Chapter 4
Ella Walker POV:
Walking home under the dim streetlights, the thousand dollars tucked securely in my bra felt like a warm, protective shield against my skin. It was more than just money. It was a lifeline. It was my ticket out.
In my first life, I had been eighteen and desperate. My body was the only currency I had, the only thing of value I possessed. So I'd sold a piece of it to Javier Mack for fifty dollars. Enough for a week's worth of food and a pack of sanitary napkins.
The consequences were swift and brutal. That humiliating photo, taken on his phone, spread through the school like a virus. I lost my name. I became "Fifty-Dollar Ella." The picture was a ghost that haunted the digital hallways of our high school, passed from phone to phone with snickering commentary.
Boys would slip notes into my locker, crude offers scrawled on scraps of paper. Ten dollars. Twenty. Five dollars just to look. The girls, my supposed peers, treated me like I was contaminated. They would shrink away if I got too close, whispering behind their hands, their eyes filled with a mixture of scorn and pity.
My life, which was already a quiet kind of hell, plunged into a deeper, more public circle of it. There was no physical violence, no overt bullying. It was worse. It was a death by a thousand silent cuts, a public shaming that flayed me alive, day after day.
I would not make that mistake again. I couldn't.
At twenty-eight, I was a fortress. The taunts of teenagers were like pebbles thrown against a granite wall. The name "Fifty-Dollar Ella" had no power over me anymore. But here, now, in this fragile eighteen-year-old body, with the wounds still fresh, I was vulnerable. I still cared. And because I cared, I had to be ruthless.
Javier Mack deserved what he got. It was a simple equation of cause and effect. He had built his reputation on the backs of people weaker than him. It was time he learned what it felt like to be the one on the ground.
I hummed a little tune as I walked, my steps light. A thousand dollars. It was enough. Enough to survive until the SATs. Enough to buy food, toiletries, new study materials. Enough to keep my head above water while I fought for my future.
After the exams, I would be gone. I would leave this town and never look back. Just like I did before. But this time, I wouldn't be running away in shame. I would be walking toward a future I had meticulously engineered for myself.
The past was a scar, but it was a scar I had learned to live with. It had been sanded down by a decade of struggle, of clawing my way up from nothing to become a woman who answered to no one.
But that was the 28-year-old me. The 18-year-old me was still bleeding. And she demanded justice.
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