Face-Slapping14 min read
I Was Supposed to Be the Villain — I Read the Book First
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They say some people are written roles they cannot escape. I used to believe that too, because for a long time I thought I was only what others named me: the cold girl, the disappointed heir, the unlovable one.
"My name is Emmeline Brady," I say, because names matter and I keep mine like a clean room.
There is a boy everyone loves. "Flynn," I would whisper if anyone asked who he was to me. Flynn Mitchell has always been a small sun. He smiled like a weather report promising warmth. He was the only one who moved through my bleak world without leaving frost on everything.
"He asked me out," I said one night, holding my phone like a possession. I typed and deleted the word "maybe" twice. The screen flashed, and I found two small gray characters and then a smiley. "Okay," I replied.
The next morning my bed was a mount of dresses. I tried three dozen, piled white things like I could catch his attention in ruffles. I kept the first dress I tried on: a pale blue, simple, with a skirt that made me feel like the horizon. I believed a small, impossible thing — that he might notice me as something other than a background figure.
That afternoon he arrived with a girl draped around him. "This is Beatrice," he said, laughing with an easy embarrassment. She clung to his neck like a vine to a trellis.
"She's hurt her ankle," Flynn told me. "I was taking her to see a doctor. We'll reschedule."
Beatrice Santiago looked like an answer to a question I had not asked. She fit into his life as if someone had written their story together, and I stood for a moment like a misplaced comma.
"Hi," she said, and smiled in a way that made everyone's world soften. I said, "Hmm," because I always said less.
The blue dress felt wrong. Once I had given Flynn a single crystal lily pendant on a ridiculous birthday from a mother who believed in first affections. It was the kind of gift that sat in its own little velvet box, the kind a shy girl prepares with a shaking hand.
The pendant broke the night Beatrice walked into our lives.
"He dropped it," I snapped toward her, not loud, not a storm, just a cold statement. "It was mine."
"I'm sorry," she said, voice small and honest. "I can pay—"
"Pay?" My mouth had a memory all its own. "You? Pay what? That was mine."
Flynn crouched, gathered the tiny splinters of glass and metal, and said, "It's okay, Emme. Really. It's just a thing."
"It was the first thing I ever gave him," I told Flynn later, but he smiled and touched my hair in the distracted way of someone who loved mornings but not the storms after them. "You're upset about a thing," he said. "We'll get you another thing."
My hands tightened around chopsticks for longer than necessary that night. I learned to breathe while the world believed what it wanted about me. I let myself become small because small seemed safer than becoming a hazard.
Then the book arrived.
One night, something thumped against my pillow. It was a book with a plain, dark green cover and no title. I opened it and found my name printed in it as if someone had inked me into a plot: Emmeline Brady — the malicious foil who pushes lovers apart and drives the plot toward its crowd-pleasing ending.
I read that I would become crueler and darker. I read that I would set a trap, that I would pretend to help, that there would be a staged kidnapping where I would be tied and silenced and, in the end, the hero would choose the pretty heroine. The book described me by action and headline, not by breathing hours.
"It says I'll be the villain," I told my mother one morning. Kristen Morrison didn't flinch the way mothers in books do. "So?"
"So?" I said. "So, I could follow it."
"Why would you?" she asked, because mothers rarely ask the obvious, and I had no answer I would volunteer.
Some part of me wanted to close the book, burn it, forget every word. Another part — the part that had loved too quietly for too long — folded the pages, read every line, and plotted like a cartographer.
"I could make the book true," I said aloud to the empty room. "Or I could use it like a map."
Flynn walked into that empty room, his hair sun-bright and messy. "What's that?" he asked, touching the spine like it could be alive.
"A map," I said. "It says something bad about me."
He shrugged. "Maybe the book's wrong," he said. "Maybe you're not the one it says you are."
I wanted to tell him everything. "I like you," I started once, in a garden that smelled of winter dying. He looked at me like he had just learned how to hear, eyes blown wide.
"You like me?" he stammered.
"Yes," I said.
He laughed, clapped like a boy, hugged me without ceremony, and then asked, "Will you be my girlfriend?"
That should have been a relief. It was not. The book showed me forks and bridges. It promised scenes of humiliation and a grand finale of catastrophe — me tumbling off a cliff of my own creation.
I ran instead.
I ran into Gustaf Coulter.
Gustaf belonged to a different story — a man who lounged like a cat and stared with eyes that measured the distance between people. He had always been there: at the edge of social maps, present but not warm. He used a cigarette for punctuation and everything about him suggested a lie told stylishly.
"Hop in," he said the night I fled the garden.
"Where?" I asked, breathless.
"Anywhere," he answered, and that was somehow enough.
We watched the stars and said very little. He smelled like rain on concrete. He was the sort of person who could say "You look tired," and make you feel shown.
