Sweet Romance16 min read
I Slapped the Campus Bully — Then Everything Changed
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"I hit him," I said to myself in the mirror, and the sound of my own voice felt loudly stupid.
"You hit who?"
"Myself," I answered the mirror, but that made no sense, so I tried again. "No—Bruno. I hit Bruno."
"Bruno who?" Jessie asked from her bed, her hair in a messy bun. She always knew when drama was in the air.
"Bruno Blair," I muttered, shoving my face into my hands. "Bruno is—"
"—the campus storm in a hoodie with a reputation?" she finished for me with a grin. "Yeah, we know. Did you make news?"
"I made news," I said. "I gave him a slap."
Jessie laughed so hard she snorted. "You? Jordan, this is a headline."
"I know."
"And..." Her tone softened. "How are you feeling?"
"Terrified. Regretful. Also weirdly proud?" I frowned. The list of my emotions looked ridiculous on paper, let alone in person.
"You should be," Jessie said, sitting up. "It's not every day someone slaps Bruno Blair."
"Don't call it a brave act. It was drunk embarrassment and bad timing."
"Which is the same thing that gets romantic comedies started," she teased.
I couldn't laugh. My mind rewound to the cafeteria, to the falling tray, to the way his grin had split open right before I ended up on my knees running like a coward. I could still hear his voice carrying behind me.
"Ha. My girlfriend's a little shy."
The words stung more than the memory of the slap itself.
"You ran," Professor Nolan Hansen's email said in a different place, in a different panic in my head. He had nothing to do with my slap, but his name always appeared in the background of my days like a soft-colored bookmark.
"Stop," I told the mirror. "Breathe."
"Aren't you going to tell him?" Jessie asked.
"Tell who?" I turned. Her grin made me nervous. "Nolan? Bruno? The world?"
She tapped the air like a conductor. "First: Bruno. Second: Nolan. Third: world, later."
I lived for ridiculous little rules like that, because rules made decisions less terrifying.
"Okay," I said. "Rule one: don't drink for a week."
"Promise?" she teased.
"I promise."
The campus moved around me like it always did. People with schedules, people with careers, people with destinies. I had a shelf of small, private wishes that mostly fit into a pocket: watch lists, playlists, a birthday present I'd once held to my chest and never brought myself to present.
"Why do you keep that watch hidden?" Jessie once asked, peeking at the tiny box under my bed.
"Because it was for someone else," I said. "Because I thought it would make me brave."
"Make you brave how?"
"Make me brave to be noticed."
"Noticed can be bad," she said, wise as ever. "It depends who notices."
At the party, I had tried to be compulsively normal and ended up humiliated. I had wandered drunkenly into daring territory—"Can I touch the fox tail?"—and had been denied with a joke. Nolan Hansen, in his cool, careful way, had been insulted by a different rumor and had looked at me with an expression that broke me neatly into pieces. He told me later, with cold brevity, "I care." His words landed like a small avalanche.
"He was protecting his reputation," Jessie said when I told her.
"He was being kind," I corrected myself. "And then there was Margaux."
I hadn't noticed Margaux Eklund at first. Her smile could be manufactured sunlight—warm at a distance and sharp when you came too close. She had pursued Nolan in a theatrical kind of way, using the language of advantage. She was the sort of person who took shortcuts with other people's hearts. Later, she would call herself his girlfriend in a message I didn't see until it landed like a hand over my life.
"Jordan," she had written from a phone with too many followers, "please stay away from Nolan. I'm his girlfriend now."
I reread it on a bench outside the student union, the message smelling faintly of triumph. My throat closed. A sharp, small grief settled like a stone.
"Don't waste your breath," Jessie muttered. "Go be dramatic."
So I tried one small, respectful reach. I texted Nolan: "Last night I was drunk. I'm sorry if I made a scene."
He answered quickly, "He doesn't mind, but I do. I'm Nolan. I'm Nolan's girlfriend, Xiao—"
He stopped. The message I thought I had seen—an impostor's declaration—wasn't real in his conversation. Someone had sent out a public act of claim, and it had drifted around like confetti.
"False," Nolan said when I called him, and I felt the truth itself undo something inside me.
"I deleted it," I told him, because deleting looked like control.
"Jordan," he said softly, "you should sleep. And keep safe."
"Don't be too kind," I joked. "You sound like a teacher."
