Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 32

“You know, I heard this story… one time James punched a teacher. Mr. Webb? Our lit teacher from 10th Grade. That James is really bad news, Betty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just worried for you.”

And then she smiled. Not the kind that invites you in. The kind that draws a line. She walked away, and I stood there, skin prickling like I’d just walked through smoke.

It’s strange how a single sentence can leave you feeling bruised. Not from what was said, but from everything that wasn’t.

Then I heard it. “Betty, wait.”
The voice was quieter than the others.

I turned and saw Corey, backpack slipping off one shoulder, brows pulled tight. He looked like someone debating whether or not to speak, like the words were pebbles in his mouth.

“Don’t listen to her,” he said. “They got it all wrong.”

I stepped closer. “What do you mean?”

He hesitated. I could feel his nerves like static in the air between us. Then he looked at me, really looked, and his voice came out barely above a whisper.

“James didn’t hit Mr. Webb for nothing.”

The world narrowed. “He did it because of me.”

And then he told me.
About the comments. The ones that weren’t quite loud enough to be punishable, but sharp enough to cut. How Mr. Webb smiled when he said them. How the other kids started repeating the same words in the hallway, laughing like cruelty was a punchline.
About how Corey started eating lunch in the bathroom just to breathe. Just to not exist so loudly. And James… James saw it. All of it.

“One day, he just snapped,” Corey said, voice cracking like something long held was finally being set down. “He shouted at him in front of everyone. And when Mr. Webb smirked, like it was all just a game… James punched him.”

I felt the floor shift under me. My body didn’t move, but inside, something cracked, slow and quiet like the fault line of a heart.

“He got suspended. Never told anyone why. Not even me. I think he didn’t want people blaming me. He just… took the fall.”

Took the fall. And all I could see was James’s face the last time we argued, how his voice shook when he said:

"You said you’d always choose me..."

But I didn’t. I had let the noise drown him out. Let their version of him override the one I knew, or thought I knew. I had stopped believing.

And that’s the cruelest kind of betrayal. Not loud or violent, just absence. Just silence when someone needed you to speak.

“I...I have to go,” I said, but the words barely felt like mine.

I don’t remember moving. I just remember running. The stairwell echoed with the sound of my footsteps, each one louder than the last, like my guilt was chasing me down. I hit the pavement and kept going, past the gates, past the walls, past everything I had convinced myself was fact. I raised my hand, fingers trembling as I waved down the first taxi I saw.

It slowed. I got in.

And somewhere in the silence that followed, I began to understand... sometimes the real ghosts don’t wear costumes. They live in the things we leave unsaid.

The next morning, the world moved on as if it hadn’t cracked open yesterday. I walked through the corridor like a ghost pretending to be a girl, books in my arms, face carefully blank, but inside, my heart throbbed with everything I couldn’t say. The air smelled of sweat and floor polish, a strange comfort in its familiarity. Students buzzed around me, their laughter ringing sharp and high like birds that didn’t know how to grieve.