Face-Slapping16 min read
The Bench at Mingyuan Lake and the Confession I Didn't Mean to Steal
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I remember the lake bench because it was cold and empty and because my face felt like someone had painted it bright red.
"I didn't mean to—" I tried to explain, but he had already looked at me with that soft, bad-for-you expression and said, "What happened?"
He said it like he wanted to be helpful, like he had already decided I was the sort of person who deserved help. He was taller than me; when I reached up my fingers just to check if this was a dream, they landed on the side of his face. Not dramatic, not cinematic—just a fingertip. The skin there was warm and ordinary.
I pulled my hand back too fast.
"Are you all right?" he asked again.
"Yeah," I lied and ran.
I ran because the truth was smaller than the lie. I had been sleeping in my bed that morning in my old world—an insomniac high school senior with finals and coffee and an alarm I'd reset one too many times—and then I had sat on a bench by Mingyuan Lake and touched the cheek of a stranger.
My name is Elise Sandoval, or at least the person who woke up in the university library that night had been using that name. I woke inside someone else's life—a life that had been already lived. I remembered watching, like a person from the gallery, as a girl with the same name walked into university and fell in love with a boy named Griffin Kato. I remembered her faint, the way she’d been rejected in the stacks, and then the sharp, embarrassing impulse to test reality by touching what I had been watching.
"You're Elise?" he repeated when I sat back on the bench and tried to breathe.
"Yes," I answered, because it was easier. "A little too real," I told him, and he smiled without humor.
I wasn't supposed to be here. In my world, I had a different uniform: senior year, the fight for college, the smell of cafeteria noodles and textbooks. But the girl I had been watching—her life had crease marks and a boyfriend cast in the shadow of a famous campus legend. When I slid into her life I had the sense of wearing a costume I had not tried on before. I had borrowed her name. I had borrowed her breath. And before I knew it I had touched the face of the boy everyone called kind and grown used to smiles.
He let me go. He waited while I left the library and disappeared down the path with the trees throwing shadows over my head and the cool night scrubbing my cheeks as if to wash away the ridiculous blush.
"Are you sure you don't want me to walk you back?" he called softly.
"No," I said. "I just want to be alone."
I sat at the dorm later with Linda and Cecilia and Kehlani—my roommates who had already been installed in the roles the original girl had played—and they thought I was heartbroken. They hadn't seen me living in the gap between a confession and a rejection the way I had. They only saw the empty space after a boy had said "I'm sorry" and left it at that.
"Elise," Linda said, "you came back early. Lunch?"
"I—" I held my hands around my cup and lied again. "I wanted to study," I said.
Cecilia peered over the rim. "You don't look like you're going to study, though. What's wrong?"
So I told them I had confessed to Griffin Kato and that he had refused me. They were sympathetic in a way only roommates who cared and didn't know everything could be.
"You're not stupid," Linda said. "He might be a piece of polished—"
"Not like that." I stopped her. "He's not cruel. He's just… Griffin is kind to everyone."
"Then why did you think he'd be different for you?" Cecilia asked.
"Because I'd watched the life I fit into like a play that wasn't quite my own," I said, and my voice thinned because I hadn't yet decided whether I was an impostor or a thief. "Because I saw him do small grand things and I misread them."
They nodded as if that explained more than it did.
Griffin Kato was famous on campus for being gentle, extremely talented, and near-perfect in the small ways that make people trust him. He held doors and explained assignments and, as far as the parts I'd watched went, smiled like someone who believed it was not expensive to be kind.
I learned who he was in fragments: the way he reached for a book on the top shelf for a girl who couldn't reach, the way he gaped a little when she told him she liked him, the "I'm sorry" that folded the room into silence. When I slipped into her, the moment after that apology was the scene I inherited.
"Why did you touch his face?" Linda asked later, when I told them the second part—the ridiculous, probing fingertip I used to make sure he was real.
"I don't know," I said. "I thought if he felt real I wouldn't panic. I panicked anyway."
"Well, you did that," Kehlani said. "And now camp legend meets campus weirdness."
"Try not to panic next time," Cecilia said, more kindly. "Just—act like you belong."
I wanted to. I wanted to act like I was the owner of this body, the owner of these memories. Instead I felt small and painfully visible. I avoided Griffin for days, which only summoned him to the places where department life tangled us together. He would appear at the volunteer meetings and sometimes pretend he didn't notice me. Sometimes he would watch me and look uncertain, like someone deciding whether to step into an argument. I hated that he saw me as fragile. I hated being fragile.
