CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 110
"Are you shaking?"
Arizen panted through the curtain.
"Only enough to keep me from actually being really dead." I smiled, but my hands shook over the remote for the slideshow like they were hardwired into my anxiety.
I risked a glance at the audience. Standing room only. I spotted the dean. Queens Arrows. Even the cranky old media professor who told me my work was too 'raw' was seated in the front row.
And then I saw him.
Tony Zacks.
He wasn't smirking. He wasn't glaring. He slouched forward on the aisle, elbows on his knees, gazing at the stage as if it held the key to his salvation.
I dragged my eyes back before they gave away the tempest brewing in my ribs.
\---
The lights dropped.
My name was called.
I entered the crimson circle, the well-known burn of stage lights searing my flesh, and breathed a lungful that stripped away all the scars that I bore.
\---
"Hello," I began, my voice sharp, solid. "My name is Mackenzie Lanka, and I've been both a witness. and a weapon."
I hesitated there.
Heads turned, interested. Others went rigid.
“I’m a photojournalist. Not the kind that travels the world—yet. Not the kind that wins Pulitzers—yet. But the kind who once took a picture that went viral for all the wrong reasons.”
I clicked the first slide.
It wasn’t the photo that ruined Tony.
It was me—framed in the shattered lens of my guilt.
"During a fight at school, I took a picture," I said. "It was an instant of violence. The type of freeze-frame that doesn't mean anything. But it was the trigger. Everything came from that."
I scanned the sea of faces.
"Nobody cared about what happened before. Nobody cared about after. Just the picture. Just the boy in the picture. Just the blood. The damage wasn't mine… but the tool was.".
"He died doing this. Capturing war. But he would always say, the camera does not judge. People do."
I swallowed.
"And I believed him—until I saw somebody lose everything to the snap of a shutter I did not intend to become a bullet."
\---
Slide change: the body of work I'd never shared anyone before.
A boy in silhouette. A scar on skin. Anger in motion. Pain in repose.
"Everyone knows the angry half of his story. But no one saw the boy beyond the backlash. The friends who were ghosts. The lost scholarship. The silence that followed."
The auditorium had been silenced.
"I did. Because I haunted it."
I took a step forward, nerves now forgotten, replaced by something I had not expected: conviction.
“I’m not here to ask for forgiveness. This isn’t an apology tour. It’s a reckoning. A refusal to let the only story told be the one soaked in blood.”
\---
Slide change: Tony, eyes closed, candlelit, from the photo series he let me take the night he showed me his scars.
“I asked him for permission. He gave it.”
I heard someone inhale sharply in the crowd. Maybe Queens. Maybe Tony.
"I recorded the world he lives in—not the one the internet determined for him."
Slide: Tony's back, the scars—raw and unapologetic. Not set up. Just… real.
"But this story isn't entirely about Tony Zacks. Or me."
Slide: Arizen sleeping on a pile of books. My mom burning incense beside Dad's picture in a frame. A protester outside campus with a sign that read, Truth Isn't Viral—It's Earned.
\---
"About responsibility. About choosing how we use our platforms. About asking harder questions. About survival that isn't pretty or perfect."
Slide: A mirror. My face—eyes bloodshot, jaw tight.
"This," I said, "is what it is to look at a person—not through a lens—but as a human."
\---
I paused for a second, leaving the last image up. It was a photo of the stage I currently stood in, empty, with the red dot and a single vacant folded chair.
"I title this piece The Story She Wrote, because I realized that I didn't end a life. I pressed pause. And now, I'm helping to rewrite it—consensually, through my eye, and with something far harder than truth—vulnerability."
I stepped back.
No instant clapping. And for an instant, I thought I had bombed.
Then someone stood. Clapped once. Then twice. And it began to build. Spread.
I didn't weep. Not yet.
But I did catch Tony's eye—and saw pride, not pain. And that did it.
\---
Arizen backhugged me in the wings. "You killed, babe. Dead. Gone. Buried."
Queens Arrows were next, eyes shining, hands warm.
"That," she told me, "was the kind of thing your father would've wanted to see. You didn't take the picture. You developed the soul."
\---
I sat outside on the steps, ice-cold breeze in my face, letting the adrenaline crash finally come.
Footsteps approached. Heavy, purposeful. Familiar.
I didn't need to turn to know who it was.
"You always did like to make an entrance," Tony said quietly.
"You came," I said.
"I had to," he said bluntly. "It was our story too."
I glared at him. "Hate me less now?"
He shrugged. "Hate's easy. What you did tonight wasn't. You made it something no one else could've."
I examined his face. The boy in the photo was gone. This was a man who'd burned and emerged. And somehow, he saw me clearer now too.
"I still don't know how to fix this," I panted.
Tony tilted his head, then rummaged into his pocket.
He pulled out something.
One roll of unexposed film.
"You already did," he told me. "Now film the next chapter."
I stared down at the film, its bulk heavier than it was.
"Together?" I whispered, holding my breath.
Tony's smile curved. "That's your choice, Camera Girl."
\---
And I smiled that guilty, unencumbered smile for the first time in years.
Because The Story She Wrote was no longer mine alone. It belonged to us. A wound transmuted to art. A war transmuted to witness.
And at last…
A start.
Not an end.