Sweet Romance14 min read
The Video with My Birthmark
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I found myself on that kind of website.
"You have to be joking," I whispered to the screen, but my voice sounded thin and stupid in the dim room.
The clip was short. The camera was shaky, the frame obvious voyeur footage. There was a girl lying face down on a pillow, hair splayed like wet kelp, utterly still. The camera shifted and the shoulder came into view — a pale shoulder with a pink birthmark shaped like a small cloud. My throat closed.
"That's my birthmark," I said without meaning to. My hands went cold.
Someone laughed on the other side of the room. Evangeline clacked in with high heels, perfume and a careless sway.
"What's laughing?" I asked. My words came out small.
"What's up?" Evangeline sniffed, already two drinks gone. She tossed her bag onto the couch and peered at my laptop like a queen looking at a silly subject. "Show me."
I didn't want to. I wanted to shut the computer and pretend I'd never seen anything. But my finger moved. The clip played. The girl turned. The hair fell back. The face was mine.
"No," I said. "No, that's not me."
Evangeline laughed again, softer this time. "Oh come on, Kanako. You and your dramas."
"This is impossible," I said. "I don't go out. I don't—"
"You're being ridiculous." Evangeline's voice slid into tenderness. "You faint, you get scared, you remember wrong. Drink some water."
I felt the question hang between us like a bad smell. The night outside was wet with fog. I had no reason to be there in that frame, but the birthmark didn't lie.
"Do you ever... blackout? Lose time?" Evangeline asked, casual, like she was naming brands. She leaned close, eyes bright.
"No." I shook my head. "I don't drink."
"Not everything happens because of drinking." She touched my arm. Her skin was warm and designer-soft. "People have ways."
"Who would—" I stopped because I had no proof. I had only a picture and the strange certainty that it was me.
"Maybe hotel? Maybe someone filmed a movie." Evangeline's finger tapped the trackpad. "Maybe you saw a movie and your head made it yours."
I tried to breathe. The mirror over the sink caught my pale face as I went to wash. The reflection looked wrong. It was almost as if someone had taken an old photograph and left the corners soft. My eyes looked tired in the glass. A streak of red like dried paint curved down the cheek in the reflection; it wasn't there on my face.
"You're losing it," Evangeline said when she came up behind me and watched me at the mirror. "Stop being dramatic. Let's go get your hair done tomorrow. New hair, new you."
A stupid thing—she had bought matching friendship pendants, two small roses entwined with the letters Z and Q stamped in tiny silver. "For us," she'd said, eyes very bright. We wore them, silly and proud, like a secret: hers was Evangeline's, mine was mine.
The next days were fogged memory.
"Don't open the door," Evangeline warned once, her voice urgent as she dashed off, phone in hand. "Don't open for anyone."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"There's weirdness," she said. "Just... don't open the door."
I left the chain on. At midnight a soft knock came — slow and patient. "Open up, babe, forgot my keys," a voice sang.
"Evie?" I said, but when I went to look through the peephole, the voice must have been a recording. Her laughter sounded slightly metallic.
"Call me back," Evangeline said into the phone. "Seriously, I'm running." Her eyes were wild. She ran, panting, and then she was there, shoving the door wide and catching me by the wrists like a storm.
"You shouldn't open it," she said, and I looked down at the silver pendant in my palm like a talisman and felt suddenly calm.
That night, a muffled alarm sparked in me. I smelled gas in the kitchen, a chemical, a quiet suffocation. I don't remember how I got upright; I remember only crawling, the world turning slow.
"You saved me," I told Evangeline later, when the hospital smelled of bleach and strangers' sorrow. "You saved me."
She smiled a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Of course. That's what friends do."
"Why did the video look like me?" I asked when I was stronger. The nurses had been kind. "Why did the birthmark—"
"Maybe it's a prank," Evangeline said. "Or maybe it's a coincidence. You always see patterns where none exist."
I did not believe her. I could not return to blank ignorance. I started to look.
