Sweet Romance12 min read
Two Peonies: A Body That Loved, A Body That Fought
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I remember the sink, the cold hard rim pressing into my hair. The water filled the basin like a small lake, and the last thing I felt was my lungs clench shut.
When I came back, someone was standing at the mirror, patting her hair dry and humming as if nothing had happened.
"Big sister, I thought you were living so well. I'm disappointed," she said, and the voice in my mouth sounded like someone else's lullaby.
"Who are you?" I croaked, but the answer was already moving, warm and furious, like a cat lit on fire.
"I'm Journi," she said in a girlish tone. "Your new little sister."
I had no sister. I had a life wired tight around hiding, studying, and surviving. My name is Isla Moeller. I had learned that the safest thing was to fold myself into a corner and be small.
"You can't be in my body," I told the reflection. "You can't—"
Journi smiled at the mirror like she had heard the funniest joke. "Why not? You do everything so politely. I'm bored of being the one hiding. Let me have some fun."
Later, she would call me "sister" like it was a blessing. At first, it felt like a betrayal.
Keyla Zimmermann had been the one who started the small wars. Because I had been top of the school that year—the scholarship kid with hands that had learned to hold books like lifelines—she'd made me a target.
"You're here because we pay for you," Keyla would sneer. "We put you in this school for our numbers, not for your spotlight. You think you can beat me?"
She would flip my books, cut my jacket, leave glue in my bag. When I tried to tell teachers, they smiled pity and turned away. Keyla's father sat on the board; he made the school bend.
So I learned to be careful. I learned to swallow pride. I learned to thread revenge into patient little plans.
"Go buy my water," Keyla said one afternoon, tossing me a phone like a gauntlet. Laughter like a pack of insects filled the hall.
I took the phone and, with hands that didn't tremble too much at the moment, plugged in a tiny thing I had soldered on nights alone—an old USB with a spyware I had learned to tinker with. The plan was not dramatic. It was slow and patient. I wanted to know where Keyla's arrogance came from. I wanted, someday, to pull the rug.
That night in the bathroom she shoved my head into the basin. I came back with a different kind of company.
"Who are you?" I asked the mirror again. The girl in my body—Journi—smiled.
"Your sister," she sang. "Relax. I know how to fight."
She wasn't gentle. She wasn't good. But she had nerve, and for the first time since they had planted trophies and rich parents across the courtyard, someone used my body like a blade.
"Do not make a sound," I told her silently. "Don't ruin—"
"Relax, I got this."
I watched, helpless and furious, as she walked into the classroom soaked, and turned an entire lecture into a scene.
"She got beat up in the bathroom," Journi said loud, and when the teacher's eyes skimmed the wet sleeves, everyone shifted at once.
Keyla's smug smile faltered. For reasons I could not understand, the wounded pose fit me too; students whispered, teachers frowned, and Keyla sat like a statue of someone losing sunlight.
"You called the police?" someone hissed. Name-calling dripped like ice. Keyla's followers scowled, and for a moment, they looked like what they were: children who had been fed cruelty and told it was class.
Journi didn't back down.
"Enroll me," she said to the teacher, "or do you only teach whoever has your money?"
The teacher, red-faced and small, had no answer. His discipline cracked like cheap wallpaper. For the first time that semester the teacher's authority tried to mean something more than convenience.
Over the next days, things shifted. Journi and I argued in silence, trading control like one of those clumsy duets. She would take my body and kick, and I would come back and patch the wounds. She loved being loud. I loved to build the wires for the revenge that would make their power brittle.
"You're going to use my body to flirt?" I snapped one afternoon when she told me her plan.
"Benjamin Boyer will be easy," she said, mischievous. "He always has a key somewhere and a car that smells like money. Also, he looks like a kitten who learned to bite."
Benjamin Boyer—handsome, indifferent, and wrapped in privilege—drove a white SUV and spoke like wealth was a weapon. The first time I had buckled under humiliation and tried to ask him for help, his voice had been like a blade, "Do you know how to drive, Isla?" and a key had dangled in front of me like a bribe to my dignity.
Now Journi wanted to make him stumble.
"That's the point," I said. "We don't need him. We only need his power to cover our moves."
