Time to go on the offensive.

“Someone should take responsibility,” I agree with forced calm. “Which reminds me—did you read the article I sent you?”

Her voice is cold. “I don’t see how that’s relevant right now.”

“Don’t you?” It goes against my every instinct to talk to an authority figure like this, but I plough on. “Because the article should offer a vastly different perspective on the events leading up to the kidnapping. My perspective. If it were published, who do you think the public would side with? The working-class girl who resorted to helping her rich classmate pull off a crime just to pay for school, or the classmate who devised the whole thing for personal gain, and yet was still given the benefit of the doubt by everyone in charge?”

Madam Yao’s thin lips press together until they’re almost white. Yeah, she definitely hates me.

“I bet people would also find it interesting,” I continue, “that I was put in such a difficult position to begin with. I mean, Airington’s second main school objective is that it’s accessible for all, right? That it welcomes students from different backgrounds? Yet you have a twenty-million-RMB mini golf course and only one scholarship offer for the entire student body. And it’s not even a full scholarship. Do you even realize how much money 150,000 RMB is? How long it’d take for anyone below the upper middle class to earn that?”

The more I speak, the angrier I get, and the steadier my voice grows. I think of all the people like me, like Lucy Goh or Evie Wu or even the young woman from the restaurant with Chanel’s father. The neglected ones, the unlucky ones, the ones who want more than they’ve been given. The ones who have to crawl and scrape and fight their way up from the very bottom, who have to game a system designed for them to lose. Always the first to be punished and blamed when things go wrong. Always the last to be seen, to be saved.

And I know that’s not going to change within a matter of days or even years, but maybe it can start with something like this: with me, sitting across from Madam Yao, Henry and Chanel positioned by my side, wrestling back power from the powerful bit by bit by bit.

“You believe that someone should take responsibility,” Madam Yao says stiffly, when I pause to take a breath. “But based on what I’m hearing now, and what I’ve read, you don’t think that someone should be you, correct?”

I lay my palms flat on the table. “Look, I’m not saying that I’m completely innocent, or that I’m the victim here. I made some wrong choices, and I’m genuinely sorry Peter’s injured. It should never have gone that far. However,” I add, before she can try to twist my words again, “I am saying that this case should be handled fairly, and that the consequences should be proportionate to our actions, not our places in society.”