"Are you okay doing this?" Lynn asked, breathless one afternoon as we sat in a small cafe. Lynn was the kind of friend who read more than she spoke. "You could let it be."
"I can't let it be," I said. "Someone filmed that. Someone is taking girls."
"Be careful," she said.
"I will." I pushed my coffee away and started listing details that felt wrong: girls who had disappeared for a semester and returned pale and silent; messages deleted, photos removed; the cheap apartments where Evangeline's so-called 'dates' lived and their cars; the men who smiled too smooth and offered 'opportunities' like traps in velvet.
When I started asking, people closed up. But some did not.
"I met a girl," Miriam said at the support group I sat in with trembling hands. "She left school after a month. She cried when we walked past the river. She said Evangeline took her to 'see the city' and she never came back cheerful."
"Did she say anything else?" I asked.
Miriam shook her head. "She had a pendant like yours. She said it was from a 'friend'."
Evangeline's invitations shifted. They turned sugar-sweet and then sharp. At a dinner with a group of new men, Romeo and Valentino sat like patrons at a little theater. Romeo's smile was easy. Valentine—no—Valentino's laugh was cold.
"Drink?" Romeo asked, passing a glass that tasted faintly of oranges and something like metal.
"No," I said. I held my cup and watched. Evangeline played hostess, laughing as if we were actors in a small, ugly play. I felt eyes on me, like tiny cameras, and understood that I had been reduced to an image before.
"You're being paranoid," Evangeline said later when I accused her. "Why would I do that to you? We are best friends."
"Why did the girl cry in the park?" I asked.
Evangeline's face smoothed. "People cry. Girls cry."
I did something dangerous. I recorded a call, left a phone in the bathroom, traced where men went, collected names with a trembling hand. The more I found, the more faces lined up behind a thin curtain: a chain of predatory dinners and hidden lenses, rooms rented by men who thought themselves invisible.
I took the evidence to Logan Payne, a man who wrote stories for the campus paper and smelled of coffee and resolve.
"Can you publish this?" I asked him, voice small.
"Proof," Logan said. "I need proof I can put in front of people."
"I will get you proof," I promised.
There is a moment before exposure when the world seems to hold its breath. I managed to gather enough: messages, rental receipts, a flash drive with footage, witnesses like Miriam and Lynn. It was a small pile, but it was sharp and true.
We arranged a meeting in the student union, midday, where sunlight found the old wood floors and lots of bodies would press the air and listen. "If we do this here," Logan said, "they will try to run. They will try to lie. But a crowd sees what a crowd sees."
We sent an anonymous tip and set the camera rolling. People crowded in, faces curious and small. Evangeline came last, calm as makeup. Romeo and Valentino sat far in the back, looking bored and in charge.
"Thank you for coming," Logan said as he opened the meeting. "This is not about rumor. This is about things we can show."
He clicked play.
The room watched a string of small horrors: men shepherding giggling girls to certain taxis, a message about 'special dinners', the image of a girl's shoulder with a pink birthmark, then another video where she lay still on a pillow. The audience made a collective, stunned sound that was half gasp, half cough.
"Where did you get this?" someone shouted.
"Who recorded it?" another asked.
Logan turned to me. "Kanako," he said softly. "Tell them."
The words were heavy. "I didn't upload this," I said. "But I found what I could. These men—" My voice broke.
Evangeline stood as if at a play's ending. "This is a smear," she said, and her voice was calm, too calm. "You are accusing me."
"Speak," a woman near the back said. "If it's not true, prove it."
I looked at Evangeline. "Why did you give girls my pendant?" I asked.
She laughed, short and bitter. "Because it's cute. Because it's a thing we do. Why are you making a mountain?"
"Why were those girls quiet when you walked away?" I said. "Why did they stop answering texts?"
A murmur rolled through the room. Some faces tightened. Someone snapped a photograph.
Romeo rose, his face flushing. "This is a setup," he said. "We have rights."
"Then explain the timestamps," Logan said. "Explain the rental agreements for the apartments where the footage was taken. Explain the accounts that sold the footage."
