Face-Slapping10 min read
He Called Her "Baby Plus" — I Wore Sneakers Again
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I found the photo by accident.
"Why are you scrolling my phone?" Boston asked as I handed it back, but my hands were shaking and I already knew the answer before his mouth formed the question.
"It was unlocked," I said. "I grabbed it to check the train times."
"You always do that," he laughed, the way he always laughed at small things. He was so soft with me. "You're ridiculous."
"Show me," I said.
He frowned and handed the phone. I opened his messages, my eyes catching a nickname under a contact: "baby plus." I had "baby." He had "baby plus."
"Who is that?" I asked.
"That's my sister," he said, calm. "She—she's coming to Beijing for the summer. She'll stay at your place for a bit if that's okay? My apartment is small."
"She'll stay at my place?" My voice went flat. "You didn't ask me first."
"I'm sorry, Diana. I thought—it's easier if she has a quiet place. I'll pay rent. Please?"
"Fine," I said.
I believed him. I chose to believe him, until the first photo appeared on her public feed.
"Look at this," someone at the lab whispered, sliding a phone across the bench.
"Her legs," someone else said. "Who is she?"
I tapped. The image filled my screen: a girl in double-ponytails, a Lolita skirt, a plush rabbit in her arms. She posed like a model—that same ridiculous 'tempt lover' pose girls used for clicks. The caption read: "New treasure today..."
The dress was my Fendi knit.
A tight, metallic laugh escaped me, more like a sound from someone I didn't know. Boston stood by the sink, oblivious, but when he caught my face he squinted.
"Is everything okay?"
I swallowed. "Your sister—what's her name?"
"Josie," he said. "Josie Cervantes. She's shy. She'll love your place."
"Shy," I said, thinking of the photo.
When she arrived, Boston pushed a silver suitcase and watched her light up the sidewalk like sunlight. He smiled with a smallness that used to belong to our early days. He looked like someone who'd already been practiced at being tender.
"Hi, I'm Diana," I said, reaching for normal.
"Hi, sister," Josie purred, and then she handed me a bottle with the sweetest smile. "For you."
She handed Boston a limited edition sparkling water. I watched her carefully, because the face on the screen had been a trapdoor into memory.
"She talks like that," Boston said as if explaining the weather. "She's so sweet."
"She... seems comfortable," I said.
He kissed her hair like a private ritual. The smallness in his smile made my chest contract.
That night he texted: "She forgot pajamas, Diana. Could you give her one of yours? You're about the same size."
He typed "you're about the same size" like it was an observation, like it was nothing.
"Sure," I replied. I picked the La Perla embroidered butterfly set—the one I kept for myself—and walked it over to their room with a stomach full of thunder.
Josie was on her stomach searching prices on her phone. She barely glanced up.
"Thank you, sister," she said. Her voice had the practiced lightness that had always made me tremble.
She had been my nightmare five, six years ago: that same face bent into cruelty like a ritual. I had tried to be invisible, to shrink. I had begged, begged for mercy. I had been broken.
I changed my name back then—different city, different surname—and I learned to build myself out of small, slow bricks. Frederick, my stepfather, taught me to hold my head up. He taught me to trust the world could be redone.
I didn't expect fate to hand me her face again across a Beijing living room.
"Why are you tense?" Boston asked one night when I couldn't sleep.
"You say 'sorry' like it's a band-aid," I said. "You say it and nothing else."
"I say it because I love you," he murmured. "Because you get scared."
"But when I ask 'what did you do?' you say nothing." I watched his expression, searching for guilt. There was the same practiced gentleness, the same avoidance of detail. I started checking things.
"Are you sure she came alone?"
"Yes."
My phone died two days later; I used his. Her photo appeared—this time a dress I recognized, a Polo with a small embroidered tiger I'd bought in Milan. She posed, and the caption was a wink to the camera. I froze.
"What’s wrong?" Boston asked, suddenly near.
"Why does your sister wear my clothes?" My voice was small, a brittle thing.
He smiled placidly. "Maybe you bought the same things."
Maybe. I didn't believe in coincidences anymore. Not after what Josie had taken from me when I was younger.
"Do you remember a girl named—" I stopped. It was strange to ask names that had been scars. Boston didn't.
He didn't know me yet. He had known only the soft present. He wasn't the one who'd broken me. But he had, perhaps, been the one to give her keys to my life.
