Face-Slapping15 min read
The Death Exam — My Left Eye’s Secret
ButterPicks14 views
I never imagined my life would be decided by a clock and a television.
"It wasn't me," I said.
"Of course it wasn't," Helena said, as if reading an answer in a textbook. "Tell them again, Eliza. Make them listen."
"Please," I whispered. "Please tell them the truth."
"Why should I lie for you?" Katrina snapped, voice sharp like broken glass. "You insulted my brother. You said his music is trash."
"You heard us argue—" I started.
"Save it." Katrina's laugh cut me off. "You should know how this ends."
She was the one who pointed. She was the one who called me cheap. She was the one who told everyone I had cheated. Michelle and Angela, who used to pass me notes and laugh with me, watched my face and slowly folded their hands into accusation.
"Eliza," Michelle said softly, "we all saw it."
"How could you—" I tried to keep steady. "I swear I didn't write that cheat sheet."
"You have no proof," Katrina said. "You only have excuses."
"Prove it," I begged Helena. "Please."
Helena looked at me like someone studying a draft. "We'll listen," she said. "But don't interrupt. Let her talk."
"She wrote it," Katrina said. She pointed at me, then at Michelle, then at Angela. "It's obvious. She envies us. She wants what we have."
"Stop," Angela mumbled. "You're—"
"Hit yourself," Katrina ordered suddenly, a cruel grin on her face. "Three slaps. Hard. Then we'll consider forgiving you."
I stared. The laughter in the room vanished like a pulled curtain. Everything hardened into glass.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because we can," Katrina said. "Because she lied about my brother. And because people like you need to be disciplined."
Helena's eyes were cloudy. She didn't object. She only said, "Talk less, listen more."
So I did what I couldn't imagine—what a dozen nights of humiliation and debt and a father's gambling had trained me to do. I hit my own face. Each slap felt like folding myself into a thinner shape.
"Good," Katrina said finally. "Now apologize, and maybe I'll help you with the dean."
"I am sorry," I said. "I'm sorry for saying his music was—"
"Enough," Katrina interrupted. "Say, 'I hit myself for what I said.'"
"I hit myself for what I said," I repeated, raw and humiliated. My cheeks stung and my throat tasted of metal.
"One more thing," Katrina said. "You owe us."
I remember clinking glasses after that. The room smelled of cheap beer and cheap bravado. I remember Helena hiccupping a laugh, then the world dipped and went cold.
I woke to a sentence written on a blackboard.
"You all should die."
I blinked and the letters swam. Then I realized I was in a classroom I didn't know. No desks. No chairs. No windows in the usual sense. The light hum above me was pale and relentless.
There were chains tied to the ceiling. A heavy iron ring hung at my throat and I couldn't pull away. The other chains tugged at others.
"Helena?" My voice came out like cotton.
"I'm awake," she answered, absurdly calm. She sat, cross-legged, reciting vocabulary out of habit. "Twelve, thirteen, fourteen... helps me think."
Around us, my roommates lay huddled. Michelle was pale, Angela clutched her arms like a frightened child. Katrina's face was already beginning to convulse. Out of the wall, in place of windows, something moved.
They were eyes.
Not pictures, not ornaments. Eyes—glassy, living, blinking at us, clustered like barnacles on panes of glass. They focused on us, one hundred little judges.
"Welcome, contestants," the television on the lectern said. Snow danced across its grey screen. Then words scrolled in heavy black:
"Welcome to the Death Exam."
"Is this a prank?" Angela whimpered.
"Show yourself," Katrina shouted. "Who did this to us?"
The TV wrote, patient and obscene:
"Your lives will be tested. Hatred, suspicion, betrayal—these are your questions."
On screen the words changed:
"You have been poisoned. One of you is the poisoner. Find her. Vote her dead before the timer ends."
"Three minutes," Helena whispered after reading. "Three minutes to decide?"
"We didn't do anything," I said.
"Did you?" Katrina accused, eyes burning.
"I didn't poison anyone," Michelle said, hoarse.
"Then prove it," Katrina said.
The TV continued, indifferent: "If you fail to identify the poisoner, everyone but the poisoner will die. The poisoner is marked special. Hide and live."
"How?" I asked. "Who would—"
The walls creaked. The eyes around the glass creatures shifted. A single black ball popped off one of the panes like a tick and dropped into my palm. It was cold and heavy and when I looked closer it had no white—only a perfect black pupil.
