Face-Slapping12 min read
My Exam, My Trap, My Rise
ButterPicks16 views
I learned to hide my sharpness the way people tuck knives into sleeves. I kept my head down, my answers simple, my voice softer than it needed to be. I told myself I was saving knives for a later day.
"You're in the top ten again?" Mallory spat when she barged into my room the first time, her face a half moon of false sweetness.
"You broke my picture." I said nothing at first, only watched the way she tore my only photo of Mom.
"You cheated," Mallory said, laughing like it was a game. "Everyone knows."
I grabbed the edge of the desk. "Don't touch that," I said.
She tore the paper hard enough that I could feel the air rip. Then she stabbed my hand with a compass, right into the center of my palm.
"What are you doing?!" I cried.
"This is the penalty for cheaters," she said, smiling like it suited her.
I hit her. She screamed. Later she ran to Lenora, wheeled me into the scapegoat shape Lenora loved.
"Don't be dramatic," Lenora said into the phone when my father called. "She's always been… difficult."
"She's my daughter too," Matias said, voice warm on the line. "Be gentle."
"Be gentle?" I whispered into the pillow. "She stabbed me."
"Let it go," my father said.
I let it go because I couldn't afford to leave. I let it go because I needed time to sharpen. I let it go because knives need handles, and I needed money and a place to put things when the time came.
The first big plan came because of Mallory's greed and Lenora's breadcrumb of a smile. Mallory wanted the boy everyone liked.
"Song Lin?" she mouthed, as if the name tasted sweet. In my class he was Tristan, tall and steady; he had the quiet look of someone who built himself from thought.
"Tristan?" I said when I met his eyes at the library. "You help me with this problem?"
He looked as if my question surprised him and pleased him at the same time. "Sure," he said. "Ask."
He helped. He stayed. We studied late. Once, when my right hand hurt from old wounds and fresh compass marks, he cleaned it and put on a heart-patterned bandage like he thought bandages could make things safer.
"You're stubborn," he told me later, a small laugh in his throat.
"Only about the right things," I said.
Mallory saw Tristan close. She saw where her jealousy could point and sharpen. She had the habit of smiling in front of people and twisting nails behind doors. Lenora guided her like a coach with a cruel playbook.
Mallory kept her phone like a talisman. Once, I glimpsed a group chat title: "Exam Network." I almost laughed. She wasn't careful. She wasn't clever enough.
"You're always dramatic," Lenora said the morning of the big test. "Here, drink this. You need to be calm."
She handed me a cup with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. Mallory watched me like a hawk. I drank.
The world opened and closed in a neat, hot wave. I finished the test. I answered with the kind of calm I practiced. I left the exam hall like a ghost.
Later, the sirens started—only not real sirens, only people on phones, only headlines. "Student Collapses During Exam; Cheating Ring Suspected." The school hall smelled of paper and sweat. I waited for Mallory to return to her seat. She didn't. I waited for lenience. There was none.
"Someone vomiting and passing out during the exam?" a classmate said with too much relish. "She was taking calls in the bathroom."
"She had a phone fall out," another whispered. "What luck."
I should have felt proud. Instead, I felt hollow. I had not told anyone to look in that garbage can. I had not done the messy public reveal yet. But I had found the empty pill box in Mallory's trash. Seeing the shredded label, I had known.
"Are you okay?" Tristan pulled me into an empty classroom after everyone left.
"I'm fine," I lied.
"You didn't need to fake weakness," he said. "You can hold your head up. I want to see that."
"I had to do it," I told him. "I couldn't let her ruin my life before I had enough evidence."
His hands were steady when he adjusted the bandage on my palm. "You're brave," he said.
I didn't tell him the video I had hidden for months in the old camera I bought with my summer job money. I kept the camera tucked by the curtains in a sliver of hope and fear. I had recorded every time they hit or shoved me, every time Lenora's laugh turned sharp like a snapped wire. I recorded because I needed proof people couldn't ignore.
