Face-Slapping11 min read
My Upstairs Monster and the Matcha Cake That Wasn't
ButterPicks15 views
They say your building shows what kind of people live inside it. Mine showed one woman: a seventy-something who treated other people’s doors like open shelves.
"I'm Lea," I told the surveillance clip when I first replayed it, because talking to a loop of my own life felt better than crying.
"Whoever did this—" I said into my phone, pointing at the woman on screen as if she'd answer me back, "—you are going to pay for this."
"Pay?" someone snorted in the hallway just then.
"Yes. Pay." I snapped, and the hallway echoed my anger like a bad joke.
The clip was ugly: a frail figure with a hunched back and a walking stick cutting open two cardboard boxes left at my door. A glint of a box cutter, a careless toss, and my life's small joys—the ten or twelve bottles and compacts I'd waited a month for—scattered. The green serum bottle shattered like a stupid, glittering liar on the marble floor. The highlighter palettes turned into confetti. One of the limited lipsticks had its gold shell scuffed like it had been kicked.
"She stepped on my lipstick." I kept saying it, as if saying it enough would make the fact less true.
"You've upset her twice now," Paolo Carver, our property manager, said later. His face was a practiced apology. "Estrella's hard to manage."
"Estrella who?" I asked, even though I knew. I'd watched the camera. I'd seen the woman every day: her collected bottles, her hoard of cardboard, the way she moved the stairwell with all the grace of a rubbish storm.
"Estrella Clapp," Paolo said. "Seventy-three? Seventy-five? She—she's alone. Her son—Nolan—tries. They just... it's complicated, Ms. Howard."
It was complicated in the way a knotted shoelace is complicated. It doesn't mean you leave it there to trip other people.
"She broke my things," I said. "This is one thousand three hundred and eighty-six dollars. I want compensation."
"Compensation—" Paolo said, blinking like a man lighted by a sudden headache. "I'll speak to her."
"Speak to her now," I said. "I'm not taking the smell of her trash into my life anymore."
When I went upstairs that afternoon, the apartment looked like a recycling center after a windstorm. Old newspapers, cardboard flattened into miniature cities, a mountain of plastic bottles wrapped in twine, a hammock of stray grocery bags. Estrella Clapp sat in a chair that seemed to have been designed by someone who hates cushions. Her eyes were tiny and mean in a map of wrinkles.
"Ma'am," I said, polite. "Ma'am, did you take my packages?"
She looked up and smiled the way a crow might smile at a cracked window. "What packages? Mine are fine. You young people leave rubbish everywhere."
"The boxes were at my door," I said. "You opened them and you ruined my cosmetics. Do you know what these cost?"
She barked out a laugh. "Cosmetics! Hah! Fancy people's toys!"
"I have video. I brought evidence." I set the tablet on her table, pressed play, and didn't stop to enjoy the way her eyes flicked to the screen and then widened.
"Video? Who do you think you are?" Estrella snapped. "You put your gifts out in the stairwell, that's giving them away. I'm helping. I'm doing you a favor."
"Helping?" I repeated. "You left my serums and palettes on the floor to be ruined. You broke glass—my lucky bottle—"
"Your lucky bottle?" she mocked. "You think bottles have luck? You lot buy and buy and throw away and cry about it."
Nolan Brewer—her son—arrived after a phone call. He was a man who looked perpetually apologetic. "Lea," he said quickly. "I'm so sorry. My mother—she's confused sometimes. She didn't mean—"
"Didn't mean?" I snapped. "She did. She took the boxes. She opened them. Your mother stepped on my lipstick. She kicked my eye shadow. My serum is ruined. This is not a small thing."
"Let's calm down," Nolan said. "We can talk."
"Talk?" Estrella popped up like a jack-in-the-box. "You want more money? You want me to feed you? You people..."
"The police can sort this," I said. "If she won't pay, I'll—"
"You gonna call the police on an old lady?" she shrilled. "Shame on you. Shame!"
I called the police anyway.
The officers were two solid silhouettes—Beau Mendes and Paolo had told me to expect someone who would take statements and shake a finger at the old lady. They showed up with the kind of neutral patience you see in uniforms.
