Plot Twists Romance Short Stories & Hypocrisy Campus Novels

The day we take our graduation pictures, I come across a photographer's post. In the caption, he writes, "I've been a photographer for ten years, and this is the first time I've ever done a wedding shoot on the same day as the bride's and groom's graduation! "They're both gorgeous, and they're incredibly patient. The groom doesn't even touch his phone. He just keeps gazing at the bride with so much love. "I spend all day shooting, and my camera's memory card is completely full. But getting to photograph a couple this perfect makes it all worth it!" I think about how my boyfriend, Zack Warner, is absent from our graduation photo session that morning, leaving us without a single picture together in our caps and gowns. Still disappointed about that, I open the photos, feeling envious. The moment I see the bride's and groom's faces, my breathing quickens. The groom is Zack, my boyfriend of four years. He always says we'll get married once he finds a stable job. The bride is my best friend, Wendy Carter, the campus belle. Just two hours ago, Wendy comforts me over WhatsApp, saying there are plenty of men in the world. If I'm upset with Zack, I can always find someone else. But now, she's holding Zack's hand, their fingers intertwined. She's the bride-to-be about to begin her happy new life.

My boyfriend proposed to me when we graduated from high school, but I made a deal with him instead of giving him an immediate answer. "We'll get married when we've collected 500 train tickets." In the first year, Marcus could hardly wait to come see me every day. Before long, our collection had grown to 280 tickets. He even laughed and said that he'd be able to take me home as his wife before graduation at the rate he was going. In the second year, we met each other halfway. Soon, the number of tickets climbed to 400. But in our third year, Marcus told me that his advisor had taken on a new project and that a junior who had just joined the research team needed him to show her the ropes. He became swamped, so I ended up visiting him most of the time. Meanwhile, he only came to see me occasionally. By the end of the year, we had barely managed to collect 460 tickets. In our fourth year, he said he was too busy with internship interviews, leaving me no choice but to pull several all-nighters to finish my assignments so that I could spend a weekend going to see him. We finally collected 499 train tickets just before graduation. I secretly put on a white wedding dress, slipped on the ring he'd given me when he proposed, and boarded a train. I wanted to surprise Marcus. I wanted to tell him that we had finally reached 500 tickets. I wanted to tell him that I was ready to marry him. But when I arrived at the foot of his dormitory building, my heart full of anticipation… I saw Marcus holding another girl tightly, surrounded by a large heart of flickering candles. He lowered his head and kissed her on the lips amid the cheers and teasing from the crowd.

When I was 18 years old, I did something that I would regret the most in my life, just to make Adrian Dickson change his mind and come back to me. I reported his secret love affair with a poor student, Cassandra Addams, to his wealthy parents. The next day, the poor student was made to slap herself in the auditorium in front of the entire school, calling herself a bitch, and then, she dropped out of school. I thought that Adrian would be sad about it and even resent me for it, but he didn't react as I thought he would. He still went to school with me every day, ate with me at recess, and showered me with different gifts and flowers from time to time. He even agreed to marry me and made me his fiancee. But on the day of the wedding, my parents are suddenly kidnapped, and the huge screen meant to play a video of all the sweet, tender moments between me and him begins playing a video of Mom and Dad being thrown into a snake pit, howling in pain. I cry until I nearly faint as I watch the tragic scene in the video and plead with Adrian to save Mom and Dad. However, in front of all the wedding guests, he grabs me by my hair and forces me to my knees. "Sure. Get down on your knees and slap yourself a hundred times while calling yourself a bitch, and I'll consider saving them. How about that?" At that moment, all the blood in my body runs cold. As it turns out, he's been harboring a grudge against me the entire time.