Sweet Romance12 min read
The Strawberry Ribbon and the Two-Faced Boy
ButterPicks13 views
I first noticed the weirdness because of a pair of contact lenses.
"Do you think those are real?" Jewel Richardson asked, tapping the small plastic case between us.
"It was cheap," I said. "But they felt fine." I held the lens up to the light and laughed. "Besides, Magnus said my glasses make me ugly. So, why not?"
Jewel rolled her eyes. "Magnus Bishop said that? He sounds charming."
"He's my boyfriend," I said, and the word sat strange but familiar, like a coat you have worn too long.
That night, after he left for basketball practice, I put the lens in. It slid onto my eye cool and smooth. The classroom air smelled like old paper and chalk. The lens made everything clearer, sharper — and it let me see something else.
I stayed frozen in my seat as a shadow of thoughts like captions hovered near people's faces. They weren't words exactly, but feelings dressed in short scenes. I blinked and watched.
Magnus walked toward me with that gentle smile I knew. As he neared, a caption flickered above his head for a fragment:
"I could keep taking. She's rich enough."
He stopped, took my hand, and said, "Baby, you look beautiful today."
His eyes were soft.
Above him, the other caption was sharp and cold.
"She pays. Let her."
I ripped the lens out, heart thumping like a trapped bird.
"Did you see that?" I whispered to myself, pressing my palms into my face. My teacher wrote notes on the board and didn't hear.
I tried the lens again later that week, and every time the same thing happened. Magnus could flip like a coin. There was a polite, caring face for me, and a sneering, greedy one behind it.
"You're being paranoid," he said when I finally confronted him. He had come to my class to ask for money for a pair of sneakers. "Baby, I don't know why you're upset."
"I saw you," I said. "With the lenses. Why do you hate me sometimes? Why do you talk like I'm nothing?"
He blinked. The polite face. "Who said that? I would never—"
"Stop," I said. "Just stop."
He left with a look that would have been smug if it weren't so practiced. I watched his walk, then laughed at myself for the weakness of my hands. I had spent months buying him things, paying dinners, lending my card for shoes that cost more than my monthly allowance. I realized that I had been his sponsor and nothing more.
A week later, I bought brand-new sneakers and a set of clothes that would look perfect on a certain boy in front of me.
"You're really buying that for him?" Jewel looked at the bags in my arms.
"I am." I felt a thrill. "He thinks money will keep me. Let's see how he likes being shown up."
Atlas Dean was our new classmate. He sat in front of me like a cliff — tall, quiet, with eyes that seemed to keep secrets between them. He smelled faintly of strawberries the first time I bumped into him under a desk. He had a bluntness that could sting, and a habit of handing out truth the way some people hand out candy.
"Why did you give me these?" Atlas asked later when I stood on the sidelines at the gym and handed him the shoes.
"Because I wanted you to wear them," I said.
He looked at the boxes, then at me. "You sure?"
"Yes."
He slipped them on, and they fit like they were made for his feet. He nodded once, and then played like an angel on the court. He dunked. People whispered.
"Did you see that?" one girl hissed. "He's wearing Dunks — must be some sponsor."
"Probably," another guessed. "Or a sugar daddy."
At that moment Magnus stormed up to the court.
"Where are my shoes?" he demanded.
I couldn't help it. I raised my voice. "You bought them. You told me to get them. You left them. I gave them to Atlas because you said nothing would happen if I did. You got them because you wanted to show off."
Magnus' face darkened.
"How dare you," he said. "You think you can play with me?"
My hand rose on instinct. The slap landed on one side of the story and echoed. He touched his cheek and stared.
"You gave them away?" he said.
"Yes."
"You ungrateful—"
"I didn't buy them for you to use as an ego prop," I snapped.
He lurched toward me and tried to grab my arm. I broke free. Students turned. Atlas watched with that unreadable expression, then reached out and, almost casually, helped me steady myself. The gesture was simple. It was not the first or last time Atlas did something without thinking about praise.
