"What you lost was nothing but an exam score. What your little sister lost was a full eighteen years of her own flesh-and-blood family!"
"What do you mean, your score? Where do you get the nerve to say that? If your mother and I hadn’t raised you for eighteen years, even a donkey dragged in off the road could’ve made it into college. That honor should’ve belonged to my real daughter in the first place."
"Big sister, how can you say something like that? You took my place and enjoyed my life for so many years, and you’re still not satisfied? A country girl from some backwater ravine like you ought to go back and live the hard life honestly. And you say the people in the countryside can’t stand you either? That’s because you’re just plain unlikeable. You really are a failure. A dirt girl like you might as well die sooner rather than later!"
...
Those faces and those harsh, stabbing voices in her head all sank away at last into freezing river water. On a bitter winter night, a young life had slipped out of the world in despair.
A few seconds later, Vivienne Calloway suddenly opened her eyes. One small hand pressed hard against her chest as she dragged in breath after breath with difficulty.
The carriage was hot and stuffy, so close it was hard to breathe. The first thing she saw was Genevieve Weston’s fake, sugary face.
Putting on a show of concern, Genevieve reached out as if to touch her. "Sister, you’re not about to throw up in the car, are you? You’re really too delicate. You’ve been carsick the whole way. How are you supposed to survive once you get to the countryside?"
Smack!
A wave of disgust surged up in Vivienne’s chest. She slapped the hand away at once, her face pale as paper.
Genevieve immediately acted as if she’d been hurt, her face full of grievance. "Sister, why are you hitting so hard? Are you blaming me? Fine, fine. If you really don’t want to go back to the countryside, th-then we won’t switch after all."
The moment she finished, the well-kept face of an elegant society wife turned around from the seat beside her.
Mrs. Weston drew together her carefully penciled brows, plainly displeased. "Vivienne Calloway, we’ve spoiled you rotten. Once you get to the countryside and live properly with your real parents, you’d better fix those bad habits of yours. Don’t keep treating yourself like some rich young lady. At least then all the trouble we went to sending you back won’t be for nothing."
Listening to the mother and daughter toss out one sickening line after another, Vivienne fought through the violent swaying of her carsickness and tried to sort out the chaos of memories in her mind.
She had transmigrated.
She had become the vicious supporting girl in a period novel, and that girl happened to have the same name as her: Vivienne Calloway.
A few days ago, the Weston couple had brought back the daughter they had lost, Genevieve Weston, who had grown up in the countryside.
The original Vivienne was the fake heiress, the cannon-fodder side character in the book, the one written only to set off the heroine.
On her eighteenth birthday, she had been told that she was not the Westons’ child at all. Her real parents were in Ji Province, a poor mountain village thousands of miles away, so broke it had nothing to its name.
Now that their real daughter had returned, the whole family talked it over and made the decision without asking the original Vivienne whether she was willing or not. They simply stuffed her into the factory’s car and were sending her straight back to her hometown.
The Weston family in Jingshi didn’t usually show off, but they were moneyed people all the same. The Calloways, on the other hand, were flat broke, stuck deep in some mountain hollow.
The original Vivienne had five blood brothers. But from the time they were little, every last one of them only doted on Genevieve Weston. Even when the Calloways were so poor they could barely keep the pot on the stove, Genevieve had never gone hungry, never done a day of hard labor. The whole family guarded her like she was the pupil of their eye.
And then there was the original Vivienne. After she was sent back to her real father and mother, she didn’t feel like a daughter at all. She felt like some unwanted extra who had barged into the wrong house.
She couldn’t go back to the Westons.
She couldn’t fit into the Calloways.
No one paid her any mind.
Whoever saw her, disliked her.
She was trapped in that poor mountain backwater with no way out.