Chapter 3
The grad school results were posted in no time.
There was no suspense in it, because I took the only direct doctoral slot with the highest overall score in the school.
As for Sophie, even with Charlie wrecking my slides and probably tutoring her more times than anybody knew, her written scores were a disaster.
She didn't even clear the interview cutoff.
They couldn't turn a loser into a winner.
That afternoon, after the list went up, I was packing my bag in the dorm to head to the library.
Charlie blocked my way again.
This time he had dropped the act about believing in me. He was furious, and he had come to put me on trial.
"Olivia, are you satisfied now?"
His shout echoed outside the girls' dorm, drawing stares from everyone passing by.
I frowned and looked at him coldly. "I earned first place. Why would I not be satisfied?"
"You could have held back a little!"
His eyes were red and his voice dropped into a growl. "Do you know what Sophie is going through? She fell apart the second she saw that list.
"She was in her dorm screaming that she'd cut her wrists, and she's in the infirmary right now.
"Are you trying to push her over the edge? When did you get this cold? Where did the kind Olivia go?"
I almost burst out laughing at how ridiculous his logic was.
"Charlie, did you get your brain stuck in a door or something?"
I stepped closer and held his eyes. "She failed because she isn't smart and she doesn't work. I got in because I'm good and I put in the hours.
"So by your logic, I should cut off my own arms and turn myself into nothing to protect her feelings?
"Your kindness is very generous with other people's lives. If you feel that sorry for her, why not scoop out your own brain and give it to her?"
Charlie was left speechless, his face turning pale and then red with embarrassment.
The students watching started pointing and whispering, a few snickers drifting through the crowd.
He could not stand it, and he jabbed a finger at me through his teeth. "Fine, Olivia. You win. You've climbed up somewhere high, so now you look down on your poor friends? You'll regret this!"
With that, he stormed off, fuming.
I watched his back as he left, feeling utterly hollow inside.
Poor friends.
So in his head, twenty years between us had been the source of his own smallness the whole time.
I thought that was the end of it, but I had underestimated how low the two of them could go.
That night a post blew up on the campus anonymous board, and the title was built to travel.
[Exposing the real face of a certain O.L, the business school's top student goddess. Bullying, stealing a poor student's spot, and driving a classmate with depression to the edge!]
The post ran thousands of words, all of it tearful, accusing O.L of using her family's money and connections to grind down a poor roommate with severe depression through the whole selection period.
It claimed O.L used S.M as a servant and humiliated her right before the defense until S.M broke down and failed.
It even suggested that O.L's own score was inflated because she was close to the dean.
No name appeared anywhere, but business school, the letter O.L, and top of the grad school list might as well have been my ID number stapled to my forehead.
Worse, the post came with a few blurry photos of me standing there without any expression while Sophie, her face pixelated, wiped her eyes.
That was from the semester before, when she owed me money and I had asked her to pay it back, and they had cut it out of context and turned it into bullying.
The board went up in flames.
[God, you never know what somebody is really like. Who knew the campus goddess was this vicious in private?]
[Depression is hard enough. She bullied somebody who's sick? She doesn't deserve that spot.]
[I heard she didn't even use slides at her defense and the dean still gave her top marks. Think about that for a second.]
[Boycott Olivia. We want a full investigation from the school!]
The abuse came in like a tide, and my phone blew up with questions and screenshots from classmates.
My roommate watched me carefully. "Olivia, don't read the board. None of it is true..."
I sat at my desk with no expression and went through the comments one by one.
My hands were shaking, and it was not fear.
It was rage, because they meant to finish me.
It was obvious who was pulling the strings behind all this.
Sophie played the victim, and Charlie was the one spinning the story.
Those two scumbags were in perfect sync, a match made in hell.
They knew that for a top student reputation was everything, and that once the words bullying and academic misconduct were attached to me, the spot would not save me from being buried.
"Olivia, why not post something and set the record straight?" my roommate said.
"No."
I closed my laptop, my eyes cold and steely.
Proving one's own innocence is the stupidest trap in the world, because the moment I started explaining that I had not bullied anybody and had not used connections, I had already lost.
People only believe the weak one they want to believe.
If they wanted a war over public opinion, I would give them one all the way to the end.
But I was not after an explanation.
I was after the evidence that would bury them.
I picked up my phone and dialed a number.
"Hello, is this campus security? This is Olivia Lane from the business school. I'd like to request the surveillance footage from backstage in the main lecture hall yesterday afternoon."
"The reason? My personal property was stolen and destroyed, and the value involved is significant."
I hung up and took a deep breath.
Charlie must have thought that deleting the files off the drive left nothing behind.
He had forgotten that some things cannot be deleted, like surveillance footage, and like what people decide to believe.
But I never expected things to get even more dramatic than I'd imagined.
Just as I was about to head out to the security office, my phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.
It was a number I'd never seen before.
There was just a short message and a cloud storage link.
Unknown: [Looks like those two idiots are about to bury you. Here's a knife. Don't mention it.]
I frowned and clicked on the link.
The next second, my eyes went wide in shock.
This was no ordinary knife.
This was a freaking bazooka.