Chapter Nine: Elena

I read Victoria's name in that text so many times it stopped looking like a word.

She's the one who made sure the review board got an anonymous tip.

I didn't sleep again. By the time I dragged myself into the girls' bathroom before first period, running on nothing but two hours of shallow, useless rest, I told myself the worst of it was already behind me. 

I'd survived the wig, the engagement announcement and the letter so whatever today brought, I could survive that too.

Then I looked up at the mirror.

Someone had written across it in thick black marker, right at eye level, impossible to miss.

HOMEWRECKER GOES HOME.

My stomach turned over. I stood there staring at my own reflection warped behind those four words, feeling exposed in a way that had nothing to do with clothes or wigs or cameras. This wasn't rumor anymore. This was someone standing in this exact spot, marker in hand, deciding I deserved to see it the second I walked in.

I grabbed a paper towel and scrubbed at it until my knuckles ached and the ink finally smeared into a gray, illegible mess. 

It didn't make me feel better. It just meant I was fifteen minutes late to first period with red eyes and shaking hands, which, of course, gave everyone something new to whisper about the second I sat down.

By lunch, it had a name.

I heard it before I understood what it meant, a ripple of laughter near the vending machines, a girl covering her mouth, another one saying it slow and deliberate like she wanted to make sure I heard every syllable.

“Wig-Snatcher.”

It landed in my chest like a slap.

I found out later, secondhand, from a girl in my chemistry class who clearly felt a little guilty relaying it, that Melissa had started a group chat overnight. Hartwood Tea, she'd called it, forty-something members deep by morning, screenshots of the wig moment pinned at the top like a trophy. 

Someone had coined the nickname around 2 a.m. Melissa had liked the comment personally. By the time first period ended, half the school was using it like it had always existed.

Wig-Snatcher.

It followed me from class to class, whispered just loud enough to be heard, never quite loud enough to prove anything if a teacher asked. 

Someone taped a photo of a cheap costume wig to my locker door, complete with a little cartoon speech bubble reading oops! 

I ripped it down so fast the tape tore a strip of paint off with it, and I didn't care. I just wanted it gone.

I told myself, over and over, the way I'd told myself yesterday, that this too would pass by tomorrow. Rumors always burned bright and fast and then found some new target to obsess over. I just had to survive today.

I almost believed it, right up until I clocked in for my diner shift that evening and Denise wouldn't meet my eyes.

“Hey,” I said carefully, tying my apron. “Everything okay?”

“Elena.” She rubbed the back of her neck, the same gesture she'd made two days ago right before she told me corporate wanted me gone. My stomach dropped straight through the floor before she even finished the sentence. “I need you to head home tonight. We're — we're cutting your shift. Just for now.”

“For now,” I repeated. “What does that mean, Denise? You told me corporate backed off. You said you fought for me.”

“I did.” Her voice cracked slightly, and I could see she meant it, that this was costing her something too. “But it's not corporate this time. It's Elena, half the servers on tonight's schedule are students at your school. Word's gotten around. Two of them asked to switch shifts so they wouldn't have to work with you.”

“You're firing me because of a nickname,” I said, and I heard my own voice go thin and strange, like it belonged to someone else.

“I'm not firing you. I swear to you, I'm not. I just… I need things to cool down first. A week, maybe two.” She reached out, squeezed my arm, guilt written all over her face. 

“I'm so sorry. You didn't deserve any of this.”

I untied my apron with hands that wouldn't stop shaking and walked out into the parking lot before she could see me cry, because I refused to let one more person watch me fall apart today.

The walk home took twenty minutes. I don't remember a single second of it. My whole body was running on autopilot, replaying that bathroom mirror over and over, replaying the nickname, replaying Denise's careful, apologetic voice, until I was standing in front of my own apartment door without any memory of climbing the stairs.

That was when I noticed the note taped to it.

Not marker this time. Handwriting. Careful, deliberate cursive I didn't recognize, folded once and stuck at eye level exactly the way the mirror message had been.

My hands were shaking so badly it took two tries to get it unstuck.

You should know the anonymous tip to your scholarship board wasn't the only thing Victoria sent this week.

She's been in contact with someone claiming to represent your birth mother's family — a woman who says she's been looking for a daughter she gave up twenty-one years ago at Ridgemont Memorial.

Ask Martha what hospital you were actually born in. Ask her why the name on your original paperwork doesn't match the one on your birth certificate now.

Victoria already knows. That's why she's making sure you lose everything before you have time to find out too.

I read it twice, my whole body gone numb, the hallway tilting slightly beneath my feet.

Ridgemont Memorial. Not the hospital Martha had always told me I was born in. A different name entirely, a different city, a detail so small I'd never once thought to question it in twenty-one years of believing I knew exactly who I was.

I looked up and down the empty hallway, heart hammering, searching for whoever had left this, whoever kept finding me, whoever knew things about my own life that even I didn't know.

There was no one there.

Just an empty hallway, a locked door in front of me, and a folded note in my hand that had just cracked my entire identity open like an egg and no way, not yet, of knowing if a single word of it was true.