Chapter One
JADE
Five months earlier….
“I can’t go. You don’t understand.”
My voice cracked on the last word. My mother’s pacing had worn a trench into the carpet, but it wasn’t helping either of us. Her hands trembled. Her lips pressed together like she could hold in her fear if she just tried hard enough.
“I can’t homeschool you, Jade,” she said finally, sitting on the edge of my bed. Her voice was frayed. Tired. “Your father and I both work.”
“I can’t face them. Any of them.” I stared at the ceiling like it might offer an escape. “Not after… all of it.”
She reached for me, smoothing my hair, stroking my back like she used to when I was little and sick with nightmares. Her shoulders curled forward under the weight of something too heavy for either of us to carry.
It wasn’t her fault.
It wasn’t mine either.
I was just the punchline in someone else’s joke.
High school catfishing. Cyberbullying. Humiliation posted and reposted a thousand times. My face, my body, mylife—twisted into a meme by kids I’d shared lunches and bus rides with.
The school district lawyered up before I’d even wiped the mascara off my cheeks. I’m sure the group behind the fake Instagram account did too.
But us? My family?
Hiring an attorney just to get the names of the people who did this to me wasn’t in my parents’ budget—or anywhere near their reality.
“Fine,” my mom said quietly, pressing a kiss to my temple. “Stay home today. We’ll think of something.”
The tears I’d been holding back finally slipped free. So did hers.
I’d always hated Whitney. Ever since fifth grade, when she told everyone I smelled like “off-brand shampoo” and that my parents “weren’t Ivy.”
I didn’t even know what that meant back then. Neither did half the third-grade class. But she said it like a curse, and from that day forward, she had it out for me.
The day she called me “discount Visco girl” just because I didn’t have a Hydro Flask in 2019 should’ve been my first warning. Whitney and her crew didn’t need a reason. Just a target.
And now?
Now I was radioactive.
The worst of it wasn’t even the fake messages or the doctored screenshots.
It was the account.
They made an OnlyFans using my face.
Stolen pictures from my Instagram. My face, my body—spliced together with someone else’s skin in ways that made me want to crawl out of my own. They edited everything. Perfectly. Horrifically. They made it lookreal.
It was beyond cruel.
It was criminal.
But when we went to the police, it was like we hit a wall wrapped in red tape. They said they were “doing what they could.” They said taking the account down was “complicated.” That it had been reported. Flagged.Reviewed.
That didn’t stop the screenshots from spreading like wildfire.