I started watching.
"Stay at Haley's for a few nights," I told him. "My friend is sick." Haley Mills was a model friend—skillful with wardrobes, and angry enough to help.
"Okay," he said. "I'll miss you."
I left the house like I was carrying an iron box inside my chest.
I made small moves—too small for anyone to notice unless they were watching. Haley returned some "borrowed" items to my closet, casual and unrelated. Haley acted like a woman who had been wronged. She was loud and generous and perfect for a performance.
I told Josie I was leaving. I told her I needed space because I was "helping a friend." I left a line of messages that made her comfortable, that made her believe I was frivolous, that my wealth was careless.
A month into the summer, I fed her crumbs: "You can have whichever you want. It's fine."
She took them like a scavenger.
She posted more. She paraded my things. Boston liked her photos with a small double-tap from an alternate account. They were both sure I wouldn't notice, or that I wouldn't care.
I cared enough to plant little luminous hooks. I let some things be "forgotten." I said out loud to certain people that I had duplicates, that sometimes I kept three of the same dress. I said it loudly enough that the vanity would push its head out and bite.
One evening at the mall, I orchestrated an "accident." Haley invited us both to dinner. The table was noisy, the lighting warm. Haley, the good actor, spilled hot broth—"so sorry!"—and it slashed across Josie's purple knit. Her face fell. She laughed at first, embarrassed and then defiant.
"You're such a klutz," she said, trying to make it a joke.
"Don't worry," I said, the words soft as a blade. "I have three of these. It's fine."
Her fingers walked the stain like a map. She had three paths: buy a replacement, send it to dry-cleaning and risk ruin, or swap a cheap replica. She chose pride.
I watched her cling to the idea that someone else would always pick up the bill. She had always assumed people bend to her will.
I planted more seeds. I let certain friends "return" one item less than the true number. I made small, controlled gaps in inventory until I could claim exact tallies. I waited until the web of concealments was ready to be plucked.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Haley whispered one night, kneeling beside me in the dim. Her hands were steady.
"More than anything," I said.
When the semester opened, I invited a cluster of loud, loose-tongued classmates to a screening in the media room—the same room that could see into the private house yet remain unseen. The plan was ugly and clinical and precise.
Halfway through the screening, the lights went dim and then back on as a pair walked out into the lobby.
"Isn't that—" someone hissed. "Boston and Josie?"
They were kissing. At first it was small, then it flamed, a public intimacy that looked like betrayal, because Boston had been my boyfriend—my private sun—for three months. The reactions threaded through the small crowd.
"He's cheating!" someone said.
"Get a grip," another said. "Did you see that? Gross."
The rumor machines whirred. Someone posted an anonymous thread. I watched the net tighten around them.
Boston came to me the next day with a white-hot panic.
"You're making this worse," he said. "You need to tell them we're not—"
"You're right," I said. "If we're not official, then let's settle account. You told me you'd have your sister stay here and you'd pay rent."
"It was a favor," he said. "Please don't blow this up."
"I want ten thousand a week for what it's worth," I said. "Say thank you to the rent you're supposed to pay. Or clear it and I'll deal with the rumor."
His face went pale. "Ten thousand? I don't—"
"I want ten thousand now," I said. "Sign the paper."
He signed.
It felt small and petty and part of a larger trap. It earned me ten thousand, then another ten thousand. He scrambled in panic, begging, promising. I dragged him until his pride cracked and he signed more.
I had told his parents—carefully, a performance. "Your son has been very generous," I had said, on the phone, voice breaking with contrived despair. "He spends everything on his sister. I'm just trying to make them see." Franz Beil and Georgina Larsen were excellent actors for my story; between my tears and Haley's feigned outrage, they began to worry.
Two weeks before classes started, I called the police.
"Someone has been stealing," I said, measured. "From my wardrobe."
They sent uniforms. The story spread like wildfire across the school. Students who had whispered suddenly had a spectacle to clutch. Gossip turned lethal in speed and tone.
On the stage of the opening assembly, as Boston was mid-speech as a student representative, two officers walked up to the podium and took him gently by the arm.
"We need you to accompany us," one said, into the amplified microphone.
I watched the crowd.
"He stole?!" someone shrieked.
"He can't be," another whispered.