"Your voting tool," Helena said calmly. "You wear it on your finger. When the eye opens, your choice is sealed."
An iron hand closed around my fingers. We were the only witnesses. The screen's countdown began—three minutes to judge and kill.
Katrina spoke first. "Eliza," she said, voice like a whip. "You were angry—about your family, about your father's gambling. Who wouldn't hate their life? Who wouldn't hate us? Who wouldn't want revenge?"
"You—" I started.
"You told everyone earlier," she insisted, "you shouted about our things, about my brother's music. You humiliated me. Maybe you tainted the drinks earlier. Maybe you slipped something into the bottle."
"I didn't!" My voice broke. "I didn't touch those bottles."
"Proof?" Katrina said, flat.
Helena, who used to hold my shoulders and promise me a better future, quietly said, "We must hear everyone out."
She listened like a judge. She didn't jump in. She didn't protect me.
Time thinned. Michelle's eyes showed pain. Angela trembled. Then another television flash—someone's life on the screen: our dorm, the five of us, my face slack in their vision. The words:
"You must vote. The clock eats the indecisive."
Katrina pointed and did not stop. One by one they pointed at me. I felt the room constrict like a throat.
"Vote her!" Katrina urged.
"I won't," Helena said suddenly, but not for me. "Not yet."
The first round ended with Katrina's screams. The black pupil on her finger opened wide and the iron leash around her neck pulled. She was yanked like a marionette; for a second her mouth formed "Brother!" Then her head struck the ceiling. The sound was a wet crack that I will never unhear.
Blood rained. Angela fell and shrieked. Michelle covered her face and began to laugh, the sound jagged and out of place.
When the last drip fell, the screen flashed:
"Error."
"Error?" Helena repeated, stunned.
The black counter reset to three minutes, the votes returned to zero. We were two-thirds through some cruel triple-round exam. The girl Katrina had accused—killed—and yet the test was not over. The screen used our fear like fuel and demanded more.
"Why did you help kill her?" Angela screamed at Helena.
"I didn't kill her," Helena answered. "We voted."
"Then who is left?" Michelle said. "There are three rounds total. If we miss again—"
"Don't," Helena murmured. "We have to think."
We tried to think. Helena took charge like a conductor guiding panic into rhythm. She asked questions, tricky ones, tiny details—who returned to the dorm first, who washed which cup, who had cut their hand. Her voice was steady and sharp. She guided thoughts, nudged memories, opened cracks.
When the third round came, the two of us—Helena and I—were left. The votes tallied, and Helena, smiling, tapped her own head as if this were a game won.
"Why did you..." I couldn't finish.
"I did it because I'm tired of seeing you hurt," she said softly. "I wanted to keep you from being hurt."
"You set it up," I choked. "You..."
She shrugged. "I ended the exam my way."
When it finished, the screen declared:
"Special recruit: Eliza Bernard. You passed. You are allowed to continue."
And then, in the flood of blood and glass, Helena smiled and threw me her blue hairpin. "Thanks for being my friend," she said, oddly bright. "This time I had fun."
She turned a pistol—no, she put the hairpin to her temple and smiled as if reading a book. There was a dull sound and then Helena's head was gone.
The news after the hospital was different. Helena's body was nowhere to be found. The police said forms, identities, fakes. My dream classroom was called "delirium," "hallucination." My left eye bled. Yet a hairpin had been found clenched in my hand when the ambulance came. A blue hairpin.
In a hospital bed I learned that Michelle and Angela never woke. Katrina's body—hospital records could not fully explain what they had found. The police asked questions and wrote "unknown toxin" in their notes.
Then Cooper Winter found me.
"Are you Eliza Bernard?" He asked by my bedside, voice like warm concrete.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Cooper Winter. You might have been in... something. We need information." He didn't smile. He wasn't a showman. He was a man who was used to quieting chaos.
"Can I trust you?" I whispered.
"You can," he said. "Or at least you can trust that I will tell you the truth as I know it. I want to help, but you are not safe."
"Safe?" I laughed, a brittle sound. "Safe from what?"
"From those who run the exam," he said. "From people who see something in you they want to keep. From a system that uses fear to sort people."
