Rebirth13 min read
The Year I Decided to Slack — and Stole the Stage
ButterPicks14 views
I never planned to be a martyr or a hero. I planned to survive.
"You're up," the dean said, pressing the microphone into my hand like it belonged to someone else. "Speak for the students."
I looked out at the assembly — endless heads like black pebbles under sunlight — and felt the odd, stupid calm that comes right before you either crack or step off a cliff.
"This is my second chance," I said into the microphone. "I don't have a cheer. I don't have a promise. I have one sentence: stop letting people define you."
"Say what?" someone yelled from the crowd.
I smiled. "Go slack. Go be the kind of beautiful mess they can't label."
A shocked rustle went through them. Dean Gonzalo Snyder strode up like a man trying to return a borrowed item. "Elina Christensen, what are you doing?" he barked.
"I'm telling you what I learned," I said, and I meant it. But under Dean Snyder's attention a pair of eyes cut me clean.
Lennox Vitale's stare on me that day was a kind of cold that feels like judgment magnified. He'd been the golden boy since elementary school: first in mock exams, first in actual tests, first in every photo where adults asked someone to smile for the camera. He was handsome, practiced, and dangerous because he expected admiration and got it.
"Is she serious?" I heard a girl whisper behind me.
"Elina's lost it," muttered another.
Lennox didn't speak that day. He looked at me like a man seeing dirt on a new suit.
I used to worship him.
In my previous life — the one where I followed the narrow track, swallowed shame, and counted pennies to buy prestige rather than food — I chased him like gravity. I climbed from rank five hundred to top ten because I wanted to be near his orbit. The final morning after the test, the grades came out and I was ninth, and the school rejoiced because both Lennox and I had reached the same university. Two names, side by side in the acceptance list. The whole school assumed destiny.
When the courage of friends pushed me, they also pushed me onto him. "Tell him," they'd chant. "He's so handsome."
"Go on," my roommate Jaden Schultz had whispered with a grin then.
My confession didn't go the way I'd practiced.
"You know," Lennox said when I confessed, eyes folded with practiced candor, "if you were a little paler you'd be perfect. You're kinda dark on camera."
It was a small, stupid line. It lodged like a knot in my throat and I thought: if I were white, I'd be loved. I bought creams. I avoided sun. I wrapped myself in drama and coolers and hid in alleys of sunscreen. That one phrase sent me on a strange pilgrimage.
I fainted once on a hot takeout run, collapsed in a puddle of noodles. Someone took me to the infirmary. The message to Lennox — my pinned contact — blinked with a single gray reply: "Nope."
I told myself it was a joke. I told myself he was immature. I told myself that if I became a better student, he’d notice. So I flogged myself through study sessions, through dinners of little more than rice and resentment. I became a machine for improvement until I broke.
Then the exam day where everything turned: a crumpled scrap of paper fell near my feet during an important test. The teacher found it and, with slow theatrical disgust, asked, "Who does this belong to?"
"Not mine," I said.
"It fell from Elina's desk," someone snapped.
Lennox. He was looking at me with a controlled face, a clinical detachment. "I saw it fall from Elina."
My mouth went dry. "Check the surveillance," I pleaded.
Camera angles don't care about feelings. The footage showed a small scrap tumbling and settling at my shoes. With Hadley Neumann — class captain, flawless — sitting ahead and Lennox's sworn testimony, I became public evidence.
"Cheating," they said.
The math professor, Thomas Clark, looked at me like he had discovered a stain on a favorite book. "Please do not choose my course," he sneered.
Rumors grew teeth. Roommates turned cool. Jaden stopped eating with me at dinner. The college I'd dreamed of — the one the golden boy was headed to — became the cage that denied me fresh air. They revoked my honors. They canceled my awards. My whole world narrowed to an accusatory echo: you, Elina, are dishonest.
I filed for leave. I remember the taxi's stale air, the driver's loud music I didn't have energy to stop, and then a truck that crushed memory into a blank. When I woke up, I was back — in high school, three years younger, my cheeks still smooth with freshness and the future a brand-new, unnerving blank.
This time, I didn't lean forward. I leaned back.
“What's with you?” Dean Snyder barked when he saw me resting during a test. “You think the world owes you something?”
I hummed. I let my eyes swim over the page. Part of me wanted to climb again, to prove I'd been right to want so much, to beat Lennox at whatever metric measured worth. But the memory of dust and humiliation and deep, real loneliness changed me.
Then the transfer happened. Milo Buchanan walked into our math class like he had arrived in a scene he already knew, tall, unreadable, with a half-smile that said mischief. The class hummed.
