Nothing spreads faster than a juicy rumor in a small town.

What happens when a false rumor causes someone to leave town while holding onto evidence against the person spreading the rumors?

This is a long story, but definitely worth the read. Check it out.

Entitled, gossipy witch sabotages my totally legal, romantic relationship with my former teacher, ruins her career, and runs us both out of town? How about I destroy yours and your entire family’s whole life, lady?

I come from a really small town.

Think of the littlest, most nothing-happens-here city extended layover in your flyover state nightmares, and my hometown is even more quiet than that.

Think, half a mile or more between neighbors, a single main street downtown, one McDonalds, one department store, one movie theater with three screens, where everyone goes Friday and Saturday night.

Church every Sunday, everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows their business, the whole city is invested in the fortunes of the high school football team, that sort of place.

Graduating class of sixty.

Not because the senior class was dumb. It was just a tiny high school.

Small town, got it.

I didn’t really fit in at school, and kind of was a loner by choice.

I cringe about it now that I’m almost twenty-six, but I was a wannabe emo/goth rocker.

I still got invited to party with the other kids, not because they liked me, necessarily, but because there just wasn’t many people to invite.

My mom baked cookies and cakes for church, and when she wasn’t doing that, she cut hair in the town’s one salon.

My dad owned an internet cafe for a while when those were hot; once everyone even in our little nowhere town got WiFi, he turned it into a tax service.

Business is always slow because most people did their own taxes, but he didn’t really depend so much on his business.

He served twenty years as a petty officer in the Navy, and so he and mom got by on his pension.

In high school, I worked at the private burger place that competed mostly unsuccessfully against the town’s single chain fast food restaurant.

My boss always told me I should ask my mom to cut my hair to “stop looking like a dang girl.”

No thanks, old man.

Hottie from the big city? This is going to cause a stir.

So, with all this boredom everywhere, you can imagine the sensation “Miss Amber Fontaine” caused when the high school hired her to be the eleventh and twelfth grade English teacher.

Miss Fontaine was of French extraction, and had moved to America in her later teens to go to college in New York.

She was only twenty four, and very beautiful. She spoke perfect English, but did so with a very pleasant accent.

Obviously, all the guys loved her, and lots of women hated her.

She appeared oblivious to all the attention, however, and just stuck to her job.

Really, we didn’t know too much about her. She mostly kept to herself and nobody ever saw her hanging out with any men in town, and it wasn’t for lack of the men’s trying.

It soon became clear that she wasn’t into dating any of the men our city had to offer.

Much later on I found out that she had just taken the job in our small town to gain experience, with a future goal of being a college professor in a big city. A sort of two year plan.

Obviously I had a crush on her. We all did.

It was and still is a small, church-going town, so nobody really acted out on his urges or tried to harass her or anything like that.

As guys, we’d talk about how hot she was amongst ourselves, usual locker room stuff teenage boys do, but that was it.

My one real out of school experience with Ms. Fontaine was when she stopped by the burger joint I worked at and saw me working there.

She told me I had a nice smile, and that she wished I smiled more because in school I was always frowning (because I was in my emo, “everything sucks” phase).

When the food preppers came up with her food and handed it to me to give to her, I was impressed and not at all surprised that she ordered a salad.

She didn’t strike me as someone who ate the greasier slop we sold there.

In school the following Monday she smiled at me in the hall and I smiled back.

She sounds like a great teacher.

Then she said, “you’re learning,” but not in a condescending or patronizing way. Just a fun, kidding way and I exchanged a smile with her every time after that.

And that was the extent of my great, high school romance with Ms. Fontaine. Exchanged a few hello’s and smiles during my senior year, when I was seventeen.

Things changed the following year, though.

I was eighteen and still working at the burger joint, when Ms. Fontaine comes by the restaurant. “Oh hey!” she says, and asks with real seriousness, “are you going to college?”

I tell her the truth. I’m working with my band (I cringe about this period in my life, too), playing guitar, and saving money for community college.

Only sort of truth about the last thing.

I was the main vocalist in addition to being guitarist, and our band’s only other member’s were “Jerry” the bassist and “Gabe” the drummer. Both of them were just out of high school, like me. And, like me, they had no plans to go to college.

Gabe worked at the same burger joint as me, and Jerry, who had been one of my best friends in high school, ironically worked at the chain fast-food restaurant down the street from my restaurant.

