Face-Slapping14 min read
I Am Who: Nezha Mask, Two Sisters, and a Comeback
ButterPicks8 views
I woke up knowing three things: I had been given a second chance, my face would not be cut again, and I would not play the spare for Janessa Harvey ever again.
"I don't understand," my mother said from the doorway, voice sloped in the same old way. "Why do you want to stay away from home? Why are you so spiteful?"
"Because," I said, and the word felt like a small, sharp stone in my mouth, "I want to be Elise Wells. Not her shadow."
"Elise," she called me a name she had never used as kindness. "We kept you for the good of the family."
"You kept me away."
They had sent me to the countryside as a child and left me there for ten years. They had raised Janessa under fans and silk and whispers that she was 'the lucky one.' When I returned at fifteen, my report card was the only thing in my pocket that truly belonged to me.
"Change with her," my father, Manuel Thomsen, had said, proud and cruel. "Let Janessa take your place at the top school. It's better for the family."
"Let her what?" I remember saying. "Let her take my hard work? What do I get?"
"Safety," Lucia Booker had said, the smile that always cost me. "Comfort. Luck."
"Luck," I said, and the word tasted like ash. "So 'luck' is for the pretty one."
Janessa smiled at me like a child taking a prize. "Please, Elise," she cooed. "I don't want to ruin your life. Don't make this hard."
"You never made anything hard," I wanted to tell her, but I was tired of fighting the wind. I let them switch our names. I let her walk the hallways I had earned. In return, I got a shelf of old clothes and a room with a single window.
"Go," my father said that day. "Go be the one who is grateful."
I pretended to leave. I learned how to disappear.
"Why did you cut your face?" someone asked me when the invitations came.
"My mother threatened me," I said, voice small and flat. "She said if I didn't comply, she would ruin my life."
"Did she?" the girl in the dorm whispered.
"Yes," I lied in the way that saved me. In truth, I remembered the knife, the white hot pain, the decision to make their threat visible. I remembered Janessa matching the scar in the same place, like a puppeted twin. I remembered the hospital: Janessa with the best doctors, me with a bottle of medicine and a whispered apology.
When the world grew too sharp, I climbed to the edge of the twentieth floor. I thought death would cut the strings. I was wrong. I opened my eyes and the world reset.
The second chance came like morning. The memory of cutting my face was still there, but the ending had changed. I had knowledge. I had time.
"Stay quiet," I told myself. "But not invisible. Not anymore."
"Elise," my grandmother, Eileen Hansen, said when she heard the story. She had changed a life before by marrying a man named Draven Elliott, a brilliant brain surgeon with a soft voice and a gentle way of saying the truth. "We will not let them use you again."
"We?" I laughed and then stopped. I had been lonely so long that the sound of 'we' made me dizzy.
"We," Draven Elliott said, and when he agreed to help, he meant more than surgery. He meant a place.
"You can stay with us," he told me the day after I left. "You can live with me and Eileen. Come back to the city. We will be your home."
"And your name?" I asked.
"Your name is Elise Wells," he said like he already knew.
"Good," I said. "I like that name."
Janessa took my place in the key moments that had once been mine. She walked into the high school I had qualified for. She took my exams. She took my reputation as easily as she took my clothes. She learned to cry when needed, to fake the tiredness of late-night study. She learned to be other people.
She got into trouble the moment she met Laurent Caruso. He was the boy who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and later would be in the right time in my life.
"She pushed me," Laurent said once, a bitter, hoarse secret. "I pushed for her to live. She fell. I jumped in front of the car."
"You told people she pushed you," I said when I first sat with him by his hospital bed. He had seen the worst of the world: blank nights of blindness, fear that lived in the dark. He was not cruel. He had a stubbornness like a machine.
"She said I was careless," he replied. "She said I was always dramatic."
"I know both of them," I told him. "Janessa told one story. Elise told another."
"Which is which?" he asked quietly.
"You will meet the truth soon," I said.
I lied at first. I played Janessa to keep my place near Laurent. I learned how she ate, how she held a fork, which side of the bed she liked. I discovered how to become her in small ways and why she had always been able to slip inside someone else’s life.
"Say my name," he said once, when the hospital corridor hummed quiet.
"Elise?" I tried.
"Say the other one," he pushed.
"Janessa," I said, and watched him wince, as though he had bitten down on a bad memory.
"Elise," he tried again. "Say Elise and mean it."
"Elise," I said, and suddenly I felt a small thing shift inside me. A truth had an echo.
When Laurent recovered under Draven Elliott's careful hands, the life I wanted started to feel less like a dream and more like a plan.
"Why are you helping me?" Laurent asked the doctor one afternoon.
"Because," Draven said, "you were given a hand, and I was given the skill to hold it steady."
