"I'm your sister. What's wrong with asking you for a little money? You know I'm just a housewife now. I don't have any income. What, you want to watch me sweat over a few hundred dollars?"
A few hundred dollars. That wasn't hard to manage.
But a few hundred here, a few hundred there, over and over again?
She knew I was just a student. She knew my family didn't give me a living allowance. And still, she held her hand out without a shred of hesitation.
It only got worse after Tim was born.
I'd just finished my master's degree and was in the thick of job hunting. Jennifer didn't want to pay for a nanny, so she got our mother to trick me into coming home to take care of her kid.
Before Tim turned two, he spent far more time in my arms than he ever did in Jennifer's.
Once he was older, she turned me into her free tutor. When his grades were good, it was because her son was naturally brilliant. When they slipped, it was because I'd been a bad influence.
After so many years, I'd gotten used to all of it.
Until she told me to pull strings for Tim at school. To shortchange other students for his benefit.
That was the first time I ever said no to her.
It cost me my life.
My mother's texts kept rolling in, one after another. She talked about how she'd raised me, how hard her life had been.
All of it aimed at one goal.
She wanted me to admit to taking bribes, then apologize to Jennifer and Tim.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The demand was absurd, and yet they issued it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
But I didn't have the energy to fight her right now. I knew Jennifer had prepared something else to destroy me.
Just like in my previous life, another video hit the trending page that night.
The man in the video was the father of one of my top students.
"My kid is in Melissa Donaldson's class. The other parents all assumed that since my daughter's grades were good, Ms. Donaldson would treat her well."
"But what you don't know is that ever since Donaldson became the homeroom teacher, she's been dropping hints. Our family has given her at least two hundred thousand dollars. It was only because of that money that she was ever nice to my daughter."
Then came the chat screenshots, carefully cropped to remove all context.
Some of them were outright fabricated.
Every line of those messages was blown up, zoomed in on, dissected word by word. Every punctuation mark was analyzed in essay-length posts, all of it treated as ironclad evidence of my guilt.
It didn't take long before I was doxxed. My personal information was plastered across the internet.
They found out Tim was my nephew, and the vitriol turned even uglier.
She'd scam her own nephew? Is she even human?
Think about it. If a student were a teacher's relative, they'd normally get special treatment at school. If her own nephew was forced to spend his pocket money buying her gifts, Donaldson must have been targeting this kid on purpose.
My lawyer called and asked if I wanted to get ahead of it, try to contain the damage.
I shook my head.
"Let it burn. The bigger, the better."
I wasn't after some slap on the wrist.
I wanted them to pay the full price.
Jennifer's call came through.
"Melissa. How does it feel? Scared yet?"
"I want you to remember this lesson. That's what you get for sticking my son in the last row on purpose."
What a joke.
Seating in my class was on a rotation. Everyone took turns. Tim couldn't stand sitting in the back for even a single day and wanted me to permanently assign him the best seat in the room.
The audacity was truly something.
On the other end of the line, Tim's voice dripped with glee.
"This isn't nearly enough of a lesson."
"That's right, everything my son says is right," Jennifer cooed.
She finished praising Tim, then turned her venom back on me.
"Melissa, since you're my sister, I'll give you one chance. Bow and apologize to me and my son, and then pay our family a settlement."