We both laughed. It was a gentle break, the kind that did not hold hands to a promise.
But campus news spreads like gossip seeds. The next morning, I was a celebrity of sorts—"the girl who slapped Bruno." The rumor mill was merciless: across the cafeteria I could see Bruno waiting at the entrance like a storm at the door. He had a way of owning a room. His laugh was a weapon and he knew the angle to hold it at exactly the right time.
I dropped my tray—literally—and his bowl of rice became a badge on his white T-shirt. He laughed like someone who'd prepared lines.
"Big appetite, huh?" he said, and then he performed what he called an apology show for a girl jockeying for his attention.
"Act," he whispered to me later, draping his arm around me in front of an approaching rival. "Pretend."
When he kissed his own hand and tapped it to my cheek, I panicked and slapped him without thinking.
The sound made the cafeteria stop. I fled like any sensible person who'd performed a stupid, loud act in front of an audience.
He said later, under his breath where only I could hear, "That's my first time getting slapped. Make it up to me."
I ran. Of course I ran.
A day later, he'd come to my room not to punish me but to annoy me. At a track workout, between me panting and him watching, he tossed a bottle at me as if it were a truce.
"Drink," he said, and when I choked, he offered the bottle back like an accidental intimacy. We both touched the rim. A dumb, small thrill crawled up inside me then.
But there was Nolan, too. Nolan who practiced careful kindness. Nolan who had a plan to go overseas and an invisible weight carried like a mantle: public scholarship, public sacrifice. When I found him that day, he'd been patient in a way that felt like a harbor. He'd taken the gift I had secretly purchased for him—an expensive watch—and refused to keep it, worried about fairness and the balance of debt between us. He folded the problem into a soft, practical solution: "Take it back. Let me return it."
"You like it now or not?" I demanded once, not brave, just confused.
"I like the thought," he answered. "But I can't accept it. Not like this."
He told me, "I work for something bigger than either of us, and I have to finish it. I'm sorry."
"That's..." I tried to be angry, or indignant, or something sharp. But his calmness folded into my chest like a blanket. I felt guilty for having wanted a place in his plan.
Bruno found me later, unexpectedly. He liked the watch, and he put it on like a person wearing a uniform.
"Jordan," he said quietly, "you shouldn't waste good things."
He had men around him—Zack Conti with a cigarette, quick and easy—and an ease that made me want to test gravity. He bought me dinner the night I couldn't stop thinking of Nolan. He protected me in places where I didn't know I needed protection. When I was hurt by a girl in a restaurant, he knocked three men down. He came home with injuries and blood at his lip like a badge, as if he had collected them for me.
"You don't owe me anything," he said after the fight, dabbing at his split lip with care he did not show many.
"Why did you fight them?" I asked, quieter than I wanted.
"They hit you," he said, like that was the only reason that needed to exist. "And I don't like people who hit girls."
I had never expected to be protected. I had expected to fall alone.
"Then why did you want me to apologize to Bruno?" I asked one day when we were training for the eight-hundred meter run and my lungs wanted to give up.
"Because you smacked him," he said with a smirk. "And because sometimes the easiest way to fix something is to let the other person lose an inch and then wave it off."
He threw a water bottle at me. It hit my nose and I bled. Then he fixed me. He sat up the rest of the afternoon to buy cotton swabs and iodine like a nurse who had been waiting for purpose. He walked me home. He carried me at times.
I started to sleep better.
We dated the kind of way people start to date in slow motion: little confessions, half-mischievous jokes, a shared pack of grape juice at midnight. He liked grape more than anyone should. He remembered it when I said it once and used it to pull me from a storm of tears. He lit cigarettes sometimes in the wrong places and then crumpled them in pockets when I told him not to. He had good hands for medicine and bad hands for holding grudges.
Nolan? He was shadows and light. He was steadiness and the thought of leaving, and with him, I learned to love simple things: a returned message, a shared umbrella. He never promised me forever, because he spoke of a future that did not include small promises. He explained, once when I pressed him, that he couldn't ask me to hold a place for a man going overseas to build a life. "I can't ask that," he said. "It's not fair."
I understood. I still liked him. But the space inside me rearranged as soon as Bruno stood there and lit up a cigarette and sheepishly let me read him. He smiled at me the way a person smiles at a revelation he was scared to name: softly and with a little flinch.
