Chapter 149 Anya's Fight Back

Chapter 149 Anya's Fight Back
Anya's POV

Jade from the school paper corners me outside the library with her recorder already half-raised, like she's braced for me to bolt.

"I know you've turned down every interview request for two weeks," she says quickly, "and I get it, believe me. I just, if you ever wanted to say something on your own terms, in a place that isn't going to twist it, the Crest would run it exactly as you say it. No edits. No spin."

I almost say no. It's the reflex I've built over the last fourteen days, no comment, no thank you, I'm fine, the armor I've been wearing so tightly I forgot I could take it off on my own terms instead of having it ripped away.

But I think of Mrs. Darnell's voice in that quiet classroom. You decide who you actually are underneath what they're saying.

"Okay," I say, before I can talk myself out of it. "But I write it. You publish it exactly as I give it to you. No cuts."

Jade's eyes widen slightly, then she nods, fast, like she's afraid I'll change my mind if she blinks too long. "Deal."

I write it that night at my kitchen table, my mom's radio humming low in the background, three crossed-out drafts before the words finally come out sounding like mine instead of like an apology.

The next morning, it runs on the front page of the Crest, under my own name, in my own words, and by lunch it's already been reposted a hundred times past the school's usual readership, because apparently a girl finally speaking for herself is more interesting than everyone else speaking for her.

My name is Anya Reyes. I am not a scholarship. I am not a plot twist in someone else's story, and I am not the punchline you've been building out of my old work uniform and my financial aid forms.

Two weeks ago, a boy I care about stood in front of a room full of cameras and said my name out loud, on purpose, because he was tired of hiding something that mattered to him. I don't regret that moment, even though what came after it has been the hardest two weeks of my life.

I don't regret it because it was true, and I have spent a lot of my life being told, quietly, in a hundred small ways, that people like me should be grateful for whatever room we're allowed to take up. That we should stay small. Say thank you. Not ask for more than what we're given.

I worked weekend shifts at a diner so I could afford a calculator for AP Chem. I filled out financial aid forms at fifteen because I understood, earlier than I should have had to, that nothing in my life was going to be handed to me. None of that is a scandal.

None of that is something to whisper about in comment sections like it's a secret I should be ashamed of. It's the reason I know how to work harder than almost anyone I've ever met, and I am done letting strangers turn that into a punchline.

I am someone's girlfriend, yes. I'm also someone's daughter, someone's friend, an honor roll student, a girl who still doesn't know what she wants to major in, a person who is scared and tired and, some days, genuinely proud of how far she's come.

All of those things are true at once. None of them belong to the internet. They belong to me.

So here's what I have to say to anyone who's spent the last two weeks deciding who I am from three photographs and an old work schedule: you don't know me.

You don't get to. I'm not asking for sympathy, and I'm not asking to be left alone, because I know that's not how any of this works anymore. I'm just telling you, plainly, that I am not disappearing, and I am not ashamed, and I am done being anyone's headline instead of my own person.

Thanks for reading. Back to my actual life now, I have a chem test Thursday.

By the time I get to lunch, half the cafeteria has already read it. I feel the shift the second I walk in, not silence exactly, but something gentler than the whispers I've gotten used to. A few girls I barely know nod at me like we're suddenly on the same side of something. Someone claps, just once, awkward and genuine, and it startles a laugh out of me before I can stop it.

Levi's waiting at our usual table, phone already in his hand, and the look on his face when I sit down nearly undoes the composure I spent all morning building.

"You read it," I say.

"Three times." His voice is rough in a way that tells me more than words would. "Anya. That was" He stops, shakes his head like the right word isn't coming fast enough. "That was the bravest thing I've ever seen anyone do."

"It was just words."

"It was your words. About yourself. On your own terms." He reaches across the table, threading his fingers through mine, steady and warm. "Two weeks of people deciding who you are, and you just walked in and took the whole story back in five hundred words and a joke about your chem test."

I feel my eyes sting, but it's a different kind of tears this time, not the exhausted, cornered kind I've been crying alone in my room for two weeks. Something looser. Something that feels almost like relief.

"I'm still scared," I admit quietly. "Publishing that doesn't make the comments stop. It doesn't undo any of it."

"No," Levi says. "But it means the next thing anyone reads about you, they're going to read in your own voice first. That matters. That's not nothing."

I squeeze his hand, looking around the cafeteria at faces that, for the first time in two weeks, aren't just watching me like a story unfolding. Some of them look like they're rooting for me instead.

"I meant what I wrote," I say. "I'm not disappearing."

"I never thought you would." He lifts my hand, presses a kiss to my knuckles, easy and certain. "You're the strongest person I know. I just wish the whole world didn't have to find that out this way."

"Maybe it's better this way," I say, surprising myself with how much I believe it. "Now they know exactly who they're dealing with."