Face-Slapping11 min read
I Took My Brother's Maybach and Unmasked Her
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I never liked being the loudest person in a room, but I am loud enough when it comes to what is mine. "Don't look at me like that," I told the girl sprawled on the bed when she tossed my suitcase and my shirts into the bin. "Those dresses? Those are mine."
She sat up, game controller in hand, and blinked. "Who cares? They're just clothes."
"I care." My voice was flat. "You owe me an explanation."
"Explain what? Maybe you're jealous," she sneered, not bothering to stand. Lisa Bonilla and Nina Gray—my temporary roommates—had the same sweet, sycophantic look I've seen a thousand times. They circled Autumn Romero like moons around a star.
"My brother bought that bag," I heard Autumn say later, to much applause, as she handed a ten-thousand-dollar purse to a roommate. "He'd give me the moon if I asked."
"How humble," I said under my breath, and the room went quiet for a second. Then they started giggling again, and I felt something like a bruise forming under my ribs.
Later, my phone buzzed. Grant Pereira: "Did you see her? Isn't she easy to get along with?"
I thumbed a reply. You mean the girl who treats gifts like trash? But I didn't send that. Instead I just smiled a little at my phone and put it away.
I followed Grant to a run-down noodle shop. He was slurping soup like a repentant monk. "Since I started seeing Autumn," he said, full of proud vanity, "I've learned simplicity. I live small now."
"You bought her a limited-edition dress and gave up nothing," I said, watching his pink cheeks.
He looked at me like I was being difficult. "She's different, Elaina. Trust me."
"Trust?" I tasted the word and spat it out. "Okay, introduce us."
He brightened. "She'll come meet you. I promise."
He did not keep his promise well. He left in a rush to volunteer with Autumn at a nursing home. He left me alone to find my clothes tossed into corners.
"Who did this?" I asked, picking shirts out of the trash.
The one asleep on her bed didn't even bother to look. "Not me. Don't know," she said.
"Then why is she so confident?" I asked, watching Autumn glide back into the room later, breathless and glowing. "Buying dresses like steam, tossing gifts like trash. Who is she?"
"She's got a rich boyfriend," Nina gushed. "She deserves it."
"Well then, tell your boyfriend to stop letting her treat gifts like used napkins," I said, and they laughed, only a little meaner.
Grant was good at being naïve. At first I thought he was just inexperienced. Then I watched how he emptied one bank account after another for Autumn, and I started to feel the edges of something cold.
"How much have you given her?" I asked one evening. He flinched like someone caught in the rain without a jacket.
"I gave twenty thousand," he stammered, "but only because she really needed help with rent."
"Rent she can afford if someone buys her a ten-thousand-dollar dress," I said. The soup in my bowl sat there, cooling.
"Elaina, you're—"
"Jealous? Envious? Maybe," I said. "But mostly I'm afraid you'll get hurt."
He smiled like a child. "She loves me. She says I don't give gifts for the money. She says I have a good heart."
That was when the screen of my phone filled with messages from friends: "Don't be shameless; you're trying to take other people's men." A class group erupted: "She's a homewrecker."
I did what any rational person would do. I screenshot the messages and sent them to Grant. I wanted him to know what people were saying about his sister casually stepping out of his car.
"He'll support me," I told myself. "He's my brother."
Instead, he bought Autumn a new dress the next day.
A week passed. My patience frayed like old twine. I'd had enough of petty roommate theft and petty cruelty. When I heard that Autumn had been sitting on another man's lap in a private room—on display—and kissed him, the world narrowed to a point.
"She was leering," someone told me. "We all saw it."
I went to the place where she was safest: his circle. Marshall Omar—my family's distant protector in this city, the man who had been an older friend to me since childhood—was there, and, as always, he moved through the room like an authority you couldn't help but follow.
Marshall's voice cut through the hum. "Enough," he said, and a dozen guys sat straighter. "Sit down and stop acting like fools."
When Autumn saw me enter, she froze. Her smile flickered like a faulty lamp. "What are you doing here?" she asked, too softly.
I let the question hang. "I'm here to meet the woman who thinks my brother's things are hers."
Her eyes flashed. "Excuse me?"
Grant looked at me, panic on his face. "Sis—"
"This is my sister," he said to Autumn, like he had rehearsed it. "We should all apologize."
Autumn lowered her lashes and folded her hands. "I'm sorry if there was a misunderstanding."
Then the room filled in a way I hadn't expected. People who'd been drunk on power the night before were suddenly attentive. Garrett Baird—quiet, a little abrasive—stepped forward. "She tried to offer herself to me for promotion," he said. "In that room. She tried to use me."
The words were a match struck in dry grass. "I have photos," Garrett added.
"Photos?" Autumn's face blanched. "That's impossible."
"Do you want to see them?" Marshall asked, calmly.
Someone cleared their throat. The rich kid who'd been the subject of whispers—Xavier Bullock—stood up, face red, looking like a man who'd been caught with his pants down. "I—" he began, then stopped.