"Who are you to me?" Laurent asked.
"A friend," Draven said. "And maybe something more."
That was one of the small moments my heart kept: a man who used to live in my gray days and now offered me color.
I worked. I studied under the house tutors Giavanna Cardenas had hired for her son and for me. She had grown colder the day Laurent closed his eyes. Then she softened like a snowbank in thaw when he started to smile.
"Stay here," Giavanna told me one night, handing me a set of new clothes. "You are good with him."
"Am I?" I asked.
She looked at me like a judge who had just found a prize. "You are honest. And you are useful."
I did not argue. Useful became a currency. I learned how to spend it.
I started a small masked livestream to teach kids math and English. I put on a Nezha costume and a cheap mask, called the show "I Am Who," and signed with a soft voice.
"Help with triangles tonight," I said one evening to the lens. "Get your pens. We'll do easy steps."
"Who are you?" they asked in the chat. Their voices were tiny flames.
"I'm someone who studies," I said. "Someone who forgets to sleep."
"You're funny," someone wrote.
I kept the mask. I kept the voice. Fans called me the masked teacher. The Nezha mask was my shield and my lure. It let me teach without the world first treating me as baggage.
One of my fans was Laurent. He watched some nights on a borrowed phone. He laughed whenever I turned a hard problem into a stupid story.
"Did you pick that name?" he asked once. "Nezha used to be angry when the whole world was against him."
"I like the anger," I said. "It helps."
He smiled like a promise.
Janessa hated that. She despised the fact that I could be useful and that people liked the masked teacher more than the delicate girl she pretended to be.
"Switch back," she begged my parents the day the school year turned. "Put me back. Give me my luck."
"No," I said, finally. "No more."
She plotted like a small winter storm. She leaked the video of my private grief to my mother, claiming she was the real Elise. She went to the right cameras, to the right friends, and to the right corners where my family listened like wolves.
"You're cruel," Giavanna said to her once when she caught Janessa trying to take my place at the dining table. "You act like you are owed the world."
"She took everything from me," Janessa told Giavanna. "She took my home."
"Which one?" Giavanna asked, and Janessa couldn't answer. She had built a life of theft with a mirror of a sister.
I held my tongue until the time for the big move.
"Is this what you want?" Laurent asked one night as he pressed a phone into my hand. On the screen, a message from the admissions office bloomed like a star: "Tsinghua Admissions Representative: We would like to meet Elise Wells."
My mother squealed when the call came. She dressed Janessa in my new dress and pushed her into the halls with the same grin she had once saved for me.
"Go in," Lucia said to Janessa. "Show them."
"Show them what?" Janessa asked, hands shaking.
"That you are charming," my mother said. "That you deserve it."
They didn't expect me.
When the banner for admissions rippled at the door, I stepped forward because I had already decided the last years would not be written by my parents. The admission officer, Hans Santos, had the kind of civility that only comes from seeing the world fail its promises many times over.
"Which one is Elise Wells?" he asked, looking between the twins.
"That's my daughter," Lucia said, pointing at Janessa and smiling as if she had won a lottery twice.
"No," Eileen whispered, and Draven squeezed her hand.
"I am Elise Wells," I said.
A silence fell like ice.
"Can you answer a question?" Hans asked me calmly. "Let's ask something simple."
He did not mean a test. He meant the thing that would break pretense. He asked both of us about a trivial family memory that only the true Elise would know.
"What flavor did the old stall near your house sell? And what did your grandmother call the small white dog?"
They looked at each other. Janessa fumbled. My mother turned red with anger. Lucia grabbed Janessa's arm like a lifeline.
"She called him 'Lele'," I said. "And the vendor sold sugar pears."
A small camera on a young staffer's phone clicked. Someone in the doorway had started recording. The admissions officer smiled slightly, the bookmark of a man who could read lies.
"Thank you, Elise," he said. "We believe you."
My father made a strangled sound, half rage, half emptiness. My mother went to push me back into the house, but the representative stepped forward.
"Please," he said. "If you have anything to say publicly to correct your names, now would be the time."
My father could not help himself. "You fraud," he snarled. "You have ruined our family."
"Is this the sort of thing you say to your child?" Eileen asked, voice hard.
"She is a curse," my father shouted. "We were unlucky because of her."
At that moment, the admissions office team filmed the exchange live to their internal feed. We didn't know. Every phone camera in the lobby clicked a thousand tiny beaks.
I looked at Janessa. Her face was white as egg-shell, but she tried to smile the practiced, sweet smile of someone used to being lauded for a face that didn't earn praise.
"Do you accept this?" Hans asked me. The whole waiting room had gone silent. The air was full of people who had come to meet a scholarship candidate and now watched a family fall apart.