"Ma'am," Officer Mendes said, formal. "We have a report of deliberate property damage."
Estrella folded her arms as if the sky were expected to apologize to her for daring to be blue that day. "I did nothing," she hissed. "She lies. She accuses the elderly."
"There's footage," I said. "Please—"
"There are laws about entering someone's home," Officer Mendes said. "We can mediate. Miss Howard, do you want us to issue a demand for compensation?"
"Yes," I said. "One thousand three hundred and eighty-six dollars. For the bottles, the palettes, and for the heartbreak."
Estrella's mouth flattened. Nolan paled. "That's—" Nolan began.
"Pay me now," I said. "Or we file. Or we put it in the building group, because if she did this to me, imagine who else."
That set something off. Estrella flung herself onto the floor and started wailing like a banshee.
"She did this to me in front of the police!" she shouted. "She shames me, she threatens me, she wants my money!"
"Open the door," Officer Mendes said quietly. "We need to see inside. Nolan, cooperate."
Nolan begged with a Holy-please in his voice. "Ma—open the door. They'll leave if you open up."
Estrella dug her nails into her palms and called out a string of words that tasted like vinegar. She finally opened the door. The hallway smelled of deep fried things and old citrus peels. She spat on the floor and called me a name I won't repeat.
"Now," Officer Mendes said, "let's sort this out."
Nolan counted on his fingers then put the money down. He looked like he'd swallowed the ocean and still had a dry mouth.
"Give her the money," Estrella said, "and get out of my building."
I took the bills, my fingers trembling. I felt like I had won a small battle, but the war—the daily war of living beneath a person like this—was far from over.
"Take your money and go," Estrella hissed. "You should be ashamed."
A week later, my door had yellow phlegm on the handle and a pamphlet woven into the doorknob. Someone had left droppings in my hallway trash. It was explicit hatred in human shapes.
"She keeps doing things," I told Paolo, who offered me another version of helplessness: We can't forcibly enter her home. The police can only warn. The building can't move people out on a whim. "Do you want me to move?" he suggested, as if abandoning the fight were a reasonable option.
"Move?" I laughed. "This is not a breaking-up-of-my-life scenario. This is a fight. And I'm not the kind to leave my floor."
Then the lockdown happened.
Everything that was punchy in our complex—the early morning aerobics, the little Sunday markets—closed. Food deliveries became gold rushes, and what used to be a polite economy turned into a squirrelly survival game. Packages and food bundles left outside doors became fragile treasures.
We organized. We watched. We texted in the building chat. Someone called themselves "The League" and posted a schedule of Estrella’s movements: up at four to forage, home by nine, out again midafternoon. The list was almost funny. Almost.
I bought a tiny wireless camera and placed it at my door. I named it Narcissus for my amusement and to make the revenge feel theatrical. The camera caught Estrella at impossible hours wearing shoes she swore were only for the doctor, and with a sack full of other people's parcels. She was a professional scavenger. The video gave the building people a righteous glow.
"Someone posted the clip in the group," a neighbor laughed. "She took the fried chicken."
"She took my fried chicken." I said, remembering the burning anger of that day—my morning collapsed into the emptiness of paper wrappings.
Estrella, of course, shifted to a kind of guerrilla operation. She stopped hitting A Block and stalked B Block. She scaled the low wall like an athletic elder and vanished with the goods. When the man across the courtyard, Elden Andre, ran out for his medicine, it vanished too. That one—his medicine—would change everything.
He was seventy-eight and wiry. Everyone liked Elden. He had a laugh that made all the nosy lines on your face rearrange into something kinder. He'd been waiting for a special box of heart medicine—an imported emergency pack—when it disappeared from the temporary delivery shelf.
"Maybe it's a mistake," someone suggested.
"It was gone in under fifteen minutes," Paolo said. The color had left his manager-cheeks.
When they couldn't find the package, Elden's son—Beau Mendes—rushed over. He and Elden were so familiar with one another you could see three decades of neighborly punches behind their easy insults. The son saw the footage: a crate like a red-blooded flag of wrong being carried into Estrella’s doorway.
