I Drew the Blank Straw for Eighteen Years Chapter 03

I Drew the Blank Straw for Eighteen Years Chapter 03

The next morning, my old high school teacher called.

“Wren, do you still have your notes from junior and senior year? The kids in the grade below want to borrow them, if that’s alright.”

“I still have them all. That’s fine.”

“I’ll send someone by this afternoon to pick them up.”

“Okay.”

That afternoon, I walked to the corner of the apartment complex and handed my three years of meticulously annotated notes to a younger student who’d come to collect them.

His eyes were full of gratitude. He bowed on behalf of the whole class.

He also gave me a new Miu Miu hair clip—a thank-you gift from everyone.

“Thank you so much, senior!”

I gave him a polite hug.

“Good luck. You’ve got this.”

The moment I got home, the neighborhood group chat exploded with an anonymous post.

Attached: a photo of me hugging the boy.

His face was blurred out. Mine wasn’t.

The caption was vicious:

[Some girl in this building was seen wrapped around some random guy outside the building. Shameless!]

The group chat lit up with gossip.

Neighbors quickly figured out it was me, and started tearing into my grades, my character.

Mom and Dad stormed into my room, shoving a phone screen in my face.

“You’d better explain yourself right now!”

I clenched my fists and spoke, slow and even.

“He’s a junior. He came to borrow my notes.”

Mom let out a cold laugh.

“Wren, you can’t even lie convincingly? You’re headed to community college—and people come to you for notes?”

“Funny how nobody ever comes asking Vivienne or Marielle?”

Marielle snatched the hair clip off the table before I could stop her.

“Wow, Wren, what junior has the money to buy you a designer hair clip? I know you’ve always been jealous of the one Julian got me, but you didn’t have to go find yourself a sugar daddy over it.”

“That’s not— that’s not what happened —”

Before I could finish, Dad’s hand cracked across my face. Twice.

Pain flared hot and sharp. Blood filled my mouth.

“Wren, is it that we don’t feed you? Don’t clothe you? And you go and do something this disgusting?”

His voice shook with barely contained rage.

Vivienne finally spoke up.

“Maybe there’s some kind of misunderstanding?”

“Vivienne, her face is right there in the photo. They’re hugging. What misunderstanding is there?”

Marielle’s retort left Vivienne with nothing to say.

Mom smashed the hair clip on the floor, crushed it under her heel.

I crouched down to gather the pieces, and a sharp edge sliced my finger open.

I pulled out my phone. There was already a message from Julian waiting.

[Wren Whitmore. All that, over a hair clip? I really didn’t think you were this kind of person.]

[No wonder that out of all three of you, you’re the one your parents never doted on. Guess you had it coming.]

Tears splashed onto the screen.

My finger stung, but it was nothing compared to what was inside me.

The storage room had terrible ventilation, and after everything that happened that day, I broke out that night in a sudden allergic reaction.

Angry red welts spread across my neck, arms, back—itching down to the bone.

I forced myself up and stumbled to the living room.

Mom was picking out new travel clothes for Marielle.

My voice came out hoarse, cracked with coughing I couldn’t hold back.

“Mom, I’m having an allergic reaction. Can you get me something for it?”

She didn’t even look up. Her tone dripped with impatience.

“It’s not that big a deal. You’ve been itchy before. It’ll pass.”

“Vivienne and Marielle never bother us over stuff this small.”

But I remembered clearly—when Vivienne so much as scraped her hand, Mom would panic and tear the house apart looking for a bandage.

When Marielle coughed twice, Dad would bring warm water and cough drops within seconds.

Marielle glanced at my raw, scratched-up arm, her mouth curling into a smirk.

“Wren, you’re not just faking this for sympathy because of what happened today, are you?”

Dad sat on the couch, voice like ice.

“If it itches, splash some cold water on it. Stop making a scene.”

Vivienne stood off to the side. She saw clearly the swelling on my neck and my arms.

Her lips moved a few times. She never got a word out.

I stood there, frozen, waves of suffocation and burning itch rolling through me.

I went back alone to the dusty storage room and scrubbed at my swollen skin with cold water, over and over.