraveling was not cinematic; it was bureaucratic, consequence-driven, and collective. Fans recorded the admission, the shaking apology, the denial, and the final acceptance that the stage had turned.
Outside the auditorium the reactions varied. Some of her former followers argued on the steps. Some called for legal action. Others felt the moment as a lesson—that idols could be fallible, dangerously so. Cameras captured her leaving the building, shoulders hunched, head down. People in the crowd recorded her with their phones, Tessellating her every step across the web, but the tone of the clips had shifted. They weren't juicy endorsements now; they were cautionary tales.
Lexi's reaction had weathered a dramatic arc: from composure to denial to plea to a collapse into shame. The watchers had their own arc—initial curiosity, then betrayal, then eerie sympathy that comforted no one. The punitive measures were both institutional and social. The dean's suspension, the sponsors' withdrawals, the court of public opinion—these together formed a collective retribution. It was not a bloodthirsty mob, but a community holding someone accountable, and the spectacle was not revenge for its own sake but an attempt to reclaim safety and trust.
When the day ended, Drew found me in the shadow of the quad, away from the cameras and the chatter.
"I'm sorry," he said simply, an ache in his voice I had never known he could summon.
"Sorry for what?" I asked.
"For letting it go that far," he answered. "For not standing sooner. For being small." He paused. "You deserve better, Estrella."
I looked at him. The person before me was different: less of the boy I had loved a long time ago and more a man looking at the consequences. He had scars now, not just the bandage on his arm, but the sense of having done wrong.
Emmett stepped into the light and slipped his hand into mine without fanfare. "You alright?" he asked.
"I'm okay," I replied. "I'm tired, but okay."
Months passed. Not the summary kind that erases details, but the kind that builds a new life in the architecture of small mornings. Emmett and I grew into the quiet rhythm of being a couple—no grand social campaigns, no staged posts, just real days full of problems and coffee and small victories. He didn't perform his love. He showed up: for late-night study sessions, for rainy days when my umbrella broke, for hospital nights with Drew's bandage that needed re-taping in silly moments. He brought stability like an old friend.
Drew found his way back slowly, not to me but to being someone whose mistakes carved him into an honest shape. He apologized to people he'd let down and tried to make amends. He volunteered for campus safety drives, for bystander training, for helping to organize the assembly that eventually uncovered Lexi's threads. When he saw me with Emmett for the first time after everything, his eyes narrowed in a way that was not the possessive glare from before but a look that asked for forgiveness.
A year later Lexi's name still flickered online sometimes, but the echoes of her past deeds were loud enough that even fans who wanted to rebuild her image had to reckon with reality.
One winter afternoon as snow softened the edges of the campus, Emmett and I walked past the stairwell where everything had almost shattered. We paused.
"Do you ever think about how small moments could turn into something else?" I asked.
"All the time," he said. "But you were brave. You left. You didn't let someone else's script become your life."
I looked at the chipped stone and the faint rust stains. "The scar isn't mine," I admitted, touching the bandage on Drew's arm—he had come by earlier with coffee and had tipped it to me with a sheepish smile. "It belonged to someone who protected me."
Emmett squeezed my hand. "And that's a real kindness."
We kept walking, and the campus moved around us—students with their headphones, a poster for a charity drive, a litter of fallen leaves. Overhead, a faint gust lifted the corner of a flyer. On it, someone had doodled that old photo: two hands, palm to palm, used now as the emblem for a bystander training session sponsored by student safety. It felt fitting in a quiet way.
Later, when I found myself alone, I opened my phone and scrolled back to the first photo Lexi posted—the hands intertwined—and I smiled, not with sorrow but with a small, private victory. The year had taught me many things: the difference between public drama and private reality, the value of someone who shows up without the camera, and the thinness of illusions.
I wound Drew's old jokes into a small, harmless memory and left the sour parts stitched into the past. Emmett sat beside me, thumb gently smoothing my hand, steady as a metronome. I leaned on him.
"Stay," I whispered.
"I will," he said. "And when things are heavy, we'll keep them light together."
At night, under the hum of our dorm, I pressed my fingertips against the bandage still on Drew's arm—not to reopen old wounds, but to remember that someone had once put his body between me and harm.
We all had our mistakes, our foolishness. The world gave us a chance to be honest about them. That mattered.
The campus never forgot the image of the bottle thrown at a stairwell or the replay that exposed a plan. But it also learned that a community could gather the messy evidence of wreckage and, instead of letting it fester, expose it to light so no one else would be so thoughtless.
When I finally closed my phone that night, I thought of the small bystander poster on the stairwell and the two hands that had once been a prize. The poster's corner curled in the same way the photo had once been shared and reshared. I smiled and, before sleep took me, I said his name like a prayer.
"Emmett," I said into the dark.
"Yes?" he answered without opening his eyes.
"Thanks for staying when the world was loud," I murmured.
"Always," he whispered, and his breath was warm against the hush.
The old picture had lost its glamour and kept its lesson. I slept.
The End
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