"You like Nolan?" he asked one dark night when the city smelled like rain and the campus lights were blurs.
"I did," I said. "But I don't now."
He blinked, like a deer, and then the whole of him laughed without making a sound. "So you like me?"
"Yes," I said before I could think anything clever.
He choked on a laugh. "Then say it properly."
"I want to be your girlfriend," I said, stupidly steady. "Now. Not later."
He stared at me, incredulous as if I'd said something illegal. Then he leaned forward and let me kiss his lip like a key sensing a lock.
*
There was, however, someone who kept playing games. Margaux. She was the type to take a seat in a crowded auditorium, smile into a camera, and cough out a rumor like medicine. When she faked a line claiming Nolan was her boyfriend, she did more than poke; she stabbed with a practiced hand. She brought photos that were out of context, videos edited to suggest closeness where none existed, and she sent them to a thousand people.
"You're nothing like her," Bruno told me one evening when I sat confounded by the reach of rumor. "Don't let her make a story of you."
"She already is," I said.
At first, I thought the truth would be enough. I thought I could walk into the student council meeting and say, "This is not true." But Margaux had built an armor of followers. She had a charm that acted like an umbrella in rain. She had the dean's assistant's ear and a knack for being at the right place with the right camera.
"Sometimes, you need more than truth," Bruno told me, setting plans in motion like a general. "When someone plays dirty, you play clean but loud."
"How loud?" I asked. I always wondered how far I could shout before being overheard.
"Public," he answered. "Where the crowd is. Where witnesses are. Where people can see the whole act. And where she can't edit the moment afterward."
I thought of all the punishments I had imagined for villains in stories—exposure, public shaming, sliding into loneliness. I believed, selfishly, that if Margaux was humiliated, Nolan would be free and perhaps a nook inside my chest would lighten.
So Bruno and I planned. We had allies: Zack, who filmed; Jessie and Mami, who spread the word; Avery, Nolan's roommate who vouched for details. We arranged for a student awards ceremony—an event Margaux would attend because she loved the spotlight. The dean would speak. The campus newspaper would stream live.
"You're sure?" I asked Bruno in the back room of the student union, my hands trembling.
He touched my cheek like he'd done since the fight. "We'll do it your way," he promised. "You lead. We'll follow."
The night of the awards, the auditorium buzzed with the kind of sweet breathlessness that comes before something significant. Margaux arrived in a dress that screamed entitlement and carried a smile like a set-up. She sat not ten rows from the front, where everyone could see her.
"You're calm," she said to me when I passed. The words were velvet. "Brave, even."
I gave her my clearest smile. "Not brave. Busy."
We waited until the dean introduced the new student ambassador, and then we began.
"Good evening," I said into the microphone, my voice braver than I felt. "I'm Jordan Nicolas. I have a short statement and a video to show."
"About what?" someone yelled from the audience, half jeer, half curiosity.
"About truth," I answered. "And about how easy it is for that truth to be stolen."
I clicked play.
The screen lit with grainy footage Margaux had posted weeks ago—edited to suggest closeness between her and Nolan. The auditorium murmured. Margaux planted her smile and looked around as if she were giving the moment applause.
"And yet," I said, "what you haven't seen is this." I pushed the remote again and a new video began—raw, uncut, a screen recording of Margaux on a phone, fingers moving too fast, her laughing and mouthing instructions, then a message typed and posted by her account. My palms sweated.
"What's that?" someone in the crowd asked. The dean's eyebrows raised.
"It’s an original file," I said. "A screenshot of the conversation where Margaux admits she staged those clips."
I kept talking, each sentence a stitch: who had seen the messages, how she had taken Nolan's forgotten phone and sent false messages from it, how she had engineered a rumor to get attention. I watched Margaux's face.
"You're lying!" she hissed, at first loud and practiced.
"Prove it," I asked gently.
She snapped. "You can't prove anything."
"Then here's the proof." I motioned toward Zack. "Zack, roll the unedited footage."
Zack pressed play. There was Margaux, bright-eyed, saying into a camera about manipulation, about love as a tool. Her false victory became a confession on the spot. She slapped her hand over her mouth like she'd been burned.
"Where did you get that?" she cried, voice fraying.
"From the cloud of your account," I said. "From the backups you've forgotten. From a friend who couldn't stand silence."
