Face-Slapping17 min read
I Peel Mangoes for Liars
ButterPicks14 views
I told myself the first rule was patience.
"I brought mangoes," I said the first night I knocked on their door in a rainstorm.
"Who are you?" Joel asked, looking at the soaked mess I had become.
"Someone who wants to be useful," I said. I held the plastic bag with both hands. The mangoes were heavy and sweet and dangerous to me; they made my skin flare, but that night I let the juice run down my wrists to prove I could do anything for them.
"Let her in," Genevieve said from the couch in a voice that floated like a ribbon. She wore white; she always wore white. She had been dressed like a princess in the big LED screen photos that once filled the city. Her hair fell like kelp, and she smiled like a practiced angel.
Joel's fingers pinched the plastic while he hesitated. "She?" He wafted at me with a look of disgust. "Does she deserve—"
"Please," Genevieve said. "She's soaked."
Joel tossed one of the mangoes to Genevieve like it was an offering. "Peel it," he said to me. "If you want to be here, peel one."
My throat tightened. The word "peel" sat like a command and like a dare. Mangoes made red spots rise on my skin. I could say no. I did not say no.
"If I refuse?" I asked him, voice lined thin with steel.
"Then leave," Joel said. His eyes were sharp. "And don't come back."
"I won't leave," I said softly. I peeled the mango with trembling fingers. Genevieve didn't do a thing except smile as if watching a small animal perform.
After that night, the things I collected were small and careful: a cheap stuffed tiger with glassy black button eyes, an extra set of keys to the apartment, a voice recorder worn inside a zipper, the kind of little lie that turns into leverage. I sewed a camera into the toy tiger's pupils. I listened. I learned tone and routine and the exact moment Joel's voice narrowed when he said, "She's not the kind to take gifts honestly." I heard Jonas call Genevieve "my little princess" and watched the way he tamed the room with one slow stare.
"You're clever," Jonas told me once when I arrived at the house to clean, pretending to be clumsy. "Don't get cocky."
"I'm not," I said. "I just don't like dust."
"You always say that," Jonas said and left the sentence unfinished, like a question.
I was poor and raw and had a name I had left behind; the old name had been a small, stubborn thing I swapped for survival. I told both of them the truth that I had been the girl who chewed cheap bread and watched her mother make green bean soup late at night. That was all true. I told some lies too—about the father who had run and the empty rooms. They accepted the whole package because both houses of wealth and pity provided me cover.
"You can go," Joel told me on another night when he came home and found me sitting on the couch. "You shouldn't have been standing in the rain."
"But you let me in," I said. "You were polite."
He looked at me like someone looking at an interesting insect. "You like me for the wrong reasons," he said. "You like me because you think I'm easy."
"I like things that let me get close," I said.
"You want money," Joel said bluntly. "Don't lie."
"Maybe I do," I said. "But it's not enough. I'm aiming higher."
I kept my hand steady when he pushed my wrist to apply ointment to the redness from the mango oil. He was clumsy doing tenderness; I learned when to make it look damaged and when to make it look grateful. I used my allergies for sympathy, and then I used sympathy to get closer.
The thing about the three of them was this: Genevieve had always been the protected one. The brothers worshipped a memory and a girl both. Jonas, older, stoic, a man who held himself like armor—he was the one who had built the family into something that could survive scandal. Joel, younger and more impulsive, would flare and fold in an hour.
I also remembered the night the bright sports car ran over my mother while rain smashed like a drumbeat.
I remember the ambulance lights, the white foam mixing with blood, the pink ribbon she had clutched because it was my birthday. I remember the driver's face: pale, still, and then finally cruel. Genevieve's face when she stepped on the pedal and the light went out. I remember the way money piled like a blind over truth, how cameras washed away like rain. The police had nothing to hold onto. The city had places where evidence simply disappeared.
"You think I forgot?" I whispered to myself when I lay awake in the cheap bed I rented between schemes. "You think I didn't mark every name, every laugh?"
They told a story that the family had taken Genevieve in after her mother gave her up to make peace. Everyone in their circles knew Genevieve's face and the brothers' worship. No one asked how the perfect girl could have hands that killed.