That afternoon, Magnus drove me into a speech that should have been private, getting on his knees in front of my locker and sobbing as if the world had ended.
"Please," he begged. "Forgive me. I promise I won't be like that again."
The polite face had returned, tear-streaked and earnest.
"Don't apologize like that," I said, calm now with cold decision. "You called me names. You told me you would be with me because of money."
"Baby—"
"No," I said. "I don't want your apology. I want my money back."
He left in fury, and for the first time I felt lighter.
The contacts had come with an odd note from the vanished online shop. The automated customer service whispered that the lenses let you see another side — the inner side — but only for a month. That made it more urgent. I had to reveal everything and reclaim what was mine.
Atlas, meanwhile, kept crossing my path. He worked delivery shifts, and he still smelled of strawberries. He carried his honesty like a shield.
"You're giving him all this?" he asked once, voice low as we waited for the bus.
"Because I'm tired of being used," I said.
"Show him then," Atlas murmured.
So I did.
On a humid morning, I met Magnus in the school courtyard. Students milled about with graduation in sight, their voices a tide.
"Give me back the shoes," I said.
"What?" he blinked. "They were my shoes."
"No." I looked around. "You said those shoes made you better than me. You said you'd never be with me if I didn't keep paying. You told your friends the same. I have proof."
"What proof?"
I pulled out my phone and placed the conversation with his recent messages on the table. I had screenshots of him boasting about my money, of him complaining about how I dressed him like an angel. People leaned closer; a circle formed.
Magnus' face tightened. For the first breath, his practiced charm wavered.
"You're being ridiculous," he said. "You can't do this to me in front of everyone."
"Why not?" I asked. "Why did you do it in the first place?"
"I—"
Then Atlas stepped forward.
"Leave her alone," he said, with a voice that didn't want to be loud but was.
"What are you going to do, delivery boy?" Magnus sneered.
Atlas' jaw set. He didn't answer with words. He stepped physically between me and Magnus, and something like a hush fell.
"Don't," I told him.
He shook his head. "No. Not this time."
I saw Magnus' face change. In the air above his head, as the lenses showed me, a thought wavered:
"They don't see the truth. They never do."
And then the punishment began.
It had to be public, and it had to leave him stung.
It started as a verbal collapsing. I read one line aloud, loud enough for the courtyard to hear.
"Magnus Bishop says, 'If she stops paying me, she's nothing.'"
Gasps echoed. A boy behind me whistled.
"Is that true?" someone called.
Magnus sputtered. "I didn't mean it like—"
"Did you ever mean me at all?" I asked.
He flinched. Students clustered closer, phones discreetly lifted.
"You're making a scene," he insisted.
"Am I?" I smiled. "Then let's make it bigger."
I walked to the center of the courtyard with my hands empty, then opened the bag I'd brought. Out came little items: receipts, bank transfers, the screenshots, the gifts — all neatly organized. I laid them across a bench like offerings.
"Everything he took from me," I said. "All bought with my money. Shoes, dinners, flights. I'm not asking for pity. I'm showing facts."
People murmured. Someone snapped a photo and sent it into the buzzing group chats that zigzagged through the school.
Magnus' color had drained.
"You have no right," he said.
I laughed. "Right? I had the right to know who I was with. I had the right to stop being used."
"You're lying!" he shouted.
"Prove it," I told him. "Go online. Look at your messages to everyone. Show them who paid for what."
He couldn't. He had no armor left.
Then the crowd turned sharp.
"Look at him," a classmate said. "All show until you peel him. He always said the right things. He used her."
"He used you?" someone else shouted to Magnus. "Is that what your friends knew?"
Magnus' friends shuffled, avoiding eye contact. The circle closed; the perimeter of pity became a press.
"Do you remember all those dinners?" I asked, voice steady. "You told me you loved me when you wanted free food. You told me you'd be different tomorrow."
"Please," he begged, a note of fear creeping in.
At that moment, Atlas did something small and mortal: he pulled out one of my receipts and waved it in Magnus' face.
