HER UNREQUITED LOVE

The Trap Of Memories

For as long as Aria could remember, the massive white mansion sitting on the highest hill in town had looked like a royal castle. It was the Vance estate—a sprawling, intimidating monument of wealth that Aria had stared at from her bedroom window since she was a little girl. And for just as long, the children inside that castle had made her life a living hell. Andre, Colton, and Vanessa, the venomous twin. From the moment her father left for some unknown reason, the three of them had formed an unbreakable alliance of cruelty against Aria. Vincent never joined in on the laughter. He always stood behind the scenes, a quiet shadow who wrapped himself in his music and drama. Because he refused to participate in their cruel games and kept to himself, his siblings openly mocked him, labeling him the weakling of the family.

As Aria walked near the edge of the campus football field, her mind drifted into the dark corners of the past. She often asked herself the same agonizing question: Why do I still love someone who bullies me? Perhaps she still remembered how nice Colton was to her when her Dad was still around, always calling her by her nickname "Ari", and in a single day everything changed.

It was a sick, twisted hold Colton had over her heart, rooted in years of psychological torment. She vividly remembered her tenth birthday. Vanessa had handed her a beautifully embossed invitation to the Vance mansion. Aria had been ecstatic, begging her mother to buy her a new dress. But when she arrived at the grand white gates, there was no party. Colton and Andre had been waiting with buckets of muddy water, drenching her from head to toe while Vanessa filmed it, laughing as Aria had a severe asthma attack on their pristine driveway. Another time, in middle school, Colton had pretended to be her secret admirer, leaving sweet notes in her locker for weeks, only to read her private replies aloud over the cafeteria microphone, cementing her status as the school's ultimate joke.

Aria was so lost in the bitter sting of those memories that she never heard the warning cries.

SMACK!

A heavy, leather football slammed violently directly into her face, sending her crashing hard onto the gravel pathway. Her notebook flew from her hands, and the sudden shock sent a sharp, familiar constriction straight to her chest.

Roars of harsh, mocking laughter instantly echoed across the football field.

Aria blinked away the tears of pain, forcing herself to sit up. She pressed a trembling hand to her throbbing cheek and looked up toward the field. To absolutely no surprise, standing there with a smug, arrogant grin, was Colton.

Oh, yeah, she thought bitterly, wiping a smudge of dirt from her lip. This beautiful cycle of balls being hurled at me.

Colton took a few steps closer, his varsity jacket gleaming under the morning light. He didn't show a single ounce of remorse. Instead, he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted across the grass, his voice dripping with pure malice.

"Hey, scareware Aria! Get off our football field and don't stain it with your poverty!"

The team behind him erupted into another wave of laughter. Aria gripped the gravel beneath her fingers, her heart hammering against her ribs as she looked at the boy she hopelessly loved was now her monster.

"I... I wasn't staining anything," Aria whispered, her voice trembling as she gathered her scattered papers. She tried to stand tall, looking directly at Colton. "It's a school path, Colton. You didn't have to throw it at me."

Colton scoffed, "Did the charity case just speak back? Go cry to the nurse, Aria. Maybe she has a spare lung for you."

Another wave of brutal laughter erupted from the team, and Aria couldn't take it anymore. Clutching her notebook tightly to her chest, she turned and hurried toward the main building, her chest heaving as she tried to suppress the rising urge to cough.

By the time she reached the science wing, the hallway was entirely empty. The late bell had rung five minutes ago. Aria swallowed hard and pushed open the heavy wooden door to the Physics lab.l"You are late, Miss Aria," a sharp voice barked instantly.

At the front of the room stood Mr. Adams. He was an incredibly skinny man, looking almost like a skeleton draped in a white lab coat, but he was fiercely strict and undeniably brilliant. He tolerated zero distractions.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Adams," Aria stammered, her face flushing pink. "I got caught outside—"

"Save the excuses for detention if it happens again," Mr. Adams snapped, cutting her off cleanly as he tapped the chalkboard with his wooden pointer. "Take your seat. We are already behind."

Aria kept her head down, quickly walking toward her usual desk near the back of the room. She didn't notice the sharp, wicked smirks exchanged between Vanessa, Chloe, and Mia. She didn't see the sticky pink bubblegum they had stretched across the seat of her chair just moments before she walked in.

Aria sat down heavily, letting out a quiet sigh of relief to escape the hallway.

"Now, as I was saying before the interruption," Mr. Adams continued, writing complex variables across the board. "Today we are diving into nuclear physics. Can anyone explain the concept of binding energy and how it relates to the mass defect?"

The classroom fell completely silent. The wealthy students of Oak Haven suddenly found their desks very interesting, refusing to make eye contact with the strict teacher.

Mr. Adams sighed, shaking his head. "No one? A room full of future CEOs and noble heirs, and no one knows basic atomic theory?"

Aria hesitated, but her academic pride pushed her forward. She raised her hand timidly. "Binding energy is the energy required to disassemble a whole nucleus into its individual protons and neutrons. The mass of the bound nucleus is always less than the sum of its parts; that missing mass, or mass defect, is converted into energy according to Einstein's equation, E = mc^2."

Mr. Adams' eyes lit up slightly behind his thick glasses. "Precisely, Miss Aria."

"Excellent. Brilliant, in fact," Mr. Adams praised, nodding approvingly.

But instead of feeling proud, Aria's stomach twisted.

"Look at the teacher's pet trying so hard," Chloe whispered loudly from two rows over.

"She has to know the answers," Mia said back. "How else is she going to keep her charity pass? It's not like she can pay her way in."

"Probably spent all night memorizing the book instead of washing her hair," Vanessa muttered, loud enough for the surrounding desks to hear.

The low whispers and cruel comments rippled through the back of the classroom. Aria felt the confident posture she had just held completely deflate. Her shoulders slumped, and she stared intensely at her desk, her confidence entirely shattered by their words. She could feel the sticky trap beneath her uniform, a silent hum of laughter vibrating through the desks nearby.

From the corner of the room, tucked away by the window, Vincent Vance watched the entire scene unfold. He was sitting completely still, his notebook open to a page filled with musical staff lines rather than physics notes. His twin sister's venomous laughter echoed in the quiet room, but Vincent's expression remained a blank, unreadable mask. Was he bothered by his sister's cruelty? Or was he unbothered??

Aria squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the whispers. She focused entirely on the scratch of Mr. Adams' chalk against the board, praying for the clock to move faster. Every second in this room felt like a tightening noose, a heavy reminder that no matter how perfectly she answered, she would always be an outsider in their gilded world. The burning pain in her cheek from Colton's football was nothing compared to the slow, suffocating weight settling over her chest as Vanessa's malicious eyes locked onto her profile.