Face-Slapping14 min read
I Woke Up in 1974 and Everyone Thought I Was the Villain
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I opened my eyes to bright sky and the sting of pain at the back of my head.
"Don't move," a voice hissed somewhere close.
My vision swam. I saw a shirtless man fumbling with a button near my chest. Panic filled me like icy water.
"What are you doing?" I said, or it came out a ragged sound that might once have been a question.
"Making you mine," he said with a grin that tasted like rot.
I fought. My hands were clumsy, breath harsh. I kicked at him and hit something that made him curse. He loosened—just enough—and I scrambled to my feet, lunging away before I could think.
"Get back here, you bitch!" he roared.
I ran as if my life was a thread and the thread would snap any second. The narrow dirt road blurred under my feet. Corn stalks rose like green knives on either side. I had never seen a road like this in my life—my life in the city, bright lights, an office that smelled of glass and coffee and varnish. I was a specialist at an auction house; I catalogued things people felt proud to show off. I should have been sleeping in my soft bed in the twenty-first century, not running across a rural road in a shoddy shirt with a bandage at the back of my head.
A cold hand brushed my arm. I jerked away hard.
"Help! Help!" I shouted. My voice broke.
Footsteps pounded behind me.
"Get out of the way!" another man barked, then, "Stop! Don't run!"
I slammed into someone tall and broad who shouldered a bundle of wood on his back. His face was a hard, weathered thing—sharp eyes, sharper jaw. He looked like trouble wearing a calm face. I remembered the name that drifted up from a memory that wasn't mine: Holden Perrin.
"He's trying to—" I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Put your shirt on," Holden Perrin said, as if he were stating a weather fact.
I glanced down. The shirt was wrong—made of cheap synthetic fabric, a dated floral print. I had been in leather jackets and silk blouses; how had this ended up on me? The realization hit in a cold drop: I wasn't in my time.
"He's my boyfriend," the shirtless man said. "We're fooling around."
He slithered closer again, eyes greedy.
"Let go of me," I said to the shirtless man. "You can't—"
He lunged and Holden Perrin moved in front of me like a steel door. "Put your shirt on," he said again, his voice low and dangerous now.
The man gaped, then made a show of straightening his pants. "We were just—"
"You were laying hands on her," Holden Perrin said. He didn't look at me when he said it. He looked past the man, and his eyes sharpened like knives. I thought I saw something like anger move across his face; I thought I saw danger.
"Stop lying," the man spat. "She wanted me."
"She said no."
A small crowd had gathered: a cousin's voice, a nosy neighbor, a woman's quick alarmed whisper. One of them—Kennedy Knudsen, I learned later—pointed at me and said, "You two look a mess. What are you doing here so late?"
"She ran out," Diego Brown—my attacker—answered, licking his lips with the kind of smugness that makes a room colder. "She came here with me on purpose."
"You're full of it," I said. I forced myself to be loud, to be clear. "He tried to assault me. He hit me."
Diego Brown's smile disintegrated into a face I could not forget: animal and angry. "You should be grateful I didn't finish. You'd be married by now."
Holden Perrin's jaw tightened. He did not speak for a moment. Then he picked up his bundle and left without a word.
"Hold on," I cried. "You saw him. You can prove what he did."
Holden Perrin's shoulders barely moved. He kept walking.
"Hold on!" I shouted again. "Holden—"
He did not stop.
A neighbor—Galilea Zaytsev, known for a mouth that could spread a rumor faster than the radio—started shouting to the village. Kennedy Knudsen's face hardened with judgment. Someone suggested bringing the detachment leader. Someone else suggested covering up the whole thing—"for the girl's honor," they said.
I felt dizzy. My head kept stuttering bright pain like a bell.
"He's got a bandage," Galilea said. "Look at her head."
"She might be lying," someone said.
"Is this true?" Frederick Dietrich, the detachment leader in the village, asked me sharply.
"It is," I whispered. I had never felt so small and huge at the same time. "He hit me. He tried to force me."