After discharge, the world narrowed to one thing: my left eye throbbed and occasionally fluttered with a terrible awareness. Sometimes it felt like a second mind—like a camera watching small thoughts in the faces of others. Once, when I dropped an onion and told myself "freeze," everything in my kitchen did stop for a second—white doves stopped midwing, a spoon hung motionless in the air—and then it started again. A pulse of power and horror.
Cooper called me to a meeting I had to take. He was not alone. "We know about the exams," he said. "We know survivors exist. We know they carry something. We need them contained, or to make them answer."
"Contain?" My throat closed. "You're... policemen?"
"Something like that," Cooper said. "There's a choice for you: disappear and pray, or help us find other survivors and uncover the network. You're alive, Eliza. You saw things no ordinary person saw."
"Why me?" I asked. "Why give me a choice?"
He leaned forward. "Because you passed," he said. "And because you've got that left eye. You can help recruit proof. Or they'll recruit you."
I agreed to watch. He told me to keep twenty meters near the next lead: a boy who survived a car sinking. He gave me a small DV camera and a number of instructions that tightened like straps.
"Stay unnoticed," he said. "Record. Stay. Don't attack."
The boy was Brody De Luca. He had come back from a water tragedy; four others had drowned. He had the same black pupil in his left eye.
"How?" I asked him in the dry pool where he was being beaten by grief and locals.
"It wasn't my fault," he said. "I didn't make choices below water. I woke near the bank. I swam. Others didn't."
"Why hide?" I asked.
"Because they will hunt survivors," he said. "They think we repeat to them some secret pattern."
He touched his left eye like greeting an old wound. "It shows me faces," he said. "It shows me flashes of what people think."
"Like me," I breathed.
We did something then we shouldn't have done: we compared nightmares. Brody told me about being yanked sideways from the water by something that had not been human; he showed me where the car had sunk. He had horror and silence wrapped together, the way a person might wrap fingers around anger.
We were both catalogued. Cooper called: "Stay at distance. Monitor. Do not intervene unless ordered." We did it anyway. We prowled the edges of encounters, watched men meet in parking lots, received coded texts that blinked "exam" and "host."
Months passed like thin film. Every time I closed my left eye, the flashes came: a white-haired boy on a TV, a voice that said "This is my scholarship," a hand pinched at my old nightmares. I tried to live, to keep my grandfather fed, to file forms and sit under fluorescents that buzzed like flies.
Then the world we had been trying to expose exploded.
Helena was on the news.
They found a stash of documents—fake IDs, funding transfers, a ledger of victims. It pointed fingers in ugly lines back to a group of men and women who rented spaces like ours for tests. They were different from the people who watched gore for sport. They were quieter. Their ledger said "sponsors." Their ledger said "exams."
Cooper came to me and said, "We can get her. But we need one thing: public exposure."
"Public exposure?" I asked, my stomach a fist.
"Yes. We need her to be punished where everyone can see. If she is simply missing, the network will scatter. If they see one of their own crushed in public, they will move, and we will have openings."
I wanted to say no. I wanted to say she had been my friend. But there were still photos of Helena's smile in the hospital archives; there was the hairpin in the evidence bag. The ledger named names. The ledger named her alias.
"Will you testify?" Cooper asked.
I thought about the classroom. I thought about the blue hairpin on the floor. I thought about the little black pupils on our fingers, the way they had opened and chosen blood. I thought about the boys and girls who no longer walked. I thought of Brody sleeping sometimes like a man waiting for a storm that would never stop.
"Yes," I said finally. "I'll testify."
They planned it like surgery. They got a permit to broadcast her confession live. Cooper told me later that they had to arrange for heavy protection, for witnesses, for a stage that would not be toppled by the mob. They wanted her confession recorded on every channel. They wanted the world to know.
The day came.
A plaza thrummed with noise—a crowd pressed like a dark fabric. The wooden stage was ringed with cameras. Townspeople whispered. The families of the missing were there. I watched from behind two layers of glass, not allowed near the stage for safety. Brody stood beside me, silent as a bay window.
"She must be convicted in public," Cooper said, a thin line across his mouth. "We will hand her to the world."
They brought Helena onstage manacled, not because of dignity but because they had a right to. Her face was paler than I remembered, but the smile was there, tight and strange. She lifted her chin and looked at me in the crowd. For a second it felt like the old dorm, like late-night noodles and library lights. Then the microphone caught her voice.