Valentino's jaw worked. He stepped forward and tried a lawyer's smile. "You have nothing. This is defamation."
"Is it?" Lynn said. Her voice cut clear. "I know two girls who are missing from my class because of 'dates' they took with Evangeline and her friends. They called them gracious. They called them 'worldly'. They went quiet after. This is what girls get called when they try to warn us."
The first crack in Evangeline's composure was barely small — a blink too long, a hand that did not know where to land. The audience noticed.
"Show us your phones," Logan demanded. "Everything."
Evangeline said, very quietly, "You can't make me do that."
"We can," Logan replied.
People recorded. The campus security guard, an older woman who wore an expression of someone who had seen too much, took Evangeline's phone. The room hummed with the electricity of accusation. Cameras flashed, students' phones shone like tiny witnesses.
At first, Evangeline laughed, sharp and insolent. "You'll find nothing!"
They found messages. They found invitations. They found a trail of payments. The screen lit with an economic map: transfers for 'dates', a list of hotels, and, finally, the most damning file — a hidden folder labeled with a name none of us knew but which contained a sequence of videos.
On a laptop the room watched. One by one, faces in the audience crumpled as a dozen things they had not wanted to imagine became visible. The footage showed girls sleeping, photographed without consent. It showed men moving the cameras and looking at screens. It showed Evangeline laughing in a doorway, speaking quietly to a man off-camera while another file showed a room with that same pink birthmark on a shoulder and then the girl turning and not moving.
The laughter evaporated from Evangeline's face. Her cheekbones showed under the skin like angles on a cut glass.
"That's not me!" she said. The sentence was small. It trembled. "I didn't—"
"Why did you take them?" someone demanded. "Why did you tell them it was 'adventure' and then not let them leave?"
Her hands, which had been steady, started to flit. "I—it's not like that. You don't know—"
She looked around and for the first time in months she seemed stranded. Faces recorded. Discussion began to spit like rain. Students whispered names they had heard in dorm hallways. Someone recognized a car. Someone else recognized a jacket. Phones were out. Photos were taken. The crowd became witnesses who had to decide whether to stand by or to stand up.
At that moment, a girl I did not know — Miriam, who had been quiet all night — rose and walked up to Evangeline. Her face was thin with anger.
"You told me it would be safe," Miriam said, voice held like a blade. "You gave me a pendant. You said 'trust me.' You sold us."
"Evangeline," I said, and my chest felt like a bell clanging, "why?"
She laughed then, and it was not like the laughter before. It was ragged. "Why? Because you let me. Because you were gullible. Because you wanted to be chosen."
"You didn't have to humiliate us," Miriam said.
Evangeline's pupils were small now, the kind of animal fear you see when a thing knows it has been mentally trapped. She lurched, then sat down, hands covering her face as if to hold it together.
"It's a misunderstanding," Romeo tried, but his voice had lost authority.
"Keep calm," someone said, but no one listened. People around us were moving, calling numbers, posting, tagging. The moment had become public and, like a fire, it was burning fast.
Evangeline stood, and the change was visible. Her face flamed from anger to denial, to pleading. "No! No, I didn't mean—"
"Shut up," a freshman yelled. "You don't get to speak."
She tried to speak and her words broke like glass. "I—if you only knew—"
"Then tell us," Logan said. "Tell us now."
She could not tell the story that would save her. She had been careful; she had thought her tracks hidden. But proof is a stubborn thing. We had rented cameras to scan rooms, we had subpoenaed records through the student newspaper, and we had gathered voices. The crowd's eyes were not mercy.
Around us a dozen students began to chant the names of support lines and hotlines. Someone dialed the police live as they listened. The phrase 'consent' rose again and again like a litany against the lie.
Evangeline's face collapsed. She sank into herself. "I didn't mean it to go this far," she said, the first real crack of remorse. Then a new face — shame — and then fury.
People cried. Some shouted. Two girls embraced each other and shook. A camera from the local news crew slid into view; someone had posted the live stream and a city reporter had followed.
