by Aurora Yeo
“You’re no fun.” Wesley sighed before spitting the tasteless gum back into the wrapper and dumping it into a nearby bin.
We were barely even by the school’s doors when a familiar figure, without her usual other half, nor her best friend, loomed into view. Noticing Charlotte finally alone by her locker, I grinned.
“Why do you look like you’re about to plot someone’s death?” Wesley asked with a raised eyebrow, and I smirked.
“Not death, not really. Listen, I’ll catch up with you in a bit. There’s still someone on my hitlist I’ve yet to mess with today.”
Without argument, Wesley turned and began to walk toward the school’s carpark, easily avoiding Charlotte as though he had not noticed her. Once he was out of sight, I quickly ran a hand through my hair to adjust my curls before strutting over to her as best as I could. True enough, when she noticed me, her face displayed both fear and hatred.
“Char! How nice to finally see you again. Did you fail any other classes during my time away?” I smiled, placing one hand on my hips and the other on her locker door, slamming it shut.
She chose to ignore my question, simply clenching her jaw before her eyes met mine coldly. “You know what? No one will miss you, Avery. No one ever misses a cruel bully like you. You are alone while I, at least, have Blake on my side. So leave me alone.” She snapped, anger clear on her face, and I clicked my tongue.
“Oh, dear Charlotte, you do hurt me ever so much with your devilish words. It’s like…what’s that term again? Oh yeah, the pot calling the kettle black. Do you want to know something, little Charlotte? It is that you are just an absolute waste of space on this planet. The lies and tales you planted into that dumb blonde’s mind were really hilarious. It’s a joke that she would even believe you in the first place. But of course, we both know who I am talking about, right?”
Charlotte opened her mouth to speak, but I swiftly cut her off.
“And you’ll know that one day when you’re old and haggard, you were never loved. And that includes Blake. Blake never loved you. In fact, I kind of pity you. People like Blake just don’t do love. He’ll drop you just like he dropped me. It’s just in his blood you see?” And with that, I turned on my heel, leaving a gaping and startled Charlotte alone by her locker.
What I said, though, was true. It wasn’t because Charlotte Brooke wasn’t a girl that could be loved, as much as I hate to admit it. It’s just that Blake Ryder was never one to love in the first place. Every single person on earth deserves a chance to be loved by someone wholeheartedly. And while perhaps one day Charlotte might find her knight in shining armor, I could bet my entire life’s fortune that it wouldn’t be Blake. While people deserve to be loved, it doesn’t mean that they can love others as much as they love themselves.
Blake Ryder would be a perfect example of that.
I thought that he had a heart of gold so pure that the sun would wail in jealousy. And yet I had also mentioned that the heart of gold was protected by a wall of ice.
I was wrong.
Blake’s heart wasn’t covered in ice. It was made of it.
Chapter 23
Whenever I bought things for my revenge schemes, it seemed as though every cashier was judging me. In fact, I didn’t need to be planning for revenge at all. Whenever I went to the supermarket, they would look at me as if I were a killer ready to strike at any given time. They were giving me that look then.
One can of spray paint
One bottle of shampoo
One raw fish
One carton of milk
One tray of eggs
And one packet of sweet gummy worms
The triple threats all stood beside me, each annoying the other, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. It always seemed as if I was out with three little kids and I was the mom, the only sensible one around.
“Those shoes look as if our long-lost dog chewed them. Get a new pair, wouldn’t you?” Winnie complained to William, and he scoffed.
“These babies are perfectly fine. They don’t need tips from you.”
“Dude, did you seriously just call your shoes babies?” Wesley laughed at William, and William kicked him in the shin.
“This is not as weird as it looks.” I gestured to the three bickering idiots as the cashier gave me a doubtful look. “We’re all actually really good friends and don’t argue all the time.” Turning over to face the trio, my eyes narrowed as they all stopped mid-argument. “Right, friends?”
“Oh, yeah, totally.” Winnie waved nonchalantly at the cashier. “Best friends. These are just some things we need for a party.”
“You people are the weirdest I’ve seen all day.” She sighed, passing me my purchase, and I thanked her and walked out of the shop with the triplets still arguing behind me.
“Guys! Just shut up for a moment, will you?” I snapped, and the three of them immediately shut their mouths, looking at me with startled expressions. “Good. Now, we’re here to destroy our real enemies, not ourselves,” I spoke slowly to them as if they were children, and Wesley rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe you just rolled your eyes at me.” I glared at Wesley and pointed to William. “Will, you’re sitting up front with me.” I strutted to the driver’s seat and threw the bag in the back seat.
“Wait, you can’t do that!” Wesley shouted from outside as I started the engine. “I’m your boyfriend! I get immediate shotgun dibs!”
“Oh yes, I can.” I grinned as he scrambled in, grumbling at the back with Winnie. “That rule doesn’t apply if you are all acting like children.”
Without another word, I maneuvered the truck out of the grocery store parking lot, muscle memory immediately bringing me down the road towards Blake’s familiar estate.