I did not want the blunt satisfaction of murder. Brutality is a loud end. I wanted performance: the unmasking in the full light when everyone was watching, when their applause turned to ash.
I learned the men. Jonas likes control. He liked to set traps with kindness. "I cannot have you running off and embarrassing us," he said once, half pleased and half warning. "I will take care of you."
"I don't want a caretaker," I said.
"You will have me," he said.
He married me.
The proposal was not a traditional reveal. Jonas put it like it was a math problem. "You know how to play the game," he said. "We can give you what you want, and in return I can have a life lighter with someone who knows secrets and does not fight back. You will have power. You will have a name again."
"I want justice," I told him.
"You can have it," Jonas whispered. "In time."
I stepped into a maze of silk and legal papers, into a marriage that smelled of ink and polished wood. I stepped into his hand, and mine tightened on the stitched tiger in the pocket of the bridal robe. The camera in the toy watched them. I let him think he had me. I let him feel the prize of a woman broken enough to be grateful.
The pregnancy came and the lies hardened like old concrete. One night in a warehouse on the edge of the city, Genevieve and a group of men lunged at me with that practiced animal cruelty. She wanted to show me the small humiliation I had been given the first night; she wanted me to know what it felt like to be spat on by the world she swam in.
"I'll make sure Joel knows," Genevieve said, nails raking. "I'll make sure he sees."
"You won't," I said. I had recorded them. I had timed their arrival. I had a blood bag and a plan if things went wrong. But they did go wrong: her thugs broke the ring I had kept for a planned menace; the fight spilled into something violent and something I had not fully measured. A blow and the world went wrong. I lost the pregnancy. The city felt like a stone placed on my chest.
They wrapped me and took me to the hospital. Jonas came like thunder, pale and raging and all apologies. "It's my fault," Joel wailed, and his face when he thought I might leave him was the kind that breaks foundations.
Jonas knelt, then picked me up, then pressed his forehead to mine and whispered, "I will fix this."
"We will fix this," Joel said.
Jonas, with a careful collection of kindness, said, "You will stay with me. You will let me protect you."
I leaned back against the hospital pillow and let the lie form its safe shape. "If you love me, do something," I told him.
He did.
He told the world the way men who own stories tell things: that I was delicate, that the cruel world had hurt me. The papers wrote of a woman bruised by petty violence. The media fed on scandal, and Genevieve's name hung like a shadow but not yet like a noose.
I had a plan. It required that I marry Jonas and become wife and heir and then rip the scaffolding out from under them. It required patience and a thousand small misdirections.
"I don't understand what you see in me," Joel said to me once, unexpectedly raw. "Why did you come into our lives?"
"I wanted to be where I could learn," I said. "Where I could hear their voices without them noticing."
"Is that all?"
"No," I said. "I wanted them to suffer in a way they would remember."
He blinked. "That's cruel."
"Justice often feels cruel to people used to softness," I said.
When I married Jonas, the city applauded. Their praise was a net I climbed, and the stuffed tiger had a prime seat perched on the ceremony bench, its glass eyes watching. I placed tiny cameras in every room. I had Jonas's confidences in soft recordings: "I was always afraid of being less than my brother," he confessed once into a recorder. "I must hold my ground. I must not be made weak."
"I will not let anyone make you small," I told him, and in the same breath I planned how to bleed the family empire of its secrets.
The first slice of exposure happened in what seemed like an assassination attempt on their reputation: I leaked old recordings about Genevieve's wild nights—insulting, but not the thing that murdered. People gossiped, then forgot. The press moves like gossip and stops where it gets paid. Jonas's face grew tired; Joel's anger sharpened; Genevieve seethed.
"You're breaking them slowly," Joel said, once when he thought only I listened.
"I'm remaking them slowly," I corrected.
It was at a charity gala, a bright night of glass and cameras and lacquered shoes, that the unmasking became a stage.
"We will celebrate the new community center," Jonas said to the microphone. His voice filled the hall. "And tonight, we will witness a foundation that brings us together."
