When I see someone asking for help in an assignment related to the entrepreneur course on the college forum, I join the group chat using a student account. I even help refine several financial models and market strategies because of my job's nature.

Everyone in the group chat is excited, to say the least. Every day, they keep calling me a genius while urging me to improve the details of the whole assignment.

Two months later, the assignment's quality is very close to perfection. But the group chat suddenly goes silent.

I scroll through the chat history out of curiosity, only to find out that the students have already created another group chat.

"That senior isn't an official teammate of ours. Let's not tell her about us using this assignment for an upcoming competition."

"Precisely! Our names are the only ones on the list! She'd better not steal the credit during tomorrow's finals!"

"With one less person involved, we each get an additional tens of thousands of dollars' worth of rewards!"

As I look at the screen, I just let out a soft chuckle.

It appears that this isn't an assignment at all.

But unfortunately for these students, I happen to be one of the judges sitting at the judging station tomorrow.

The students I'd been guiding had created a new forum group chat, but they had forgotten that one of the accounts they were using was a shared account with me.

The moment I logged in, messages in the new group started popping up nonstop.

"We were just being nice to her. She doesn't know anything."

"Exactly. All she did was flap her mouth and tweak a few lines of data. We were the ones pulling all-nighters, writing reports, making the slides, and running errands. Why the hell should she get any money?"

"I know, right? We'll insist this was just a final project. No one's allowed to talk in that group. We won't say anything in it for a few days. Then, we'll shut it."

A final project?

That was exactly how I had been tricked into joining in the first place. So they still planned to lie all the way through.

I felt a surge of irritation.

I opened the old group chat and sent a message from my own account, "I've been guiding you guys for a long time. So, I need to remind you that some of the sources and depth of the core financial models and market forecast data in these reports are much closer to an actual business plan.

"Because of that, they can only be used for regular coursework. They absolutely cannot be used in a business competition, or the judges will question where the data came from."

In the two months since I'd joined the group, I had rarely spoken in such a professional and serious tone.

If they stopped whatever they were doing now and collected publicly available data, I could pretend I didn't know anything. I wouldn't make things difficult for them at tomorrow's finals.

A barrage of messages flooded into the new group chat almost immediately.

The youngest member, Taylor Lark, sent a shocked emoji and wrote, "If she's saying that, does that mean she knows we're planning to use it for the competition?"

The team leader, Sylvester Wallace, was dismissive of this notion. He texted, "What are you panicking for? She says she's reminding us. Who does she think she is, putting on that high-and-mighty act? She's just afraid she won't get a single cent, so now she's freaking out and trying to scare us."

Another male teammate, Zander Stewart, chimed in right away, "Sylvester's right. She just doesn't want to see us win using her stuff. She wants to look all impressive and indispensable."

I rested my chin in my hand and laughed helplessly in my office. So they knew all along that this was my work.

When I first joined the group, everything they had was a complete mess. I kept teaching them theories and practical applications, but what they turned in was always riddled with mistakes. In the end, I had no choice but to revise it myself.

By the time it was finished, every single part had been typed out by me. I had done it bit by bit at the cost of my sleep.

As for what they bragged about pulling all-nighters, revising drafts, making slides, and running errands…

At best, that only entailed downloading things from Google and slapping together a slideshow template before tossing it into the group chat to brush me off while claiming they had personally conducted market research.

And now, they had relied on my work to make it into the finals. Yet, they wanted to cut me out completely.

Ten minutes later, Sylvester finally sent a message in the old group chat.

He wrote, "Fine. Since you've made it clear, I won't beat around the bush either. All that guidance you gave was just theory that anyone can find online. We understood it long ago. As if we needed you to tell us."

Sylvester went on, "Now that we've made it into the finals, you suddenly say something so ominous in the group. Isn't it obvious? You just want a cut of the prize money."

Zander sent an eyeroll emoji and added, "You didn't even have the ability to form a team and compete yourself. You just randomly joined a group and gave a few half-assed comments. Now, you want a share of the spoils. The nerve!"

Their accusations grew uglier by the second.

I frowned and replied bluntly, "I joined the group because you were asking for help with coursework on the forum. It had nothing to do with the competition, and I never joined for the prize money."

My message had barely gone through when Zander sent a middle-finger sticker.

He wrote, "Still lying, huh? If it wasn't for the money, why would you take the initiative to guide us? Don't tell me you saw some handsome guy in our team photo and your heart started fluttering?"

A female student named Charlotte Unwin jumped in and texted, "The most handsome one on our team is obviously Sylvester, right?"

Sylvester laughed even more brazenly as he wrote, "Oh, Jolene. So you were doing all this for me? Sorry to disappoint you, but I've got high standards. Even if I were blind, I wouldn't be able to compel myself to touch a woman like you."

He posted the only selfie that I had ever shared on my WhatsApp Status into the group chat. Normally, we communicated through the forum group chat. Only Sylvester had my number.

At the beginning, they didn't have any startup funds. I had fronted the five thousand dollars, which Sylvester had received.

Last month, Sylvester's mother, Helen Varney, had been diagnosed with cancer. I had seen him asking for help in the group. Out of kindness, I had asked around to help him secure an appointment with a top specialist and had also covered a significant portion of the medical expenses.

After all, I had been a student too. I knew better than anyone how hard things could be for them.

Later, Sylvester had thanked me in a WhatsApp voice message, saying his mother was undergoing chemotherapy and that the chances of success were very high.