Our lives at this time revolved around wasting our youth, skateboarding, getting blasted, and playing in our punk band (we liked to think that we played an emo/punk/metal fusion, but looking back our sound hasn’t aged well).

Ms. Fontaine tells me that now that she’s in her second year of teaching, she has a better sense of how to do things. She tells me that she wished that her current students were as well-behaved and put in as much effort as me.

I earned mediocre grades throughout school but consistently earned an “A” in English because I liked to read. She says she’ll see me around.

A few days later she comes in to the restaurant again, and we get to talking, and she asks me if I’d like to go to a movie.

I can tell she’s bored because there’s really no one her own age for her to hang out with in town, or if there are, they’re all lame.

Scandalous for a small town.

I think we both get the feeling that it’s natural we should hang out. And now that I was completely out of high school and she wasn’t my teacher, and we were both adults (by this time I was newly eighteen and she had just turned twenty five), why not?

So, that’s how it started.

We’d meet up in the early evenings, totally innocent, and go to the movies, or to dinner at the one good restaurant in town.

Ms. Fontaine was cool about letting me slide when it came to paying for our dates because she knew I made minimum wage.

It was actually me, who started to push our relationship to the next level.

After a while I started to hold her hand when we walked places, and finally we started kissing. Never in front of anyone.

She taught me a lot of French words and phrases over the next summer and fall while we were going out.

My parents knew I was sort of dating my former teacher, but since it was key word “former” they didn’t really raise any stink about it. Ms Fontaine would always try to convince me to go to college, but she did see our band play a few times when we got a rare gig at the roller rink, and she was nice enough to not tell us what she really thought of us LOL.

We didn’t have relations until we had been dating casually for nearly two months. That was my idea, too, but she admitted that she really liked me and she wanted it to happen ever since we reconnected earlier that year, after I had graduated.

I’m not the kiss and tell type, but my bandmates sort of knew that the dynamic in my relationship with Ms. Fontaine (she had been “Amber” ever since we first made out) had changed.

They appeared cool with it. I stopped doing so much silly youth stuff and really began putting money away to save for college.

The JC near my house was super cheap. Amber would often tell me she thought about applying there for work, but said that she really wanted to move to the West Coast, or back to the East Coast to teach at a college. Eventually, she told me she’d like me to come with her.

After a few months, I was in love with Amber and she was in love with me, too, she said.

We didn’t throw our relationship in people’s faces or show public affection, but it’s not like we pretended not to know each other, either.

Amber had come around the house and my parents really liked her, and thought she was a great influence on me. I didn’t exactly cut my hair, but I was neater and more presentable, and eventually I really did begin enrolling in GE classes at the local two year.

But then, things went downhill fast.

That isn’t good.

Out of seemingly nowhere, Amber got called in for a meeting with the local school board.

There had been reports that she was dating a former student romantically (they were talking about me). And that she was having a relationship with said student when he was still a minor and still attending high school. Of course, she denied everything.

Of course, they believed nothing. She had sent me a desperate text, and since ours is a small town (I think I’ve mentioned that a couple of times already), I was at that meeting in literally ten minutes.

The truth often doesn’t matter in these situations.

I told them the truth, that I was in Ms Fontaine’s class in twelfth grade, and that I was her student. That was all. I told the truth that we reconnected several months after graduation, and only then did we begin dating. And I was over eighteen.

The opinion of the board was essentially, “look son, we appreciate the noble effort you’re making to defend your friend’s honor, but we’re looking for the truth here, not omissions.” I insisted that I was telling the truth and not trying to cover anything up.

After a lot of tears, Amber was simply warned that it wasn’t becoming of a teacher to be seen with students outside campus, even if they’re former students.

And we assumed that was all. We were really wondering who complained about us, or who would make up tales about us having *** while I was still a minor and a student of Amber’s.

I was staying at Amber’s apartment by this time (I kicked in a portion of the rent of course). I had even met her parents, albeit only on webcam.

They’re good people. They don’t speak a lot of English, but Amber filled them in on missing pieces.

They knew my age and they were cool about it. We assumed it was just small town gossip and that it would blow over.

Yeah… this was about to blow up big time.

Boy, were we wrong.

Over the next several weeks after Amber’s meeting with the school board, vicious rumors started to spread about her.

I won’t insult your imagination. You know what people were saying.

