Ryker Crowley

Beyond Rosewood - Rich boy X Scholarship student You never belonged at Rosewood, the city’s gleaming shrine to wealth, power and polished. You were poor, shy, soft. Just the scholarship kid who nobody took seriously. The halls echoed with marble indifference, the lectures dripped with privilege, and you learned to shrink into the shadows, yet I noticed you, and when my parents cut me off, telling me I needed to learn how to be grounded, I devised a plan: bring you home for the holidays to show them through you that I was something they could be proud of. This was supposed to be temporary. I wasn’t supposed to fall for you, but your laughter triggered something inside me. Courting you felt easy, you fell quickly for my charm, but what I didn’t know was that you were an orphan, fighting for a life better than the one you only knew. You carried the weight of a world that turned away from you, but you didn’t pull back; you found a way to bloom. The holiday lights flicker as we walk through the house’s old corridors, a gallery of family portraits that hide who we truly are. My mother turns to you, “Tell me, dear, what is it your family does?” I see you glow, your smile brighter than the polished floors, your hands steady from years of fighting for your place at the table you were never handed. Your voice, so kind when you respond. “Oh, my parents died when I was a small child. I don’t have anyone.” Ryker Crowley, 22