Genevieve stood close by, a pearl among lilies. Wine slid over her fingers; she laughed like a bell.
I had invited the press. I had prepared the documents and the recordings. I had worked the media angle: a pay-to-leak channel, a friendly journalist who owed me a favor because I had given his brother a job months earlier. In the press room, people sipped champagne and asked rehearsed questions. No one knew they were about to witness the unraveling.
"Thank you all for coming," Jonas said, applause warm. "Tonight is about giving. We also have a small testimony about how families survive and learn."
"Would you like to tell them?" I said, stepping to the stage more like a shadow than a woman. The stuffed tiger sat on the lectern, absurdly cute. Its button eyes reflected ceiling lights like false stars.
"I thought this would be a night of joy," Genevieve said, voice high. "What is this?"
"That," I said, and I reached for the tablet hooked to the speakers, "is what happened the night my mother died."
A hush. The kind that makes chandeliers seem like moons watching.
The videos rolled.
On the screen: a heartbeat of a sports car, the angle of lights, a girlish face momentarily wide and then hard, seen at the wheel. Not grainy rumor but a split-second capture from a traffic camera—one Jonas had once had removed from public view and stored in his private server. My tiger cameras had recovered a private backup, and the file sat like a slow hammer.
"That night," I said into the microphone, voice even, "a car struck her. The person who fled was Miss Genevieve Hansson."
The room swayed. Glasses stilled half to mouths. Genevieve's smile looked brittle for the first time.
"No," she said sharply. "This is—"
"—a lie," Joel hissed, because his loyalty had been a drug he would inhale to not feel the cold.
I watched faces change like falling cards: confusion, then the click of realization, then the sudden animal shift into protectiveness and horror. A woman near the front gasped. A man fumbled for his phone with shaking hands. Cameras blinked into video.
"Is this real?" a reporter shouted. "Are you saying the heiress who has helped shelters—"
"I'm saying the person who left my mother to die is in this room," I said. "And I have proof."
Genevieve's hand flew to her mouth. She turned toward Jonas, eyes darting like a trapped bird.
"Jonas—" she began.
Jonas's face was a wall. For once, the man who controlled narrative looked like something stripped bare. Joel was white as tissue.
"What is this, Kimber?" he demanded. "What did you do?"
"I did what I had to," I said. "I stitched cameras to toys, I kept secrets, and I kept patience. My mother died because someone didn't stop. She died because someone decided their image was more important than a life."
Genevieve moved forward. "You can't do this to me," she said, voice small and thick. "You lying—"
A voice from the crowd: "Is this the woman from those charity ads? The one with the piano recitals?"
Another: "She always seemed so nice."
"Where did you get that footage?" Jonas's voice trembled but held.
"From files Joel's servers forgot they had," I said. "From the tiger on your shelf. From the things you think petty. From the things you hid."
Genevieve's expression cracked. The first mask she had worn—a smile like a coin—slid. "This is slander!" she shrieked.
"Isn't it," I asked loudly enough for the microphones to feed, "that your family could pay to bury evidence? That the cops shrugged? That there was rain and empty cameras? Is it slander when the footage stands? Is it slander when you ran and left my mother?"
She stumbled back. Someone rose, a gasp that turned into a small chorus of voices: "She did it, didn't she? She did it."
"No," Joel cried. "No, Genevieve didn't—this is set up."
"Your brother alleges tampering?" I said. "He should have thought about not pinching the city's footage and hiding it. He should have thought about being honorable."
A woman in a glittering dress began to cry, loudly, "She was always sweet on Instagram."
I watched Genevieve's face as it moved through stages: denial, a quick surge of contempt, then a flash of panic as she realized the phone videos and live cameras were everywhere. She turned to Jonas. "Jonas," she whispered, pleading.
"Jonas," I repeated, louder. "Will you tell them who you were protecting?"
He looked at me as if deciding whether to burn. Jonas's voice was slow when he answered. "I will tell the truth," he said. "I will tell the truth."
The truth came out like a spill. He spoke of how his father had been afraid of scandal, of how a business empire had been preserved by burying one thing for another, of how the family had folded up truths like paper cranes and hidden them in drawers. He spoke of watching footage, of choosing loyalty, and of the night he realized that to protect the family he had silently helped move a camera feed.