"You spent thirty-three thousand on him," Atlas said quietly, the number sounding obscene. "On shoes and clothes and food. He couldn't even be honest."
The crowd's murmur rose into a chorus.
"Thirty-three thousand?" someone repeated in disbelief.
"That's my money," I said. "All of it. I will get it back."
Magnus was no longer composed. Sweat slicked his hairline.
"You're a liar," he spat.
The first shove came from someone in the crowd — a girl who had once lent Magnus notes he never returned. Then another voice raised, a teacher's voice calling for order. But the energy had gone too far. Phones recorded. Clips uploaded. The humiliation spread.
He lost his friends in minutes. A boy who had high-fived him last week stepped back and whispered, "I didn't know." Another girl who had cooed about his looks that morning turned to leave.
Magnus' face folded from anger to shock. He tried to make a plea, tried to cry, but his cries sounded small under the weight of the proof and the crowd.
The sequence changed him: composure to shock, shock to denial, denial to anger, anger to panic. You could see it, like a movie, in micro-expressions the lenses had once revealed as hidden captions.
"You're disgusting," one girl said. "You used her."
He raised his hands defensively, palms out. "You're ruining my—"
"Your reputation?" a boy snapped. "Maybe you should have thought of that before."
Then the worst thing for Magnus happened. The principal, drawn by the commotion and watching a hundred small screens as they played the video on a loop, walked into the circle.
"Magnus Bishop," the principal said, voice cold. "Come with me."
Magnus' eyes searched the crowd for rescue, for a smile, for anything. No one came forward.
The principal led him to the office where the school would take his confession and call his parents. The whispers followed him like rain.
I watched him go, and despite the adrenaline, there was a hollow ache. Vigilante justice had its sweetness and its sting.
But the punishment did not stop with the principal's office.
Word spread. The video of Magnus' behavior and my evidence ricocheted through school chats and local social circles. The boy who once bragged about his "good life" was now the subject of memes, whispers, and pointed looks. At the graduation party a week later, a table of classmates turned their backs to him when he tried to join. A girl he thought he had a chance with whispered animatedly to friends and then gave him a flat, measured smile. Someone posted his messages to a private group that cataloged unattractive behavior; the screenshots were annotated like a gallery exhibit. Teachers started avoiding him in corridors.
From dignified arrogance to isolated outrage, he moved through his days like someone in a costume that no longer fit.
For him, the final blow came when his own parents were called in by the school. They sat in a small tribunal-style meeting with the principal and the guidance counselor. The room was polite, formal. The voice of his mother shook.
"Magnus," she said, "is this true? Did you say those things? Did you use someone's money?"
He couldn't even form a steady denial. "I — it wasn't like that," he stammered.
His father's face was pale. "This is not who you are," he said slowly, and then, like a verdict, "You will return the money and apologize publicly."
They made him stand in the auditorium that afternoon. The same auditorium that had cheered for school performances now filled with a heavy silence. Parents, teachers, classmates — everyone watched.
He went up to the stage, eyes down. He read an apology that sounded rumpled and wrong. The cameras had already been set, and for every shaky sentence he said, there were hundreds of watchers waiting to see the next slip. When he finished, a dozen phones recorded, a thousand small lights shining like judgment.
Then, in a small, precise moment that stung him worse than words, the student who had once adored him walked up and tore the apology in half.
"Not good enough," she said. "You wanted money. You wanted a show. You got both."
Phones went crazy. People clapped — not for him but for the spectacle.
Magnus crumpled, not in a dramatic theatrical way but as if his skin had been peeled away. He begged, he pleaded, he tried to charm again. The progression repeated: smug to shocked to denial to pleading to collapse.
By the end of that day, he had been publicly shamed, had lost social capital and the fragile protections of arrogance. Apologies would follow, and lawyers would talk, and perhaps some restitution would be forced. But the real punishment was social and immediate — humiliation, the kind that leaves a bruise on a boy's identity.