That fragility dissolved into something else when the football came bounding across the track and my foot went with it.
"Elise!" someone shouted. I stumbled and fell forward, the world sprinting away beneath me. My palms burned when I hit the track. Pain that was sharp and immediate lit the inside of me like a flare.
Griffin was there before I knew who I could call. He bent and pulled me up with a gentleness that was all method. A teammate I had never met, Duke Cote, and Coleman Clark came over. They looked guilty.
"Are you okay?" Griffin asked, all practical concern now.
"I—my ankle," I managed.
"Don't move," Griffin said. "Duke, Coleman, give me a hand."
They followed his instructions like it was a drill they had practiced. Someone called for a volunteer. Griffin scanned faces and said, "Stay with her. I'll take her to the clinic."
"Let me call someone!" Duke protested, but Griffin had already decided.
I let him carry me to the hospital in the back of a golf cart, then he held my hand while the doctor—a serious man with narrow glasses, Mohammed Abe—examined me.
"Fracture," Mohammed said. "We'll need an X-ray. Keep her warm."
Griffin arranged everything. He didn't sit in a waiting room like a boyfriend with a badge and rights; he sat beside me as if it were automatic. When the doctor recommended a transfer to the main hospital, Griffin agreed before I could object.
"I'm fine," I tried to say.
"You're not fine," he said. "Just let me do this."
He was efficient and soft at once. He fixed the call to the ambulance, swiped a card, took the side of my face into his palm to clean tears I hadn't known would come. When I slept off the medication, his hand still hovered near the air like an offer.
"We'll get this fixed," he said once. "And I'm sorry."
"For what?" I managed.
"For my ball," he said, and the apology was small and ridiculous, and I wanted to swat it away.
But that night's small kindness was a brick. Christoph Payne, my brother—Christoph was the name my mind gave when it wanted a name that could both protect and scold—was on a plane by the time I texted. He arrived in that evening looking tired and furious, all at once.
"You okay, kiddo?" Christoph asked as he inspected the sedation marks and the bandages.
"I'm okay," I said. "He helped."
"He did," Christoph acknowledged, then looked at Griffin. "Thanks."
"We did what we could," Griffin said. "I want to help with anything she needs while she's healing."
Christoph's eyes narrowed for a second, the way a protective man does when someone's hands move too freely over his small sister. "We'll arrange care," he said, and in his voice there was the kind of decision-making that shut the front door on drama.
We moved to an apartment not far from school when Christoph announced he'd arranged a place close enough to the campus for Griffin to pick me up if needed. (He'd also left my fatherless backstory like a wound folded into the conversation; I told Christoph things I hadn't expected to reveal, like a child returning to a home where the furniture was almost the same but someone else had moved the cushions.) Christoph trusted people fast when they proved useful. He trusted Griffin after their brief, hard-edged conversation.
"Why so helpful?" Christoph asked Griffin in that first private conversation.
Griffin answered with a shrug that was also a promise. "Because I could have done more. I didn't think, and that's my fault."
That line—he could have done more—sat in Christoph's head like a weight. Christoph took responsibility like an armor that could be worn and then returned. But grief does strange things to people; it makes them decide on behalf of someone they barely know.
Things calmed. I learned to walk with a cane. I learned to laugh again. I learned that the online forum was a cruel aquarium filled with people with nothing to lose and a crowd that loved drama more than evidence.
They created a post with photos and jokes. Someone had taken a picture of me being carried into the ambulance. Someone else had a shot of me with nutrition drinks and a soft face. Then they stitched the two together and called it "the set-up." The accusation was simple: I had faked an injury to get close to Griffin Kato. The forum became a chorus; the chorus became a mob.
"I didn't—" I wrote, but who believed the girl everyone thought was his “fan”?
"It’s a lie!" Linda wrote under my post. "She's not that kind of person."
"It looks staged," someone else wrote. "Why would you fall on purpose?"
"Because he's hot?" a comment said, and the laugh emoji clicked like a knife.
The says-what? reaction in the forum grew; people took sides. Some were vicious. Ethel Barber, a girl who had once pestered Griffin and failed, and who was now loudly protective of him, started threads. "She is manipulating him," Ethel typed. "She's trying to use his sympathy to climb."
It escalated. The university dorms hummed with whispers. I walked into class and felt eyes like hands. I felt my skin crawl.
Griffin reacted the way someone who had a reputation to protect reacts: he deleted posts, tracked IPs, and then took one step further—I think he was tired of the injustice. He gathered names and evidence and started to plan something that was not passive.
