After Rebirth My Class Beauty Led Cheating and I Stayed Silent Chapter 08

After Rebirth My Class Beauty Led Cheating and I Stayed Silent Chapter 08

June 9th. 9:00 a.m.

I didn’t go to school.

No one had called me in.

I sat at home with a novel open on my desk, but my eyes never actually registered the words.

At 9:13, Delaney called.

Her voice was shaking. “Tessa… I’m at school… where are you?”

“No one told me to.”

“There are… there are a lot of people here. Not teachers. People in uniform.”

I tightened my grip on my phone. “How many?”

“I don’t know… at least ten, maybe more. And some of them have cameras, not media, but official,

state-issued body cams. I saw Grant get called in. Brielle’s crying in the hallway.”

Her breathing was getting faster.

“Tessa, is it because of that… that thing… from the other day?”

I stayed silent for two seconds.

“Your testing room was in Building B,” I said.

“You weren’t involved in anything. Just go sign in with the administration office and confirm

attendance. This probably has nothing to do with you.”

“But…”

“Delaney.” My voice stayed calm.

“You don’t know anything, and you didn’t do anything. Sign in, then go home.”

The line went quiet.

“Okay.” Her voice dropped. “Tessa… why do you sound like you’re not surprised at all?”

I looked out the window at the leaves shifting in the sunlight.

“Because I guessed this was coming.”

I hung up.

The screen lit again in my hand. The class group chat had started moving.

But this time it wasn’t panic or speculation.

It was Sienna.

She had finally reappeared.

The message had been sent ten seconds earlier.

Sienna: [Everyone listen to me. If they call you in for questioning, don’t admit anything. They don’t have hard evidence. This is just a routine inquiry. The devices were handled cleanly. As long as our stories match, nothing happens. Remember this: we don’t know anything, we didn’t use anything, and we all took the SAT normally.]

Under her message, the ellipsis flickered as someone typed, then vanished. Finally, Brielle

managed a single line.

Brielle: [But I already…]

Nothing after that. She’d probably realized she shouldn’t have said even that much.

Sienna replied instantly.

Sienna:[What did you say?]

Brielle didn’t answer.

Three minutes later, Sienna sent another message.

Sienna: [Brielle, call me.]

Then a system alert popped up.

Brielle Dawson unsent a message.

The chat fell silent again.

I stared at the conversation on my screen.

Sienna was still trying to hold the situation together, desperately clawing to be the sun and keep all

her orbiting planets from spinning off into space.

But her gravity wasn’t strong enough anymore.

Because fear was stronger than loyalty.

Once one person started talking, even halfway, everyone else would unravel too.

That was the prisoner’s dilemma.

And Sienna, apparently, had never studied game theory.

At two in the afternoon, Grant called.

I answered.

“Tessa.” His voice was raw, the kind of raw that came from talking too much or too loud for too

long.

“What’s wrong?”

“You… didn’t come to school today?”

“No one asked me to.”

There was a long stretch of silence on the other end. Then he asked the question I’d been expecting.

“Did they contact you?”

“No.”

Another silence.

“Tessa, let me ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you… know all of this already?”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the thin crack running across the ceiling.

“Grant, there’s only one thing I know.”

“What?”

“My testing room was Building C, Room 201. I didn’t use any device. Every answer on my test came from me. Everything else has nothing to do with me.”

His breathing went rough in my ear.

“Tessa…”

“Do you have anything else you want to ask?”

He said nothing.

“If not, I’m hanging up. Cooperate with the investigators and answer honestly. Lying will only make

things worse.”

I set the phone back down on the desk.

It buzzed again and again as more messages came in.

I didn’t look.

Instead, I got up and walked out to the balcony. The early-June wind carried the sound of cicadas

and distant traffic with it.

Below me, a couple of little kids rode their bikes in circles, laughing and yelling.

I stood there with both hands on the railing for a while.

Then I took a deep breath.

Something inside my chest kept swelling. It wasn’t satisfaction. It wasn’t grief.

It was emptiness.

A huge, hollow space.

In my last life, I had filled all those places with kindness. In this one, I had dug them out one by one.

And once they were empty, the wind could pass straight through.

Nothing clogged anymore. Nothing festered. Nothing rotted.

I went back inside and picked up my book again.

Outside, the angle of the sun shifted slowly, crawling off the page and onto the wall.