"You're making strange decisions," he told me once, when we stood side by side and drank coffee in the dawn light.
"You always say that," I said.
"Because most people make the same mistakes," he answered. "You make different ones."
That difference is what drew him in the end. He saw me, not as a background who could fit into his life, but as a person with hands that could do things.
Beatrice's name circled us for months. Her history folded into a sob story of a sick mother and a late-discovered father — the kind of biography that films put slow strings to. Everyone liked her. Flynn liked her.
The book's hand pushed me toward scenes I despised: me conspiring with a pair of men to fake my own kidnapping so Flynn could choose between me and Beatrice; me being humiliated and then cast away. The book's narrative voice was smug. "She will die," it wrote. "She will break."
I could have let it happen. I almost did.
"Come on," Gustaf said softly. "Let me help you rewrite one scene."
"Why would you?" I asked him.
"Because I like the idea of a story that isn't boring."
He did not mean romance when he said like. He meant action and consequence. He wanted to see what I could do. He wanted to see me stop being a caricature and start being someone dreadfully competent.
We collaborated. I told him about the book. He smiled like he had expected something stranger. "We don't fight fate," he said. "We intercept it at the printer."
We built a plan out of paper and phone calls. I hired people — professionals who could turn a staged incident into a dismantled trap in thirty seconds. I bought the cold comfort of readiness. I wanted to be protected against the version of me that would be a perfect villain.
Then Beatrice tried to be cunning for me.
"Help me," she begged in a warehouse where dust had learned how to fall in slow loops. "I'll tell Flynn you were with me when that man slipped on the stairs. We'll make it look like you were clumsy."
I didn't believe her apology.
"Choose," she hissed to me in the dim.
Two men stood with ropes and knives like cruel punctuation marks.
Flynn burst into the warehouse, breath splintered, and there were whispers of a ransom and the chaos of boyish panic. I had watched the book's script and every beat tasted sour on my tongue. My hands were bound. The ropes bit.
"Choose one," the leader said, and men leaned with knives like fell swoops.
Flynn's face was a map of twenty years. He was a boy who had learned to love me cleanly once, and now stood split open.
"I choose—" he started, and I saw his throat work, the decision heavy in his breath.
"I choose Beatrice," he said. The words fell like a hammer.
My body understood something before my mind did. I smiled. I let the ropes cut.
"Flynn," I said, almost casually. "You choose her."
He ran out. The robbers laughed and advanced. Then the room reshaped itself.
The ropes slid away. Men dropped to the concrete, clutching at phantom wounds. I stood up. A man in a dark suit had stepped into the light.
"We're done," Gustaf said.
I had hired professionals. I had not been taken.
Beatrice sobbed into Flynn's chest, triumphant, and then someone handed me a thin file, an envelope made for disposal.
"Look," Gustaf said. "They have everything."
We drove away while Beatrice's performance dissolved into the police routine and Flynn sat in the car with a facemade of broken promises.
I took the file and slid it into my bag like a contraband banana in a prison novel. The file contained texts — messages between Beatrice and the robbers, details about the staged performance, proof that she had paid men to put us on a stage so the plot could be convenient.
I could have walked away then, leaving Beatrice to whatever small justice might be served. Instead I did something louder. I wanted the world to watch.
Weeks later there was an event — a charity dinner at the Hall of Winters, where the city's important people polished reputations in exchange for salads. I was invited under the pretense of congratulating a union between two houses. Beatrice was in a white dress that fluttered like apology. Flynn looked a step away from laughing at a joke he'd told himself he liked.
"Emmeline," the maître d' said, bowing as if to an old ghost. "You're late."
I moved like a shadow with a plan. I allowed people to imagine a fragile, defeated version of me. I played the role of someone small and sane.
"Why are you here?" Gustaf asked, as we slipped into a shadowed balcony over the marble. He wore a suit that looked like it had been designed for cold light.
"I'm going to speak," I said.
He arched an eyebrow. "You and speeches are a dangerous combination."
"Watch," I told him.
The ballroom was full. The city's new money and old names glinted under crystal. Cameras perched on necks like beetles. Beatrice was center stage, smile wide and untroubled. Flynn sat at her table, leaning as if leaning was now his posture. His hands were folded in a way that looked like prayer. Everyone expected something sweet.
"Good evening," I said when I took the podium. My voice was quiet at first, and then cleaner as it found the room. "Thank you for letting me speak."
There was a polite clap — the kind reserved for people no one thought would ever rock the boat. I smiled the exact way I had learned to while handing out pastries at a worst job a long time ago.
"I was going to say something light," I went on. "But I have something that matters more than lightness."
I could feel all the cameras tilt toward me. I opened the envelope on the podium like turning the page of a short, sharp book.
"These are messages," I said. "Contracts. Photographs. Audio files."