Diego Brown harrumphed. "She's making it up. Want me to marry her tomorrow? Huh? Then who's to say?"
"We'll take him to the station," Frederick Dietrich said finally.
Diego Brown tried to bluff and charm and bully. His mother screamed. "My boy is a good boy!" she cried. The crowd, which had come to gawk, wavered like a reed in wind.
"You broke her head," I said, "and you tried to rape me."
Diego Brown's face went from insolent to incredulous to panicked faster than anyone else. "I didn't—"
"You did!" I shouted. People began to murmur. Some put hands to their mouths. A few had phones—people were beginning to film. The village in 1974 had no viral internet, I kept thinking—yet the instinct to record, to witness, to make a paper trail existed in their eyes.
"Get him," Frederick barked. Two men grabbed Diego. His smug smile had frozen into a mask of terror.
"Please, I'm sorry," he begged in a breathless, immediately false contrition. "I—"
"You're going to jail," someone said.
Diego struggled. "No! No! You don't understand—"
A woman shook his shoulder. "You understand beating and trying to rape the wrong girl? Understand now."
I watched the scene with a strange detachment. My chest still hurt. The back of my head pulsed with pain. Part of me catalogued the details the way I used to catalog lots of pottery in the city: the rust on the tractor wheel; the corn leaves with their serrated edges; Holden Perrin's shadow as he walked away like a cliff.
When Diego Brown's fists were bound, when Frederick Dietrich set hands on the man and two village teenagers held the rope, Diego's eyes found me. He smiled with ice.
"You'll regret this," he said.
"He's already regretting enough," a woman hissed.
They took him on the tractor toward the town station. A few hours later, two policemen—young, nervous, from the town—came. I told my story again. The doctor, Elliot Baumann, examined my head and said the blow had left a concussion and a laceration; he cleaned and bandaged it.
"You need rest," he said in a voice both dry and kind. "There's bruising and you lost blood."
"Thank you," I said. Gratitude filled me, oddly sharp and small. I thought of my own world, of sterile hospitals, of painkillers that washed everything dim; I thought of how fragile my life felt in a wooden bed in a house that smelled of smoke and starch and boiled vegetables.
In the thin light of that evening, I realized a thing that made my breath cold as the inside of a freezer. The name of the chestnut-haired girl in the book I'd read came to me with the same slow certainty as a bell toll: I had slipped into a story.
"Mom," I said to Emi Belyaev, my adopted mother in this new life, though she had the shape of an older woman who loved me in a plain, fierce way. "Is there a place called Dà-shù village?"
She hummed. "Yes. Where did you think you were?"
"Am I in a book?" I wanted to say I was dreaming. I wanted to say I had been struck and would wake up in my car with the rain and the seatbelt and the smell of leather.
"You're delirious from the head injury," she said, but she did not sound convinced.
That night I lay in bed with an ache at my temple and a story unfurling in my head. Fragments came, like stage directions: a girl named Jeanne—no, the book called her the heroine, and I was the villain. The heroine wore new clothes and had magic in pockets—space, a space, a system, a gift that could store food and things. I knew the book's title. I had once skimmed it at an online store, laughing at the popularity of cheap romance and rural tragedies. I had not expected to become the "bad girl" inside its pages. In the book, the bad girl—my name in that novel—played at being lofty and educated, coveted a soldier's attention, sabotaged the heroine, and ended up in prison and finally dead.
I wanted to laugh at the absurdity. Instead I swallowed a breath that trembled like a leaf.
"How do I not become her?" I asked the dark.
The next morning, the village had recoiled and rallied. Diego Brown was held at the station. Opinions had split. Some pitied him. Some spit. Lie whispers curled around my ears like smoke. I had not expected the story to be literal—villain carried a weight heavier than my own conscience.
People began to gossip in bright, ugly rings. Kennedy Knudsen—my cousin—did not bother to hide her scorn. "Why were you out so late?" she asked once, under her breath, while other women folded their palms around food. "You're bringing shame."