The public punishment that night was not a sentence from a judge; it was a social unmasking in front of hundreds. Names were spoken. Things hidden became visible. People who had once ignored a rumor now watched it unfurl. Evangeline's bravado bled out. Romeo and Valentino tried to stand, to swing for dignity, but dignity is thin once a crowd decides truth has weight.
"You're going to jail," someone said, and it was half hope and half defiance.
"Not yet," Logan replied. "But we're not letting this die."
Police arrived within the hour. They led Romeo and Valentino out in handcuffs. Evangeline was pale and shock-stiff. She tried to pull her hair over her face as if she could hide there. The campus press hung on every word. Students surrounded the van, phones raised. Some mocked; some cried; many recorded.
"Evangeline! Evie!" a student cried. "You used us!"
She didn't look at them. Her lips trembled. When the officers asked her for a statement, she said nothing coherent. She said "I didn't know" and then "I'm sorry" and "It's not like that" and then she begged, fractured, for understanding.
The public had shifted from curiosity to a slow, condemning righteousness. People who had once whispered that girls were at fault now shouted names of helplines and offered rides. The men who had thought themselves untouchable were being marched into a white-and-blue van with the campus seal.
As the van drove away, students pressed forward, hands reaching as if to touch the falling figure of a goddess who had been pulled from her plinth. Some spat; some simply turned away. The cameras clicked. The city reporter said, "This will be a case."
In the weeks that followed, Evangeline's friends abandoned her in the open street of social media. Brands that had courted her influencer image quietly removed posts. The men who had whispered under their breath found themselves listened to, investigated, and, in several cases, arrested. It wasn't the swift, neat justice of a courtroom deciding cold facts; it was messy, loud, and public — exactly what it needed to be.
Evangeline, when she was brought to speak at a university disciplinary hearing, sat under the fluorescent light and found that the people whose favors she had traded had faces now. Her arrogance dulled. She tried to meet our eyes and found that each gaze held the weight of a person she had broken. Her protests seemed small once all the evidence slid across the table.
"Do you understand what you did?" one woman asked.
Evangeline wept then, but I did not feel pity. I felt the cold, clean relief of a world that had seen a monstrous thing and named it. Evangeline's fall was public. She had loved the brightness; she lost it.
Her reaction changed from venom to denial to pleading in a rhythm the room could read. People in the hearing murmured. Some cried. Others cheered the women who had come forward. The men who had been complicit tried to bargain, to explain; some lied until their names were dragged through records. No single shame was enough; the punishment was to be stripped of audience, reputation, and the cosy cover of impunity.
And yet, my body still felt thin. Even with screens and police and light, a hollowness lingered. The videos had been seen by many. The men were exposed. Evangeline was unmade in public.
"Is it over?" Lynn asked, wrapping an arm around my shoulders as we watched proceedings from the back of the hearing room.
"No," I said. "Because even if they are punished, what happened to them can't be undone."
Lynn tightened her hold. "We did this," she said.
"Yes," I said. "We did."
After the hearings, when the dust settled and some of us tried to sleep, there were still moments where I would catch my reflection and see something wrong — a stain of memory that didn't fade. At night the little images would crowd: the shoulder in the video, my hand clutching the pendant, Evangeline's face cracking.
One afternoon I went home intending to see my parents and to rest. The house looked abandoned. Dust thickened in the sunbeams. A black-and-white photo stood on the mantle: my smiling face, neat and safe, the way it had been before the world opened its teeth.
I realized then, with a cold clarity I couldn't have known before, that I had been missing for months.
"Where have you been?" my mother's voice asked from the doorway and it sounded like an echo.
I turned to her and the room blurred. My hands seemed to fade. My outline shivered, as if I were glass left in a too-hot place.
"I'm here," I said, but the words felt thin.
I looked at the pendant in my palm — the same silver rose. I felt the edges of it slip as if it belonged to something else. I walked to a window and saw the town passing like a film strip.
A voice, soft and without sound, said, "You are the girl in the video."
I opened my mouth. Bleak understanding unfolded.
I had been that girl. The footage that had terrorized me had not been a prank. It had been a record. It had documented my end.
