Professor Karma: Lessons in Revenge

Avery

The ring light hums against my closet door, that soft mosquito-whine buzz I've trained myself not to hear anymore. White noise. Like my mom's disappointment. Like the sound of my life being packaged into something consumable.

Just get through this one. Then you can breathe.

I prop my phone on the makeup mirror, adjusting the angle by millimeters. Two years of trial and error taught me this: tilt too high and you see the bump on my nose that rhinoplasty TikTok keeps targeting me with. Too low, and the shadows under my eyes make me look like I actually feel, which is to say, like a girl who's been grinding through senior year while her GPA and her follower count fought for dominance. Neither number ever wins clean. There's always some sacrifice hiding in the decimal points.

"Hey besties."

The smile slides on like lip gloss. Automatic. I've practiced this in the mirror so many times that my face knows the script even when my brain doesn't. Sometimes I wonder if the smile is even mine anymore, or if it belongs to the algorithm now, on loan to me for exactly as long as I keep performing it correctly.

Show them the girl they want. Not the one falling apart at 2 a.m.

"Avery Lane here, and okay, so senior year is officially over in like, three days? Can we talk about how insane that is?"

I angle the camera toward my closet. The cap and gown hang there, gold and white, the tassel doing this slow pendulum swing that screams main character energy. Sacramento High colors. The polyester still reeks of plastic and the vanilla body spray I drowned it in, because if I'm going to be suffocated by something, it might as well smell like dessert. I bought that body spray with tip money from the summer I spent scooping ice cream, back before any of this, back when the only audience I had was whichever kid wanted extra sprinkles.

"I know, I know. Very aesthetic. Very 'that girl.'" I catch my lower lip between my teeth, pulling back the grin before it gets too real. Too desperate. "But I'm feeling all the feelings right now. Excited. Scared. Nostalgic." I pause and let the silence hang, the way I learned from watching hours of other girls doing exactly this, performing feeling like it's a costume you can try on for the length of a video. "And maybe a little bit in love."

I set the phone down before the camera can catch the flush climbing up my throat. My pulse thrums somewhere near my collarbone, quick and stupid, the way it does every time I say his name into existence even sideways, even in code.

Stupid. Too much. You always do too much.

The comments are already stacking, hearts and fire emojis scrolling faster than my anxiety can process. Someone asks if I'm dating anyone. Someone else says spill the tea bestie. Three people have already guessed it's "that college guy from the January post." My thumb hovers over the notifications, greedy and ashamed of its own greed.

I don't answer.

Mystery keeps engagement up. That's Mom's voice in my head, cynical and sharp, from back when she still pretended to care about my content strategy instead of just texting me my grades like they're the only metric that matters. I can't remember the last time she asked how I was feeling instead of how I was performing. Maybe those became the same question to her a long time ago, and I just wasn't paying attention when the switch happened.

My thumbs fly through the caption. last high school sunset but maybe just the beginning of something better?

I hit post.

By the time I'm slicking on my lip gloss, Fenty, always Fenty, because if I'm going to perform adulthood I need the right props, the view count is already climbing. Fifty thousand. Sixty. The dopamine hits before the number even settles, quick and bright and gone just as fast, like a match struck only to prove that fire exists.

See? This is real. This counts for something.

"You," Zoey says the second I slide into her passenger seat, "are literally glowing. Like, nuclear levels. New highlighter, or are you just that pathetically in love?"

She's got her hair in space buns, a cartoon cat crop top that cost more than my textbooks, and the car smells like strawberry air freshener waging war against the four energy drinks in her cup holders. The bass from her speakers hits my ribs like a second heartbeat. Zoey's been my best friend since middle school, since before either of us had a public self to manage, and there's a comfort in her chaos that I don't examine too closely, afraid it might dissolve if I look right at it.

"Shut up." I'm smiling so hard it actually hurts, like my face might crack open and spill something embarrassing. Like hope.

"It's the college boyfriend." She pulls out of my driveway without even looking, because Zoey Chen has never checked a blind spot in her life. "Don't even try to deny it. You've been posting cryptic captions for weeks, Ave. 'Something better?' 'New chapters?' You're basically waving a flag that says I let a boy touch me and now I'm different."

I pull up Liam's last text and stare at it like it might disappear if I blink wrong.

Can't wait to see you this weekend. Got a surprise planned.

