Face-Slapping11 min read
"You Can't Buy Me Off" — A Girl, A Tutor, and One Very Public Reckoning
ButterPicks11 views
"Open the door," I said, and the lock clicked.
"You're up early," Fox said through the gap.
I let the door open. He stood there with two heavy suitcases and a quiet face. "I'm your tutor," he said. "Fox Gerard."
"I already said I don't need a tutor," I said. I kept my voice flat. I keep my voice flat most of the time.
He smiled, and the smile was small and honest. "You might not need lessons. But you might need someone who checks the boiler and makes sure you eat."
"You can leave the food on the table," I said. "Or don't. It's the same to me."
He lifted one suitcase like it was light. "I cooked last night. I fixed the heater. You can decide which of those things is more useful."
I watched him carry the things inside. He moved like someone who was used to being careful. The house smelled faintly of oil and garlic. I did not move to stop him.
"Who sent you?" I asked later, when he had made tea and put a blanket on my knees.
"My employer signed a contract," he said. "They paid me. I came to work."
"Then you work for money first."
"For now," he said. "But I make friends in the second week."
I laughed briefly. "You think you'll be my friend in a week?"
"Maybe sooner," he said. "Maybe never. But I will stay until they tell me otherwise."
"Then you are a body in my house," I said softly.
"Then I will be a useful body."
He left a spoon on the table and sat across from me like he belonged there. That was the start.
After the exams and the move, people in town had reasons to gossip. They said I was taken by a city school, that a private university bought my papers, that my family had finally sold me. I let them say it. People like stories more than truth. My real life was quieter: a small rented room, a mother who disappeared into casinos, a father who answered only when his money did not buy silence, and me — I who learned math in empty rooms and read books like they were water.
Fox stayed. He learned the small things about my house: where the spare blankets were, that I liked my tea bitter, that I would not take a hand unless I trusted it. He also learned the harder parts: the nightmares I did not speak, the waking hours that felt like cold rooms. He did not call me brave or fragile. He just did things. He smiled less than he cooked. He stirred the soup and told stories in short sentences.
"Do you ever get angry?" he asked one afternoon, watching me fold clothes.
"I get precise," I said. "Anger is messy."
"Good," he said. "Precision helps."
We built small routines. He knocked before he entered my room. He bought plain bread and put it in a jar by the stove. He read aloud sometimes, because he noticed I read faster but understood less when I read alone. He poked me in the ribs until I laughed, and for some reason I let him.
School was a different life. I kept my head down most days, buried in formulas and silent answers. The other students whispered and watched. Some of them were kind, some hungry for rumors. Beth Smirnov started sharp. She had a way of turning the room toward her like a lamp. She had friends who laughed at her jokes before she finished. She wore brand names like armor and used other people like stepping stones. She saw me as a new thing to break.
"Who is she?" Beth asked in a voice loud enough so the group around her could widen their eyes.
"New transfer," a girl whispered. "Top of the city tests."
"She looks like a list of rules," Beth said, and everyone laughed.
I did not answer. I do not trade words for sport.
Beth's small wars began as stares and cold jokes. She tried to shame me at the auction one night — but I bid in silence and let her spend her family's money until she owned an ugly prize. She cried later when they asked her to pay. She used pity as a weapon. When that failed, she used sneers.
Fox watched it all with a quiet face. He always stood close enough to notice who stepped on me.
"Don't give her a stage," Fox said softly one night.
"I don't want a stage." I swallowed.
"People will give you stages. If you don't pull down the curtains, they'll use them to hang you," he said.
He was right. People liked stages.
Then came the paint on the door.
"Who did this?" I asked when I found my front door thrown with red paint and smashed eggs.
The building manager shrugged and pointed to the broken camera. "The footage failed last night," he said. "We will clean it."
"Or we will not," Fox said. He called friends, a few quiet men who knew cameras and numbers. He took the broken seals and found a missing clip, then he traced the route. I knew he moved like a magnet — he found metal where others felt only air.
When the semester moved forward, so did the small cruelty. Beth found a way to make people pity her and to use them. She paid the guard at the gala and offered favors to some boys so they would look the other way. She had people who would throw stones and then run. She thought hidden hands kept her safe.
She was wrong.
The school asked me to accept an award. The principal stood on a stage and read my name like a headline. After all the rumors, the city press had a small table. The gala was full of people who liked the lights of other people's lives. Beth arrived in fake calm, a sunless smile, as if the world owed her applause. Her friends were loud and ready — they had been practicing outrage for weeks.
I did nothing the whole night. I watched. Fox stayed by my side. He put his hand on my shoulder once, a light pressure, and that was all the promise I needed.
Then, at the end of the evening, the auction stage was set for a small charity. They had a large screen for videos. The auctioneer walked the stage and called numbers. People clapped and pretended they were not counting.