"That is my father's medicine," Beau said, and his voice broke in the way a sea does when it hits a cliff. "You took it."
Estrella's eyes flashed like a trapped animal. "I didn't take anything!" she snapped.
"Take him down," Beau said. "We need to search."
Estrella refused to allow anyone through at first. She barked and spat and raised a storm that would have googled a thunderbolt. But the building was done waiting; the grief over Elden's missing pills had ground into rage.
"They kicked her door in," I admitted later, gloating a little. The action was like a badly written climax—a human tangle of desperate hands and mad energy. The door came open with a jagged prayer.
Inside, the apartment looked worse than before: bottles stacked like art, cardboard folded into terrible sculptures, stray socks, and in the middle a ruined treasure trove of stolen goods. People found packages, wrappers, and then—miracle—Elden's box. But it was empty.
The son, Beau, did not sound like a son anymore. He sounded like vengeance. "Where's the medicine?" he bellowed. "Where is it?"
"Where's my money?" Estrella spat. The air tightened like a noose.
Beau grabbed her by the collar. "Give me the medicine," he seethed. "If anything happened to my dad, I'll make you—"
"Make me? You?" Estrella cackled, then spat at him. The spit was a dagger. It set the crowd off.
"What is wrong with her?" someone shouted.
"She stole from a sick man," Paula—Monica Matthews from 402—said. "That's beyond petty."
"She didn't mean to, she probably thought—" Nolan started weakly.
Estrella launched herself at Beau, scratching and clawing, and the man grabbed her arm back. She bit, she cursed. The son, burned out by fear and fury, lifted a small kitchen knife then immediately wished for an ocean to swallow him.
Before anyone could really follow the downward spiral, things happened. The group reacted like well-trained actors: someone took the knife away, someone called the ambulance, someone filmed with their phone. The crowd cheered as if it were a sporting event, but it wasn't a game. Estrella, whom we'd all fantasized about toppling, now lay tangled in her own defenses, shrieking.
"She—she stole a man's medicine!" the son cried. His voice was raw. "This is why people die. This is revenge for stealing life."
"Give her to the police," Paolo demanded. "This is criminal now."
Estrella hit the floor and screamed for help. Then she screamed to be left alone. Her chest sounded like a kettle almost boiling.
When Elden's son told his neighbors they had to act, the crowd did more than act; it assembled into a punishment that would be recorded and replayed for months.
This is the scene I remember like a photograph of a car crash: a public punishment that was both justified and ugly in its joy.
"On your feet," Beau said, firm and bone-cold. He wanted her to stand and apologize, to make right with words what she could not give back with packages or money.
"No! I won't!" Estrella spat.
"Look at him," Beau said, and he pointed to Elden's son, who had cradled the empty pill box like it was a broken heart. "You stole his father's medicine. His father died. You will stand here and apologize."
Estrella's face moved through the masks of emotions like a bad actor impatient to get to the tragedy: first indignation—"You can't do this to an old woman!"—then panic—her voice narrowed and thin—then denial—"I didn't!"—then, finally, confusion, and then that hollowing beat when the crowd's attention turned inward like a spotlight that chews you.
"You can't—" she tried to slide off the stairs but the son wouldn't let go. He wanted to hurt her; he wanted to make it honest.
"Apologize," he said, and that single word carried a thousand small reckonings.
She stayed silent. Her mouth made a shape like a cave of denial.
"You're a thief," someone shouted. "You're a killer."
Around us, people who had once been quiet put their phones out. Live streams began. The chat filled with comments: denounce her, shame her, videotape evidence. The rightness of it—public exposure—felt delicious in a cruel, human way. The camera captured everything: the spit, the knife, the way a neighbor Mom—Joanne Masson—from 1002 sobbed as she clutched her toddler, the toddler's little face like a question.
"On your knees," Beau said, finally. He was tired of talking. He had a son's hunger for clarity.
She looked at him like she was hearing a language she didn't understand. "If I get on my knees—" she croaked, "—what will that do?"