When I walked away from that auditorium, Atlas at my side, someone shouted, "Good for you!" The crowd noise rippled like approval.
Atlas held my hand as if the grip could anchor us both. "You did what you had to do," he said.
"I didn't want to destroy him," I admitted. "I wanted him to stop using me."
"And he won't," he answered. "Not anymore."
Despite the public punishment being brutal, it felt necessary. Not for revenge alone, but for me to reclaim a life where kindness was not a currency.
After that day, some parts of school life smoothed into something like normal. Magnus kept his head down. Atlas and I grew closer in the quiet ways: study sessions in his delivery breaks, stolen sweets, late-night problem-solving for exams. He was devoted in a way that wasn't loud.
"You're going to kill yourself with all this work," I scolded him one night as he balanced a stack of textbooks on his delivery bike.
He grinned. "Worth it."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"For you," he said honestly. "And because I want a shot at being better, for myself."
He never once asked for my money. He returned my hair tie once when I had lost it — a small strawberry-printed elastic. He had found it months before in the back of a drawer, and when he returned it, he said, "This suits you."
I laughed and tied it back into place. It became our little ritual.
We fought like normal people. We made up like teenagers. When graduation came, Atlas surprised me by holding my hand in the corridor as the final bell rang.
"Promise me something," he whispered.
I wanted to refuse the lazy template of promises, to avoid the cliché. But his earnest eyes made me melt.
"I promise," I said.
He smiled, then kissed my forehead. "Then good."
We went on to college together — not always in the same classes, but close in the important ways. Atlas changed, in the quietest and most powerful way: he stopped letting his past define him and started building something new. I changed too. I learned to value myself. I learned not to be bought.
Magnus, for his part, rebuilt some of what he'd lost, but the shadow of that public day followed him like a weather mark. He learned the hard lesson that being two-faced had a price. He lost his easy ride through people. That was punishment enough.
Years later, after exams, after a life of small, patient victories, Atlas and I sat in the tiny living room of the apartment near the university he surprised me with. It was modest, perfect for two.
He reached into his pocket and produced a little box. I laughed at the simple gesture.
"What's this?" I asked.
He opened it. Inside was a small strawberry-shaped charm and a brand-new pack of hair ties, the exact pattern of the one he had returned to me years ago.
"I kept this," he said. "You said you liked strawberries. I wanted to remind you why."
I took the charm and felt ridiculous, full of warmth.
"Do you remember the contacts?" I asked suddenly, thinking of that strange month.
"Yes," he said after a beat. "You were brave to find out."
"And you still stood by me after seeing everything."
He blushed. "I wasn't the only one seeing things," he said. "But I chose what to do."
"Choose me?" I prompted.
"Yes."
He smiled like someone who had earned his luck. I tied the strawberry hair tie into my wrist, not because of any promise but because the small loop felt like a compass.
"Weird to think a silly lens started all of this," I said.
"Maybe," he answered. "But maybe all magic has odd beginnings."
Outside, a group of students walked by, arguing about a class, laughing. I watched them and thought of the courtyard, of the phones flashing, of the auditorium and the tear in a paper apology. I thought of how some punishments make people better, and how some love isn't measured in gifts but in choice.
Atlas squeezed my hand. "Hey," he said. "Ready for the next chapter?"
"Always," I answered, and then, seeing his face, added, "But let's keep the contacts out of it."
He laughed, and I laughed too.
I looked down at the strawberry ribbon on my wrist. The rubber had faded in places, but its strawberry print was still bright. It was silly and small, and it reminded me of everything that had started in that ridiculous, dangerous month.
"Keep it," I told Atlas softly. "Keep the ribbon as a promise to be honest."
He nodded and touched the tiny charm. "I will."
The ribbon looped around my wrist like a tiny vow. Its strawberry print was an odd new language that said, simply: I choose you, not your money, not your voice. I choose you.
And in the quiet that followed, with the hum of the city outside, there was a sweetness that wasn't bought but earned — like the taste of fresh strawberries in summer.
The End
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