"Shame?" I said. "I was almost raped."
"Men and women both make mistakes," she returned, eyes like cold chips of glass.
"He's been sent to the station," I said.
"Send him? That's a lot of trouble. We don't need trouble here," she muttered.
A crowd formed at the little meeting place by the telegraph poles. Women with hands cracked from work watched with their palms against their mouths. Men stood with cigarettes in their fingers like little flags. Diego Brown's mother cried louder than most, but more from fear than from belief. The village used shame like a scale: it punished who it could, it protected who it needed to.
"You're really a bad one," Kennedy said to me later, after people had drifted away and I had been left to trudge home with a back full of pig feed. "You always get in trouble."
"Shut up," I said, and the harshness in my voice surprised even me.
Home was a low house with a slanted roof. Hector Williamson—my grandfather—sat chewing the stem of a grass and watching me like a judge. Floyd Schmidt—my father—was a gaunt man with tired eyes and a body that had once been strong and was now tethered to a bed because of a long-ago accident. "You shouldn't have put him in that position," Floyd said softly when he thought I couldn't hear.
"Who?" I asked.
"The village. You know how they are. They wouldn't have handled it kindly."
"I'm not the problem," I said. "He is."
Grandma—Jocelyn Finch—was louder. "You always were trouble," she said. "We could go without more trouble."
I thought about the money I had found hidden in an old cloth pouch that morning—forty-nine bucks and change, money the previous life had saved to buy a dress. I had spent my life buying dresses, investing in skin cream, taking taxi rides that smelled of perfume. Here, that money felt like the seed of a plan. I could not sit and watch Diego Brown get loose because someone liked him enough, or because a cousin wanted the family to be "quiet." I could not let a man who tried to murder me walk and then take other girls in the night.
So I learned to bargain.
"Galilea," I told the woman who peddled news like bread, "I want eggs. I will trade you five pounds of dried sweet potato for twenty of your eggs."
She tilted her head and laughed like gravel. "You and your big-city ways. Fine. I'll do it."
I traded. I had money and I had new teeth to show. I walked the eggs home like a treasure. Small deals, I thought. Small seeds.
A boy with bruises and stubborn eyes followed me one afternoon to the clinic. Elliot Baumann patched him. His name—Holden Perrin's brother?—was Otto Nguyen. He had been beaten by local kids because his family was better off than some and worse than others; small-scale cruelty has no logic but hunger. I paid for ointment. We became odd companions—me, the city-born with the villain stamp; Otto, a thin boy with sensible ways.
"They'll make you into a bad girl in that book," Otto said once while we sat under a tree and smoked the smell of dirt through the air—he was still so small he must not have really known the hour glass of conflict. "Why'd you get involved?"
"Because some things are wrong," I said, which was larger than a lie and smaller than the truth. I began to notice how my presence made people react. Old men watched me like I might break or beautify their world. Young men started to learn my schedule. Some were useful; some were dangerous.
The day the punishment happened, I did not expect the theater of it.
"Diego Brown will be judged by the village," Frederick Dietrich announced at the public square. The detachment leader had a voice like low thunder when he wanted it. "There will be witnesses. There will be no shortcuts."
They dragged Diego to the center of the square, a rope binding his wrists. People formed a wide ring. Children were lifted to shoulders like flags to watch. The sun pressed down like an observer. Everyone's faces held that peculiar appetite of a crowd: to see the wrong righted.
"Diego Brown!" Frederick called. "Stand and tell the truth."
Diego's chest heaved. For a heartbeat he wore his old arrogance like a mask and smiled into the sky. Then the mask slipped.
"You think this is justice?" he said, attempting bravado. "She lied. She lies to get men in trouble. She wanted me—"
A ripple of profanity. "Shut up!" Galilea spat.
"You're not the judge here," Holden Perrin said from the edge, his voice a calm blade. He was there now. He had been absent earlier; his presence sharpened every person around him.
