The peace lasted about forty minutes.

"WHAT THE —"

Zack shot bolt upright, phone clutched in both hands, eyes wide enough to show white all the way around.

"Who posted this? This is, this is straight-up slander!"

Stan cracked one eye open from across the room.

"Someone’s dragging your name through the dirt on the forum," Zack said, already swinging his legs off the bed, his voice vibrating with the particular righteous fury of a loyal friend who had just discovered an injustice. "Look at this. Look at this."

He thrust his phone across the gap between their bunks.

Stan took it and glanced at the screen.

The post was titled "Campus Belle Exploited Because of Debt" and it had already climbed to the top of Peak University’s student forum. The view count was in the tens of thousands. The comment section was a wildfire.

Quinn Carter’s name wasn’t attached to it directly, the account was anonymous, but Stan didn’t need a detective’s badge to identify the author. The writing style, the moral outrage, the specific details about Sarah owing money that Quinn had loudly broadcast across the cafeteria just hours ago, it was so obviously Quinn’s work that he might as well have signed it.

The post told a story. Not the real story, of course, a different one entirely.

A carefully constructed narrative in which Stan Harrison was a predatory loan shark who had lent Sarah money at some unspecified point and was now using the debt as leverage to control, humiliate, and exploit her.

The language was florid and deliberately inflammatory, painting Stan as a manipulative villain who dangled financial ruin over a helpless campus belle’s head while demanding increasingly degrading favors in return.

It was, from top to bottom, a work of pure fiction.

But fiction spread faster than truth on a university forum, especially when it involved a beautiful girl and a scandal. The comment section had already metastasized into something genuinely toxic.

"Have you seen this? Stan Harrison actually HARASSED Sarah. How is this guy still walking around campus?"

"Sarah owes him money and he’s using it to force her to, I can’t even type it. This is disgusting."

"Someone needs to report this to the administration. This isn’t just bullying, this is borderline criminal."

"I always knew there was something off about that guy. Nobody goes from broke loser to hanging out with campus beauties overnight without something shady going on."

Each retelling was worse than the last. The story had entered the rumor ecosystem as ’Stan Harrison is holding Sarah’s debt over her head’ and had already evolved, through the alchemy of anonymous comments and collective outrage, into ’Stan Harrison is threatening to destroy Sarah’s life unless she sleeps with him.’

The gap between what had actually happened and what the forum now believed had happened was so vast that light couldn’t cross it.

Stan scrolled through a few more comments, his expression unchanged, then handed the phone back to Zack.

"It’s nothing," he said. While he already suspecting Quinn, all this is nothing, since he can easily clear his name and make Quinn pay with money...

"Nothing?" Zack looked at him as if he’d just said the ocean was damp. "Stan, there are people in here calling you a, a predator. There are people talking about reporting you to the dean. This isn’t nothing. This is character assassination."

"It’ll blow over," Stan said, settling back against his pillow and closing his eyes. "These things always do."

Zack stared at him for a long moment, visibly wrestling with the disconnect between Stan’s total lack of concern and his own rapidly escalating blood pressure.

Then he turned back to his phone with the grim determination of a man strapping on armor.

"No. Absolutely not. I’m not letting this slide."

His thumbs started moving across the screen at a furious pace.

[@AnonymousOP: You’re a liar and a coward. I was THERE at lunch today. Stan refused Sarah’s dinner invitation because he was BUSY, not because he’s "exploiting" her. Get your facts straight or post your real name so we can discuss this in person.😡😡😡]

The reply was immediate. And hostile.

[@DanH_Peak: lol another one of Stan’s lackeys. How much is he paying you to defend him?😂😂🤣]

Zack’s nostrils flared. His typing speed doubled.

What followed was a sustained, multi-hour forum war in which Zack Howard, armed with nothing but loyalty, righteous anger, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of energy, took on a rotating cast of anonymous commenters who were equally committed to believing the worst about Stan Harrison.

Stan, meanwhile, took a nap.

When he woke up two hours later, the room was dark. Zack’s face was illuminated by the blue glow of his phone screen, his expression locked in the thousand-yard stare of a man who had been arguing on the internet for far too long.

"Have you slept?" Stan asked groggily.

"No."

"It’s past midnight."

"I know what time it is." Zack’s thumbs hadn’t stopped moving. "This guy just said you ’probably have a criminal record.’ A criminal record, Stan. I’m not letting that stand."

Stan looked at the ceiling, then at his roommate’s hunched, furiously typing silhouette, and felt a quiet, genuine warmth settle in his chest.

Zack Howard, the man who split delivery fees three ways, who sold Louis XIII at a discount and handed over every dollar, who woke him up at dawn to chase a girl he’d never met, was now sacrificing an entire night’s sleep to defend Stan’s honor against strangers on the internet.

It was, by any measure, the most loyal thing anyone had done for him in a very long time.

"Zack."

"What."

"Thanks."

A brief pause in the typing. Then it resumed, faster than before.

"Don’t thank me. Thank me when I find out who posted this so I can break their jaw."

Stan nodded...

He then sighed inwardly, while he was acting so casual about all this he wasn’t about to let this slide...