My stomach executes this complicated gymnastics routine. Flip. Twist. Stick the landing somewhere south of my heart. I read the message four more times before I even realize I'm doing it, searching each word for some hidden second meaning, the way I've started reading everything he sends me lately.

"He's perfect, Zo." The word feels thin in my mouth, worn down from overuse, like a coin rubbed smooth from being carried too long. "Actually perfect. Like, if I made him up, nobody would believe me."

"Details. Now. Or I'm driving this car into the ocean."

"Okay, so." I twist in my seat, letting the seatbelt saw into my shoulder because the pain keeps me grounded. "He's a freshman at UCLA. Blond. Hot. Like, surfer boy meets future finance bro. We met at that college fair in January, remember? When I was supposed to be networking for pre-med and instead I was networking for... this."

I flash her the photo. Liam's arm around my shoulders, some LA café with exposed brick and plants that cost more than my monthly allowance. We're laughing at nothing. It took twelve tries to get that laugh looking spontaneous. Twelve tries to look like someone who gets to be happy.

Twelve tries. Does happy even count if you have to fake it first to make it real?

"He makes me feel like..." I stop, searching for the right words. The ones that won't make me sound like every other girl who thinks a boy's attention is the same thing as being seen. I think of all the nights I've lain awake rereading his texts, trying to locate the exact sentence that made me fall, and never quite finding it, because it was never one sentence, it was all of them, a slow accumulation like sediment. "Like I'm not just some high school girl with a camera and a dream. Like he actually sees me. The real me."

"Hot," Zoey deadpans. "Because you are. Allegedly."

"Yeah." I stare out the window, watching my neighborhood blur into something less familiar, the houses I've known my whole life reduced to smears of beige and green. "That too."

We hit the beach lot right as the sun starts its whole dramatic performance, orange bleeding into pink like the sky is trying to trend. I grab my phone on reflex, already framing the shot. Sunset through the windshield. The algorithm eats this stuff up. Breakups and golden hour. The only things more reliable than taxes. I snap three photos before I even think about whether I want to remember this moment or just monetize it, and the fact that I can't tell the difference anymore sits somewhere uncomfortable in my chest.

"You gonna post him eventually?" Zoey asks, her sandals crunching against gravel as we walk toward the bonfire glow. "Or is he just going to be your little secret forever?"

I think about the saved drafts. The photos of us I've almost uploaded a dozen times. The captions I've written and deleted, each one a small rehearsal for a commitment I'm not sure I'm ready to make public, as if saying it to the internet might jinx whatever fragile thing is growing between us.

"When it's real," I say, hating how young I sound. How uncertain. "I want to make sure it's real first."

Zoey stops walking. Just stops.

Her face does this thing where the mask slips, no more joking, no more cartoon cat energy. Just Zoey, who got her heart broken by a sophomore at Berkeley last spring and never really talked about it, who still flinches sometimes when a certain song comes on the radio and pretends she doesn't.

"Avery."

"What."

"College boys." She says it like she's translating from a language I haven't learned yet. "They're not always loyal. They're not always what they post."

Something cold settles in my gut, right next to the warmth Liam's texts always leave there. Like drinking something hot too fast and feeling it burn all the way down, the pleasure and the pain arriving together so you can't separate them anymore.

"Liam's different."

"I'm sure he is." Her voice turns careful, practiced, the way people talk when they know something you don't, or when they're trying to protect you from a truth they can't quite prove yet. "Just keep your eyes open, okay? Don't let the aesthetic blind you to the actual."

She doesn't get it. Nobody gets it until they're inside it.

I want to argue. I want to list every proof point, every good morning text, every voice memo, every time he said I was beautiful without the ring light, without the filter, without an audience watching to confirm it was true.

My phone buzzes against my thigh.

Liam: counting down the hours until I see you baby

I smile and turn the screen toward her like evidence. Like a winning hand, like proof I can lay down on the table to end the argument before it really starts.

She sighs, not a happy sound, more like surrender. "Fine. He's cute. I'll give him that. The jawline is doing heavy lifting."

The bonfire throws sparks into a sky that's gone the color of a healing bruise, purple and tender and somehow violent. Somebody's Bluetooth speaker plays the songs that'll soundtrack this whole summer whether we want them to or not. Couples are already pairing off around the flames, phones out, building content they'll caption later with lyrics they don't understand yet, chasing the same high I chase every time I hit post and watch the numbers climb.