"I accept their lies as facts no more," I said. "I accept myself."
And then the strangest thing happened: the cameras didn't just record my parents; the lobby filled with neighbors who recognized me from the "I Am Who" livestream. Jolie Schulze, the dog-walking neighbor, stood in the doorway, arms folded.
"You can't treat a child like that," she said loud enough for everyone to hear. "Do you know who you are? Shame."
Someone in the crowd shouted, "She’s the masked teacher! I watched her help my son!"
"She taught me for free during the pandemic," another voice said.
The crowd started to murmur in proof. My father's color drained away. My mother's hands trembled.
And then the public punishment began.
It was not violent. It was worse—careful, starched, devastating.
"Do you want to explain to the crowd why you sent Elise away?" Hans asked, and his voice made the words like a bell.
My father sputtered, "She is bad luck!"
"Where is your evidence?" someone called.
"Is your business failing because of Elise?" another woman asked. "Or because you made poor choices?"
My father's cheeks turned a tight lead color. He opened his mouth, closed it, then tried to say, "She took opportunities—"
"You took them from her," Jolie said. "You threw a child away."
Phones pointed like birds of prey. The admissions officer had no malice; he had law and fairness. He asked Janessa to answer the same family question again in front of everyone. Her voice trembled. She could not remember the small details. Her act unspooled.
"You dared to score wins with her name," Hans said, calm and precise. "But you did not earn them. We cannot accept fraud."
"Please," my mother begged, hands grasping. "We only wanted what's best."
"Best for whom?" Hans asked, and the hall clicked with cameras.
People recorded. Some took photos. A mother in the corner wiped her eyes. A young man applauded.
"You're heartless," Jolie said to my parents, and it felt like a verdict.
My father tried to step forward. "They're lying," he shouted. "She is stealing our daughter."
"That daughter you accused of 'stealing' is the same child who taught geometry to needy kids," someone yelled. "You sold her, Manuel Thomsen. You tried to sell her."
A reporter who had been in the building for a different story asked to speak. Within an hour, a short clip of the exchange had been shared with a local feed. Neighbors started to gather in front of our building. The shame didn't explode in flames; it trickled, a cold rain that soaked into the walls where my parents had once pretended to be proud.
Janessa, who had been an actor my whole life, finally crumbled. She began to sob like a child who had been told that the stage would not applaud. She grabbed at my mother.
"Mom, what happened?" she sobbed.
"You wanted my life," I said softly. "You wanted the warm bed, the praise. You cut your face to be like me, but you couldn't bear the work of being real."
Her pleading turned to panic. "No, no—"
"It was recorded," someone said. "It's on my phone." The crowd's phone-lights seemed like a thousand small judges.
My father stepped back. He tried to salvage dignity by shouting for the security guard. The guard refused. He had watched the way they had treated me in the past and felt disgust. He later told me he stayed because he had kids of his own and couldn't watch any parent treat a child cruelly that way.
"Take your child and leave," Hans said to my parents. "Not because you are terrible—because you are being exposed."
My mother fell to her knees on the tile, hands clasped as if in prayer. "Please," she begged. "People will think I am cruel. Please—"
"On camera," Jolie said, voice hard. "Look up and tell them you were mean because of a superstition. Look at them and say you were wrong."
My mother looked up. The likes, the comments, the cameras waited like a jury.
"I... we..." she broke down.
At that moment, Janessa's face became something I had not expected: real fear, an animal's need. Around her, the crowd's reactions fluctuated from scandal to pity. Nobody clapped cruelty. They clapped truth.
The punishment was public. It was steady and merciless. My parents had no violent collapse. Instead they had a steady, public unmasking. Their friends avoided their eyes. Their neighbors talked less to them. The grocery store owner who had always given my father business asked whether he would still be in town.
Ten minutes later, a dozen videos had been posted. Within a day, messages poured into my masked teacher's livestream asking if I was truly Elise. I answered.
"I am Elise," I said on my stream, voice steady. "I taught because I wanted to help. I live simply because I choose to. I am no one's substitute."
"You're brave," someone wrote, and for the first time in a long time I believed it.
That evening, Draven made soup and Eileen set the table. "You made them see," Eileen said, handing me a spoon.
"It was more than my voice," I replied. "You and Draven made it possible."
"We did what we should have long ago," Draven said, but he sounded like a man who had been right for a long time.
Weeks later, back at school, I found that my name held weight. The masked livestream had grown subscribers. Kids who had watched me now waved in the hall and whispered, "That's Elise." Laurent came by with a ridiculous gift: a pair of tiny Nezha plushies that held a banner reading "Study Hard." He placed them on my desk and smiled like a secret.
"Do you still want to be friends?" he asked.