As we edged closer to Blake’s giant house, I started to plan in my head just exactly what should I do. Honestly, I never actually planned any of my revenge. I just sort of go with the flow and drift wherever the current wills me toward. It’s such a hassle to think beforehand and plan everything down to the last detail, especially since things don’t always go the way we want it to in life. So when the perfect idea finally came into mind, my lips curved into a sinister grin, making me press even harder on the gas pedal to accelerate, Blake’s mansion coming into view.
“Boys, welcome to round two of the revenge plot.” I smiled, parked the car outside, and grabbed the items.
When we first came here for the first revenge plot, the sharpie markers were my best friends in the plan, creating beautiful designs on Blake’s precious Ferrari. Now, my new best friend would be the can of purple spray paint. I gleefully chuckled when I realized that the repainted car was back in the same spot. Grabbing the spray paint, I started to spray all over the windows and the lights of the car, making it completely colored so that the driver couldn’t possibly see the way he is going.
I mean, Blake wouldn’t be dumb enough to drive in this, right?
Smiling, I began to spray my initials at the back of the car and headed towards my friends by the pool with a skip in my step.
“Will, Winnie, you guys can handle down here, right?” I asked, grabbing the raw fish, spray paint still in my hands. As a natural reaction, my nose wrinkled and I turned away from the fish, the putrid scent filling my nostrils as I resisted a gag.
“What are we going to do with these?” Winnie asked, gesturing to the rest of the items as I beamed at them.
“Get creative!” I smiled and gestured Wesley to follow, climbing up the balcony of Blake’s room once more.
“Put this in his game room, preferably in between couches or something like that so that he could never find it. Do you remember where it is?” I passed him the fish, and he nodded, running down the hall immediately, slimy fish in hand. As soon as the fish left my fingers, I wiped my hands down my jeans, scowling in disgust as I could still feel the slimy texture cold against my fingers.
It took me barely even any time to locate Blake’s room. On each wall, I randomly painted item
s. Then I realized that he had actually removed all of his pictures with Charlotte. His walls were now all clean, nothing on it but strings and little wooden clips that once held the pictures.
Surveying the room, I walked around and randomly picked up any item that caught my eye, randomly spraying some paint on them as well. Soon enough, most of the items in the room were already a deep purple, and my spray paint had already run out.
Sighing, I threw the empty can of spray paint onto his bed and made my way toward the balcony. However, on my way over, a large A4 sized envelope caught my eye, and I turned to look at it.
It was a simple envelope, light brown and official looking. I gingerly picked it up and pulled its contents out. Now, before you go criticizing me, I don’t usually rummage through people’s personal items like this. The envelope just looked so official and seemed to be hiding something, that I absolutely had to open it to see what secrets it held.
The first thing I noticed was that it was from the local hospital, and it was dated three months back, around the time I was in the hospital recovering from the accident.
As I scanned through the papers, my eyes grew wider and wider, gaping unbelievably at the contents. There were only three lines I had caught, though.
Blake Ryder
Stage Three Cancer
Type: Leukemia
The worst part of all of this was he was diagnosed almost a whole year ago.
“What are you doing?” Blake went into the room, and I dropped the papers in shock, my hand clutching my chest.
A towel was loosely wrapped around the lower half of his body, his hair wet from the shower. If it were a few years back when everything was still fine and dandy, I might have been drooling over him. However, considering the circumstances at the moment, I only felt numb. Funny, though, I hadn’t even heard the shower running.
“Why are you going through my stuff?” In seconds, he was already standing in front of me as I held my breath. “Why are you even here?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice was already shaky, and Blake’s face paled, looking down to see the papers scattered on the floor.
“I…”
“Damn it, Blake, why didn’t you fucking tell me?” I was crying then, hitting his chest as I yelled at him, pointing to the papers.
“I couldn’t let you know…you would’ve…” He was scrambling for words, but I wasn’t having any of that.
“Is that why you did it? Is that why you broke up with me?” I looked him dead in the eye as he clenched his jaw in distress.
“I didn’t want you to cry for me.” Blake ran his hand through his hair, clearly caught in the act. “If I had stayed, who knows how long you would’ve cried for me when I die? You have to hate me, Avery. Go back to hating me.”
“You can’t just ask me to hate you when you’ve done nothing wrong!” I pulled at my hair in frustration. “God. I feel like such a bitch now. I can’t believe I trashed your car twice.” I laughed sarcastically, wiping a tear from my eye.
“The car is the least of my concerns,” he said and took a step closer toward me. I didn’t back away. “Don’t cry, please, Ave.” He was so close, his hand on my cheek, wiping a stray tear. “Never cry for me.”
Chapter 24
Growing up, every single parent will probably tell their children to never lie and to always speak of nothing but the truth. Children of the olden days gladly followed their parents’ reasoning mainly because they looked up to their elders. They wanted them to like the person they become, to be proud. Over the centuries, humans sort of evolved, and not all children obey their parents anymore.
That’s why there was such a thing as liars, schemers, thieves, criminals and murderers. There was such a thing because the children grew up with a different mindset from the children of before, and they have a natural instinct to have fun, to put themselves first before others.
I mentioned this many times: people change, and it might not always be for the better. It might be for the worse.
