Climbing the social ladder in a new school is quite the task for any high schooler.

One conscientious student managed to befriend the most popular girl in school, although their newfound “friendship” came with strings attached.

She soon grew tired of their transactional relationship, and when the popular girl tries to retaliate, it backfires spectacularly!

You’ll want to read on for this one.

Have me do your homework but not talk to me? Got it.

This happened years ago during my freshman year of high school.

I went to a newer STEM based charter school and so one of the classes we had was programming.

I already had a good understanding of the basics of Python before even taking the class, so it was my “easy A” class.

Seeing an opportunity to explore a new identity, she tried to pivot her friend-making strategy.

Well, being that I was at a new school and have never been the “popular girl,” I didn’t want to lean too heavy into the nerd that I ultimately am and instead tried to be cool.

In doing so, I started to establish a friendship with the “It girl” of our school.

She quickly saw an opportunity to get in with the popular crowd, so she took it.

We were talking about programming class and she mentioned how the homework was impossible for her and to kind of try to solidify our friendship, I offered to do it for her.

Genuinely, I didn’t mind for a while.

It helped me practice things that otherwise I would have forgotten and gave me more excuses to code.

Before long, the relationship started to feel too transactional.

Well, after a while, we would only talk to ensure I had done her homework (I guess she didn’t think to just login to check herself?) and that was it.

So eventually I started to do her homework less and less until fully stopping.

Popular girl quickly notices her grades slipping.

Suddenly, her grade went down and she realized it was because her homework was not being done and when she confronted me about it I was very honest.

Now, here’s where the unintentional revenge happened.

She explains how their assignments are typically graded.

So, the homework program they used for our coding class had a major programming flaw ironically enough.

If you opened up an assignment, didn’t type anything, and hit continue… it counted it as 100%.

Not just ‘Started’ or ‘Viewed’ it registered as a full 100% completed and correct.

This meant that when the teacher looked, she would assume the program meant to grade your code graded it correctly and just copied the grade over.

She lets the popular girl know she’s been exploiting this hack.

So, in order to balance my homework and hers, towards the end before I entirely stopped doing her homework I just skipped all of her assignments.

One day when me and her were talking I had told her about this trick but said I didn’t do it too often, just on the extremely difficult assignments.

So the popular girl rats her out, thinking the teacher will punish her.

Well, she wanted to try and get back at me for not doing her homework so she went to the teacher and told them how “some people aren’t doing the assignments and instead are just hitting continue.”

So, the teacher painstakingly went through all of the kids homework assignments and adjusted the grades accordingly.

But the popular girl is the one who ends up getting punished.

Everyone went down at least one letter grade, including her.

She went down from I believe a C or D to full on failing.

However, my grade didn’t move.

She walks out on top, all while teaching the popular girl a valuable lesson.

I’m assuming since the teacher knew I loved coding and had a background in it before even going to that high school that there was no need to go through my assignments.

“It girl” ended up screwing herself over so bad she had to retake the class and I got my “easy A”.

Next time you want someone to do that big of a favor, at least try to talk to them.

It girl won’t be getting a job working with technology anytime soon.

Redditors chime in.

This commenter doesn’t get why a smart student like her would do something like this.

With proper boundaries this situation could be avoided.

This commenter saw the situation with a bit more humor.

The popular girl learned a valuable lesson that day that taking too many shortcuts may leave you taking the long way around.

After her plan backfired, it may have been easier for her to just do the work herself.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.