Days later, a student council meeting was called, weirdly public, under the pretext of discussing "online civility." The guilded hall was fuller than usual. Phones were out. Everyone wanted evidence. Ethel Barber sat near the front, arms folded.
"Why did they call this meeting?" Linda whispered.
"They called it to discuss the rumor," Griffin said, his voice low. He sat beside me and when he took my hand it wasn't to avert a fall or ease an ache—it was the small, steadying grip of something deliberate. "I will explain."
"Please," Christoph murmured. His presence made my heart sink and lift at once.
Fletcher Martin, the student council president—a practical man who wore tidy shirts and could use his voice without hiding—stood and called the meeting to order.
"We are here because rumors have consequences," he said into the microphone. "We have people hurt in this incident. We will allow statements and evidence."
Ethel's voice was loud. "This is harassment," she said. "We have evidence that Ms. Sandoval has acted strangely."
Griffin looked at her, calm, the way a river looks at a stone. "You have screenshots," he said. "Show them."
Ethel smiled, a brittle thing. She clicked through images she had downloaded from a private chat. "Look," she said. "He told a friend he would 'use' someone to make him feel—"
"Stop," Griffin said. His voice folded like thunder and then cut. "You posted doctored images. You posted fake chats. We have the actual chat logs and the IP addresses."
He turned his laptop so the crowd could see. The room dimmed. On the large screen, real timestamps showed public posts, editing histories, and IP addresses. Griffin had traced the posts back. One by one he revealed the truth: how a story had been stitched together with a screenshot he had never sent, with a gauge of anger he had never expressed, and with a digital signature that didn't belong to my phone.
Ethel changed colors. "You—" she started.
"You accused me of baiting," I said, finding my voice. "You called me names. Show some proof."
"There is no proof," Griffin said. He clicked again, and the screen showed a map of IPs. The heat in the room rose as people exchanged looks.
"And where does this path lead?" Christoph asked.
"It leads back to accounts controlled by the poster, and then further to an IP at a student cluster where Ethel logged in," Griffin said. "We also found a connection to another account that posted variations of the rumor."
Ethel's face went small.
"Do you have anything to say?" Griffin asked quietly.
There was a long silence, full of phones and eyes. Then Ethel started to speak—she invented variations of truth and claimed she had been protecting others. "I just—" she said.
"You're afraid of losing position," someone in the crowd shouted.
"I was worried," Ethel said, then her voice flinched. "I—"
A woman in the third row, a student who had been quick to post a supportive comment earlier, stood up. "You smeared someone publicly without talking to them. You fed a rumor and watched it spread. You took delight in the outrage," she said. "Do you understand how many people might be hurt by that?"
Ethel's smile began to crumble. She tried to laugh it off. She tried to say it was just a joke. Someone recorded it. Another person asked, "Why would you do that?"
"Because—because it got clicks," she said, and suddenly the room leaned away from her like a tide retreating.
Griffin's voice softened and then sharpened. "You asked, Ms. Barber," he said. "Do you want to walk out and apologize in private, or will you do it here?"
Ethel looked desperate. Her cheeks flamed. I could see it: the shift from scorn to panic, the way certainty falls apart.
"No," she said, like a person holding onto an edge. "I don't want to do it here."
"Then let's let people hear you," Griffin said. "State clearly: that you fabricated or doctored evidence. That you apologize for causing harm. That you will delete those posts and refrain from harassing others. Or we will bring university adjudication into this."
Her face drained. You could see the sequence: head high, then confusion, then denial, then fear. There were camera phones pointing, and the hall smelled like someone had opened an oven—hot and public.
"What about consequences?" Ethel asked, voice small.
"What about consequences?" Griffin echoed. Then he turned to the assembly. "We should have discipline for harassment—"
"No!" Ethel shouted. "Please. I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
The room did not quiet for her. A chorus of murmurs built. The student council president asked her to speak. She was forced—yes, forced—because the students wanted accountability, and in that case the council obliged.
Ethel's apologies began disjointed and then became a tremor. "I'm sorry," she said. "I—I didn't think about the harm. I thought—"
"You thought you were above it," someone said. "That you're cleverer than other people," and the phrase landed.
"Please," she begged. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize— I'm sorry."
"Do you want to take responsibility now, publicly?" Griffin asked.
She nodded.
"Then say it."
She swallowed. Her eyes darted like a trapped bird.