Diego's mouth formed into an animal's snarl. "He saw me with her," he accused, jerking a thumb at Holden. "He said nothing. He's in on it."
Holden Perrin stepped forward. "No," he said. "I told you to get your shirt on. Nobody else saw what you were planning to do."
"That's a lie!" Diego shouted. "She—"
"Enough!" Frederick thundered. "We have witnesses. We have the girl's blood. The doctor will testify."
"Testify," someone said. "Doctor!"
Elliot Baumann stepped up, hat in hand. "She has a concussion and contusions from being hit," he said. "There was a wound on the scalp consistent with a blow from a blunt instrument. There are torn fingernail marks on her arms."
Murmurs turned to the kind of collective swallowing that a crowd does before it decides to judge.
Diego's first expression of frightened cunning came like oil. "That's false," he began. "I was playing. I would never—"
"Play?" someone laughed. "You wait like a wolf and call it play?"
He swung. A man at the edge videoed with a little camera; more hands raised phones. People shouted. A few clapped when Frederick announced the punishment: public rebuke, restitution, a required public confession at the harvest meeting, and forced labor in the granary—years, if the charges were pursued. For the village, shame and a mark on the record could be worse than a prison sentence.
Diego's face had gone from pretense to panic. He blinked, his grin cracking. "No, you can't do this," he said, voice drawn out thin. "You're not allowed—"
"Hear the evidence," Frederick said.
One by one, witnesses stepped up. Galilea told the story of how she'd heard Diego threaten me. Kennedy Knudsen repeated my words from that night. A neighbor who had seen the bloody cloth testified. Holden Perrin's silence earlier was the quiet of a man who chose not to make himself the center of every battle; his testimony was short and sharp. "He tried," he said. "She told me. I told him to get dressed. He laughed and chased her."
Diego's expression collapsed further. "I didn't—" he said.
By the time the truth had been laid naked, the crowd's mood had turned to an animal that could not be sated with rumor alone. They wanted to see the end of what he had started.
"Diego Brown," Frederick said, voice like a hammer. "You will stand in the square at dawn for three days. You will apologize publicly. You will return every coin you took and perform labor for the village for a year. If you resist, we'll make it formal."
Diego's eyes widened. He tried to smile. "No," he whispered. "Please—"
"Please," the crowd repeated, but not in sympathy. Someone started clapping, slow and cold. "Confess," they chanted, and the sound rolled like a wave.
Diego's composure shattered. He sank to his knees in the dirt, rope scraping his wrists. The crowd which had once animated him with tongues now leaned back like a roof breaking open.
"Please," he choked. "Please, I didn't mean— I—"
"No one meant this," someone said, voice low.
He was halfway through his denial and halfway through his collapse. His legs gave out and his knees hit the packed earth. "I didn't mean to hurt her," he said, the words thin as paper.
"Do you confess to hitting her?" a woman called.
"Yes!" he cried, then grabbed his face with both hands. "No—no—I'm lying—"
"You're done," Holden Perrin said softly, and there was no mercy in it; there was only a fact. Diego's face went from defiance to confusion to frantic pleading in seconds. He clutched at Frederick's feet. "Please, please don't—"
The onlookers shifted. People took pictures and made firm notes in their heads. Women covered their mouths. A few villagers who had been neutral now hissed. People began to record the scene on devices—small boxes that would carry the story beyond the dirt road and the corn field. Someone whispered about how the market would gossip; someone else whispered about how shame would follow a family for years.
Diego bowed his face into the dirt and begged and begged until the sound of his voice was only a tired animal's whimper. "Please! I won't do it again! I—"
"Begging?" Galilea said, loud enough for the circle to hear. "Begging in front of everyone? You always had a talent for making a stage. But now the audience knows."
Diego's shoulders quivered as if he had been struck. He began to sob and his tears fell like small, treacherous rain onto the dust. He crumpled, gasping, begging for mercy. He stood for a moment, shook his head like a wet dog, and then he threw himself onto his knees again. "Please—" he whispered. "Please, forgive me. I will work. I will do anything."