"Show him," I said.
Garrett flicked his phone screen across to mine. Images, blunt as fact, played: Autumn in compromising positions, in a private room where her body language said all the things she had denied. The screen was a small, brutal sun. Grant's face crumpled.
"These can be faked!" he spat, voice raw and broken. "She wouldn't—"
"Listen to the recording," I said. My hand found my recorder, the small device I'd hidden under the table since the first night she mocked my clothes.
I hit play.
Autumn's voice, soft and sweet at first, wrapped around the room like a snake. "My boyfriend is very generous," she heard herself say, in one clip. "If I say the right things, he would give me the moon."
Another clip: "You should beg me, ask me to give you clothes. You'll be lucky."
Another clip: "If he sees someone like her, of course he'll be jealous."
After a few minutes the room had fallen away. People were no longer guests, they were jurors. Someone gasped. Someone laughed. Someone pulled out their phones and started filming.
Autumn dropped to the floor.
"Explain," Grant whispered.
She tried to get to her feet. "You can't do this," she said. "You can't—these are lies!"
"Then explain why you told everyone my clothes were trash," I said, loud enough for the whole room. "Why you sold the charity clothes you 'found' in our donation and kept the rest for yourself. Why you sat on other men's laps and pretended to be innocent."
"You don't know what you're talking about," she said, but the tremor in her voice made her sound small.
Marshall walked to the center of the room. "All of you—sit down," he said. "This is not a brawl. This is a reckoning."
He called people in. "Security, HR, faculty. We will have witnesses. You will be heard." A list of names was made. Phones recorded everything.
I watched Autumn's face as the crowd turned from curiosity to contempt. I watched the mask slip, and beneath it the woman who'd practiced cadence and cuteness reveal the strategy it had covered. She recited lines in the way of trained actors—too precise, too practiced—but when she couldn't match the recordings or the photos, her rehearsed sincerity broke.
"You betrayed Grant's trust," I told her. "You used him for money and for doors. You treated gifts like trash, proclaimed poverty when it suited you, and scorned the people who actually trusted you."
Her eyes found mine. "If you thought I was bad, why didn't you tell him? Why didn't you step in earlier?" she cried.
"Because I'd rather have him find out than be the one to take his first heartbreak away from him," I said. "Because he needed his own lesson. Because I didn't want to be the sister who always told him what to do."
"And because," I added quietly, "I was saving the proof."
Her composure disintegrated. First came indignation: "You're lying!" She screamed at Garrett. "Those photos are set up! You manipulated them!"
"No," Garrett said. "I took them."
She shifted into denial. "I never—" She flailed, trying to drag people into her panic. "Those recordings are bait! You planted them!"
"On whose authority?" asked Marshall. "You expect us to believe that an entire network of people—is this a conspiracy?"
An older professor in the corner muttered, "We can't have one student's reputation destroyed by another's lies, and we cannot allow harassment."
By the time the faculty arrived and the dean sat at the head of a long table, Autumn's story had splintered. The dean spoke plainly. "We will investigate. But we take bullying and deception seriously. The evidence seems... overwhelming." His voice was sand and ice.
The public punishment that followed was deliberate and total, and it was not a private thing. It unfolded in a conference room with nearly every eye in the faculty and several students trained on that small space. "This is about behaviors we will not tolerate," the dean said, and he listed each charge. "Bullying, theft, deception, misconduct during off-campus events, using one's image to mislead others for personal gain."
Autumn was made to stand while each charge was read. At first she mouthed the words in shock, then denial, then a brittle courage. "You can't expel me," she shrieked when the dean finally pronounced the decision. "You have no proof—this is a set-up!"
"These are more than accusations," Marshall said, his tone even. "They are documented. They are overwhelming. This is neither a private quarrel nor a rumor. The school must act."
Garrett displayed the photos on a projector. The same images that had been whispered about were now enormous, huge enough that there was no escaping them. "This is what you offered," Garrett said, each word a hammer. "This is what you told our classmates. This is the pattern."
Autumn's reaction was a study in collapses. First there was rage—an animal, hot and loud. She lunged toward Garrett until faculty restrained her. Then came denial, loud and self-contradictory. "You're all insane," she cried. "You're ruining me! I did nothing wrong!" The voice slid into bargaining. "I'll pay back the money. I'll apologize. I'll—"
But the room had already shifted. Students who had cheered her compliments hours earlier now watched with tightened jaws. Roommates who protected her found their loyalty brittle in light of proof; some looked ashamed, some looked angry, some looked betrayed.
Then, in a final movement, the emotion shifted to pity and scorn. A man who had once clapped for her earlier in the evening, now stood and turned his back. "I won't be associated with someone like that," he said quietly, and the act rippled like a falling curtain.
Faculty members murmured among themselves about mental health support and restitution. The dean stated the punishment: immediate suspension pending further disciplinary review, a formal hearing, and, given the severity and the evidence of deception, recommended expulsion. "You will not represent this family," the dean said, each syllable deliberate.