We became a crooked little team. Journi's strength and cruelty fit with my patient plotting. She would wear my face like a mask and bend the world in ways my body had never allowed.
"Let me handle Keyla," she said one afternoon, eyes bright. "I'll make her swallow her pride."
"Don't make it public," I warned. "She can pay to bury anything."
"Public is half the fun," she chirped. "Besides, if we're good, people will notice."
I did not mean to let her make a show. But when the day came, she did everything loud and perfect.
We waited until assembly. The hall was packed—students, teachers, and a few parents who loved drama more than facts. Keyla sat with the crowd like a queen in a throne of ignorance. She wore that small, clean smile that had been baptized in other people's fear.
"Isla," she said when our eyes met, venom thin, "you're so lucky your family gets to stay in your town."
I let Journi step forward.
"Excuse me," she said into the microphone, voice clear. The hall hushed.
Keyla's supporters tittered. Keyla smirked.
"Pick another day," she called. "We don't have time for you."
Journi lifted the laptop I'd tired fingers over for nights. She touched a key and the big screen at the back of the hall lit—images, messages, receipts. The hall fell like a curtain. Everyone leaned in as our small, slow war became lighted.
"Meetings. Transfers. Payments. Keyla Zimmermann's father on company letterhead making donations to silence complaints," Journi read between set teeth. "And here's a chat where threats were typed and payments promised to avoid scandal."
I had always been careful, but Journi had a flare for the theatrical. She had taken the threads I'd wrapped into a rope and pulled.
Keyla's smile froze.
"That's not true!" she spat. "Those are—"
"Dates. Times. Screenshots," Journi said. "Do you want to explain to everyone why you bought silence?"
The room exploded. Phones rose like birds. "What is that?" "Is that Keyla's account?" "She paid someone to threaten Isla?"
Keyla's face rang through a thousand cameras. Her followers flinched, faces shifting from smug to shell-shocked.
"This is a lie!" she screamed, marching down the aisle with a face like a drum about to break. "You can't do this!"
"Keyla," Journi said, soft with ice, "sit down. Tell us how much you paid those boys in the back to scare me. Tell us why you set the glue in my books."
Keyla's mouth opened. Then shut.
"You're lying," she hissed. "My father—"
"Your father has names on those transfers," Journi said calmly. "You're free to explain. Or you can let everyone see the receipts."
For the first time, Keyla looked smaller than a rumor. Her cheeks burned. Something in her chest—pride, the same pride that had made her punch—ached.
"I didn't—" she started, denial breaking like a brittle twig. "He— he would never—"
"Then call him," a teacher said from the stage, voice shaking. "Explain this to the parents. Explain this to your classmates."
Keyla's voice hitched. She reached for her phone and shook like a child. Her following began to murmur, some moving away, pulling their phones down and casting downward glances. A harsh, wet sound left her and turned into crying.
"You're lying!" she repeated, this time the sound collapsed into a plea. "You can't do this to me!"
The auditorium became a theater of reaction. Phones streamed; whispers doubled into loud, angry waves. A parent near the back stood up and shouted for fairness. The school's board member—a man who had learned to lean on power—stepped forward, face a strange pale.
"Keyla," he said, and his voice had the weight of waiting paper. "We will investigate."
"Investigate!" Keyla sobbed, curling into loud denial. "You can't—my father—"
Journi didn't shout. She didn't need to. She watched Keyla dissolve, the crown of cruelty falling off like brittle glass. On the stage, Keyla's expressions changed in quick, terrible rhythms: smug, shocked, flaring denial, then raw fear, then pleading.
"Please," Keyla whispered, bright and thin. "Please—don't."
The crowd watched the fall. Phones recorded. Students whispered and recorded and pointed. Some cried; some laughed quietly, overwhelmed with the bitter justice of a cruel joke come round.
A group of parents, murmuring like an old storm, demanded immediate action. The board said they would freeze certain accounts pending an audit. The teacher called security. A father of a boy Keyla had paid in a scheme to confront me on campus stood up and publicly apologized while Keyla's face turned from flayed defiance to pleading.
"Keyla," Journi said softly, hearing my echo in the back of her voice, "you should have thought what you made other girls feel."
Keyla's hands shook. She fell to her knees and cupped her face.