"One last lot," the director said. "A gift from the school's benefactors."
The lights dimmed. The screen blinked to life.
"What is that?" Beth whispered. Her voice went high.
On the screen, the camera showed a car at the school gate. The clip was real; it had a time stamp. Next, the footage showed a man lifting an arm and throwing eggs. Then it cut to another shot — Beth's face in a parking lot, handing an envelope to a guard. The audio track was clean: a recorded call where Beth's voice said, "Make sure she can't come tonight. Do it quietly."
There was a single held breath in the room.
"That's not mine," Beth said quickly, voice thin. "They hacked—"
"Play the second tape," said Fox, voice low.
The video did. It showed an earlier clip: Beth texting the guard, laughing while counting small bills. It showed the guard rubbing paint on a door. It showed people walking with Beth's driver. It showed a phone video of Beth saying, "She doesn't belong here. Make it clear."
"No—" Beth's words cracked. "This is fake. Photoshop. I didn't—"
"That's your number," Fox said. "We have your messages. That phone call was made from your line. Your bank records show the transfers."
Someone in the crowd hissed. Phones lifted automatically. People began to record.
"She paid to humiliate me," Beth shouted at the screen. "You can't show that. You can't—"
The screen switched. Now it showed receipts. Now it showed close-ups of the guard, and then a synced clip of Beth in the CCTV of a fast-food place, handing cash to someone in a black jacket. Little proof after little proof clicked like dominoes. The room turned into a courtroom without a judge.
"Why are you doing this?" Beth wailed. "You have no right!"
"You bought a guard to attack a girl," said the director of the gala, voice like frosting turning hard. "We will not have this at our event."
A hundred phones shone like stars. A reporter left his seat and moved forward, microphone in hand.
"Ms. Smirnov," he said. "Are you willing to explain these messages and payments?"
Beth's smile had drained. She pressed her palms to her temples like that would hold her together. Her friends shifted back like fish.
"This is a smear," Beth said. "Someone's emotional, someone—"
"Someone put paint on a child's door," Fox said. "Someone sent eggs into her life. Who speaks like that about another person in a quiet town?"
Beth's eyes found me. She held my gaze like she wanted to sink into it and drown me. She lifted her chin. "You think you are some holy thing?" she spat. "I only did what had to be done so people like you stop taking up space. You're a fraud. You're a show."
"A show you funded," Fox said.
They flashed more clips. A voice mail where Beth laughed and said, "Don't worry, I took care of it." A video of Beth's friend boasting about the paint. A receipt for the guard's money. Another clip of Beth ordering a private list of lies on a call.
"Who sent these?" Beth demanded, throat raw.
"People who could not stand to watch you try to buy other people's shame," Fox said. "We recorded them. We kept everything."
"Shut it down!" Beth sobbed. She ran toward the table where the director sat and slapped her hand on the table like she could erase the images. "You can't do this! Take it down!"
We were a room full of witnesses. The cameras in people's phones clicked and recorded. The crowd began to murmur, then shout, then boo. Someone took Beth's phone and opened her messages. They read the threads aloud. Her words, once sweet or commanding, sounded small in the light of the room.
"You wanted to ruin her!" someone shouted.
"She paid for it!" another voice said.
"She made threats," someone whispered.
Beth's face went through colors. She went from shock to fury to collapse. Her knees hit the carpet. People gasped. A woman from the front row moved forward and called for security.
"Beth, stand up," she told her.
Beth did not move. Her shoulders shook. She tried to pull herself up and failed. The photographers took shots. The director motioned for someone to call the police. Someone else handed Beth a bottle of water, and she pushed it away.
"Don't let them film me!" she cried. "Delete it! Delete—"
"They're not yours to delete," Fox said in a voice that did not tremble. "You made these records by yourself."
Beth's friends clustered, but they were thin. Someone in a sequined dress took a step back. A man with a camera looked at her like she had become a story he could sell.
"Please," Beth whispered. "Please, I didn't mean—"
She looked up. Her lips trembled. The eyes around her were not cruel — some were curious, some were angry, some were simply tired of seeing cruelty dressed as power. A small boy from the front row whispered, "Why did she hurt her?"
Beth's hands flew up and she grabbed the ankles of the woman who had moved forward. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I will pay back! I will do anything! Please, don't ruin me. I will ask my father. I'll— I'll—"
Her voice dwindled into nothing. Her knees scraped the floor as she sank lower. For a moment she was raw and small. People in the room shifted. A woman muttered, "She is begging."
"Swap the money back," the director said quietly. "Apologize publicly."
Beth's face crumpled. She made a sound like an animal. "I can't. I can't. I can't—"
"It never helps to kneel if your hands still hold poison," Fox said. "Kneel only when you're ready to hand me the coin."
Beth's shoulders shook. For a long minute she lay folded on the carpet, then pushed herself up. Her knees scraped. She tried to make her voice steady.