"Who's that?" someone breathed.
"International transfer," the murmur went. "From abroad. Standoffish."
He sat at the back and didn't speak. But later he would sit next to me — or at least beside me — and the first time I talked he joked, "You look like someone who's rehearsed surprise and found a stock answer."
"I didn't rehearse surprise," I snapped.
"You look like you know how to hide cleverness," he said. "Why hide it?"
I didn't know. I told myself I'd learned something powerful in the crash: the way I had lived before had been for someone else. I had tried to be a surface, polished for Lennox's gaze.
Milo surprised me. He asked questions I wasn't used to hearing: not about study tricks, but about the feeling of things. "Why let someone else's small cruelty change you?" he said once, face tilted like it was a riddle.
I saw him watch Lennox. "That guy expects the sun to bend," the Milo grin said.
"I'm not interested in him," I lied.
"Then don't be," Milo said. "Be interesting to yourself."
His company was like someone tapping a twig on a fence in the night — it sparked a small, stubborn flame. For the first time since the rewind, I let myself be uninterested in chasing Lennox. I also let myself be cunning in a new way.
Tests came. I answered when I wanted, left blanks when I didn't care. The teachers circled their fingers in the air, confused. "Elina, you don't seem to be trying," Thomas Clark scolded.
"I'm trying to breathe," I said.
This new cadence annoyed the power structures. They wanted narratives: the climb, the fall, the redemption. I gave them none. But I also never lost what I'd learned. When a math test came that evil looked back and winked, I had memorized it — by rote, by muscle memory from the previous life. I could have destroyed people. I could have been the same anxious climber, hungry for validation.
I refused.
Then the oddest thing: at a midterm, Milo and I both did unbelievably well. He — who had sat and written one problem — placed second. I — who had semi-deliberately written like I didn't care — placed first. The math teacher clapped like a man who'd seen an apparition.
"Who even knows what's happening?" Thomas Clark asked.
Lennox's face was an unsettling mask of confusion. He had always been first; the notion of being passed bruised him like a public insult. He started to ask about our tests, to sniff for impropriety, and we let him roar a little.
"Why are you asking to look at our tests?" Dean Snyder inquired.
Lennox's eyes flicked to me like one was supposed to look at a property dispute. "I just want to make sure it's fair," he said smoothly.
"Fine," I replied. "We can submit to whatever checks you want. We'll even take individual rooms for the next test."
He seized on that, proposing separate examination rooms — a thinly veiled attempt to humiliate us publicly and highlight any "irregularities." I agreed loudly. "Yes, I want a single-room test too."
So they gave me a room alone. Cameras, monitors, the sound of a hundred study rumors turning like a mill outside. I sat and completed the paper. Milo, true to his mischief, left one question blank when his score would have made him second by a wide margin. He smiled when he saw the ranking, like a conspirator.
When results came, our first-place finishes made the papers turn. Lennox, who had tried to paint us cheaters, was now off balance. He had always been an image man — the model son at home, the star in the classroom. Without easy dominance, his image cracked.
Then came high-stakes decisions: college acceptance lists, press, and a hall full of reporters who smelled scandal like predators smell blood. When the national reporters learned that two students had tied in an impossible way, they pushed in with blinking lights. I wasn't ready for that kind of attention.
"Explain how you did it," one reporter asked Lennox, microphone thrust like a challenge.
He answered with practiced lines about discipline, routine, and sacrifice. But then a younger, sharper voice — Milo's — asked him a question that made the air stop.
"What did you write for the geometry last question?" Milo asked, casual but precise.
Lennox's jaw moved. Behind him, the crowd leaned forward like a wave. "Why are you asking me?" he stammered.
"Because the last question has been discussed online," Milo said. "It seemed you were exact in your choice before, but your current response doesn't match what's expected. Can you tell us the exact answer you wrote?"
Lennox's face went hard. "It's my work. I don't need to explain myself."
He tried to keep the interviews going like wind moves leaves. But Milo and I kept asking the right questions. We asked about specific problem steps; reporters filmed his hesitation. His confidence leaked into silence. An eagle of doubt circled and found its perch in people's minds.
Then a student livestreamed from the back — Milo, who had started recording to keep things honest. His live feed showed a human face that hadn't been dressed for publicity: Lennox hunched, his hands trembling. Live comments exploded. People began to compare the supposed answers to actual test patterns. Threads formed. Online sleuths counted steps and notches and found mismatches.