A murmur flew like a flock.
"Beatrice Santiago," I said her full name because the air had a habit of being forgotten unless it was precise, "arranged an assault. She hired men to stage a kidnapping. She paid them. We have records. We have witnesses."
"That's impossible," someone at the next table whispered. "Beatrice would never—"
"Play the audio," I said.
A man from the back — my liaison — set a small speaker on the lectern. A file played. Beatrice's voice, private and casual, ordered men to make it look authentic. The room inhaled as if the sound itself were a blade. Flynn's face changed in the way pictures do when a light is shifted: shocked, then crestfallen, then a strange white bloom of betrayal.
Beatrice's expression slipped like a mask sliding. She stared at the stage, at the screen, at me. Then she looked at the guests. Her smile was still on, like a clown trying to hold a grin on a face that hurt.
"It was..." she began, and the soft, rehearsed cadence broke into jagged phrases. "I didn't— I wanted—"
"You wanted what?" I asked, and it was the first time I had asked something of anyone in a room where all of them watched with that terrible, hungry interest.
"You wanted him," someone at the next table breathed. "She wanted the golden boy."
The press, always awake for spectacle, rose like wolves. A hundred phones lifted, blinking. Flashbulbs popped. Talkers began to gossip into microphones like bees in winter.
Beatrice's face went through the entire set of human colors in less than five heartbeats. Smugness fell. Shock widened her eyes. Denial tore at her lip. Finally, she collapsed into pleading, the cheapest of human armor.
"No!" she cried, the syllable too sharp. "That's not true. You can't—"
"You bought themselves," I said, soft and clean, the way surgeons speak. "You thought you could buy their silence. You thought you could buy a story that would make you the heroine."
"You don't understand—" she whispered.
"I understand wanting," I said. "I understand the itch of wanting someone so much you think you can own the narrative so they have no choice but to love you. But you don't get to pretend you are saintly because you taped over a crime with performative sobs."
The crowd reacted in a slow crescendo. Voices rose into questions, and then the staccato beats of cameras. Flynn sat frozen, his face an anatomy of disbelief. People leaned toward their tables and whispered into their phones.
Beatrice's allies — a few older women who curated reputations like gardens — began to look like they had cooled. One of them stood, hand trembling. "This can't be true," she said. "Where's the proof?"
"We have bank transfers," I said. "We have messages with time stamps. We have audio. We have witness testimony from the men who took the money."
Her smile collapsed into a hard, awful thing. Her eyes darted to Flynn. His hand had left his lap and was trembling at the table.
"Beatrice," someone called. "Is this true?"
She laughed, but the sound had the brittleness of cracked glass. "You're lying! You're smearing me!"
People are so hungry to see the mighty fall that the first taste always tastes like triumph.
A woman in the front row, a partner in an investment firm who had once been mocked for trusting easy charms, rose to her feet. "She hired men to stage a kidnapping," she said. "She tried to steal sympathy. Shame."
Another guest reached forward and took Beatrice's hand. Flynn's chair scraped back. He stood up so fast a napkin fluttered to the floor.
"Flynn," I said softly. "Do you—"
He didn't answer. He simply walked toward the center of the room as if through thick honey, his gaze fixed on Beatrice like a compass needle to iron. His face had the artless, terrible clarity of someone watching a child in a traffic accident.
"What did you do, Beatrice?" he asked. His voice had an edge I had never heard — the edge of a man whose map of the world had lost a landmark.
Beatrice's reaction changed in a sequence the room now recorded for history. She tried indignation first: "How dare you—" Then her eyes darted to the women who might protect her: "You don't know—" When those voices fell away, she tried bargaining: "I didn't mean—" Then denial: "You're making this up—" Then panic. Finally, a thin, ragged begging.
"Flynn, please," she breathed. "Please. I love you."
He looked at her as if truly seeing a stranger. "You bought a story," he said. "You bought my mercy and used it as currency. I don't want to be your purchase."
The crowd reacted the way people do when a curtain is pulled aside on a play. There were whoops and an ugly roar of approval from some corners; there were sharp intakes of breath among old friends who had worn kindness like armor. Someone raised a phone to call the local morning show. Someone else began to applaud, like a wave.
Beatrice's face crumpled. She started to sob loud and theatrical. People circled like detectives of emotion.
"Security," a man said calmly, a veneer of duty. "Ma'am, you need to come with us."
She resisted for a heartbeat as if to perform a final, tragic heroine. Then the room watched as those who had laughed with her turned aside. Her mentor — a woman who had once brought her to galas and shown her how to smile — stepped back as if hurt by a knife.
"I didn't do anything wrong!" Beatrice cried.
"Not everything wrong is a crime," someone murmured. "But deception is a currency, too. She bought a story."