Later, I forged small falls in class. I pretended scores slipped. I let whispers collect around me like frost. I did it so that when everything exploded, it would be a clean blast. No one suspected the person who sat low and muttered answers under her breath.
"Why are you doing this?" Tristan asked once, in the library, when I flinched from a question he asked gently.
"Because sometimes truth needs to be set on fire," I said. "Because I don't want to keep hiding. Because my mom is a star somewhere and she wouldn't like me living in the dark."
He looked at me with something like wonder. "Then let me help you stop hiding."
I let him.
Things moved. College and exams came like trains. Mallory's scores took a sudden odd climb—high marks where there had been none before. She started to smile like a girl who'd been served someone else's success.
"Cheaters get caught," I muttered.
She laughed in my face. "You don't deserve that pity," she said.
But she did get caught. I had left fingerprints on things she couldn't explain—her phone in the wrong place, a message thread that betrayed its owner, the meeting times and faces of people manufacturing answers. Someone in the group had underestimated how obvious their web had become. Santiago, the bully who had once dragged me into the group's edges, overshared to impress someone and tipped off a teacher. He thought he was being brave.
"You always did look down on us," he muttered the day a teacher asked him to stay late.
"Not now," I said quietly.
When the exam scandal hit the internet, it was a hurricane. People dug into detained phones. The media loved villains. Mallory's name circled the rumors and then landed on headlines. People praised righteous students. People called for punishment.
Then I released what I had kept hidden: the footage from the window, the small camera that had watched every bruise and every thrown plate. I uploaded it as soon as the cheating story started to trend. I attached a calm message: watch the evidence. Let them see the whole house.
The backlash was fast. People saw what I had kept secret for years. The videos were ugly; the actions repeated like a bad refrain. Lenora's face changed from sharp amusement to something feral when the first comments rolled in. Her voice in the footage was like a bell tolled wrong: angry, small, cruel. Mallory's face when the camera caught her was proud then panicked, reaching for excuses. The world opened its eyes in an instant.
"You're insane," Lenora screamed the first time my footage went public and phones buzzed in the principal's office.
"You're a liar," Mallory shrieked. "You always wanted attention!"
I had planned the public moment carefully. The consequences had to be public, unavoidable. I called for a meeting at the school auditorium, the kind of place where parents and students gather and gossip travels like smoke.
"Why are we all here?" a parent asked.
"There's a public notice," the principal said. "A student has provided evidence of abuse and organized cheating. We invited police and press."
Lenora had dressed as if for a court appearance, jewelry and a face of indecent confidence. Mallory sat near her, fingers tight. Tristan sat in the front row next to me, hands pressed together until knuckles showed white.
"Let her speak," Mallory hissed during the waiting.
"Go on," Lenora said. "Make a scene."
When I stepped up to the microphone, my hand shook only a little. My camera footage was organized in a folder on the school's laptop. I pressed play.
The screen showed things the school had always pretended not to see. It showed Lenora hitting me, then laughing as I cried. It showed Mallory slipping a phone into her sleeve and then taking it out in the bathroom, voice low and proud. It showed both of them forcing me to eat something that made my stomach turn. It showed them taking my practice books and tearing them later in a fit.
"She sent this to the education board," Lenora said, voice thin and losing shape. "This is false!"
"It isn't," I said. "This is what I lived through."
"What is your proof that this is real?" Lenora barked. "Where did you get the camera?"
"It's right there," I said, pointing to the laptop. "You can see. You didn't know the little camera was by the curtain."
The auditorium was full. Phones lit like stars. Parents stared. Teachers exchanged quick looks. The video kept playing. The audience's faces moved in degrees—from polite interest to shock to anger.
"How could you?" someone whispered behind me.
"She's always been strange," another muttered, and then their voice was swallowed.
Denis Jones, wearing his teacher's cardigan, stood up from the front row. His face was both grave and worn. He had been the person who later became Tristan's guardian, the one who had shown me the wound could be closed with kindness.
"Is that you?" he asked me softly when the footage ended.
"Yes," I said. "I recorded it. I chose moments I couldn't forget."