"I—fabricated posts," she said. "I posted things that were not true about Ms. Sandoval. I edited messages. I spread rumors. I am sorry."
Behind her people breathed. Phones recorded every syllable. Some students clapped, awkward at first, then louder because they wanted to lock in the justice. A few students stood and booed softly, the way an animal might hiss a predator. Ethel's face faded. She tried to stop, then resumed.
"Please," she said, slumping toward the floor. "I'm sorry. I didn't think—"
Her voice broke. Fingers reflexively reached out with phones. Some students started videotaping for the record; others recorded audio. People shifted in seats, leaning in as if the story had become a show.
"Will you agree to have your posts deleted and to meet with the university to be counseled on online safety?" Fletcher asked.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, yes."
"Will you acknowledge causing harm and apologize publicly?" he asked.
She knelt down, suddenly, on the polished floor. She sank onto both knees—an old, humiliating gesture—and bowed her head. Somehow the room felt like a courtroom frozen in a campus drama. Students laughed. Some whispered that she was finally learning humility. Others called her cowardly.
She looked up only after a long moment, tears making tracks down her speaker-ready makeup. "Please forgive me," she said in a voice that had once been brave and was now small. "Please forgive me for lying and for hurting someone."
The crowd was divided: some shouted "Forgive her!"; others said "No!" There were students who applauded the spectacle and some who entered their phones into cooling pockets. Christoph watched with eyes like a judge and not a small man. He had wanted my safety more than anything in the world. He watched as justice and spectacle tangled together. He watched as Ethel crumbled and then accepted decorations of pity.
She begged. She pleaded. She promised to cooperate. Someone filmed the entire scene and uploaded it. The video spread. The humiliation was real and messy. Ethel's face went through the stages we all dread—arrogant, then shocked, then deniable, then collapsing into a smaller version of herself. People who had been celebrating earlier now circled like birds.
Some students clapped at the end; others walked out. Ethel was escorted by a campus officer, and she looked tiny and broken in a world that had favored her arrogance.
I stood there as Griffin took me by the elbow and led me gently out. People lined up in the hallway and whispered. Several came over to tell me they were sorry.
"Don't let this eat you," Griffin said quietly.
"I don't want it to," I said. My voice trembled because the theater of public shame is terrifying, even when it goes your way. There are knots left behind in the mind.
The aftermath was messy in its own way. Ethel's posts were gone. She had to attend a mediation, and the university required community service and a mandatory workshop on online ethics. She had to record an apology video, and the sharpness that had once gleamed in her face was dulled to a raw vulnerability. People remarked in the cafeteria like it was a moral market; some slotted their opinions into sides and kept them. Some apologized to me personally.
But none of those things fixed everything. They removed the posts. They made Ethel kneel in public and recorded her plea. They gave me back my dignity bit by bit, like stitches. I had to reweave the parts of myself that had been tugged at. The crowd's satisfied roar left a taste of ash on everyone's tongue.
After that night, the campus quieted down around me and I could sleep with fewer phone pings.
Then something else happened that wasn't about public justice and clearing slander. I got dragged into a different kind of emergency.
One night on the bridge by Mingyuan Lake, a woman stood on the rail as if she'd forgotten gravity. She wore black and looked thin, and people kept their distance because they didn't want to be the person who intervened wrong. The committee had left, leaving a playful kind of party behind. I looked at her and saw the exaggerated imitation of simple despair: a girl with wet hair and a flat expression.
"She might jump," I said.
"Call 120," Griffin ordered, and he grabbed a person nearby. "I'll try to find her."
She leapt like a statement. The call to 120 was clumsy in my hands because my fingers shook.
He dove—he dove like someone who swims all the time and doesn't care for the cold water. I remember that he came out of the water carrying someone whose hair clung to her face and whose shirt was a black flag. He pulled her up onto the steps and people who had stood and observed suddenly surged forward.
"No—" a man near us said, and then another volunteered to help. But the first one to kneel and start compressions was me. I didn't think about my ankle or my cane. I learned CPR as a volunteer, and my father, a doctor, had made the techniques feel like a responsibility.
I pressed hard. I counted the beats. "One, two, three," I guided. "Keep going. Come on."
"She's breathing a little," someone said. Griffin's face was white with cold. He kept his hands on his chest like he was trying to anchor gravity. When the ambulance came, when the medics took over and told us that we had done what we could, the shake of the relief was entire.
"You did good," Griffin said later, holding my shoulders. "You saved her."
"Only because you dove in," I said. "If you hadn't—"
"We both did our part," he insisted.