"I—my life—" she sobbed. "Please—my dad's going to—"
She had gone from mayhem to rubble in one long, recorded minute.
It was not the only punishment she would get. The board froze donations; the school's private channels flamed. Keyla's father called with rage and then with legal threats, and then with silence when auditors asked questions. The same thread of money that had bought her silence could not buy away the camera phones and the internet.
In the days that followed, the public punishment widened. Parents who had smiled at Keyla's table in the past kept distance. Her friends erased her from group chats. In the cafeteria someone left a simple printed sheet on Keyla's tray: "We see you now." Students recorded her walk into class and uploaded clips with cold, sarcastic captions. The boy Keyla had hired to threaten me was suspended after he confessed in an interview when confronted with his recorded text messages that matched bank receipts. The money trail, once pulled, tightened.
When the board called the family into a public meeting, the fall was comics and cruel. Keyla stood in front of dozens of parents and teachers. Her face was a tight mask that tore and showed the raw underneath. She had all the stages the rumor-mills needed: denial, outrage, pleading, collapse.
"How do you plead?" the headmaster asked in the meeting room, his voice small and precise.
Keyla's lips trembled. She could not find a strong answer.
"I—I'm sorry—" she said, then "It's not—" then "Please."
Around the table, people who had once bowed to her father now watched incredulous, recording the unravelling as proof.
It was public. It was slow. It was the kind of punishment that doesn't need law to burn a reputation: the whole school—parents, students, staff—bore witness.
But I could not be satisfied with humiliation alone. I wanted Keyla to see what she had stolen from other people. I wanted the people who had watched me be small to see what being big could do.
So I let the registry be pulled further. Bank audits found discrepancies. A small news site smelled rot and published a piece: the school's benevolence, the transfers, the hush-money that had been paid. The piece hit the local feeds like a dropped stone, spilling out into larger nets. Keyla's father took the fall; he was asked to step down from several boards. The company he sat on had to answer to regulators. The board meetings their families had manipulated became official inquiries. Keyla's friends were questioned. The power that had stacked the school in her favor cracked.
At the first public hearing, Keyla walked into a room full of cameras, parents, and students. Her face was paper-white, her mouth dry. When a grandmother who had once applauded her walked up and spoke her disappointment, Keyla's eyes went large. She tried to answer.
"I'm sorry," she said into a thousand tiny microphones. It was the kind of apology that resembled a legal statement because it had to. When she tried to look at me—at Isla—my face was calm. I did not smile.
That day, Keyla's expression slid again—smugness, then denial, then anger, then collapse, then pleading. She cried into hands that would no longer protect her.
"It used to be so easy," she whispered once, when a camera drew too near. "Why did they do this to me?"
"Because you did it," Journi said once when we watched the hearing on a tiny screen. "Because you made your world out of other people's fear. It turns."
Keyla would lose friends, privileges, and a sliver of future confidence. People photographed her leaving the hearing; editors wrote scornful headlines. The punishment stung publicly, in the way that matters in a small, sharp life—her reputation, the currency she had traded in, dissolved like sugar in rain.
Benjamin—he who had knelt before my world and later bent to apologize—faced a different kind of fall.
After I had sown digital threads into that company file, auditors came. Irregularities, creative accounting, and old favors were pried open. Benjamin's father's company, the one that had lent its weight to protect the school, found itself lodged under investigation.
He came to me not on the stage, but in the quiet after the storm. He knelt, all weight and boyish arrogance melted into a single rueful line.
"Isla," he said, the name like a confession, "am I that bad? Will you—will you ever—"
"You're not the only one who had a choice," I told him quietly. "The people who watched, didn't act. You didn't have to be a villain, Benjamin. You were a witness. That's its own crime."
He choked and tried to say something about how he'd been angry as a child, about losses that had made him sharp. He reached for my hand, and I let him take it for a moment.
"Do you feel anything?" he whispered later, on his knees, the boy still leaning on the edge of a man.
"I feel you," I said, flat as a ledger. "I am proud when you choose to fix what you broke. But that doesn't erase what you let happen."
He got on his knees not only for me but for a reputation that had been bruised by our revelations. When the news ran, he was seen as the young scion of a company in trouble, not the entitled prince. He lost positions, invitations, and the smiling crowds. He learned to look smaller in public.
