The boy and the girl were both 16. Naive, innocent and crazy in love. But some people around them hated them for it. People told the girl that she was better off without him. He was a troublemaker at school and always made trips to the Principal’s office. She was a studious, cheerful and sweet person. She wanted to try and please everyone. She had a lot of friends and even though she was away from home, she felt happy because she had good company. Little did she know that the people around her were plotting her downfall. It first started with baseless rumours, she brushed those off because she knew there was little truth to them. Her girlfriends suggested that she should avoid hanging out with her boyfriend for a while since the rumours were about her boyfriend and her. She didn’t want to do this because she didn’t understand why she had to. Her boyfriend did nothing wrong. She loved him with all her heart after all. He remembered the little things she liked and always surprised her when she least expected it. He always brought her chocolates because he knew how much she liked them. He made her laugh and he could read her mind. People didn’t know how he was like she did. People started talking and the rumours got way out of hand that people stopped hanging out with these two. The girl couldn’t understand why these things were happening. Fights between friends and fallouts are normal, but she didn’t understand why things had to go this far. Why would people who were once her friends try to ruin her life and her future?

Her parents wanted her to become a doctor and she had enrolled for coaching classes for the medical college entrance exams. She was doing alright juggling both school and coaching classes after school. The coaching school she went to, was one of the best in the state, and they were famous for being strict with boys and girls socialising. Students who were focused on going to the best colleges in the country weren’t supposed to get distracted and date around. The owner of the coaching centre was a famous Professor and he was notorious for expelling students who went against the rules. Some girls thought it would be fun to make her life hard, by sending an anonymous complaint letter about her and her boyfriend, to the Professor. She got called to the Professor’s office and she knew it was trouble. No one gets called to the Professor’s office unless they broke the rules. She had always been a good student, so she was really confused. The Professor showed her the complaint letter and looked at her student file. He said he will let her off with a warning since she was a good student, but if she received another complaint like this, she would get expelled. The girl didn’t know what to do. Everyone her age dated and it was a very normal thing to do, why was she being punished for this? She decided to be careful and focus on studying but the rumour mill went into overdrive. Slowly, students stopped hanging out with her and the teachers started to single her out in class. She became an outcast and the only people she had on her side were her boyfriend and a friend she shared her room with at the girls’ hostel.

She couldn’t handle how people could smile right in front of her face and stab her in the back when they had a chance. Is this how Julius Caesar felt when he was stabbed by his dear friend, Brutus? She always thought that was an awful way to die, being betrayed by a close friend. She was desperately waiting for a Mark Antony to fight for her, she just didn’t realise it at the time. She felt isolated, she started to have trouble concentrating in class and her grades dropped drastically. She told herself every day that she did nothing wrong to deserve this. She tried her best to lay low but people wouldn’t stop talking about her and she seemed to draw attention wherever she went. She felt like she was being treated like a criminal. Her signature look was her thick black eyeliner, people who said that she had beautiful eyes, started to say that she looked like a prostitute with those eyes. She realised how fickle-minded people were, just like the Roman people in Julius Caesar. She tried to talk to her boyfriend about this but he seemed to brush off everything like it was no big deal. He had always been a troublemaker after all. Things like this never seemed to faze him, but to her at the time, she felt like she was talking to a wall. She knew she had to deal with this all by herself. She had to be her own Mark Antony and fight for herself.

She knew she had to do something when she found out that even the school teachers were spreading awful rumours about her. Her heart broke into pieces when she found out that there was a rumour going around about her boyfriend making a bet with his friends that he would sleep with her by the end of the school year. The whole school had branded her as a slut and the kids and adults at that school went around telling everyone that she did something she shouldn’t have. She knew she didn’t do anything wrong because she had never slept with her boyfriend. But every time she took a shower, she felt filthy for some reason. She couldn’t believe she had wholeheartedly trusted a boy like that. She knew she could never trust a boy the same way again. She decided to go to the Principal’s office and filed an official complaint against those girls. Since her boyfriend was also involved in those rumours, she had no choice but to put down his name as well. He had a bad record at that school and the Principal had let him go with one last chance before expelling him. Her complaint put the final nail in the coffin of his life at that school. Justice was served, the Principal took action against those girls, her boyfriend had to leave school, the Principal said she could count on him if she faced any kind of trouble in the future. She could walk with her head held high again, but at what cost? The damage was already too great to recover from, for a 16-year-old. Her parents thought it was best to bring her back home and change schools because they knew their daughter couldn’t survive at that school in the aftermath of the bullying incident.

She came back home and went back to her old school she had studied at for years. It was her final year at school and she knew had to straighten out her life and focus. She struggled to sleep, she found herself crying in the middle of the night, she would blank out during tests and exams, she wasn’t the high-achieving student she always was. She kept blaming the girls and the boy for ruining the winning streak she always had at school. She never had bad grades her whole life. She felt like she was losing at life, she hated feeling this way. She tried her best and worked hard at school but she felt like she was running a never-ending marathon. She felt like she wasn’t making any progress and that frustrated her. The mental block caused by the trauma was too much for her. But she knew she had to keep going because failure was not an option for her. A 70% aggregate was not good enough for someone who was always in the top 5 of her class. She told herself that she would kill herself if she didn’t score over 90% for her CBSE board exams. She thought that giving herself an ultimatum like that would push her to keep working hard and not give up. She slept less, she didn’t have a lot of friends at school, all these things didn’t matter to her. Her end goal was to redeem herself and make her parents believe in her potential again.