But now, he had completely forgotten everything I had done for him. Instead, he was judging my looks and hurling crude, degrading insults at me.

At that moment, I regretted ever helping him.

I should never have joined this group. They were just a bunch of ungrateful ingrates. None of them was worth the two months I had spent working myself to the bone for them.

"I've said all I need to say. If you insist on using it for the competition, don't regret it later," I texted one final warning.

After sending that message, I realized that Sylvester had removed me from the group.

I didn't think much of it and went back to my own work. When I finally finished, I discovered that Sylvester had made a new post and tagged my student account.

He wrote, "I can't keep quiet about this anymore. I'm posting this as a warning so other students don't get scammed.

"This so-called Jolene Zimmerman claimed she wanted to guide us. After joining our entrepreneurship group, she deliberately stayed vague with her guidance. All the advice and models she gave were plagiarized from other people's work."

"Out of respect for her, we didn't expose her. We relied on our own efforts to fight our way into the finals. Now, she suddenly demanded 20 thousand dollars as 'guidance fees' and insisted on taking 90% of the prize money. She threatened that if we didn't give it to her, she'd make us regret it!"

My entire body went numb in an instant.

In just 40 minutes, the post had already gotten several hundred replies. The comments below were filled with outrage from fellow students.

"She gave you other people's work? Isn't that just plagiarism?"

"People are so vile these days. How dare they ask for 20 thousand dollars in fees for guidance given using plagiarized work? Our school's entrepreneurship competition clearly states that no team is allowed to hire advisors, let alone pay guidance fees."

"She's just a senior. What advisor are you talking about? You calling her that probably makes her feel pretty damn pleased with herself."

Someone asked, "You can't just say all that without proof. I've read her replies on other threads. She really did give a lot of reasonable suggestions."

Zander popped up immediately and retorted, "Of course we have evidence. Screenshots coming right up! Oh, and by the way, Jolene has the hots for Sylvester. After he rejected her, she kept harassing him nonstop. How disgusting."

My head buzzed as I read what they posted.

The ordinary conversations we had shared over the past two months had been maliciously cropped, spliced together, and pasted alongside sinister black captions.

More than a dozen screenshots painted me as a habitual plagiarist, claiming that I had rudely demanded "guidance fees" and a share of the prize money.

They even accused me of saying disgusting, suggestive things to Sylvester. They made it look like I was hinting covertly that I wanted to sleep with him.

What enraged me even more was that even the transfer records had been mirrored and photoshopped. The 5,000 dollars I had once transferred to him had somehow turned into money he had sent me as payment to get me to leave him alone.

I immediately tried to explain myself. But when I clicked "Send", I realized the administrators had restricted my account. Every function was disabled.

Forget replying, I couldn't do anything at all.

Then, I remembered Sylvester mentioning before that one of the admins was his roommate.

My WhatsApp chimed a few times. Sylvester sent me a laughing sticker, followed by a series of texts.

"You saw everything, right? Honestly, when you think about it, this is all your fault."

"Ever since you joined the group, you kept saying this wasn't good enough, and that was too carelessly done. You forced us to refine the financial model over and over. Taylor's timid. You made her cry more than once."

"Zander wanted to make the market growth rate look better, but you insisted that 50% wasn't realistic and forced him to use a conservative 15%. He was so pissed that he smashed his mouse in the dorm."

"You're just a student too. We're just flattering you by regarding you as our senior. But you really started taking yourself way too seriously."

"To be honest, we've been sick of your bossing us around for a long time. If it weren't for you, our project would've been way better."

Before I could reply, every single one of his messages was deleted.

Posting on the forum first had been a preemptive strike to prevent me from reporting them. Now, his retracting everything was just to avoid leaving evidence behind.

I had truly underestimated them. From the very beginning, they had already been planning how to kick me out.

"Sylvester, aren't you afraid something will happen at the finals tomorrow?"

"Are you still trying to scare me?"

That message was quickly withdrawn.

Then, he sent another, "But you did remind me of something. Jolene Zimmerman, you'd better not show up at the finals tomorrow. Otherwise, we'll post all the ultimate material that we've prepared. You're a woman, after all. You wouldn't want your reputation ruined, would you?"

My reputation?

I saved the screen recording on my phone and reread the post they had made. Starting with the team leader, Sylvester, and followed by the other five members, all of them poured out their grievances online.

They said I was a dictator. Then, they said I had borrowed money from several of them. And when they refused to lend it to me, I had lashed out at them.

As if that wasn't enough, they even wanted to destroy my reputation too.

But tomorrow was the finals. As one of the judges, why couldn't I show up at the venue?

…

On the day of the finals, someone shoved me hard and dragged me into a corner the moment I walked into the presentation hall.

"You really have a death wish. We told you not to come, and you still showed up."

The one who pushed me was Zander.

Sylvester stood next to him, dressed in a business suit and looking sharp. He was ready to go onstage.

He looked me up and down from head to toe, then smacked his lips lewdly. "Tsk. You look pretty average in photos, but your figure's not bad. I'll play with you some other time."

He continued, giving me a warning, "You'd better leave now. If you don't, we'll add a little more 'content' to that post."

I looked around at them one by one and realized how completely different they were from the sunny smiles in the group photo. It was a sharp reminder to myself that I couldn't judge people by photos anymore. Otherwise, I'd just keep inviting this kind of trouble.

"Sylvester, we can talk about the post later. But right now, please step aside. The finals are about to begin."

All six of them wore expressions of open contempt. Not a single one moved.