"I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm sorry I made a mess. I was jealous. I—"
"Say it to her," the director said. "Right now."
Beth's head snapped to me like a puppet pulled. She tried to stand. People pressed forward. Someone played her voice thread on a phone and the room heard her laugh about the plan.
"Say it," Fox demanded softly.
Beth's knees dropped. She was trembling. The microphone shook in her hand like it would fall apart.
"I'm sorry," she finally said. Her voice had no shield now. "Ainsley, I'm sorry. I was small. I was wrong. I—please—I'm sorry." Her voice broke and she fell to her knees again.
People watched. Some cried. Some started to clap — not in praise, but in noise, as if to drown the shame. A reporter clicked the record light and asked, "Will you accept responsibility? Will you pay back and apologize?"
Beth's head bowed. Her friends looked at each other. A camera crept closer, and someone called her mother. Her mother did not answer. Someone took a live feed to the school's feed. The moment flashed on screens across town.
Beth tried to speak again, to say she would return the money, to call the guard and make him confess. But confessions do not undo things. She had wielded power and lost it.
The guard who took the money was led in by the police. He pointed at Beth. She pointed at our school board. The story spilled into the night like ink in water. People who had watched Beth as an ally turned away. Some who had been neutral whispered, then went to our post to say what they'd seen.
Her knees were raw by the time she finished. She begged, wept, and begged again. She grabbed the director's hand, the guard's shirt, anyone who moved. She begged the room to stop recording. The room did not stop. The room had become the thing she once used.
When it was over, a dozen phones kept rolling. The footage of a rich girl on her knees, begging, went online that night. Her sponsors called. Her father canceled plans. Her friends turned their faces.
I left without applause. Fox walked me out. At the gate, people stopped us and thanked me in small ways. "You didn't scream," they said. "You were calm." I did not feel calm. I felt hollow and clear like glass.
"Do you want me to press charges?" Fox asked later as we watched the news.
"No," I said. "I want them to see her fall. I want them to know they cannot hide with money." My voice trembled. "But I don't want to break something that fixes itself. Let the law take what it will. Let people's voices do the rest."
We stayed quiet for a while. The town watched. Beth's world shrank into phone calls and texts that did not come. Her accounts were frozen, her invitations canceled. She went to the press the next day and tried to explain the stress she felt, and people laughed at the word "stress" like it was a confession.
Fox stayed. He spent his days fixing lights and my nights checking the windows. Sometimes he would quietly set a bowl of soup in front of me and leave without saying much. Sometimes he would call our neighbors and ask them to come over for tea. He smiled more often then.
"Are you going to stay?" I asked him on a gray afternoon when snow dusted the sea.
"For as long as they will let me," he said.
"Do you think people will be kinder?"
"Some will be," he said. "Others will not. But people will choose sides. Sometimes it's enough."
I painted the little view from the attic balcony. I gave one to the school auction after the scandal — the painting of the sea in small blue strokes. Fox bought it with his hand over mine. He did not buy me. He kept a hand, and it felt like a promise.
Later, the town changed. Beth returned to school after months; she was quieter, and the cameras followed. She apologized on live feeds and wrote a public post about mistakes and growth. People scoffed and listened. Some forgave. Some remembered. The guard was fired. The security company was fined. The gala's director resigned because he had taken favors. The world keeps cleaning itself in pieces.
Fox left once for a long week to fix a problem in his family's business. He called from a far city one night and said, "I'm coming back soon."
"Five days?" I asked.
"Two," he said. "I will be back for the spring tide."
He came back on the third day instead. He handed me a small notebook with blank pages. "For drawings," he said. "For plans. For bad jokes."
I drew the sea. I wrote numbers. I wrote a single sentence one night and left it.
"Keep going," it said.
The end of the year found me sitting in the exam hall where I used to sit alone. The room felt less empty. People had become quieter around me, not because they wanted to be cruel but because they were not sure how to find me without the old stories. I raised my hand for a question once, and a voice near the back answered. It was a voice that used to laugh at jokes. It was a friend who did not need a stage.
"Do you think things change much?" he asked after class. It was Fox. He leaned in and smiled.
"Change," I said, "is like the tide. It moves forward and back, but the shore is always different afterward."
He laughed. "That is not fair. I taught you to be precise."
"I learned it myself," I said. "You only showed me where the tape is."
We walked out into the sun. People looked at us and then away. They had watched a lot of things and learned some of them. I had been broken and put back. I had learned to keep the windows open and to lock my door at night. I had learned to accept help.
"Will you come with me when I leave?" I asked him.
"Where will you go?" he said.
"Anywhere that has no paint," I said.
He kissed my forehead like it was a small victory. "Anywhere that has no paint," he repeated.
I laughed. The sound felt warm.
The End
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