The accusation turned. What had been a whisper became a trending hashtag: #ExamFraud. The school's prestige brand trembled, and the administration, wanting to control the damage, began an internal probe. It would have been quieter if nobody cared, but everyone cared.
"Elina," Dean Snyder said to me in his office one evening, "if you want this settled quietly, you can. If you push, you'll hurt a boy's future."
I looked at him. "He has already hurt futures," I said. "He framed someone once. He put his advantage over another student's life. You call that mercy?"
Lennox's fall began in public.
At first he tried to be smooth. "It's all a misunderstanding," he said to the cameras. "Someone's making things up."
Then the proof arrived. Milo had dug through the exam room assignments and surveillance timestamps. We found edits, copied notation that matched a draft file that had been circulating in certain circles. People who had earlier been his supporters—classmates, small-time influencers—began to murmur. Someone remembered the small fight in the library when he had demanded a seat and acted with casual contempt. "He slapped me with his kindness," one classmate said. "And then used it."
I watched as the crowd changed its tune. Lennox, the golden boy, had become the simple boy who cheated.
It happened slowly and then suddenly. At a press conference, a line of reporters shoved microphones and a cameraman shouted, "Sir, can you explain why your paper's final answers don't match any known safe set?"
He laughed, that practiced laugh. "I don't have time for this," he said. "This is all jealousy."
"Jealousy of what?" one woman demanded. "Of what you did to a girl you barely knew? Of destroying her life for a seat?"
I didn't plan an exposure; I let the evidence speak. And the evidence was loud.
They found that his recorded answers had been patched together to match someone else's submission; there were identical annotation patterns in the margins that no one could have coincidentally produced. They asked for his file history; they found files with suspicious timestamps. They dug through.
Lennox's expressions changed one by one as the room watched, which is the grotesque part: a person stripped of pretense shows you a motion study of human undoing.
First he was smug. He stood at podiums with a poet's smile, nodding to cameras.
"You're making a mountain out of a molehill," he told one live anchor.
Then, under crossfire of evidence, he froze. "I don't—" he started, then stopped. His skin went pale. People in the back whispered, "He's nervous."
"You're shaking," a reporter said.
"That's what nerves do," he lied.
Then denial bubbled up. "This is false," he said, posture straightening to defiance. "I didn't cheat."
"Are you asking us to believe two different surveillance logs and file timestamps are all wrong?" an investigative reporter asked.
He refused to see the patterns. He insisted on innocence, and for a while the insistence sound like armor.
But then came the slow, public unpeeling. A former friend — someone who had crashed with Lennox at competitions and once copied his essays — walked up to the microphones and said, "He told me he could make the scores." The guy looked embarrassed but steady. "He asked me to help him procure keys. I didn't want to. But he said he could buy a place in the system."
Heads turned. Phones raised. The man who had been a brother in earlier days now spoke. "I didn't want to come forward. I was scared. But it's the right thing."
The crowd inhaled. Lennox's eyes widened with the first crack of panic. He had a story — and the story was losing its consistency.
"Stop! You're lying!" he shouted. The anger was a bark of panic.
People shouted back. "Tell us the truth!" "How could you?"
Then his mother appeared, gaunt and shaking, face white where it had been blemished by worry. She grabbed his arm and wept. "My son—" she began.
"No!" he cried. "Mom, don't—"
She slapped him. Hard. The sound cut like a single snapped twig across the lawn. The slap was not just a physical strike; it was the currency of their private ruin paid in public. People gasped. A woman near the mic gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
He tried to protest, he tried to kneel, he tried to take the camera and speak to the public in a softer tone. "Please," he begged, "please—"
"Begging doesn't fix what you did," I answered, because I could see clearly now that what had been done could not be undone by words.
People recorded. They took photos. They posted. A chorus rose: disgust, vindication, pity for his mother, scorn for him. Comments in the live feed called for consequences. Parents of other students weighed in. "My child deserved fairness!" cried a father in a black jacket.
Lennox's face shifted from arrogant to bewildered, to denial, then to pleading. The motion of his expression was like watching color drain from a painted theater set. He tried to call up his rehearsed lines, but the evidence overran them.
"I didn't—" he murmured.
"Why frame someone?" a survivor of his past spite demanded. "Why hurt people for ranking?"
"Because I wanted not to be ordinary," he blurted, and that quake of confession did more damage than any orchestrated slander. He had given the motive away: fear of being ordinary, fear of losing the trophy. That motive made him smaller than he'd ever been.