The auditorium grew loud, pieces of sound filling the air like people had been waiting for permission to speak.
"Why didn't you tell us earlier?" a mother shouted. "Why did you endure it?"
"Because no one listened," I said. "Or if they listened, they believed the louder lies."
Lenora's face crumpled. For the first time, her armor cracked. Her mouth opened and closed. She tried words that didn't hold.
"You're making things up," she blurted.
"You're the one who bought those pills," I said, and I walked to the front of the stage, the microphone heavy in my hand. "You tried to make her fail the exam because you needed her spot to be free."
"That's absurd!" Lenora screamed.
"Ask Mallory if this is absurd," I said.
The crowd turned to Mallory. Her face, once so practiced, had melted. She tugged at Lenora's sleeve like a child holding onto a coat in a storm.
"I—" Mallory stammered. Her voice went thin. A few students began to whisper into phones, their faces lit by screen glow.
Then the police officer who had been called forward stepped up. "We have evidence," he said. "We have the messages. We have the pills. We have witnesses."
There was a silence like the world deciding. Phones rose. The auditorium buzzed. People read the comments and the posts and the video side by side, a jury in their palms.
"Lenora Schmitt," the officer said, calling her full name like a bell. "You are being placed under investigation for assault and for influencing a minor's health."
Her eyes flew open, wild, like an animal cornered. She was proud and then arrested by her own panic.
"This is all a lie," she screamed.
"Not a lie," the principal said. "We will proceed.
The crowd began to react. Some parents clutched their children. A woman shouted, "How could you do this to such a girl?" Others started asking questions of Mallory's mother, who sat near the back and had pale hands.
Mallory tried to recover her face, to show the composure she had worn in halls and at home. Instead, she began to cry in a high, broken way. Tears rolled down, and with each tear her confidence was stripped away.
"You're seeing the truth now," I said, voice steady. "Please don't let her get away with lying to protect herself."
Denis Jones moved toward Lenora as the officers approached. "We will not protect abusers in our school," he said.
Lenora's reaction was a movie. First, she tried to smile. Then she went from furious to flailing. Her fingers gripped for something—an arm, the podium—but found empty air. She started to deny, then to dodge, then to plead.
"No! I did it for her," she cried suddenly, a shift from denial to strange guilt. "I was trying to help Mallory!"
"Help how?" someone shouted.
"By making sure she passed," Lenora burst, words cracking. "I— I didn't want Mallory to fail..."
"It doesn't become help when you hurt someone," Tristan said, standing up. "You exploited her."
The auditorium's audience was no longer just watching; they were witnesses. Cameras recorded every snap of Lenora's denial and each of Mallory's faltering excuses. The teachers whispered, the parents argued, and students who had once laughed at me looked away with shame.
"What about her injuries?" a student demanded, and then voices rose like a tide. People began to clap, at first scattered, then louder, a strange sound that was not for celebration but for justice finally being seen.
The police took statements. Reporters scribbled. In the chaos, Lenora tried to retreat, but hands—some of them parents, some of them teachers—gently, firmly, made sure she stayed until officers could lead her away. Mallory followed, collapse and costume falling off.
Lenora's reaction on the way out was layered. She first barked out complaints, loud and sharp. Then her voice faltered. She tried to throw blame at me as if one person's shame could erase the proof. She asked people to believe her. She begged, then cursed. In some parts she looked stunned by the size of the audience's eyes.
"She framed us!" Lenora shouted at one point, turning to the press. "She wanted attention!"
A few students started to boo, a middle note of disgust that spread.
"Shame," someone hissed. "Shame on you."
The crowd's cameras recorded it all. Phones streamed parts. In minutes, the internet rewound and played Lenora's screaming into thousands of screens. People who had once admired her for being polished now watched her unravel. People who had dismissed me now typed apologies. The humiliation was public, systemic, and complete.