For almost an entire year, I thought that Blake was the bad guy, the one who went hand in hand with Charlotte to ruin my entire life, to wreck me like no other. I thought that Blake had changed, and he had only changed for the worse, not for the better like most of the people in the world.
I had never been so wrong in my entire life.
The whole past year was a lie. Blake hadn’t changed for the worse; he hadn’t even changed at all. He had cared for me this entire time, and he hadn’t actually meant to hurt me. In fact, he had been trying to keep me from hurting in the future.
When I finally comprehended the contents of the envelope, my mind was in a state of shock that was totally unexplainable. It was as if I had been fooled, and it was true. I had been fooled, in fact. Blake had fooled me, told me that he didn’t love me and that he didn’t want me near. True, that broke my heart into complete smithereens, but, oh, that couldn’t even come up to par to what I was feeling then, knowing possibly the biggest secret that he had.
Cancer. He had leukemia. Of all cancers, leukemia, blood cancer. It was just a known fact that cancer was nothing but an absolute bitch, a huge pain in the behind, but for him to have something that was such a huge part of him be corrupted was nothing short of a tragedy.
Blood runs through your body; it flows like water in a river. Water makes a river, and blood is required for there to be life. It is a simple concept that everybody knows, even if they are not brainy doctors.
You can’t just ask a person to live normally after you poison all of their blood; it spreads like a drop of poison in a glass of pure drinking water. No matter how pure the water was before, once the poison is added, it can no longer be consumed.
That poison was spreading in Blake’s body, faster than ever, and he still stopped to think of me. He didn’t want me to hurt; he didn’t want me to cry. He didn’t want me to be heartbroken when he passes on and succumbs to his terminal illness.
Till his dying breath, Blake Ryder was still stupid enough to think of me.
He was never truly at fault, and he was never truly to be blamed. To think back, I had completely destroyed his car for nothing. I was nothing but a cold, hard, and cruel bitch while he had a heart of gold.
If I could, I would take back all of my words, all of those vile things I’ve ever spoken to anyone or thought about Blake. He didn’t have a heart of ice; his heart was made of nothing but pure gold. He cared about me so much, to the point that he had thrown away his own feelings just to keep mine.
Blake had reached the point of selflessness that I could never, as a person, ever reach.
I couldn’t breathe; the air was lodged in my throat, and I felt like an asthmatic mess, imagining myself clawing at my own throat the smallest gulp of air.
Blake fed me a white lie—a once pristine cover, a pure canvas until I had come clawing at it to tear it down, and I finally tore the cloth and brought the truth out into the light of day. He had kept it well and had hidden it so completely. If I had not known the truth and were just told one day in school that a certain boy named Blake Ryder had passed on, I would probably have smiled in the face of the messenger and just said, “Good for him.”
As cruel sounding as it is, it is the truth. My anger and hatred for Blake fueled my drive to make his and Charlotte’s lives absolutely miserable, not knowing that I already had done all of that and more, making him see Wesley and me together while he was slowly dying.
The whole time I was relishing in what I thought was Blake and Charlotte’s skin-deep misery, it had always been something more, something much deeper and down to the core of Blake. He was suffering in my grasp more than I had expected.
And yet, with his last dying breath, he would still voluntarily give his happiness away for me.
“I know you’re with Wesley now,” he said, combing a strand of stray hair behind my ear as I held back a sob. I had finally stopped crying, yet the torrent of tears felt as if it were coming again. “And I am happy for
you, Avery. I really am.”
“But you’re not happy,” I choked out, rubbing my nose with the back of my hand as Blake pulled me against his chest. For a selfish second, I breathed in his scent, something that just reminded me of home and comfort, just like how it had always been before chaos reigned in our lives.
“The truth is I’ve always loved you, Avery, and I’ll probably still love you even till the day I die.” To that, I could do nothing but break down and cry in his arms, in his familiar, warm embrace that I had missed ever so much.
He had watched me silently as I fell in love with another boy, and yet he had kept his feelings to himself and refrained from voicing his thoughts out the entire time. There was no tap to my tears; I was crying so freely in Blake’s arms as he whispered soothing words into my ears. Yet there was only one thought that had crossed my mind the entire time.
I truly am the evil villain from fairytales.
Chapter 25
A lie is a veil that covers the truth from your eyes. Sometimes it shields you away from the bad and brings out the imagined goodness of the situation. Lies, in all honesty, are never good. Whether they’re white lies or selfish lies to save one’s own life, they’re never good. They only bring about hurt and double the punishment in the end.
In Blake’s case, his lie attacked me like a tidal wave when the truth eventually surfaced. The tears were streaming endlessly, and I had to pry myself away from him to go home so that the others would not suspect me.
I didn’t do anything that could ever possibly betray Wesley’s trust. It was true what I said before; I no longer loved Blake the way I used to. Those feelings died successfully over the past many months and were replaced by a burning hatred that eventually consumed me entirely to act out and release such revenge plots on the poor victim. After Wesley came along, I grew more and more attracted to the way he just was. He had this aura of mystery and power around him that drew me to him like two opposites poles of a magnet or a moth to light, and I was absolutely helpless.