"Eliza," she said into the open air, "I did what I thought would keep someone safe."
The crowd hissed. A woman near me sobbed so loud the sound cut us both. A man in the front row shouted, "Monster!" Someone else pulled a phone to record the moment, a hundred tiny mirrors of outrage.
"Why?" someone called.
"Why did you make them choose?" another voice demanded.
Helena's hands trembled inside the cuffs. She opened her mouth. "We were chosen by a man on a screen," she said, voice steady. "He said there was an exam. He said students would be broken down. I... I thought I could steer it. I thought if I played along, I'd save..."
She swallowed. "I told myself the exam needed someone to survive. It was either one or all. We argued. We screamed. I believed I could choose who had a future. I didn't think about the cost enough."
"Did you poison them?" someone shouted.
"No," she answered. "No. Tears leaked down her cheeks and made silver lines. "I pushed the vote. I argued. I moved them. I lied. I believed I could stop something worse by steering the compass."
"Who gave you the exams?" another voice demanded as the crowd pushed, swelling like a tide.
Helena closed her eyes. For the first time the smile cracked. "They told me—" she began.
She was not allowed to finish.
"What did she say?" a reporter yelled.
"Tell us names!" a father demanded.
"She can tell the court," Cooper said, voice flat as winter. "We're in the middle of a legal process. Listen to the court."
The plaza reagitated—some booed, some prayed, some clapped. The cameras fed the world raw. They wanted spectacle and we gave it.
Then the punishment began.
He was not a judge wearing robes. He was a prosecutor whose face had the patient rage of someone who writes obituaries in his head. "Helena Schmid," he started, "you manipulated friends into choosing death. You used fear to achieve what you called mercy. This is a crime against humanity, and you will answer."
The man read her charges in a loud voice: conspiracy, coercion, manslaughter, organizing an illicit experiment, falsification of identities, trafficking. People in the crowd gasped. Someone fainted. I heard the collective intake like the intake of a city.
Helena listened and did not blink. Her face bore the lines of someone who had found a reason to stop resisting. On the big screens they played footage from dorm security, grainy but damning—Helena returning with bottles, wiping cups, guiding conversation with that small, careful voice. They showed the ledger Cooper's team had found: donations that paid for rooms "for studies," names of people who "observed," the code of exams. There were thumbnails of the TV with the childlike font proclaiming "DEATH EXAM."
"Do you have anything to say?" the prosecutor asked.
Helena looked straight into the lens and to wherever I lay hidden. Her expression was unreadable. "I made choices," she said. "I thought I was protecting someone I loved. I am sorry. But I'm tired—so tired of people being crushed by luck."
A father near the front screamed, "You took my daughter."
Several in the crowd advanced, but the police lines held. That was the point of public punishment—allow the world to watch and yet maintain order.
Then the twist—the prosecutor revealed evidence that made the world inhale in one sharp, wet breath. A tape played, unedited, showing Helena laughing in the dorm that night, her shoulders shaking. She was laughing as the camera caught her hand press a bottle cap in a way that looked off—too careful. It wasn't proof of poisoning, the voice-over said, but it was the pivot: the incriminating ledger entries contained a name that linked Helena to an account used to buy pharmaceutical compounds. The funds were traced to an intermediary who had used rented spaces for "studies."
Helena's face went from lines to raw skin. Her jaw clenched.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell the cameras I had been with her when she held my hand, when she whispered words about an apartment we'd share—but the footage was merciless. The crowd's mood curdled into hatred.
"You're the one behind this," a woman shouted. "You set them up to die!"
Helena's reply was small. "I was given a knife and told to cut one throat. I couldn't bring myself to cut my own. I flipped the coin. I thought I'd spare two. I didn't want them to die in the dark. I wanted a chance."
The shouting grew. People called for the maximum sentence. A mother held a photo of a girl who would never graduate college. "She left homework half-complete," the mother said, voice broken. "She dreamed of a job. You took that."
Helena folded in on herself, and the police led her away to a specialized cell that could be seen only by permit. They read her the charges, and on the live screens the words "detained for trial" flashed.
Public punishment, in our age, is performed in two acts: legal humiliation and moral excoriation. Helena endured both. The crowd wanted tears and a public crucifixion; the law offered procedure. The viewership was global. Comments streamed like rain.