One day my boss at the burger joint just told me he had to let me go. Some flim flam excuse about the store losing money, and my hairstyle was driving away customers. Whatever, dude. Amber told me it wasn’t my fault, and promised to support me while I looked for another job.

But then one day, SHE got fired, too.

She was working as a probationary teacher. It meant that during her first two years, she could be fired for any reason, and actually, no reason had to even be given.

Explanations were for those who earned tenure.

Her getting fired was no surprise, even though she was an excellent teacher.

We both knew why she was getting fired, but the district strongly implied that it was simply because she was an “ineffective” teacher.

In her defense, I looked at the data on the district website, and the number of students from our school who did well on standardized tests in her subject area leaped by double-digit points during the time she was a teacher there. Her numbers were far above the state average, and to this day, since her departure, those same scores have nose-dived.

Amber told me that students tended to respond well to her, and she was very popular among the students. It was true that she was immensely popular when I was a student, and I’ll assume the same carried true the year after I graduated.

Aside from the obvious fact that she was eye candy, she was simply a good teacher, and a good person, and that’s why the kids liked her.

Lots of students threatened to riot when she was fired, but being the non-dramatic, non-attention-seeking person she is, Amber asked them to just focus on their studies and doing well, and helping their new teacher adjust when he or she arrived to take her place.

My dad told her she ought to sue the district, but Amber didn’t want the drama. Besides, she said, she was “allowed to resign” so that it wouldn’t show up on her record as her having been fired. Also, she said that the district promised not to try to revoke her teaching credential.

Her own parents suggested maybe she ought to come home to France, but she insisted on sticking it out in America.

My parents were cool in that they offered to let her move in with us while she figured her life out. She’s lucky that her parents are well off, because they gave her some money to relocate to California.

But they stuck with it…

She asked me please to come with her, that she loved me, and we could start new there. I’ve always wanted to move to California, so I jumped at the chance.

My parents were happy that I was in a relationship with a good person who obviously cared about me, and gave us some money, too. We got an apartment together in the Los Angeles area.

Neither of us drove, so we both got bikes to get around. Our new area was a world apart from my old life, though I know Amber’s own teenage years were in Paris so Los Angeles wouldn’t be as much of a culture shock for her.

I immediately enrolled in a local community college and got a job as a waiter in a popular French restaurant.

Our gimmick was that some of the servers actually spoke French. Over the last several months Amber had taught me a lot of French, so I was a popular server in that restaurant because I gave it “authenticity.”

Unfortunately for Amber, the school district misled her about her teaching license. When they promised not to have her license revoked, they spoke the truth, but they left out the part where they would attach an official reprimand to it that accused her of inappropriate relations with students under her charge.

This nonsense scandal kept screwing them both.

So, whenever Amber applied for teaching jobs, this would immediately come up as a red flag on her applications. Another surprise red flag was that schools that she applied to would notice that she was fired from her last job.

“No I wasn’t,” she’d say. “I resigned.”

“Yeah, but it says here you were forced to resign to avoid termination for cause.”

Amber is seven years older than me, but I think in some ways I know a lot more about how nasty Americans can be than her.

Everywhere she went, doors would slam, career wise. She appealed to the state teaching license organization, and they said they’d look into it, but months later, nothing came up. Calls to her former school resulted in her getting the runaround. No one knew anything.

So, for the next several months I was paying our day to day bills and helping to support Amber, though I must acknowledge that the loans both our sets of parents gave us helped tremendously, and we couldn’t survive without them.

Finally, one day, Amber tells me, “you know what? Screw trying to teach public school. Oh, and OP, I’m pregnant.”

And finally some good news…

So, TWO pieces of good news.

Many, many months later, Amber and I are happily married. Wedding was beautiful, in sunny Los Angeles. Amber’s parents and mine and our families all attended. We had a pregnant honeymoon in France.

We now have a son, Richelieu. I am closing in on earning my AA in Information Technology.

I’ve been promoted to maître d at the restaurant, and have health benefits for my wife and son.

We live in a studio apartment, but at least it’s a huge studio, and it’s enough for now. Amber stays home with the baby, but she also teaches online English and French courses for a private school.

So, even though she’s blacklisted from teaching in the public K-12 district, she can still teach, which is her passion.

And life moves on…

More months pass, and I got my first job in IT, troubleshooting computers for a small company downtown. I make double what I used to at the restaurant, and my employer has a program where I can finish my BA while I work, and they will subsidize fifty percent for free, and the other fifty percent they will dock from my pay in small monthly installments.

