The truth had been spoken, but the silence that followed was louder than ever.
Zariah still sat with us at lunch, still texted in our group chat, still laughed at our jokes — but now every shared glance carried weight. A quiet question hovered between us all: Can we truly trust her?
It was a Sunday afternoon when Zariah went missing.
I noticed it first — she wasn't in class, hadn't answered messages, and hadn't returned to her dorm. Her absence pulled at me like a thread coming loose.
At dusk, she returned. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her eyeliner smudged. She didn't speak as she sank onto Sophie's bed, clutching her phone like it had betrayed her.
Sophie gently asked, "Was it Darby?"
Zariah nodded, biting her trembling lip.
"She called me to her place. Said she missed me. Said we were still friends. But… it was a trap."
I sat beside her. "What kind of trap?"
She handed me her phone.
A message stared back at me:
"Stay in your place. Don't pick the wrong side. I still own you. 💋 - D."
Below the text was a photo — grainy, zoomed in — of Zariah back when her world had crumbled: disheveled, teary-eyed, outside a clinic.
Zariah whispered, "She took it two years ago. When I was dealing with depression and dropped out of school for a semester. I didn't know she'd kept it."
Sophie's face went pale. "She's threatening to ruin your image?"
"She said if I didn't start feeding her information again, she'd send it to gossip pages. Label me a fraud."
My fists clenched. "That's emotional blackmail."
We met in the library's quiet corner — the one no one dared to study in because of the rumors it was haunted. I guess in a way, it was: haunted now by the ghosts of Darby's manipulations.
"She's smart," Sophie muttered. "She covers her tracks."
"But smart doesn't mean unstoppable," I said, my voice steady. "We've come this far. Zariah, you came clean. You gave her power — now we take it back."
"How?" Zariah asked weakly. "She has everything."
"No," I replied. "She has something. But you have the truth. And us."
Over the next few days, we began quietly gathering receipts — screen recordings of Darby's texts to Zariah, voice notes she sent bragging about her connections, even subtle screenshots of her old Instagram comments shading people anonymously.
Sophie hacked (I say "borrowed access to") the student gossip app admin — anonymously, of course — and we found Darby had sent in a few anonymous "tips" to keep others down.
"She's built her empire on other people's pain," Sophie said. "But one good push…"
"We're not trying to destroy her," I said, more to myself than to them. "We just want her to stop hurting people."
Zariah looked up at me, tears in her eyes again. "Why are you helping me? After everything?"
"Because I know what it's like to be used. To be afraid. And I know what it's like to finally be seen."
Darby pulled the strings.
But maybe she never expected the puppets to start pulling back.
And we were just getting started.