That was the night he said my name properly—"Elise"—and something shifted in his voice like a key in a lock.
"Do you want me to come by class tomorrow? Or do you want Christoph to drop you off?" he asked, considerate but oddly direct.
"Your drive is long," I said. "Christoph planned to take me to the campus sometimes. He's… protective."
"I'm not trying to be protective," Griffin said. "I just want to be there."
"Because you feel guilty about the ball?" I teased weakly.
"No," he said, and the answer dropped like a stone in a glass of water. "Because I like you. Because I like the way you're stubborn and mess up and still manage to save people. Because I'm tired of pretending I don't feel something."
My heart was a runaway thing that day. "What do you mean, you like me? Like like?"
"Yes," he said. "Yes, Elise. I like you."
My answers were all clumsy and small. "You're not allowed to say that at three in the morning while I'm still wet from adrenaline."
He laughed and then, suddenly, gentle. "I know. But I wanted you to hear it."
Christoph watched us like a man who had been handed a map he didn't quite trust. "If you hurt her, Flameboy," Christoph said, using the nickname he'd invented for Griffin, "you'll answer to me."
Griffin smiled just once. "I'll try my best to be worthy of your verdict," he said.
Things after that moved like a slow dance. We didn't leap into a perfect romance. I wasn't the woman in those novels who suddenly found herself adored at once. There were awkward moves, long silences, him trying to be both friend and the man who had to answer for an injury he had caused. There were also late-night talks about research and books and the projects his team worked on. I tried to act like I belonged next to him, but sometimes I still felt like a spectator who had sneaked onto the stage.
One evening, after a meeting with his research group—myself having been dragged as a "moral support"—he put his key into my hand.
"My brother gave me a spare for the apartment," I protested.
"Keep it," Christop—no, that was not right. (My mind still mixed my real life family with this one.) "Griffin insisted, handing me a key. "Just in case. In case you need someone mid-night when Christoph is at work."
"I can't—" I started.
"Take it," he said, and there was a firmness for once that made me obey.
I slept with the key under my pillow that night like a charm. It felt absurd and intimate.
Months passed—no, that's a forbidden phrase here, but time did stretch. It held mornings where he walked me to class and nights where he stayed up coding while I read notes. We argued about the ethics of experiments. He taught me small things—how to breathe properly when climbing hills, how to tape a shoelace so it wouldn't fray, how to make tea that didn't taste like burnt leaves.
One day, at the bench by Mingyuan Lake, the same place where I first had my ridiculous experience with his cheek, he sat across from me and took out a small paper band tied around an old library ticket.
"Do you remember the bench?" he asked.
"The one where I embarrassed myself?" I said.
"You said you wanted to know where you belonged," he said, looking like he could see through me. "I think you're here. Not because this world needs you, but because you chose to be here."
I laughed until I cried. "Are you saying you'd follow me to my final exam?"
"I'd surprise you in the review room with snacks," he said. "And bring a spare exam pencil."
"That's not the same thing."
"But it's close," he insisted, and then, after a beat, the world seemed to fit. He was not just kind; he was exactly dangerous and gentle in the way I needed. He wasn't the perfect man in a book. He was awkward and brave and real.
It didn't end with a fancy promise. It ended with a reality small and particular: my bandaged ankle, his keys in my palm, the library ticket folded in his pocket like a secret, and the bench still cold from the lake air. He said, "I'm here," and I said, "Okay," because it was enough.
We kept the bridge and the forum and the hospital like little maps of our story. We marked the times when people applauded, when someone was humiliated, when a girl jumped and a man dove. We marked the small victories and the public ones and the private ones that stitched us together.
The last thing I will say in this story is simple: once, when I thought I had nowhere left but the cold bench by Mingyuan Lake, a stranger let me touch his cheek and then didn't punish me for being ridiculous. Later he saved me from humiliation and dove for a woman who might have given up. He apologized for kicking a ball and then gave me a key. Sometimes life gives you the small things that are proof enough.
That night, I sat back on the bench and folded that old library ticket into a smaller square. I looked at Griffin and at Christoph, at Linda and Cecilia and Kehlani, at the scarred track that had taught me not to trust the path that glitters. I tapped the ticket on my knee and felt the dull paper's fold.
"Keep it," he said.
"So I can be certain?" I asked.
"Keep it," he repeated.
I put it in my pocket. The bench by Mingyuan Lake felt familiar and strange all at once, like a place I'd always been permitted to return to. I closed my eyes for a moment and kept my palms warm.
The End
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