The auditorium was watching. Students stirred like a flock. Margaux's expression folded—first surprise, then denial.
"This is slander," she said, eyes flashing to the dean.
The dean, who had watched the uncut footage in a stunned pause, rose.
"Margaux," he said slowly, "the university takes deliberate falsification of personal messages very seriously. You are accused of impersonation and coercion."
The charge landed like a gavel.
"You think you can invent a relationship and use it to control others?" the dean continued. "We will investigate. You will be suspended pending review."
A murmur built into a roar. Margaux went white at the edges.
"No—" she started, voice shaking as the crowd closed in—then a reflection began on her face like the unmasking of a stagehand.
It was more than the dean's words. It was the way Nolan looked at her—cool and distant, truth like a clear bell between them. He stood, and he said a few sentences I would never forget.
"This is not what I wanted," Nolan said in a voice like the careful striking of a bell. "Margaux used my phone. She guessed my passcode. She sent those messages to stir things up. I didn't consent. I didn't know."
The crowd oscillated between shock and growing contempt. Margaux's breaths came fast now. She tried to laugh, to deflect, to turn the moment into something like performance.
"You're lying," she said, but by then her words had aged and fallen short.
"How did you think this would end?" Bruno's voice cut through, and for the first time I noticed his hands clenched. "By making people your theater? By hurting someone you weren't ready to love?"
He stepped forward. "You took a life I didn't know was mine to protect," he said. His voice wasn't loud, but it had a weight. "You took a future from a friend of mine."
The witnesses—students who had been Margaux's friends—changed faces. Those who had once smiled with her froze. A few whispered and then began to murmur louder, the sound of a social body recalibrating. Someone started recording with their phone. Others shook their heads.
Margaux's voice went through stages: first defiance, then rationalization, then indignation, and finally a small, animal panic. She looked like a puppet about to be cut loose from her strings.
"This is a misunderstanding," she insisted, even as the dean's assistant pulled up the digital evidence and the campus security officer walked toward the stage.
"You're going to be investigated," the dean said. "Campus ethics committee, student conduct, and academic affairs will review communication records. If these actions are verified, sanctions will follow, including possible suspension, revocation of leadership roles, and removal from positions of influence."
For the first time since she'd entered, Margaux's smile faltered. Her posture fell. She tried to reach for a retort but found that the room's attention had become blunt and unyielding. Students whispered. A few—people who'd been charmed by Margaux's social energy—turned away.
"How could you?" someone in the crowd hissed.
Margaux's face crumpled. She tried to swallow a sob. "You're making this bigger than it is," she said. "I never meant—"
"Meaning isn't measured by intent alone," Nolan said. "It's measured by consequences. You hurt people because you wanted something. You manipulated one of my friends and many others."
The murmurs grew into a chorus: "Shame" and "How could she" and the sudden, small clicks of people opening their phones to record her fall.
Then change came in the worst way: Margaux’s supporters, those who had flattered her in hallways and lent her influence, one by one stopped speaking for her. They stepped back like dominoes. I saw faces I had once trusted move away. That emptying out felt like a physical thing. She had built a tower of cards, and we were watching the wind.
Margaux's expression flicked from anger to bargaining to terror. She lunged for the dean as if to salvage something. The dean gently squashed the gesture with a hand that asked for calm.
"Margaux, please come with security," he said.
Her mouth opened. She seemed to be trying, in quarter-syllables, to call for the crowd's empathy. But the crowd had already rearranged. They were witnesses now, and witnesses were forever loud.
I remember the student newspaper's editor leaning close to me afterward. "That was theater," he said, shaking his head. "Except the villain wasn't a caricature. She was human. That was the difference."
"She still deserved more than public execution," I whispered. "We could have done it privately."
He looked at me like I had asked something naive. "People who weaponize rumor live on the rumor mill," he said. "Public correction matters. The lesson has to be public."
Margaux was escorted out, head down, phone screens in her face like arrows. The witnesses recorded everything: her denial distorted into pleading, her pleading into collapse. She had a full span of reactions—pride, a blink of triumph, confusion, rage, denial, bargaining, shame, and finally, collapse. Those who had once applauded her groaned with a kind of public disappointment. A few students hissed. Some took photographs. A girl near the aisle cried out, "We trusted you."
"You're going to lose everything," someone said quietly, and it was not a threat but an observation.
