Mira Chen POV
"Still think you earned your place here?"
Victoria's phone was three inches from my face, my scholarship application glowing on the screen, my name at the top in black letters that suddenly looked foreign — like they belonged to someone else.
I didn't breathe.
I stared at that document and tried to find something wrong with it. Something Victoria could actually use. My grades were real. My essays were real. Every single thing I'd submitted had been mine, written at a cracked plastic desk at two in the morning while Mom's restaurant hummed downstairs.
"I don't know what you think you found," I said carefully.
"Of course you don't." Victoria lowered her phone but didn't put it away. "That's the most interesting part."
She took one slow step toward me.
I held my ground. My fingers gripped the edge of the sink behind me hard enough to hurt.
"You embarrassed Sebastian today," Victoria said. Her voice was quiet now. Conversational. Like we were just two girls chatting. "In front of everyone. You raised your hand and made him look wrong." She tilted her head. "Do you understand how serious that is?"
"I answered a question," I said. "Correctly."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
"You talked back," Victoria said, and the pleasant mask cracked — just slightly, just enough for me to see the cold, hard thing underneath it. "People like you don't talk back to people like us. That's not how Ashford works."
"Then maybe Ashford is broken," I said.
I don't know where it came from. It just came out.
Silence.
Victoria stared at me.
Then she moved — fast, faster than I expected — and her hand shot out and shoved me hard into the sink.
The edge drove into my lower back like a blade. Pain flared up my spine. I gasped.
"Say that again," Victoria said softly.
I couldn't. My back was screaming. Tears pricked my eyes — not from sadness, just from the pure shock of pain — and I blinked hard, refusing to let them fall.
"Remember your place," Victoria said. She straightened up, smoothed her blazer, and just like that she was perfect again. Calm. Untouchable. "This is a kindness. Next time I won't explain myself first."
She nodded to the girls behind her.
They walked out. All three of them, unhurried, like nothing had happened.
The door swung shut.
The lock clicked open from the outside.
And I was alone.
I slid down the cabinet under the sink and sat on the cold tile floor.
My back throbbed. My uniform was still stained brown from the coffee. My hands were shaking — not a little, a lot, the kind of shaking that starts in your chest and works outward.
I pressed my palms flat on the floor and breathed.
Give them nothing.
But there was nobody to give nothing to anymore. It was just me and the locked-up feeling in my throat and the burning behind my eyes that I'd been refusing all day.
I thought about Mom this morning — her hands on my face, her smell, the absolute certainty in her voice.
I thought about the scholarship letter. The weight of it. How I'd read it four times before I believed it was real.
One out of ten thousand applicants.
And I was sitting on a bathroom floor, shaking, forty-eight hours in.
I pressed my forehead to my knees and let myself cry. Just for a minute. Just once. Nobody was watching.
When I lifted my head, I made a decision.
I would not break. I would not leave. I would not give Victoria Blackwell the satisfaction of watching me disappear.
I stood up. Washed my face. Looked at myself in the mirror.
Okay, I told my reflection. Okay. You're still here.
I made it through afternoon classes by sitting in the back and speaking to no one.
Twice, I caught people looking at their phones and laughing. Once, a girl I'd never met leaned over to her friend and whispered something as I walked past, and they both looked at me like I was a funny video they'd already watched three times.
Something was circulating. I didn't know what yet.
I didn't find out until that night.
I was doing homework at my desk — alone in my room still, my roommate officially transferred, her side stripped bare — when my phone buzzed.
Unknown number. No message. Just a link.
I should have ignored it. I knew I should have ignored it.
I clicked it.
It opened a group chat I hadn't been added to. Couldn't be added to. But whoever sent me the link wanted me to see it.
The chat was called: Ashford Insider — Private.
Three hundred and forty-seven members.
And pinned at the top, posted two hours ago by an account with no profile picture, was a video.
Me. In the dining hall. Marcus's coffee hitting my chest. My gasp, my knocked-over tray, my pasta on the floor. All of it captured in crisp, perfect, deliberately filmed detail.
The caption underneath read: "New scholarship trash. Day 2 update."
I scrolled the comments without meaning to. I couldn't stop.
lmaooo she looks so shocked
somebody tell her the uniform is supposed to be clean
did she seriously think she belonged here?
Victoria's already bored of her lol
give it two weeks she'll be gone
Three hundred and forty-seven students. Laughing. At me. Together, in a place I couldn't enter, couldn't respond to, couldn't defend myself in.
My chest felt hollowed out.
I put my phone face-down on the desk.
I sat very still for a long time.
Then, slowly, I picked it back up. Because I'd seen something in the comments — just a flash before I'd looked away — a username. One reply in the middle of all the laughing that wasn't laughing at all.
I scrolled back up.
Found it.
One comment, no likes, buried between two crueler ones:
"This is wrong. Someone should say something."
The account name was just initials: K.M.
I stared at it.
In a chat of three hundred and forty-seven people, one person thought it was wrong.
I didn't know who K.M. was. I didn't know if they'd ever actually say something, or if they'd stay hidden behind two letters and a deleted comment by morning.
But right now, at eleven o'clock at night, sitting alone in a stripped-bare room with coffee still dried on my blazer — it was the only thing that felt even slightly human.
I screenshot it. Saved it. Don't ask me why.
Then my phone buzzed again.
Different number this time. A proper contact — one I recognized.
Victoria Blackwell.
She'd somehow gotten my number. Of course she had.
One message. No words. Just a new link — this one different from the first.
I opened it with hands that had gone very cold.
It was my mother's restaurant page.
The reviews from last night were still there. But now there were more — dozens more, posted in the last three hours, all at once, all from different accounts.
And the newest one, posted four minutes ago, read:
"I heard the owner's daughter got expelled from her fancy school for cheating. Wonder if the food is just as fake."
My vision blurred.
My mother's restaurant. Her name. Her nine years.
Victoria hadn't just come after me.
She'd come after Mom.
And somewhere in this school, right now, three hundred and forty-seven students were still laughing.