Chapter 4
That gray profile picture looked like a stone lying at the bottom of a river: quiet, cold, without a trace of life.
The message I sent sank into it too, like a pebble dropped into a bottomless pool with no echo. One minute. Ten minutes. One hour. Still nothing.
Harper couldn't sit still beside me and kept glancing at my phone screen every few seconds.
"Who... is this person?
"Will he reply?"
I shook my head.
"I don't know."
I wasn't even sure the person on the other side of the screen was still alive, or whether he'd be willing to crawl back out of that shared hell and look at this world again.
The storm online had already grown into a tsunami. Emily's fans, along with all the riled-up bystanders, had formed a massive online army.
They swarmed every topic connected to me, including my illustrations, my business partners, and even the coffee shop I visited once in a while.
Everything I touched was now branded with one word: bully.
Emily's team kept pushing while the iron was hot. They released a so-called high school class photo.
In the picture, a bunch of teens in school uniforms were smiling brightly. Emily stood in the middle like some princess surrounded by stars.
And in the far corner was a girl marked with a red circle, her face blurry, her expression gloomy, completely out of place with everyone else.
The gossip caption read: [You can tell just from her eyes she's bad news.]
That was supposed to be a photo of Sophie, or rather, a photo they found of some girl whose side profile looked a little like mine, then pasted me in with embarrassingly bad editing.
A lie repeated a thousand times becomes truth in a lot of people's minds.
Harper was so angry she was grinding her teeth.
"This is disgusting!
"They made the whole thing up out of thin air!"
She grabbed her phone, ready to post a clarification. I stopped her hand.
"Don't rush.
"No matter what we say right now, no one will believe us.
"We never had any high school classmates, so how exactly are we supposed to debunk a fake group photo?
"It'll just make us look like we're flailing before we go under."
Harper sank back down, looking helpless.
"Then what do we do? Just let them keep smearing you?"
I looked toward my studio.
"No.
"I'm going to paint."
Harper looked at me like the pressure had finally broken my brain.
"At a time like this? You're still thinking about painting?"
I picked up my brush and spread out a fresh sheet of paper.
"Harper, what they want to destroy is Sophie Wells the illustrator.
"Then I'll show them exactly how sharp Sophie Wells' brush can be."
Ink bled across the paper. What I painted wasn't one of my usual bright commercial pieces.
It was an endless darkness. In that darkness sat a tiny metal box wrapped in thorns, with a rusted lock hanging from the lid.
Countless hands wearing beautiful masks were trying to pry the lock open. But the box itself was slowly starting to bleed.
I painted fast, completely absorbed in it, like I was pouring twenty years of repression and rage straight into the tip of my brush.
Harper watched from the side, moving from anxiety to confusion, then finally into silence. Little by little, she understood.
This painting was my answer. Silent, but deafening.
I don't know how much time passed. Then my phone screen suddenly lit up, and a tiny notification sound pierced the dead silence in the room like a needle.
I put down my brush and picked up the phone. That gray profile picture, unchanged for years, had finally moved.
He'd replied. Just three words.
[Who are you?]
Even through the screen, I could feel the fear and wariness buried deep in his bones.
I didn't answer directly. Instead, I sent him the audio file from the MP3.
This time, the silence on his end lasted even longer, so long that I thought he'd curled back into his shell again.
Right when even Harper was about to give up, a new message popped up.
[Greenhill.]
[North Ridge Abandoned Warehouse.]
[And that fire that never really went out.]
Every sentence he sent felt like a key, unlocking one sealed door after another in my memory.
And behind those doors was endless darkness and despair.
My fingers trembled as I typed back.
[It's me, Sadie.]
[I'm back.]
His profile picture started flashing nonstop.
[Typing...]
Those letters appeared, vanished, then appeared again, just like the struggle and chaos inside him right now.
In the end, he sent one sentence.
[Does she know you're still alive?]