Her reaction changed over time. At first she was defiant. Then deflated. Then she tried denial and rage. Finally she begged—"Please," she said during the arraignment, "let me explain."
No bullet points would make up for the empty beds. No explanation could fully repay what was lost. The crowd's reaction varied: cameras clicked, people stomped, children cried from the backs of shoulders. Some held signs: "Justice," "Never Again," "Science Must Stop." Others, small and cruel, simply held their phones like mirrors and grinned.
When she was convicted of coercion and deemed complicit in manslaughter because her actions were proven to have set the pattern, the legal punishment began. Fines, imprisonment, and a public database naming her as a principal cast a net. But there was another, more human punishment:
They staged listening sessions in the square. Families were allowed to step to a microphone and speak what they had wanted to shout into the dark. A young man told how his sister had been a poet. A father read a letter from a girl who had wanted to become a teacher. Their words hammered like hammers. Helena sat in a clear box and listened. Her face, once carefully composed, slowly eroded into something that might have once been remorse.
After hours like this, the crowd's calls changed from blood to accountability. It was not enough, but it was a kind of unmasking. The public naming of her acts, the slow unspooling of how a person could rationalize murder—these things were a punishment that burned differently than the heady, immediate violence of that classroom. It was long, slow, and visible.
By the time the prosecutor finished his reading, the square was quiet. Helena's shoulders were thinner. She had lost something that day that couldn't be recovered: the easy pretense of benevolence.
I watched the livestream later, alone in a small rented room. Brody texted: "They saw her. They saw me." I answered with a single word: "Seen."
The public punishment did not bring back the dead. It did not remove the hairpin from my palm. But it did what the darkness feared most—it made the secret visible.
I learned two things from that day. One: exposure blunts some of the power of monsters. Two: the monster is patient. We still had more to learn—about who funded the tests, who sat behind the screens, and why the exams used eyes as keys.
Cooper visited me after the trial coverage slowed. "You did well," he said.
"I watched her die inside," I told him. "I watched the kindness crumble."
"It's not the end," he said. "We have a lead. There are more survivors. Some are hiding. Some were sacrificed. We think they use the exams to find people with—abilities."
"Abilities?" My left eye pulsed. "Like me?"
"Like you and Brody," he said. "And some of them might be in danger. It's not just about punishment. It's about preventing another exam."
I swallowed. "Is the world ready for this?"
"No." He smiled without warmth. "But we are the ones who will make it ready."
After the public punishment, the network that ran the exams retreated for a while. The cameras had consequences. But their resources were deep. The ledger had clients who would not accept exposure for long.
Cooper offered me a role on a team: witness, recruiter, hunter. It was a bitter privilege. I took it because I owed voices to the dead. I took it because the left eye that once made me a target might now help save someone.
At night I still dreamed of the classroom. The black pupils on my fingers. Helena's smile. The blue hairpin. But now when the dream came, there was a line of people behind me—Brody, a brave investigator named Cooper, families who had come to the plaza to speak.
The death exam had taught me a horrible syllogism: fear makes people choose fast, and choice can become a weapon. If you put a clock and a TV in the middle of a dorm, you will see human nature's bright, ragged edges.
And when the sun rose after the public punishment, I sat on my bedroom floor and placed the blue hairpin on the table. I turned it over. A tiny dent marred one edge—a mark like a small pupil. I kept it. It was proof that truth could be kept in a pocket, and evidence that even kindness could be made into a weapon.
"Eliza," Cooper said later on our first field call, "don't forget what the eye does."
"I won't," I said.
And when I closed my left eye, the world sometimes stopped for a second. I called it a glitch at first. Now I call it a tool.
We still had to find the rest of the rooms, the rest of the ledgers, the others who had survived with black pupils for keys. The fights would be long, and not all survivors would be saved. But when the night fell and the window panes darkened, I would remember the plaza, the public punishment, the faces of people who refused to let murder be a secret.
"One eye for truth," I whispered.
"One eye and a hairpin," Cooper replied.
I turned the hairpin over again and found a tiny inscription on the underside. It wasn't legible at first, but my left eye—my traitorous, gifted left eye—caught the ink in a sliver of light.
It read: KEEP WATCH.
The End
— Thank you for reading —