Toxic Bloodline

Summary

A notification suddenly popped up in the class group chat. It was a photo. It was a shot of me bending over to tie my shoelaces in the girls' locker room. My collar hung loose, exposing my chest. The camera angle was deliberate, predatory, and impossible to mistake. The sender was my cousin, Sophie. Her caption was a single word. "Guess." Every phone in the classroom vibrated in unison. Forty-something heads snapped up, their eyes locking onto me. I looked down at my own screen just as Sophie sent a follow-up message beneath the photo. "Oops, my hand slipped~" That little tilde felt like a twisted blade sliding straight into my ribs. I would soon find out that my sweet little cousin had created five separate group chats. There were 187 people in them. She had distributed over five hundred invasive photos of me. She lived in the apartment building directly across from mine. Her balcony faced my bedroom window perfectly. It took me exactly three months to send all of those people straight to a jail cell or a courtroom. That included my childhood best friend, a boy I had known for fifteen years. I did it because my grandpa, a tough-as-nails combat veteran, taught me a golden rule when I was a kid. He told me that taking a hit in life was fine, but you never, ever swallow their garbage in silence.