His punishment was very different: instead of the school assembly's instant shame, his fall was a slow unmasking in boardrooms, in articles, and in the cold way investors step away. He watched attorneys near his father's company talk quietly in lobbies and watched partners back away. He had to answer questions—hard, dry ones. He had to watch the people he thought his life was built upon lose light.
That day he knelt in my room and asked me, not for forgiveness, but for the shape of who he could be.
"I'm not cruel," he said. "I am not what you think. But I let things be. I let cowardice do its work."
"Then be brave," I told him. "Not to save yourself. For the people you stood by."
We were both changed. He learned, painfully, how to be smaller in the ways that heal.
Later, when all the dust settled, I rebuilt. I poured my nights into finishing the game I had been coding, the one that had a man with a hammer and a body trapped in a jar. I called it The Man in a Tank, a hard, unforgiving thing that made players fall thousands of times. It was ugly and honest and took real effort to climb.
It sold slowly, then a streamer took it and lost himself into its difficulty. The video went viral, and the game I had made became a small, stubborn success.
Journi and I—sisters not by blood but by a faith made of odd choices—sat on the dorm room floor one night, sharing a bowl of noodles in silence.
"Do you miss your body?" I asked at last.
She poked a noodle toward me. "Your body treats me like I'm small," she said, grinning. "Mine treats you like a vase. We made a good trade."
"You almost left," I said softly. "When my brother hit me, when the hired men came—"
"I couldn't," she said. "I promised."
My brother, Mason Clemons, had turned on me in a moment when money and anger made him heavy. He raised a wooden tool and struck. He struck a sister who had never really fit in, who had always been asked to be less. He broke bones in my legs and a chunk of trust from my chest.
It was Benjamin who arrived in a white SUV, with shadows and soft apologies and a look I had never seen on his face—raw and dark. He carried me home and paid the doctor. He stood by me while I recovered, while the game found its players, while the school learned that power could be pried.
"Why do you help?" I asked once.
"Because now that I know, I can't unknow," he said simply.
It was not tender at first. It was complicated: some kindnesses carried old debts. Then, slowly, he softened. We had moments—small ones—that made my heart flicker.
"Will you meet me tomorrow at the library?" he asked shyly one evening.
"Only if you stop pretending you don't know how to read," I teased.
He laughed. "Deal. But you have to tell me about the tank-man."
We were clumsy in our cups of tea and evening walks. He still had pride. I still had the burn for revenge. But there were nights when he would stand in the doorway of my little dorm room, eyebrow raised, watching me code with fierce concentration, and for a moment his look turned into something like awe.
"You're not like them," he said once. "You were always somewhere else."
I blinked at him. "Where is 'else'?"
"Somewhere stubborn," he said. "Somewhere not for sale."
By the time the school's scandals cooled into quiet board changes and Keyla's family resettled in shame, Journi's heartbeat grew softer. She had been injured in the collapse of a life we had unearthed; her past had finally found consequences. Her recovery was slow, and I stayed with her in a small city hospital bed, sharing stories and small pieces of food and the hope that two people can become two peonies on one stem—blooming without crushing the other.
We never stopped being two different selves. We learned to share. I gave her the rougher victories and the softest parts of my life. She taught me how to stand.
The last scene I remember before graduation was under the school's old peony tree, where once Keyla had sat like a small, cruel monarch. Journi and I sat together on a bench, both in clean clothes, both a little older.
"Remember the tank-man?" she asked.
"I kept a peony inside every level," I said. "A little thing that waits for the player to keep trying. That's us."
Benjamin walked by, gave a small, crooked bow, and left the two of us to the summer smell.
"Are you going to stay?" Journi asked, voice soft.
"Yes," I said. "I will stay to finish the game, to fix my code, to plant peonies. And if someone needs a hand, I'll give it."
She smiled, and for once the smile didn't carry mischief. It carried a promise between two sisters who had learned to turn a stolen body into a life shared.
We had both been broken and set together like two peonies on one root. The world had punished the cruel, in public and in law. It had left scars. But it also left space for repair.
I drew my hand along the peony's petal. It was soft and stubborn and forever marked with the memory of the basin and the whisper of a voice that had said, "Sister."
The End
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