The crowd began to boo, then hiss, then hold up phones. Someone sneered, "You rich kid played a poor game." A woman near the front spat, "We pay for our kids to be honest; you play tricks."
His personal defenses cracked as more people recounted slight injuries: a girl who'd been cut out of a group project because of his influence, a boy whose scholarship had suffered when a seat was stolen, a teacher who'd been pressured to look the other way.
Legal procedures followed later, but the real punishment — the one that fit in the theater of human justice where a crowd passes final judgment — played out that day in public: exposure, the collapse of a carefully curated image, the abandonment by peers, the mother's pallor and slap, the online shaming that tracked him from every angle.
Lennox begged, knelt, clawed at hearts and at reputations, but the crowd kept tally: the cruel prank he had played years ago; the smear that had once ruined another student's life (me); the arrogance. It was too much.
I watched his every reaction — the blink of denial, the flush of shame, the tearing of old loyalties — and I felt something strange and new: no triumph. Only a weary relief, like opening a window in a room that had been sealed for too long.
"I will not forgive you," I said once, loud enough that the microphones caught it. "And I won't forget."
People applauded and hissed simultaneously, as if the world had split into an ovation and a rebuke. They photographed his fallen posture. Hands pointed. Someone announced he'd been barred from taking exams for five years; the school revoked a string of honors that had been in his name. That was a formal punishment — but the social collapse, the unforgiving public ledger of exposure, was the real reckoning.
Lennox left later, head down, the people around him like a pressure well. He tried to turn to the few friends who might defend him. They had shifted sides. Someone spat, "We don't want the kind of champion who destroys others."
He knelt in my doorway one evening with his mother's hand on his shoulder and begged. "Elina, please," he said. "Please. I can make it right."
"You could never make it right by what you did," I replied. "You could make it right by being honest now, not by asking for mercy because it's convenient."
His mother sobbed in a broken voice, thin with humiliation. "Forgive him," she pleaded. "We will move. We'll—"
"No," I said again. "You must bear this, and he must grow from it. That is all."
I refused his apology like a gate that closed only once. I blocked his messages later. I let him stand in the sun and shiver.
Life after the storm was unexpectedly gentle. When the dust settled I found that my friends — Jaden, Milo — were constant. We went to classes and ate bad cafeteria food and laughed about petty things. The math teacher, Thomas Clark, who had once sneered, congratulated me in private and said, "Don't make me teach you calculus by accident again."
"Thank you," I said.
Milo walked me to the gate the morning we left for the university we had chosen — a school in the south I had chosen not because it was famous, but because I wanted a place that smelled like possibility. "You won't be any less if you slack sometimes," he told me. "You'll only be less if you let people measure your worth for you."
"I might slack," I said. "In public."
"In private, you'll be dangerous," he said. "And that's fine."
The final day of high school — when reporters had already packed their stands and Lennox's scandal had become a cautionary note on a national feed — I stepped up before the assembly to speak as one of the top students. I did not deliver a grand speech of contrition or triumph. I said, "I spent years chasing a man who never deserved my time. Then I almost destroyed myself trying to be what he thought worthy. Now, I know this: I want to live for myself."
Someone in the crowd chanted, "Go slack! Go slack!" and the sound was a strange, freeing echo.
Later, at a family dinner, my parents beamed and started planning my future as if my life were a parade. I put down my fork and told them quietly, "I won't go where everyone expects me to. I'm going south."
Mark Schmitz, my father, frowned. "But it's not the top school."
"It will be mine," I said. My mother, Emmaline Reid, hugged me hard, and for once I didn't flinch. Her arms were warm, not a shield against the world but a hand to steady me as I walked.
On the day we left for the university, Milo met me at the gate with two overly large suitcases and a grin.
"Ready to be a professional slacker?" he teased.
"No," I said, shouldering my bag. "I'm ready to be present."
He winked. "Present? That sounds boring."
"Then make it interesting," I said.
We walked into the campus together, and the future felt like a road with bends I hadn't planned for. Not because Lennox had fallen — though that had been part of the lesson — but because I'd learned the shape of my own small world: messy, stubborn, and mine. I had been given an awful, precious second chance. I chose to use it to live honestly, to keep people accountable, and to laugh when it mattered.
"Promise me you'll keep your hands clean," Milo said.
"Promise me you'll keep your eyes on your own path," I shot back.
"Deal," he said.
The last thing I did before the campus swallowed our shoulder-length laughter was look up one last time. In the distance, the city shimmered, and I told myself — quietly, not like a vow but like a fact — that I would not be defined by anyone's consent ever again.
The End
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