Phones recorded everything. A hundred thumbnails streamed instantaneously across social feeds: Beatrice, handcuffed with a false show of dignity, sobbing into Flynn's turned back; the woman who had once tried to teach her composure walking away with her head down; Flynn staring at the table like someone who had been given a new set of directions.
Beatrice's objections became thinner and wetter as the cameras closed in. People leaned in to watch the collapse because humans are curious and because they need to believe in just consequences. She begged. She shouted. The public saw it all, and then the press did its cruel arithmetic: scandal sells.
The chairman who had once praised her — a man who wore philanthropy like a hat — shook his head and told reporters, "We will cooperate with any inquiry. The charity should be above this." His staffers collected plates and made a line toward exit routes.
Later, in the street, a man shouted an accusation: "Traitor!" The word stuck to her like cheap perfume. Her fundraising collapsed, sponsors withdrew, and a dozen messages that had once been friendly fell silent. She called for help and was met with the echo of recorded files.
The punishment was not a single cinematic moment but a long, public erosion. Her allies dissolved. Her social calendar became a sentence. People who had once called to check on her well-being now pretended not to have a mutual friend. The papers published transcripts. The radio hosts played the audio and then joked about the cost of love.
Beatrice changed shape as the night went on. At first she was translucent with rage; then grainy with denial; she pivoted to bargaining; then collapsed into naked, scandalous pleading. The crowd recorded her pain, punctured her posture with phones, and then went home to debate how much cruelty a person deserved.
The thing about being punished in public is that it's long, granular, and measured by gossip. It is people saying, "I knew she was too pretty," or "She always smiled too much." It is each person in a room choosing where to stand. I watched the arc of her ruin and felt none of the triumph I had imagined. There was only an odd, cold clarity, like the light after rain.
When the dust settled, Beatrice was left with fewer places to be. Her sponsors folded like bad paper. Her phone filled with messages she could no longer answer. The charity asked for a formal inquiry. Flynn's family issued a short statement about being misled.
The justice system can move slowly, and sometimes it doesn't move at all. But the social cost — the sound that follows a person when a crowd decides — is swift and savage. Beatrice's life was carved into smaller and smaller rooms.
I stood in the face of all that and did not gloat. I had not wanted to be cruel. I had wanted to stop being the puppet of a book and to take my own lines.
Weeks later, my father sat in a meeting room with a face that looked younger at being humbled. I sat in the middle of the boardroom and listened to the hollow, stunned silence when my name was read as the new head of the family company. They all applauded because shocked boards do that. My father's shoulders tensed and then sank.
"Congratulations," Gustaf said, leaning across the table with the kind of quiet pleasure he always wore.
"I don't want pity," I said.
"No one here is offering pity," he answered. "They're offering consequence."
Flynn looked at me with an unreadable face. I had once wanted him to be my final resting place. Now I wanted him to have a better map.
"Do you hate me?" he asked once in a quiet corridor, when no one watched and the world had the mercy to be ordinary.
"Not hate," I said. "I don't want to be the reason you make poor choices."
He laughed, a tiny, disbelieving sound. "You always sound like you're reading a speech."
"Maybe I'm reading a better version than the book gave me," I said.
Gustaf waited for me at the curb when I left the office the night I signed papers. He slid into the car. "You did well," he said.
"What now?" I asked.
He looked at the green book that I had kept in a drawer, its cover worn now, its pages full of predictions I had unstitched. "We write new scenes."
I smiled once, the way people keep a secret and offer it to someone who is allowed to keep it. "I have a crystal lily in a box at home," I said.
He glanced sideways. "Do you still have the blue dress?"
"Under a pile of papers," I said. "And Flynn — he will be fine."
"You looked different tonight," he said. "You didn't look like a villain."
"Maybe the villain was never the point," I replied. "Maybe being decisive was."
We drove away from the halls that had applauded both good and bad. The city unrolled like a map, lights like punctuation. In the passenger seat the green book lay flat and harmless now.
"Do you think they'll write about this?" Gustaf asked.
"They will," I said. "But not how they used to."
"How will you tell them?" he asked.
I held the book and thought of glass and blue fabric and garden confessions. "I'll tell them about the girl who found a book, read the insult put on her life, and decided she preferred the truth."
"That's not a neat ending," he said.
"Neat endings are for other people's stories," I answered.
He looked at me and, for a moment, his face was soft. "Then we'll write the messy one."
I kept the green book and the crystal lily. I kept the blue dress. They were reminders that stories could be read — and changed.
When the city breathed at night, and the moon washed some of the old lines clean, I opened the green cover and wrote one sentence in the margin: "Not today." The sentence looked small and stubborn. I closed the book and slipped the crystal lily into my palm. It did not sparkle like it had in the shop. It was just a thing. A thing that once broke, and was now whole again because I had picked up the pieces and decided where they went.
The End
— Thank you for reading —