Margaux looked up at me as she passed. Her eyes found mine, and for a second they were not the same eyes that had plotted. There was raw wreckage there, as though a machine had been taken apart and the inner gears had been revealed.
"Why are you doing this to me?" she asked, voice thin.
"Because you hurt people," I said, because it was true. "Because you took a phone with the intent to lie. Because you thought you could write other people's stories."
Her response was a tangled thing. "You think you're better than me," she spat.
"No," I said slowly. "I think I want to protect my people."
That night, after the dean announced the investigation and after security escorted her out and after the student body signed a petition to keep campus leadership accountable, the campus somehow felt lighter. People told stories about the way rumor could spread and the damage it inflicted. They started to talk about consent online and how easy it was to steal identity with a forgotten password.
Margaux's punishment was not a neat, satisfying spectacle. It was uglier. She lost her positions. Sponsors walked away. The student radio show she had hosted cut her out of the schedule. She had private hearings. Her friends did not call her; instead they circulated a statement condemning the act. It was a different kind of publicity than the applause she had once loved.
But there was closure. For Nolan, the lie was unmade. For me, a chapter had closed with the press of public truth. For Margaux, the fall was hard and noisy and—if the rumors were to be believed—lonely. She came to the campus the next week and found that people chose not to meet her eye.
I did not revel in it. I only felt that the balance had shifted. The world seemed a bit safer, not because punishment was spectacle, but because accountability had finally gotten a standing ovation.
*
After that, things moved in quieter ways. Bruno and I grew closer in the safe trench of ordinary days: grape juice on benches, a scooter ride that went faster than it should have, a confession that did not need fireworks to be true. Nolan left for interviews and for the next steps in his plan, and we smiled when we passed because now we had untangled the lies.
"Do you regret slapping him?" I asked one evening, turning it over like a stone.
"For what it's worth," Bruno answered, "I don't regret you being yourself. And you were."
"But you..." I hesitated.
"Nolan is a fine person," he said. "He has a map. I don't. But maps aren't everything."
We kissed then, not because of fireworks, but because it felt right.
I kept the small habit of checking my phone less and the new habit of buying grape juice when he smiled. I kept the watch in a drawer where I could see it sometimes. I wasn't the bravest person on campus, and I never pretended to be. I was a student, a friend, a person who had made a loud mistake and then learned what to do with it.
Someone asked me later what the whole thing had taught me.
"People are complicated," I said. "And people can be cruel. But sometimes, if you're lucky, the people you care about will step forward."
Bruno squeezed my hand. "You're my person," he said.
"And you're my stubborn storm."
He laughed. "Dramatic, but I accept the premise."
We walked past the student union where the photos of the award night still had a tremor of memory. Margaux's absence was obvious in the crowd; it was like a missing seat. But the campus felt like it had healed a little.
As for Nolan—he took the scholarship, left the country, and occasionally sent a postcard that smelled faintly of a different ocean. I sent him a note back when I thought of him, and I meant each wish well.
"Do you miss him?" Jessie asked sometimes, a private question lodged in the rhythm of our lives.
"Sometimes," I would say honestly. "But other times I just wonder what would have happened if I'd been braver sooner."
Jessie rolled her eyes. "Bravery is a messy project," she said. "You're doing fine."
There are days when I still think of Margaux and the slow, terrible arc of her fall. I do not enjoy her pain. But I believe the campus needed a moment that reminded us all: reputation can be stolen, and so can trust, and both deserve careful protection.
At night, I look at Bruno sleeping with his arm across the blanket like he is guarding the world, and I think how absurd that is and how perfect. I press my palm to his chest and listen to the steady drum there.
"Do you remember the fox tail?" I whisper.
He laughs half-asleep. "Yes. It was ridiculous."
"It started a war," I say.
He breathes in a slow, sleepy laugh. "And it ended with you giving me a watch."
"It ended with me finding a better map."
He tightens his arm. "Then it's done right."
I watch him, and I feel the quiet joy of small certainties. The campus will always have storms—rumors like quick lightning and people like Margaux looking for power. But I know now how to stand when lightning strikes: I talk, I gather witnesses, I choose to be loud when it matters, and I let the right people love me with the small, holy steadiness that goes to the marrow.
Outside my window, a student runs by with a grape juice in hand. Inside, I breathe. I slide my fingers into Bruno's and hold on.
The End
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