J.J.'s POVThere’s a strange sort of peace that comes from watching someone become untouchable.But peace doesn’t always mean comfort.It’s more like standing outside in the rain, letting it soak through your clothes without flinching. You’re still cold. Still wet. But you stop fighting it. You let it in.That’s how it felt watching Carolyn move through the school now.Untouchable.Immovable.And far, far beyond my reach.I found out she’d burned the letter.Of course she did. She was Carolyn. The Carolyn I broke and abandoned. The one I made bleed and let walk alone.And it hurt. More than I expected it to.I hadn’t even seen it burn. But someone told George, and George told Julius, and Julius thought it would help if I knew.“It means she read it,” he said.Yeah.And decided it wasn’t worth keeping.I spent most of my days in the art room now.Strange, right? I didn’t paint. I didn’t sketch. I barely had enough credit to be allowed in there. But the teacher didn’t care. He saw the l
arolyn’s POVI’ve stopped looking over my shoulder.Maybe that’s dangerous. Maybe it means I’ve gotten too used to the silence. Too comfortable in this new skin I’ve stitched together, thread by thread. But if fear taught me anything, it’s that sometimes the most dangerous thing is staying small to survive.And I’m done being small.The new term felt less like school and more like the aftermath of a storm. Everything still stood—the buildings, the uniforms, the rules—but none of it looked the same anymore. The faces that once mocked me now avoided my gaze. Those who whispered behind my back now hushed when I passed.Funny how quickly fear replaces mockery.But I didn’t bask in it.Power that feeds on fear dies with it.I had other plans.That morning, I walked into the library with purpose. Not to study. Not to browse.To gather.Names. Dates. Accounts. I wasn’t just building a case anymore. I was building a record.And I wasn’t doing it alone.Jide now met me every Tuesday in the bac
J.J.'s POVI used to be the sun of her world. The center of every one of her orbits, or so I thought. But now, I was the shadow she stepped over without even noticing.It didn’t happen all at once. Not even after the expulsion scandal crumbled. Not after Carolyn was cleared. Not even after I watched her walk past me like I was furniture in a room she no longer wanted to decorate.It was slow. Like erosion. One memory at a time.And now I sat alone in the corner booth of the café near school. The one we used to sneak off to when things got too loud. Carolyn would press her forehead to the window, watching cars blur past, mumbling about how peace was found in the noise of strangers.She wasn’t wrong.I stirred my coffee. Cold now.Bitter.Just like everything else.It had been two weeks since she returned to school. Since she became something else entirely.Colder. Sharper.She moved through the halls like glass and iron. Silent. Elegant. Dangerous.I hated how beautiful she looked like
Carolyn’s POVThere’s something strange about returning to a war zone after the bombs have stopped falling. The air still stinks of smoke, the ground still scorched, but people walk around pretending nothing ever burned.That was school.I walked the corridors and felt eyes. Not the sharp, mocking glares I’d grown used to—but something worse. Curiosity. Hesitation. The kind of silence people wore when they didn’t know which side of history they were supposed to be on.I was no longer the villain. I was something more unsettling:An unknown.Someone they couldn’t categorize.Someone they’d misjudged.But I didn’t care.Not anymore.I didn’t dress to impress. Didn’t raise my hand in class. Didn’t laugh when someone cracked a joke nearby. I moved like glass. Clean. Untouchable. Cold.My grades had survived, barely. The teachers knew what had happened, though most didn’t dare speak on it. Except for Mrs. Obasi, my literature teacher. She stopped me after class one afternoon, handing back
J.J.'s POVThe day I saw Carolyn walk back into school like a ghost wearing iron skin, something inside me cracked again.I hadn’t even known she’d been cleared. No one told me. One minute, she was a whisper people used to mock. The next, she was a headline. Suspension overturned. Evidence found. Carolyn Okoli cleared of all charges.They pinned the notice to the bulletin board like it was a weather forecast, like it didn’t matter that they’d tried to destroy her. Like it didn’t matter that I had watched it happen and done nothing.I sat in the quad, watching her from across the lawn.She didn’t sit with anyone.Didn’t talk.Didn’t smile.Her presence was a blade—quiet, sharp, and cutting through every lie people had spun about her. But she didn’t wield it. She let it sit at her hip, silent and waiting.I don’t know what I thought would happen. That she’d see me and soften? That maybe we could talk again? Be something again?But she walked past me like I was a dead thing.And maybe I
Carolyn’s POVIt started on a Tuesday, a grey and hot day. The kind of weather that makes your skin itch before noon. I was seated in the empty art room in my aunt's mansion, well, it's her husband's, hunched over an unfinished sketch I wasn’t even trying to finish, when George walked in. I had reached out to him because he was out of the country when everything was happening. He had to follow his mum to the US for the medical procedures she needed to get. I had no choice but to call him for help since I could not find anyone in school who was willing to help me find evidence to clear my name. He told me he would help and come to me once he came to Nigeria, and that he did. He looked... out of place. Nervous. Like someone who'd just come back from doing something they knew they shouldn’t have.I didn’t look up.“You shouldn’t be here,” I said flatly, shading the corner of the page. "We can talk about it on the phone. I don't want you to have any problems with J.J."“I know,” he replie