"Make you see," someone said. "Make you remember you hurt people."
She sank to the floor, not graceful, not repentant. Her knees scraped the tile. She wobbled. The crowd leaned in. The son, trembling, pointed at her with his finger like a teacher catching a liar in class.
Apologize, he implored. "For stealing. For the pills. For the way you look at other people. For the things you took because you wanted them. For my father."
The apology that came was a sputter—"I'm sorry—"—a thing that broke into pieces. It wasn't enough. People protested that she should pay. She had to return what she had taken; she had to face an official. She had to see the doctor.
It was a public, messy consumption of punishment. People booed, recorded, admonished. The live stream grew. The building's chat was an angry echo chamber.
The worst part was watching the old woman's mask fall. She had been a robust villain for weeks—an imaginative terror we used to amuse ourselves with. Seeing her on the floor, eyes wild, chest heaving, she looked small. The public punishment that had felt virtuous suddenly tasted like blood.
"Are we monsters?" I whispered without meaning to, and the neighbor next to me, Gloria Colon, squeezed my hand. "Maybe," she said. "But he died. We would have forgone action and there would have been no justice."
I watched Nolan stand, hands in his hair, ashamed like a man who had not stopped his own build of ruin. The crowd receded into murmurs. The ambulance arrived. Hands turned from pitching toward saving to holding. That scene was longer than the legal requirements for a complaint. It was longer than the hours we'd spend in the stairwell nagging at the trash.
Estrella left by ambulance to the hospital. Her fall had been too much; she had a crushed vertebra and bruises that would not be admired. People argued and cheered retrospectively as if the crowd's roar could resuscitate the lost man. The son who had stood with a knife in his hand was later advised by a policeman to calm down; the city would handle the rest.
Weeks later, rumors spilled into the porter’s desk that Estrella had become immobile, that her legs did not move. "High-level spinal injury," they said in the same tone you'd say "it's raining." She was shifted to a cheap care home. The building sighed with relief.
Months passed. We ran into a new normal. The cameras stayed in their places. The stairwell was cleaner. People were kinder to the elderly for a minute, then less generous when it didn't cost them anything.
And me? I threw away my shriek of anger into something quieter. I sold the small vibration box I'd once hoped would shake her out of her spoils. I kept a small photograph in my drawer: the broken serum bottle's green glass now a memory on a page.
"You won," my friend Monica joked one afternoon, and I laughed because there was a truth to it.
But the truth also had teeth. The punishment had been public, humiliating, messy—and it had not fixed everything. One man was dead. A woman was broken in body and, perhaps, in mind. The building had lit an angry fire and watched as the forest burned.
Half a year later I signed for a new tenant. "Who lived here?" the agent asked as he led a prospective buyer down the hall.
I told him, quiet now. "An old woman. She died alone in a nursing home," I said. "She used to collect other people's trash and turn it into her life."
The agent's lips made a sympathetic circle. "That's sad."
"Not as sad as what was lost," I said. "But it wasn't all justice."
The buyer bought the apartment. The building kept its order. The stairwell never again smelled of stale marinade and anger. People moved out, couples moved in. The group chat drifted into gossip about deliveries.
Sometimes, late at night, I would hear a distant dog bark and imagine Estrella picking through cardboard somewhere else, perhaps in her head. There's an image that stays with me: a small, immodest matcha cake box sitting on our food table one morning, delicious to the eye. People who'd been her allies once offered it up with the placard "Not a Matcha Cake." Estrella came for it, and it was gone.
We laughed. We recorded it. We were human and petty again—two halves of the same coin.
The building is quieter now. The little green serum bottle is gone, but I sometimes reach for the handle as if to check it's still there—a muscle memory of a loss and of a fight that changed how we all lived together.
Ive kept the tablet with the footage. It sits in a drawer like a relic. I watch it sometimes. I watch the woman open the box and the way the lipstick goes under her shoe and the powder like confetti on the floor. I watch myself, furious, knocking at a door that didn't deserve the full measure of my patience.
In a way, we all did what we thought was right. In a way, we all paid.
The End
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