The worst discovery she made during this time was when she tried to eat chocolates again. She always had a sweet tooth and loved chocolates to death. But now, every time she tried to eat chocolate, she felt sick and had to puke it out. It probably reminded her of the times her ex-boyfriend brought her chocolates every single day. It was now a very painful memory for her and she knew she couldn’t enjoy chocolates like she used to. A year passed by and she gave her final exam for high school. She was in the top 1% and her parents were proud of her. She finally felt like she could breathe again. All her hard work had paid off and she didn’t feel like a failure anymore. She tried to eat a piece of chocolate to celebrate, but she couldn’t bring herself to swallow it. Chocolates used to make her feel happy, now chocolates reminded her of sad things. Deep down, she felt guilty for throwing him under the bus. Loyalty meant a lot to her and having to turn her back on someone she loved dearly, was painful. She found out later from a friend that he was heartbroken and he had cried a lot after she left. She didn’t know how to feel about that because she was heartbroken too and she cried every single day. She hated him for all the things that had happened, she felt like he was also to blame for how things turned out in her life. She didn’t know what to do with all the hatred she felt in her heart.

Good things were finally happening to her, so she decided to let everything go and told herself two things: Number 1: No boy is worth ruining your future. Number two: No exam is worth throwing away your life. A year passed, she started classes at an Engineering uni and she was enjoying her life, she could finally eat chocolates again. That’s when she felt like she had moved on from everything, for good. The boy enrolled in a medical school and he was studying to become a doctor. She couldn’t help but feel envious and resented him for being able to pursue what she wanted to do initially. She was afraid of going back to the place that bullied her and treated her like an outcast. That’s why she gave up on her dream. She knew she was running away, but she didn’t regret her choice to do something different, her happiness and well-being were way more important to her than her ambition.

Two years went by, she started to lose interest in what she decided to pursue. She couldn’t imagine herself working as an Engineer for the rest of her life. She started to feel empty and lost her drive to work hard at uni. She started to think about old things, how she was supposed to have a bright future ahead of her, how all her school teachers expected great things from her. She wished she could go back in time and undo all the things that made her choose this path in life. She was not happy. She hated the boy even more. She needed someone to blame for all the things that went wrong in her life. She talked to the boy again just to see if he was happy. He hated studying medicine and he only did it because his parents wanted him to become a doctor. She felt a bit relieved hearing this, she would’ve hated him more if he was happy when she wasn’t. But he was doing something she wanted to do, and him not appreciating what he had, made her angry. She decided to go on a rant and tell him exactly how she felt at the time. She told him about how she wished she never met him, she was supposed to have a bright future and had a lot of ambition, but now she didn’t even know what she wanted to do with her life. She lost her sense of purpose in life, everything felt meaningless to her. She blamed him for her unhappiness, how she struggled to love someone wholeheartedly – she was always cautious of men and had trouble trusting them. She treated him like her punching bag, he didn’t say anything hurtful back to her, he tried to calm her down. She cut him off from her life after that. She felt like she took things too far and she knew she would hate herself even more if she said anything further.

She graduated from college with first-class honours, she went into sales roles because she liked talking to people. She hated her life though. She only felt happy on payday. Her friends were going abroad for their postgraduate studies. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. Her parents asked her about her plan, she said she wanted to help people. Her dad told her that she could do anything she wanted, he was ready to support her dream. She felt happy that her parents trusted her and that they were willing to support her dreams no matter what. She decided to think about what she wanted to do with her life, what she enjoyed doing and how she was going to make the best of her second shot at life. She moved to Australia for her postgraduate study. She had always dreamed of moving to a country and living on her own, now it was finally happening to her. She was also able to learn and unlearn a lot of things about herself and the world because she was influenced by no one at this place. She had to learn how to be comfortable with her sense of judgement and trust her decisions. It was hard at first, but she learned how to live her life as an adult.

The boy talked to her again because he hadn’t heard from her in a very long time. She was in a happier place in her life, so she felt like talking to him again. He told her about the time he met a few people from that high school they went to and how it was hard for him to have a conversation with them. She couldn’t understand why he was affected by that incident. She was the one that was bullied, not him. As they kept talking, she found out that he had social anxiety and he hated large crowds. He was very extroverted back in high school and loved being the centre of attention. She was surprised that he was so different now. And from their conversations, she understood that he felt guilty about everything that happened years ago. He told the girl a story about how he met a girl at his uni, who had no friends, because of vicious rumours about her that were not even true. He’s her only friend right now and he makes sure she’s never alone. He had told his friends about his high school life and they all agreed that it was traumatic. She didn’t know that he was also traumatised just like she was, from the things that happened 9 years ago. It took him very long to admit that it affected him and he still couldn’t forgive those girls for what they did to him and the girl. He hated that they never showed any sort of remorse for what they did and they all seemed to be living happy lives now. He also asked the girl one thing, “What did we do to deserve what they did to us?” The girl could see that he was hurting, she listened to everything he had to say because she had felt the same way years ago. She told him that both of them did nothing wrong and that they happened to meet bad people at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And she also told him that he was feeling envious of the girls’ happiness because he was unhappy with his life. She knew the right things to say to him because she had felt the same way, years ago.

She felt bad that she didn’t realise his pain until now. She felt sorry that she had blamed him for everything. He was also bullied along with the girl. The rumours were about the girl and the boy. The boy acted like he wasn’t affected by the rumours but in the end, he had to leave school too. He was traumatised by the incident as well. He felt responsible for what happened and he knew he wasn’t there for the girl when she needed him the most. He felt bad that she wasn’t happy with her life. He said that he wanted her to be happy. And for the first time in her life, she sincerely wanted him to be happy too. She had finally forgiven him for everything that happened, it was never his fault. She just needed someone to blame for her misery. She decided to write an apology letter and a story, dedicated to him.