Chapter 4
In the midst of it all, I recalled the time I had spent with Steven.
He hadn’t always treated me like this. He used to be a secret illegitimate child who was the subject of bullying by other boys from
rich families.
My grandfather and I found him when he was barely alive after a beating, and we fed him his first proper meal.
Grandpa could not help but pity Steven when he caught the latter doing everything he could to mend the workbooks that had been
torn up by others. The sight of him injured and frantic tugged at Grandpa’s heartstrings.
When I was young, I was the de facto leader of that age group. With Steven under my protection, no one dared to bully him
anymore.
Thus, I was the person Steven was closest to up until college. I had even seen him secretly scribbling my name in his workbooks.
This lasted until the underprivileged student that Grandpa sponsored, Wendy Smith, got admitted into the same college as us.
She became the tail we couldn’t quite shake, following Steven and me everywhere.
Eventually, I noticed the two of them, who had similar upbringings, seemingly finding a sense of solace in each other. They even
started to have conversations on topics I could not join in on.
The incident that turned my relationship with Steven sour was when Wendy ended up locked in the storeroom after gym class.
Steven had frantically carried an unconscious Wendy to the infirmary, and only then did he find out she had claustrophobia.
An eyewitness had said that she saw Wendy and my best friend, Beth Lewis, going to the storeroom to store the gym equipment
after our lesson. Strangely, however, nothing happened to Beth whereas Wendy was locked inside.
Since that incident, Steven never left Wendy’s side and became her knight in shining armor of sorts.
The me of the past naturally couldn’t let her steal Steven away from me so easily. In order to vie for his attention and favor, I did a lot of dumb things.
But not only did I not win him back, I even pushed him further and further away.
Then, on the day Wendy and I went for the competition that would secure us a spot in the postgraduate research program, she accused me of locking her in an abandoned classroom.