Zoey's warning sits in my stomach like something undigested. It doesn't move. It doesn't dissolve. I try to shake it off, but it clings the way certain words do, the ones you know you'll remember at three in the morning months from now, when it's too late to unhear them.

"He wouldn't hurt me," I say, unsure if I'm convincing her or myself or the version of me that still believes in soft boys with good jawlines and softer promises.

"I hope not." She loops her arm through mine, pulling me toward the fire, toward the heat, toward whatever comes next. "Come on. Let's go be seniors while we still can. Before we have to figure out who we are without the schedule."

I follow her. I don't look back at my phone, sitting warm and heavy in my pocket with his name still glowing on the screen, a small sun I've learned to orbit without quite noticing the gravity.

Maybe just the beginning of something better.

That's what I posted. That's what I want to believe.

But somewhere, in the part of me that still listens when my mother speaks, I know better than to trust anything that looks this good in golden hour light. The light lies. It always has. It just does it so beautifully that most people never think to ask what it's hiding.

Zoey

Sleep doesn't come that night. Not really.

I lie on top of my comforter at one in the morning, sand still stuck between my toes because I'm too tired to shower it off, doing the exact thing I promised myself I wouldn't do. Stalking Liam's Instagram like some kind of amateur detective with zero self control. My thumb keeps scrolling even as my eyes burn, some stubborn part of me convinced that if I just look hard enough, I'll find nothing, and this whole tight, twisted feeling in my stomach will finally let go.

Real mature, Zoey. Real mature.

His feed is mostly gym selfies and frat party chaos, plus a suspicious number of photos where he's conveniently untagged with anyone specific. Which, fine. Guys are like that, I remind myself. My own brother's Instagram is just him and one fish he caught two summers ago, posted over and over like it's breaking news. At least that's honest. At least that's just dumb and harmless.

But then I find the tagged photos. The ones other people post of him.

There's a girl in three of them. Platinum blond, always tucked into the corner of the frame, always laughing at something happening just outside the camera's view. I zoom in on her face in the third photo, and something in my chest tightens and turns cold, because I know that face. Not personally. But I've seen it before, years ago, on Avery's phone, back when her sister still lived at home and still liked her. The memory surfaces slow and unwelcome, like something rising from the bottom of a lake.

My stomach drops. No. It can't be.

I don't say anything. Not yet. I don't have proof, just a girl standing near a guy at a party, which could mean literally nothing. People stand near other people. That's what parties are for. I tell myself this three, four times, like repetition might make it more convincing.

I text Avery anyway. had so much fun tonight. liam's a lucky guy lol

She sends back a string of heart emojis and a selfie from the bonfire, her face glowing orange in the firelight, looking happier than I've seen her look in months. My chest aches at the sight of it, at how easy her smile looks, how unguarded. I haven't seen that particular kind of happiness on her in a long time, not since before everything with her family fell apart.

I stare at the screen for a long time before setting my phone face down on the nightstand. The ceiling fan spins lazily above me, and I watch its shadow flicker across the wall, trying to organize the mess of thoughts crowding my head.

Tell her, a voice in my head insists. You have to tell her.

But another voice, quieter and more practical, pushes back immediately. Tell her what, exactly? That some girl existed in the same room as her boyfriend? That's not a scandal. That's a Tuesday.

I know Avery, though. I know exactly how this would go. She'd hear something like this and decide I'm jealous, or wrong, or trying to sabotage the one good thing she has going into a summer that already scares her more than she'll admit out loud. I picture her face hardening, that particular way she has of pulling into herself when she feels cornered, and I flinch just imagining it.

So I do the thing I always do. I wait.

I'll bring it up later, I promise myself, when I actually know something real. When it's not just a girl lurking in the background of somebody's Instagram story. When I have something solid enough that she can't accuse me of making it up, or worse, of wanting it to be true.

I fall asleep telling myself that waiting is the responsible choice.

It doesn't feel responsible, though. It feels like the coward's way out, dressed up in a nicer excuse. And somewhere underneath the guilt, a small, ugly voice wonders if part of me wants to be right about this, wants some proof that Liam isn't as perfect as he seems. I hate that voice. I hate that I can't quite make it go away.