I was halfway up the aisle when a chair scraped against the floor, slicing through the applause. My sister stood up, pointing a finger like a verdict. She screamed that I was a cheat, that my four years were a lie.
The auditorium froze as phones rose to record my destruction. I realized she had not come to witness my success, but she did not know I had already planted a trap right beneath the honorary seats. My name is Natalie Martin.
I was 24 years old, standing on the precipice of what was supposed to be the first day of my real life when the floor fell out from under me. The air inside the Hawthorne Ridge University auditorium was thick and recycled, smelling faintly of floor wax and stale perfume. There were 2,000 people crammed into the seating banks, a sea of parents and partners fanning themselves with programs, waiting for their specific three seconds of cheering.
I had waited four years for this. I had worked double shifts at the library, eaten ramen that tasted like cardboard, and slept an average of four hours a night just to walk across this stage. The dean of students, a man named Dr.
Halloway, who always looked like he was smelling something sour, adjusted the microphone. He cleared his throat. The sound boomed through the speakers.
“Natalie Martin,” he announced. I took the first step. The lights were blinding—hot white spots that erased the faces of the crowd and turned the audience into a dark, breathing ocean.
I focused on the vice chancellor standing twenty feet away, holding the leather-bound folder that contained my future. Then I heard it. It was not a cheer.
It was the sharp, violent screech of metal legs dragging against concrete. It was the sound of a chair being shoved back with enough force to bruise a shin. “She cheated!”
The voice cut through the polite applause like a serrated knife.
It was a voice I knew better than my own. It was the voice that had read me bedtime stories when I was five and whispered insults about my weight when I was fifteen. I stopped.
My heel hovered an inch above the floorboards. “She is a fraud!” the voice screamed, pitching up into a theatrical register designed to carry to the back rows. “That degree is a lie!
She bought her papers! She tricked this entire school!”
The auditorium did not just go quiet. It died.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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