Autumn's face, which had been skilfully masked and sculpted so many times, finally bled through—panic spraying across her features. She realized the people who had solidified her protection were shifting away. Nina and Lisa avoided eye contact. The students recorded and uploaded, and the footage traveled faster than any defense she could muster.
Outside the room, people whispered. "She played everyone." "She got what she deserved." For the first time, I watched a queen of a small, vicious court become an exile.
When she was finally led out, shoulders slumped and mascara streaking, she turned once and spat words at me like a curse. "You'll regret this," she said.
"Not likely," I answered. "You made your choices."
In the days that followed, the school made the punishment official. Autumn Romero was expelled and the dean sent a letter to every student informing them of the decision. The CEO of the small agency that had supported her pulled all offers. The livestream sponsors dropped her. The debt she had incurred—a ledger my brother and I insisted she repay—was sent to collections.
There was a final public reckoning at a campus assembly. I sat under fluorescent lights and listened as students whispered and judges of our small world passed sentences. They called her out, gave her names like "opportunist" and "fraud." People recorded everything, and her online presence tanked.
That public ruin was what I had been building toward: not out of malice but out of a hunger to protect the line between what is freely given and what is used as leverage. In the end, Autumn's reaction showed all the stages of collapse—shock, denial, bargaining, rage, then humiliation. The crowd's reaction mirrored it—surprise, disbelief, anger, and finally a kind of public purification where everyone took a step away from her.
In that room, as she stood with the dean and the faults unmasked, I felt a strange calm. I'd never wanted this spectacle to feel good. I wanted justice. I wanted my brother to learn, and to be able to stand on his own two feet. I wanted the people who had watched and laughed to see clearly.
After she had gone, after the cameras went dark and the dean closed the file, Grant found me in the hallway. His face was a mess of shame and relief. "I'm sorry," he said, voice small.
"Pay me back," I said.
He laughed, and it was a laugh like someone who had been pushed into cold water and now kicked the water away. "I will. Every cent. And—" he stopped, and then continued, "I'll be smarter."
We fixed the ledger together. He made a list and accounted for every coffee, every dress, every transfer. He looked at the numbers as if each one were a confession.
The law isn't the only way to punish. The public cleaning-out of Autumn's lies—her expulsion, the cutting off of sponsorships, the withdrawal of people who once called her friend—felt like a kind of law of its own. The punishment was designed to fit the sin: public, complete, and with consequences that would follow her for years.
And yet, while the world turned back to ordinary life, one quiet thing happened. A man I had always known as a steady presence—Marshall Omar—kept showing up. He held my umbrella while I stood in rain, and once when the night was too much, he brought me into his car and told me to sleep in the back seat.
"Rest," he said. He had a habit of speaking simply, like giving a command to the weather.
"Why are you helping?" I asked one night as his hand slid a small towel across my cheek.
"Because it's wrong to stand alone," he said. "And because sometimes elders hold younger people through what they can't face themselves."
I do not pretend that it was romantic at first. Our closeness was a gentle, slow thing, like a tide. He corrected me in small ways: "Elaina, say yes to help. Don't be afraid." And in the places where I had been brittle, he was patient.
Once, on a rain-silvered evening, he said, quietly, "I want to be the one to look after you." His voice had an old, warm timbre. I didn't know what to do with it, but I found myself answering, because it was the most honest thing I had heard in months. "Then stay," I whispered.
He stayed. He stood, not in the way of a rescuer, but in the way of someone who folds his coat over a chair so a stranger can sit. I learned later how much he'd risked: his reputation with colleagues, his family eyebrows. He risked it because he believed in being used to hold someone up.
Time moved forward. Grant paid back the debt. Autumn's name, once a golden thread in our small circle, frayed into a cautionary tale.
I left for my studies soon after. At the airport, Marshall gave me a terse, almost guilty smile and handed my suitcase back. "Come home once you can," he said. "I'll keep the umbrella."
On the plane I thought of the recordings that had saved me. I thought of the way faces had shifted in the conference room, from amusement to scorn. I thought of the Maybach—my brother's overly bright toy—and the way he had used it to save face and then to prove he could be reckless. I thought of the ledger, of the careful column of numbers that had forced an apology.
Before the plane took off, my phone buzzed with a message: "I'll look after you," Marshall had sent. It was simple. It was a promise.
I typed back, sitting by the window as the city grew small: "Take care of the umbrella."
He answered with a single emoji, a steady hand.
There are many kinds of victory. Mine wasn't pretty. It wasn't clean. It was messy and loud and full of hurt. But it was a truth I had set into motion: that people who act like thieves reap their own exposure, and that sometimes the most effective justice is simply to assemble the proof and bring people to see it.
When the plane rose, I pressed my palm to the small recorder still in my bag—the one that had held Autumn's voice—and thought about how proof can be both weapon and shield. I thought about Grant, looking tired but wiser, and smiling like a man who had lost, and then found, himself.
We had been bruised, but we were whole enough to move forward. I closed my eyes and let the sky take me.
The End
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