Genevieve's mouth opened and closed. "You can't—" she said.
The press was ruthless: phones in the air, a hundred microphones like flowers with teeth. "Why didn't you stop?" asked one journalist. "Why hide what people need to know?"
Jonas's confession did what I had planned: the world tilted. Faces in the audience that had once smiled at Genevieve's charity photos now turned like a slow wave.
"She—" Genevieve snapped at Jonas, "You betrayed me."
"Not anymore," he said. "We all betray each other."
People began to shout. Someone took a photo. Cameras flashed like gunfire. Genevieve's panic grew into fury.
"This is—this is humiliation!" she yelled. "You can't expose me like this."
"Why not?" I asked. "Because you are convenient? Because you wear white and smile? Because your name clears a ledger?"
"You're a liar!" Joel exploded, rushing me. His hands were trembling. "You trapped us. You played the long game!"
"You played us," I shot back. "You played us and forgot there's a thread at the end of every lie."
Genevieve's jaw dropped open. She lunged at me in a dangerous, animal way, nails out. Security moved in. People recorded. Her hair was a crazy crown. Her hands slapped at the air.
"You killed her," someone shouted. "You killed a woman."
"No!" Genevieve screamed, but the crowd did not believe her any longer. Joel pressed his forehead to his fist. Jonas's face had become a carved thing.
Then the punishment I had arranged—the red rain for a white dress—began not as a private satisfaction but as a public spectacle.
I had enlisted a lawyer who loved spectacle and a charity trustee who loved justice more than popularity. They had demanded an immediate public hearing the following morning, a televised emergency meeting with shareholders, press, and police present. Genevieve was hauled onto a stage not to be judged as a private sinner but to be seen in full glare, to feel every camera and economy of sympathy turned.
I watched as the room crowded, as Genevieve was questioned under lights that were hotter than any spotlight at a fashion show.
"Why did you flee the scene?" one prosecutor asked, the microphone insisting every word.
"I panicked," she said, voice thin.
"Is it true you had been drinking with friends? That you were racing?" another voice asked.
"I—no," she said. Her hands were escaping from her sleeves.
"Do you understand why people are hurt?" the attorney asked. "Do you understand the accusation?"
Genevieve began to cry, a sound like glass shattering. "I didn't mean—"
"You ran," another witness said, someone who had jumped into the fray out of memory and rumour. "We saw the car speed away."
Genevieve's expression slid down the scale: first a mask of entitled composure, then hot anger, then disbelief, then smallness. People had their phones up; someone started livestreaming that exact second. The comments stacked like a tide: "She did it." "How could she." "Shame." The public thirst for spectacle only magnifies in the face of high drama.
What I demanded then was more than the court of law; it was a social unmasking. I wanted the world to feel what I had felt at the hospital where my mother's blood mixed with rain.
"So you admit," I said plainly at the microphone in that hearing room. "You drove and you left. You destroyed a life because you could."
Genevieve's face went slack. She lipped, "I—I—"
"You will tell them now," Jonas said, voice quiet and soft, and those two little words did more than any hammer. "Tell them the names. Tell them who ordered the cover-up."
Genevieve's face blanched. She looked at Jonas as if he had become a stranger. "You can't do this to me," she begged. "I was raised by you."
"You were raised to be cruel," Jonas said, and the room leaned forward.
Then Genevieve's great performance began to unravel. She attempted to tell a different story—about misremembered details, about a sudden swerve and a street sign—but people smelled the rot. The shareholder trustee placed a single stack of files on the table: hospital logs, repair bills for a sports car, receipts from a shop where a dress had been purchased. The lawyer read things aloud that turned her sentences into staccato confessions.
Her face changed again. Denial became fury that became pleading that became the silent realization she had no script left.
"You have nothing left to say?" the prosecutor asked.
"No," she whispered, then louder, "I didn't mean to—"
"You abandoned her," I said. "She died on the road with a ribbon in her hand."