Later, in news cycles, they replayed Lenora's transformation: confident to cornered, sly to pleading. They showed Mallory going from smirk to meltdown, her face a map of small ruptures. The punishment was not just legal proceedings; it was the social fall. Sponsors pulled small perks they had once offered; neighbors whispered; friends deleted her from feeds. The thing people loved most was to see the powerful toppled in view of the many.
When the last officer finally led Mallory and Lenora out, their steps were small. Lenora's face was ashen; she mouthed something—was it an apology?—but the press had already started to chant for answers. The students stood, some clapping, others simply watching. I felt a cold satisfaction, not cruel but settled, like a wound finally sewn.
It was over in a way that left scars but also made the air cleaner. People who had turned a blind eye were forced to look. The punishment was public, as I'd planned. It was meant to be.
After that day, nothing was the same.
Tristan hugged me in a hallway while the crowd waited for someone to comment. "You did it," he said.
"I had to," I replied.
He tucked his head against me and breathed, "You were brave."
Months later Mallory would come back, small and raw, and Lenora would be marked by what she'd lost: respect, position, the polished life she'd crafted. The bites they'd made in me were on display, yes, but they were not all that I was. I had been seen.
"Will you press charges?" Tristan asked one night when we were home from the chaos.
"No," I said quietly. "The law will do its work. I wanted people to know."
"And they do."
They knew. The crowd had watched. They would not forget.
Life after the exposure was messy and gentle at once. Denis Jones and his wife opened their home to me; he had been more than a teacher—he had been a steadying presence when I couldn't find balance. Tristan and I stayed close, stitched by late-night study and early morning support. I went to classes and to sleep and tried to learn how to be more than the things done to me.
At graduation, when they called my name as the city top student, the auditorium filled with faces I recognized and faces that had altered. Denis squeezed my hand. Tristan's eyes shone. People whispered and pointed but in the way people point at sunrises.
"You did this?" Tristan asked in a voice laced with pride and disbelief.
"I did what I had to," I said.
After that, things slid into a steadier arc. Mallory's reputation followed her like a shadow; Lenora's fall was slow and public. My father showed up once and then was driven from the house by Denis in a scene of disgrace that left me cold and strangely free. I did not weep for the loss; I had already stored the sorrow.
One night, under the grasses of the trip we took, Tristan and I lay side by side. He asked me softly, "Did you ever wish you hadn't used the lie to draw them out?"
"You mean pretending my scores dropped?"
"Yes."
"I did it to buy myself time," I said. "To keep my focus and to let the moment be precise. I learned to hide for a purpose."
He squeezed my hand. "I came close because of it."
"You did," I whispered.
"When you told the truth in the auditorium," Tristan said, "I felt the world lean with you."
We kissed, a small thing but honest. The knife I had kept hidden had a handle now.
Years later, at my alma mater, someone tried to pull me off stage during a speech. It was Lenora again, disheveled and bitter, flagging at me like a ghost who had not found rest. The guard took her away. The crowd watched. Her life had not fixed itself. She had been punished and still she kept trying.
"Do you ever want revenge further?" Tristan asked me once, as we sat in the quiet after the storm of my story had calmed.
"No," I said. "Seeing them exposed was enough. They have to live with it."
He smiled and kissed my forehead.
I put my school ring into the drawer of my desk at home. I did not toss it. I kept it like a small map. It reminded me of the day the auditorium lights brightened, the day my camera caught things that others had ignored, the day my voice overcame their shrieks.
The cameras still play parts of that night sometimes in news specials. People still send messages sometimes, "You were brave," or "I couldn't have done it." I let them land like small warm stones.
Once, Tristan said, "You turned pain into proof."
"Someone had to," I said.
"And you did it with a camera and a plan."
"Yes," I said. "And with help."
He tightened his hold. "And with me."
I learned that people are not always what they seem. I learned to be careful. I learned that sometimes the best revenge is the quiet kind that changes how the world looks. I walked across a stage with the city behind me and the people in front who had watched and decided I was not what they had imagined.
Once in a while, when the moon was thick and silver, I would pull out the photo of Mom and trace her face with a finger. "We did it," I would whisper. "We did it right."
The End
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