Sounds like an amazing deal, and I take it. We move to a bigger apartment. Amber is making her awesome contribution both as a mother and to our finances with her tutoring.

We’re planning for her to eventually go back to school for her graduate degrees so she can finally fulfill her dream of teaching college.

“Oh, more good news, OP. I’m pregnant again.”

Life is sweet, haha.

Things are going so well, and about to get even better.

So, while everything is going awesome, one day I get a text from mom.

She was at a local school board meeting with her neighbors, regarding a bill proposal to hire more teachers. Apparently over the past few years, the population has grown, and the high school needed to expand.

So now it’s a two horse town, mom says.

While she was at the meeting, my mom ran into Jerry’s mom. Jerry, the bassist from my old band that I quit once I got into a serious relationship with Amber.

My mom never met Jerry, or his mom. Or at least in a way that connected them to me. The reason was, because I never brought Jerry around our house. Because, for a couple of years, Jerry was my supplier. He had the hook up for anything you wanted. Well what does all this have to do with anything.

My mom doesn’t know Jerry’s mom, but she hears her and some other lady talking about me, and Amber.

They finally figured out how started the rumor.

My mom heard them saying that Jerry had been the one to tell everyone about Amber and me supposedly having *** before I graduated, and his mom went straight to the school board.

Their names as informers were protected under confidentiality. I had lost touch with Jerry over the years and had stopped playing music with him long ago. I knew he resented all the time I was spending with “my chick.”

It’s a shame because he used to be such a good friend of mine. It sucked that he was behind getting my now wife and mother of my child and soon to be children fired from her career. Jerry’s mom was a teacher at Amber’s former school of employment.

It became a joke of ours—that his mom had such a huge stick up her @ss regarding prim and proper behavior, and was a goody two shoes teacher whose crap didn’t stink… Yet her kid Jerry, a student at her school, is basically the biggest dealer in town.

Also, looking back, I know he had a crush on Amber, too, and probably always resented that I got to be in a relationship with her, while he didn’t.

Maybe it’s because she knows quality, you jerk.

I was interested to learn that Jerry’s mom was now on the school board. I didn’t tell Amber about all this right away. I just asked her to tell me what she remembered about Mrs. [Jerry’s mom].

What is with this family?

She told me that Jerry’s mom was always really mean to her, and often one of the main instigators in getting everyone (the adults) on campus to exclude her from teacher social activities.

It’s one of the main reasons why Amber didn’t make friends with the other teachers. Amber tells me that the male teachers tended to be nice to her at first, but female teachers overwhelmingly despised her before they even knew her.

Jerry’s mom, Amber told me, was also the teacher she knows who started a petition not to renew her contract for even a second year at the school. This was the first I heard about this.

Evidently only a few female teachers signed the petition, but the petition was placed in Amber’s permanent file as “evidence” that the staff lacked confidence in her. They were basically setting her up to be fired even though she was doing a good job teaching, and the students liked her.

Well, I’m more Cali than Iowa these days, but I still keep in touch with a few kids (now grown up) I knew in school, including Gabe the drummer from our old band.

From what I hear, Jerry manages the burger joint I used to work at, because the old guy who owns it retired.

I have a social media account but only use it to contact people in emergencies. I never update anything. My profile is practically blank, online. I’m not one of those people who checks it daily or uploads pics of my lunch.

Didn’t post about marrying or having kids or moving to LA. I told the people that matter directly.

The plot thickens…

Jerry was still my “friend” on social media even though we stopped talking ages ago, so I clicked on his profile. Yep, he definitely managed my old place of employment.

I clicked on his friends’ and family’s profiles and recognized his mom, my old history teacher.

She was on the school board now. Sanctimonious as ever.

I think I mentioned before that I came from a small town. And in a small town, there often isn’t anything for bored kids to do other than do dumb stunts. And for the biggest loser kids of all, a group that included me, we were dumb enough to record ourselves partying and talking smack and doing illegal substances.

That’s exactly what my band used to do all the time.

Whenever we had a show, we’d go around taping ourselves using our cellphones. We’d take video of us rocking out, skating, drinking in the vacant lot, and take video of us getting high. We’d also talk to the camera.

I haven’t thought about the old recordings in years, but I never erased them from my old phones.