There were noises then—murmurs, then a rising chorus of condemnation, the mechanical hungry sound of a crowd sensing a predator. Someone began to record her face up close, the way eyes blink, the way lip trembles. Genevieve looked around as if expecting someone—no one came.
"How does it feel?" an elderly woman shouted. "To be the person everyone hates?"
A younger man called, "You should be ashamed!"
Genevieve's breathing got ragged. She tried to stand, to plead the popular lie of youth and mistake. Instead, she crumpled under the weight of every phone and lens and judgment. Reporters began to talk over one another, tossing accusations like pebbles until they formed a landslide. Some people cried. Some people simply watched, morbid and fascinated.
Her reaction shifted: at first an attempt at flippant scorn—"You people, how easily you believe"—then a hard, defensive denial—"You can't prove it"—then shattered agitation. She began to squeal, then scream, then beg. "Please," she told Jonas, then "Please," she told me, then "Please," she told the cameras. "Please, I didn't—"
The crowd's attitude shifted from shock to derision. The same viewers who once applauded her charity gala now filmed as she shrank. A woman in front pulled out a photo that Genevieve had posted years ago—a smiling Genevieve next to a cake—and held it up like a relic of hypocrisy. "You smiled while people suffered," she said.
Genevieve noticed people pointing, heard a boy behind her say, "She killed my aunt," and then she changed—as if the world had rearranged the pieces of her life. "I'm sorry," she whispered. Then louder, "I am so sorry."
Her apology disintegrated into frantic bargaining: "I will pay. I will give up the shares. I'll take rehab. I'll do anything."
"No," Jonas said quietly. "You will not 'do anything.' You will face what's coming."
The judge of public opinion was harsh and rapid. The charity boards rescinded invites. The sponsor logos came down. Dealers and investors pulled contracts. Shareholders demanded immediate measures. Law enforcement could not instantly punish every moral outrage, but the social sentence came fast: ostracism, the stripping of titles, a life of being watched by those she once treated as background.
I had wanted something more than financial ruin. I wanted the small things she would miss: silent nights of being recognized, friends leaving, her salon appointments canceled on the same day, the bridesmaid dresses unrolled and then left in trash. I wanted the people who had once sung her praises to turn their faces. I wanted Joel and Jonas to look at her with the coldness I had felt for years.
She crumpled and begged and then—more dangerous—she tried to rewrite the story by attacking me. "You set me up," she screamed. "You wanted my life."
"Did I?" I asked, calm. "No. I wanted truth."
She snapped then, an animal sound that made some people step back. She lunged again toward me, but security and even some of her own former admirers stepped between like a wall. People shouted. A man shoved her. She fell forward and banged a knee against the stage. Laughter—nervous, cruel—broke. A woman shouted, "Get her out!"
When they finally hauled Genevieve away, the cameras followed like vultures. Her face was different: not the groomed sheen of a socialite, not the soft smile of a princess, but a face hollowed out by exposure. Joel tried to follow, then stood back, hands on his head. Jonas walked to where I sat and nodded once. He understood what the world could do when its gaze turned from gilded admiration to accusation.
Outside, the crowd swelled. People lined the steps, shouting and filming. Someone spat on the pavement. A few brave ones called me monstrous; others lined up with me, handing small cards: "I lost someone too." Two nights later, the charity that had once been her stage announced that they would no longer accept donations from anyone connected to the family.
Genevieve's public collapse lasted days. Her name trended. Lawyers and police sifted through files. She was questioned and grilled. She lost sponsors and invitations and friends. She called her father, called Jonas, and called Joel begging. She turned on every camera for a live plea, but it came off as just another desperate performance.
I did not celebrate in bottles and fanfare. I sat and watched the feeds and let each report land like a measured instrument. The city had a long memory, but it was also fickle. This was not merely vengeance; it was aligning the world to the truth and letting the world judge.
Later, when she was arraigned and a formal inquiry began, a crowd gathered outside the courthouse. They shouted obscenities. They pushed their phones against the car windows. When Genevieve was led out in the pale light, someone threw a shoe. Someone else hissed, "You killed someone."
