Plot Twists Campus Short Stories & Best Friend Face Slapping Novels

In my past life, right before sitting for the college entrance exams, my best friend, Lily Shaw, and I made a pact. We promised that once we got into college, we would study finance and make a fortune. But because my exam went smoothly and I was the first to leave the exam room, I ended up on camera for an interview. Somehow, I blew up overnight. Years later, I became a top celebrity, while Lily was sent to prison for financial fraud. When she got out, I gave her a million dollars to help her get back on her feet. She repaid me by quietly forging lies about me, whipping up a wave of online hate, and doing everything she could to destroy me. I traced the truth and confronted her, but she snapped back at me, "What gives you the right to stare down at me from your lofty throne and throw me scraps, Hannah Linden? I'm prettier than you, and my grades were better than yours. Why did you get the better life?" She laid out a plan to get back at me. She knocked me out and slashed my face. She also gouged out my eyes and cut out my tongue before stuffing me into a freezer, leaving me there to freeze to death. When I open my eyes again, I find myself reborn in my senior-year classroom. There's just over a month left for the college entrance exams. I look at Lily, who sits to my left and whispers to me. I smile at her, my eyes glinting with ice and venom.

My best friend, Natalie Grey, was the most famous pushover class president in the entire management department. When classmates didn't pay their class dues, she covered them out of her own pocket. When people sent her on errands and dumped grunt work on her, she kept her head down and did every bit of it. When someone got written up and pinned the blame on her, she quietly took the fall. I, on the other hand, breathed a sigh of relief and told her to keep it up. Because deep down, Natalie was a little hellion. Emotionally detached and born with a screw loose, she was the kind of person who would actually take a knife to someone in real life. When we were kids, a boy from our town picked on me. Natalie pinned him to the ground and beat him so badly it took three or four grown-ups to drag her off. He ended up in the hospital for three days. Natalie climbed a drainpipe up to his fifth-floor room and yanked out his oxygen tube. He was so scared that his family moved away the very next day. I was terrified she would one day do something she couldn't take back, so I poured everything I had into training her to be sweet and docile. Then Selena Morrison, the department's it-girl, moved into my dorm room. She made me pick up her meals and fetch her packages, but she never paid me a single cent. Every time we split a bill, she made a point of rounding her share down. With no money left for food, I lost thirty-three pounds. When I finally tried to stop picking up her meals, Selena went straight online and posted that I was jealous of her and out to get her. Suddenly, every guy in the school had it out for me. My bike, parked outside the dorm, got smashed to pieces. My food deliveries kept disappearing the moment they arrived. One day, as I stood helplessly over yet another takeout order splattered across the ground, Selena looked at me with a smile. "Come on, be a good girl. Being my servant is an honor..." There was a loud bang. Before Selena could even finish her sentence, she went flying half a mile. I snapped my head up. Natalie was walking toward me, her face dark...

The night before term began, my so-called best friend, Wendy Shaw, posted a challenge on the university confession wall. "If this post gets 1,000 likes, our 220-pound campus belle will hand a love letter to the untouchable Jonathan Riverson during orientation tomorrow—in front of everyone!" She paired the post with a hideous photo of me taken back in high school. In it, I was wearing an oversized uniform, my face round enough to show more than one chin. The comments exploded almost immediately. "You want her to give Jonathan a love letter? What'd he ever do to deserve this?" "Goddamn, Wendy. Now the whole campus is forced to watch an elephant walk." Wendy was right there in the comments, encouraging them. "Keep the likes coming! Emilia's a brave girl!" She then texted me, saying it was just to train my courage. I stood before a full-length mirror, staring at my defined abs and sharp jawline, and I sneered. No one knew I had spent the last year working out like mad, and I had lost most of the extra weight. Now I was just over a hundred pounds. The post had 999 likes. I smiled. Then, I tapped the heart and gave it the thousandth. After that, I logged into my main account and left a comment beneath Wendy's post. "Save yourself the trouble. I'll deliver the love letter tomorrow myself."