I’m the kind of guy who hoards his old cellphones, not because I think they’ll increase in value or that I find them especially interesting, but I kind of think of them like file cabinets of my past, because I don’t erase anything.

Aside from phone numbers, I don’t really transfer data from one phone to its successor, easy as it would be. My current boss knows I used to do illegal substances, and they don’t care. In IT, I’m told, everyone used to get lit, and many still do.

I ask my wife, off hand, if her new job knows about what happened in our old town. She says yeah, but that they don’t care about any of that. They only care that she teaches expert-level conversational French.

That’s what their clients—many of them traveling professionals—demand. Many of her coworkers, she tells me, had real felonies on their records, but her employer was a firm believer in rehabilitation.

Copacetic.

Here comes that sweet revenge.

So I check some of my old videos, and find what I need.

I have no trouble finding videos of Jerry getting wrecked as heck. That’s like practically every video.

And in practically every video, he brags about how his parents know he’s a DEALER and want to ship him off to the army and make a man out of him.

The video I really want is… Nope, it’s not on this phone. Maybe the LG? Nope, just more of Jerry rolling on ecstasy at a rave we snuck out of state to attend when we were in eleventh grade. Maybe my old Galaxy?

Bingo.

Jerry talks about how his mom knows all about his illegal substance use and sometimes even smokes herself, with his dad.

And how they caught him with once and yelled at him and his dad kicked his butt, but then Jerry came home the next day from school to find that his mom was blasted on the kitchen table. And she had called in sick that day. The video was timestamped.

I think that’ll do.

I still don’t tell Amber.

It would only upset her, in her condition.

But I ask my mom for the contact info of all the people who are on the little town’s school board. I already know the school’s basic email address, and I graduated not that long ago and most of the administrators are still mid-career at my former high school. I still have their emails.

I make a throwaway email account and attach all the relevant videos to it, and send it to everyone that matters in town.

All the teachers, the administrators, even from elementary and middle schools, the church, the pizza place, the burger joint owner, the roller rink boss, you name it, they got the files.

The files where Jerry exposes himself as a dealer, with his mom having full knowledge of the fact, and her and her husband even indulging themselves.

The next day Amber asks me, while she’s feeding our son, “Honey, why are you so happy?”

I tell her, and she starts crying.

“No, I’m not sad,” she assures me. “I’m just so happy you did this for me.”

Then me, Amber, Richelieu, and our bun in the oven go for a walk because it’s such a nice day. Still need a haircut. Not getting one.

Do I even need to say what happened afterward?

All this ancient history shouldn’t matter. But in a small town, it’s devastating. The videos are just of Jerry talking trash, who knows if he’s even telling the truth?

This will now haunt them forever.

Doesn’t matter. In a small town, gossip becomes gospel.

Kind of like how everyone believed Amber and I were banging before I turned eighteen, even though that was 0% true, and they ran us out of town on a rail.

My parents had to endure the fallout of my “disgrace” when I left town years ago with that “French tramp,” as all the idle busybodies have dubbed my wife.

Mom and dad made their peace with it and have numbed themselves to the slurs, and always stood up for us. They are what’s good about small town America.

Jerry got fired from his job. Police searched his house—that is to say, his mom’s house—and found a lot of illegal substances.

Evidently when the rumors went flying that Mrs. Jerry’s Mom had a dealer son, kids busted at the high school caved under pressure to admit who hooked them up.

Oopsie! So he WAS telling the truth!

Jail for you, you POS!

His mom was summarily dismissed from her job, along with all the appropriate blacklisting that being an abusing, child-endangering, fraud-committing public official entails.

My mom wasn’t clear on the details, but there’s a possibility she had her husband might face jail time, too.

It came out that Jerry’s dad had been cheating on his wife for years with a woman from the church.

Jerry’s whole family are persona non grata.

They want to leave town, but can’t pending court case.

Until then, they’ll just be hated to their face.

I’ll hate them from across the country.

Small town.

Everyone knows everyone.

Or, at least their business.

Which means sooner or later word will slip, people will drop the “it’s confidential” charade and figure out that I was responsible for a family’s downfall.

IDGAF.

Jerry, you listening?

Good.

Come at me, bro.

That is some next level revenge. I love it.

Did the commenters enjoy it as well?

Just another small town girl.

Hmm, good question.

Keeping your old phones pays off.

Here’s a note of support.

This person recommends taking legal action.

Wow, that’s quite a story of epic revenge.

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.