"I told you," I said. "We will be more than that."
He reached for my hand. His fingers were warm. For the first time, someone wanted me for me, not my luck or my face.
Life didn't become easy. Janessa continued to try quiet sabotage; she appeared at scholarship interviews, crying rehearsed tears. Once, she even tried to accuse me of stealing her essays. The teachers laughed at her. People had seen the truth.
But public punishment does not always end envy. It repositions the players.
My father placed a bank card on my grandmother's table once, the same card he had once called "my duty." He tried to buy our forgiveness. I took the card and held it for a long time.
"Keep your money," I said. "Keep your apologies too. I have a life."
He looked at me like a man seeing a ghost of the child he had failed. The public's verdict had not killed them, but it had carved a line everyone could see.
There were other moments of small sweetness among all this upheaval.
At a late-night tutor session, Laurent took my hand and brushed something off my sleeve. "You never eat properly when you study," he said.
"Neither do you," I replied. "You fall asleep with your pen in your hand."
"I like watching you work," he said, honest, no stage. "You speak like a clock winding itself, and I like it."
"You mean my monotone voice?" I teased.
"No," he said. "I mean the way you solve things. You make the hard look soft."
I laughed. "That's the best compliment."
I had three moments that would always be heartbeats:
- The first time Laurent made me laugh with something small, when he shoved a leftover piece of cake into my hand and said, "For the masked teacher, midnight snack." He had never been generous with sweets before me.
- The night when Draven left a note on my table: "You do not owe anyone your life." I read it three times.
- The day the neighborhood cheered when my mask came off at the school gate and a dozen kids shouted, "Elise!" because I had taught them to find triangles and not fear them.
I also made sure to punish Janessa properly in my own way. I did not relish cruelty. I relished justice. I let the world see what contempt had built in her. I let her live under truth like an uncomfortable coat.
When the college admissions representative came back with good news—an offer of a place at the top university—the final act was private but had echoes in public. At the assembly where the principal announced the admission, he asked for both sisters.
"Which one is Elise Wells?" he asked, and for fun I nodded, remembering the first test at the desk. Janessa stepped forward again. Her lips trembled. This time, there was no stage to hide behind.
"Answer," the principal said.
She failed the simple question. People laughed kindly. The principal invited me to speak and asked me to tell the story of the small stall and of Lele. I told it, clear and small: "Lele used to dance when the pears were sold. The vendor would wink and say, 'For Elise, two sugar pears.'"
The auditorium burst into applause. Janessa left before we could see the whole of her defeat. She had no followers that matter.
"She will be fine," my grandmother said. "But she must learn to be herself."
"I will not try to destroy her," I told Draven. "But I will not let her take what is mine."
"Good," he said. "Remember, Elise, revenge is wasteful if it ruins the person who takes it."
I kept that thought like a map.
Months later, the admissions office called again. They wanted to come to our house to verify one final time before the scholarship paperwork. My mother put on the same old face and went through the same steps, pushing Janessa forward to play the role of grateful child.
This time, someone else was waiting at our door: the neighbor who had once stood with a dog on a leash and asked whether a girl deserved to be treated so cruelly. Jolie Schulze stood with the vice-principal, Dustin Garcia, and a small group of reporters.
"We're here to see Elise Wells," Dustin said.
My father opened his mouth to brandish more lies, but the cameras had already started to roll. The clip that had humiliated them months ago had done its work. Their business partners had turned slow. Their social circles had shrunk like someone quitting a room.
"Enough," I said simply. "If you have anything to say, say it now."
My mother started to cry in front of the cameras this time, a real thing—sharp and confusing. My father looked shabby. The neighborhood watched, watched how they handled being human.
"Do you want to buy me back with the same card?" I asked, voice steady.
Silence.
They had no words.
"Then go," I told them. "Go and be people who learn from mistakes."
They left. Some neighbors looked relieved. Some looked hollow; after all, they had stood by a house that would not shelter a child. We were not the first family to fall apart. We were only one that fell apart with more witnesses.
At the very end, the unique thing remained: the Nezha mask. I kept it. It had become a symbol. I kept a small note sewn into the inside rim: "I am who I choose to be."
When I finally walked across the university campus to take the first step on a new life, I held Laurent's hand. He squeezed gently.
"You look like a girl who earned her name," he said.
"Because I did," I said. "Because I stopped being someone else's luck."
We turned a corner toward a small courtyard full of pear trees. A little boy ran by with his dog and called, "Watch out, Elise! Lele's coming!"
I laughed. The name of the dog, the tiny vendor, the teachers, the livestream, the Nezha mask—they were all mine now.
I had been a substitute, twice over. This time, I was first. I was Elise Wells.
The End
— Thank you for reading —