"Work," Frederick said. "Start tomorrow in the granary. You will never be alone when you go out at night. You will have a chaperone for a year."
"Thank you," Diego mumbled, like a man bargaining for life with change that would never be enough.
People did not just watch. They talked. Some stared with disgust. Some recorded on little devices. A few older women crossed themselves. One man—Hank Henderson, a quiet farmhand—walked away, head shaking with the weight of surprise until someone else slapped him on the shoulder. A child started to clap, then was hushed.
When Diego finally broke, it was a shiver that made the ring of people step closer and take in the smallness of him. He screamed a kind of last denial and then slid into a silence that sounded like a door closing.
Later, a rumor would say that the recording from that day made its way to the town and that the station kept the tape. People would say the market gossip burned for a week and that Diego's family never went to a fair again. That, in the book I had once read, might have been a short paragraph. In real life, it was a day and a half of witnesses, of eyes, of shaming and of public shoves that bent him. He had gone from arrogance to pleading to worse—public humiliation—and he looked smaller than I had ever seen anyone look.
I watched from the side as he was led away. He had begged; he had denied; he had been broken. People cheered. Some laughed. Some clapped in relief. Cameras flashed.
Holden Perrin stood quiet, his face unreadable. Otto Nguyen stood by, small and solemn. I felt a strange knot in my chest—satisfaction, maybe, mixed with the sharp ache of what it had taken to make things right.
After the crowd dispersed, people came by the house to ask what I wanted. "Do you want us to press charges?" they asked. "Will you get an official sentence?"
"No," I said at first. "I need time. And I need the truth."
"Then press," some said.
"Leave it to the police," others said, eyes heavy with the weight of hours and chores.
My life settled into a new rhythm. I worked with my hands. I learned the price of wood and of eggs. I traded five pounds of dried sweet potato for twenty-three eggs from Galilea Zaytsev and felt wealthy beyond words. I patched Otto Nguyen's bruises and watched him grin like a small moon. I argued with Jocelyn Finch and with Emi Belyaev and defended my eggs against Hank Henderson, who thought his cousin deserved more.
At night I read the memory veins that had arrived with me. The book's villain—myself—had been cruel, petty, and jealous. She set traps and told lies until the heroine lost everything. The male hero in the book—someone named Shen in the lines I remembered—had been pushed away by my manipulations. The original ended in the villain's doom. I refused to accept that. I had been given a second chance I had not asked for. I had hands that could help, not hurt. I had money that could buy medicine. I had knowledge of a world in which certain things were possible.
So I began to change the pages. I climbed out of the role printed on me. I taught myself to stitch and mend. I used my forty-nine dollars to buy seeds and bread and medicine for my family. I took a job at the community pig lot, though my hands screamed for days and a child's laugh made the work seem lighter.
People watched. They judged. They admired in the small ways rural people do: a nod here, a helping hand there. Holden Perrin remained blunt and distant. He did not give me much, but once, when I was about to faint while carrying a heavy sack back from the fields, he caught my arm and carried half of it without comment. His thumb rubbed the strap of my shoulder and then he was gone, like a gust of wind that did not apologize for its chill.
I kept a list of small rebellions. I fixed my father's bowl. I bought a small soap for my sister, Chana Colombo, with money scraped from a deal. I protected Jemma Downs from being bullied by Hank Henderson. I learned to make sour tea that made a winter less fierce.
And always there was the memory of Diego Brown's kneel in the square, the sound of the crowd, and the weight of a village that could both maim and heal. I had been almost violated and would not let that be the end of me.
At night, under a ragged curtain, I would whisper into the dark: "I will not be her."
And the dark answered, not with voices but with the steady certainty of work: grind the grain, mend the fence, feed the piglets, count the eggs, keep the hand that strikes from striking again.
I was learning, and I was surprising myself with small acts of courage. The book's villain had been written as one thing; I, Julia Dominguez, was rewriting my life in the space between breath and action.
The End
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