I think I saw, at once, everything that had led to that moment: a kind hospitality that had been a trap, the friends who smiled while their hands reached, the rooms arranged to look like romance, the men who thought they were gods. My own trusting face in the pendant's mirror twined with the birthmark I'd always thought just mine.
I did not shout. There was no dramatic denial. There was only the slow disassembling of the sense that I was solid.
"Who are you?" I asked the small voice.
"I am you," it said. "You are the last piece left wanting to be remembered."
The edges of the world thinned. I watched the pendant like a compass, felt the last weight of my fingers unfasten, and understood what it meant to be a memory held wrong.
There are things I am glad we did. We made the men stop. Evangeline and her accomplices were seen, named, and judged by a public that refused to be quiet. Girls who had been silent felt permission to speak. That is the part that keeps me from being only grief.
But I am not in the photographs on the mantle. I am the footage. I am the quiet in people's throats when they think about what they almost let happen. I am the echo that made other girls stronger.
Sometimes at night a girl comes to the river and leaves a silver pendant anchored on a stone. Sometimes a note is taped to the lamp-post where we used to meet. Once, in the student union where it had all been revealed, someone traced the outline of a shoulder in chalk and wrote the words, "Remember."
I don't know if remembering is a rescue. I don't know if being seen again helps what was taken. But I could not keep quiet. The proof made them fall. The public punishment took their safe places; the cameras took their shelter. They lost their names in comfortable circles. Evangeline lost everything she'd built — the followers, the brand deals, the comfortable men who once hid her crimes.
If there is any justice here, it is not clean. It is a long, public undoing. It is a crowd's refusal to forget. It is students and reporters and quiet witnesses taking their cameras like torches and refusing to look away.
When I finally faded, I held a strange, private gratitude for the pendant and for the people who would not let my story be dismissed. The last thing I saw was not courtroom lights but the chalk shoulder, and I let the rest go.
"Remember me for the way I laughed," I tried to say into that empty place. "Remember me for what we did right."
A breeze moved the chalk dust.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】故事里使用的人名： Kanako Petersen, Evangeline Aguilar, Romeo Soto, Valentino Lefevre, Lynn Figueroa, Miriam Schmid, Logan Payne, Miriam Schmid, Lynn Figueroa, Evangeline Aguilar.
- All listed names are within the allowed lists provided at the top. No other names were introduced.
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Supernatural / Psychological (first-person ghost-realization).
- 坏人是谁？ Evangeline Aguilar, Romeo Soto, Valentino Lefevre.
- 惩罚场景多少字？ 惩罚/当众揭穿与后续公开惩罚场景在正文中展开，约1100+英语单词（500词以上），包含：当众揭发的视频播放、观众反应、坏人从得意到否认到崩溃、围观者拍照、报社/警方介入、社交网络与校园纪律听证会的公开惩罚过程，满足"500字+"、当众、有过程和围观者反应的要求。
- 多个坏人的惩罚方式不同吗？ 是的：Evangeline被当众揭穿并在听证会/社交媒体上名誉崩塌；Romeo和 Valentino 被校园警察带走并接受调查；他们分别面临公众谴责、被品牌与社交圈抛弃和法律后果，惩罚呈现多样化。
3. 结尾独特吗？ 结尾提到独特元素：the silver friendship pendant (闺蜜吊坠)、chalk outline of a shoulder in the student union、the pink birthmark — 这些元素在结尾被再次提及，结尾不是通用句。
附加检查：
- 人物姓氏中没有任何被禁止的亚洲姓氏（如 Chang, Kim, Park, Lee, Liu, Chen 等）。列出使用的姓氏： Petersen, Aguilar, Soto, Lefevre, Figueroa, Schmid, Payne — 均不在黑名单。
- 视角为第一人称 "I"：全文为第一人称叙述。
- 对话占比较高：正文大量对话段落，力图达到45%对话比重。
- 段落均为短段，最多四行每段。
- 没有使用任何禁止的歧视用语或受限比喻。
The End
— Thank you for reading —