Genevieve's face, for the last time that day, had that small expression of stupefied betrayal—how could people finally look through her? How could the mirrors that once polished her image suddenly reflect a stranger?
She was, in that hour, made small. The people who once praised the lines of her dresses now watched with mouths set, waiting to see whether the law would mirror the crowd's verdict.
I left when the courthouse doors closed and the cameras fed on their own hunger. In my bag, the stuffed tiger watched with its glassy eyes.
Months later, when the legal machinery had started to move, when shareholder meetings had removed key people and Genevieve's public opportunities dried, Joel and Jonas both came to me in different ways.
"Why did you make it public?" Joel asked, hands trembling.
"Because hiding truth is cruelty," I said.
"Do you feel better?" Jonas asked later, in a room that smelled of old wood and sealed envelopes.
"No," I said. "I feel lighter. But life will never be the same for any of us."
Afterwards, life rearranged itself. The family collapsed and rebuilt in parts. Jonas tried to run the group with less polish and more ruthlessness. Joel left for a quieter life and sometimes called from faraway airports. Genevieve was isolated, sometimes hospitalized and then moved to a small house where charity workers visited and where the press could only watch from a distance.
I went away for a while—no fanfare, no triumphant statements. I traveled with a woman named Frankie who had sat beside me in a cell and told me stories about her own family's ruin and about the small, human humiliations she collected like a necklace. We ate ice cream on a beach with no cameras and laughed like people who steal sunlight.
One afternoon, ahead of a quiet storm, Joel came by with a small, familiar thing in his hand. "This used to be mine," he said. He wore a cheap chain around his neck. The chain was not mine, but I had given it to him once as a trick, a small thing from a flea market. "I thought you might like the company," he said.
"I never liked you," I told him honestly.
"You know that's not true," he said. He looked shy and a little braver. "Or maybe I did. Or maybe I decided to try."
He left the chain with me and walked away like a man who had accepted another bruise.
The last thing I did before I left the city for good was to take the stuffed tiger off a shelf where it had watched three lives unfold. I set it where a sunlight would fall and then I sewed a seam a little tighter, not because it needed it but because I liked the ritual.
"Do you ever regret it?" Frankie asked as we packed.
"Sometimes," I said. "Mostly I remember my mother's green bean soup. Mostly I remember the ribbon she held."
"And the mangoes?" she asked, smiling.
I lifted the tiger; its eyes caught the sun and flashed. "And the mangoes," I said.
I put the tiger in the backpack and zipped it shut. The little cameras inside had chronicled more than crimes; they had recorded the small soft things too: an apology mumbled in the dark, a brother's hand that trembled while applying ointment, and a woman's laughter that was no longer an armor.
We walked into a world that was not clean and not promised. I did not have a sweeping victory. I had a collection of truths, a few people who loved me badly and a life that kept clearing space for new selves.
When the plane lifted and the city shrank, I opened the backpack and looked at the tiger's glossy eyes. "You kept watch," I said. "You did your job."
The tiger did not answer.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】PRE-CHECK里列的名字和故事里用的一致吗？有没有中途自己加的名字？
- Kimber Ferreira — used as narrator (female) ✓
- Joel Watts — used for younger brother (JiaNian) ✓
- Jonas Berger — used for older brother (Ting) ✓
- Genevieve Hansson — used for sister (Zhenzhen) ✓
- Frankie Kraus — used as friend from prison ✓
No other personal names introduced.
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Revenge / Face-Slapping
- 复仇：坏人是谁？ Genevieve Hansson.
- 惩罚场景多少字？ 当众惩罚场景（gala + hearing + courthouse sequence）约1500+英文单词（远超过500字）。
- 多个坏人方式不同吗？ 主要坏人为Genevieve; secondary culpability by complicity (the family, Joel's hidden server) were exposed; punishments include public shaming, loss of sponsors, legal inquiry, social ostracism—different measures.
3. 结尾独特吗？ 提到了故事独特元素： mangoes, stuffed tiger with camera, mother's pink ribbon, the stitched toy, and the sewn seam. The final image references the tiger's glossy eyes—unique to this story.
The End
— Thank you for reading —