Boston's face went gray-white. He flailed. "This is a mistake," he cried. "I didn't—"
They led him away. Josie was called too. She arrived some hours later, breathing hard, mascara running, a different performance now—panic trying to replace entitlement. The faculty gathered; the crowd buzzed.
"You're kidding me," she wailed when I sat across from her at the precinct. "You framed me!"
"I counted," I said. "You wore my clothes and deleted the traces. You sold some. You lied to everyone."
"You're crazy," she said. "You told me you were careless. You told me to take them."
"Listen to yourself," I said. "You told Boston to get me to 'let it go' so you could have the things. You told him about the older incident in our past, and you thought we were allies."
She trembled, then anger flashed.
"You can't—" she began.
I took out my phone and played a recording I had made weeks earlier—a voice message where her own words made a necklace around her neck. "Don't touch the stuff," I had said. "It's not free." She had answered with the old cruelty, a laugh that had once sent me to the floor.
"You stole items worth over half a million," the investigating officer said. "Do you understand?" The word "half" landed like a cold stone.
She blanched. "I'm not a thief," she tried to say.
"You sold luxury items," I told the detectives. "You sold custom pieces that aren't even on market."
Their faces changed. For fifteen years I had carried a private wound no one knew how to stitch. Here—finally—there were stitches offered by justice, if justice was a precise, sharp thing.
"How long is the sentence?" Josie asked suddenly, voice a thin string.
"That depends," an officer said, heavy. "If the evidence supports repeated, organized theft and fraud, the severity goes up."
She collapsed into denial, then panic, then pleading. "He—Boston—"
Boston's mouth was a thread of noise: "I didn't—"
When the chat backups were recovered, the evidence was like rope. Messages which had been deleted were restored. There were conversations in plain text about dresses, about 'borrowing' duplicate items, about "helping me court money from Diana." There was even a conversation where they joked about "baby" and "baby plus." They'd thought the joke private. It wasn't.
When it all landed in front of them—screen after screen of their own words—the mask slipped. Josie's face, usually poised in petulant sweetness, crumpled into horror and a choked, high sound. Boston's fingers beat his palms against the table.
"You told me you'd never—" she sobbed, then looked at Boston as if at a stranger. "You promised me you'd always be on my side."
He couldn't meet her eyes.
The trial was a bouquet of people: the girls she'd bullied years ago, now women with testimonies; Haley, honest witness for me; Franz and Georgina, showing me their disappointment like a blade. The school buzzed with the news. Old photos resettled themselves as evidence; testimony built a ladder to the past and down into the present.
When the verdict came, it wasn't the abstract thing that novels promise. It was a physical drop: Josie got fourteen years for organized theft and aggravated fraud. Boston got four for his assistance and deliberate concealment, for being a willing accomplice. They both sat like small, stunned animals as the judge read.
I watched Josie as they led her away. Her eyes found me and flamed black with something that was equal parts dislike and a bloomed terror.
"You wanted this," she hissed once we were alone through the glass.
"I wanted to not be afraid in my own house," I said. "I wanted people to know you weren't untouchable."
She screamed then—an animal sound—and the wardens clapped a hand over her mouth. It was ugly and public and categorical.
At the sentencing hearing there was a moment I will never forget. The courthouse steps were full of press, of past victims, of kids who had once been taunted. Someone took a photograph as Boston's parents approached me. Franz looked like a man caught in a rain he had not prepared for; Georgina's fingers shook. They had sheltered a cruelty for the sake of their child.
"You never thought to ask why," I said, not whispering. "When she hurt me, when she made me humiliate myself—you helped her rise above it."
They had no answers then. The cameras clicked like nails.
After everything, I went to the visitation room alone.
"Why did you do it?" Josie asked, small and raw, the old arrogance gone.
"I let you take my things," I said. "I let you live in my house. I watched so people would see what you are."
Her face crushed inward. "You never forgave me."
"I forgave myself," I said. "But I couldn't let you keep stealing lives. Not mine. Not others'."
She cried, a thin stream.
I left with a heaviness that wasn't triumph. Revenge is not a hot clean triumph. It's a long, slow untying of old knots. People applauded in the alumni group. Some said I was cruel. Some said I was justice.
In the months after, I started to walk again the way a person who has learned to trust the ground does. I walked to the park, to the small shops, to a place that once had been forbidden to me. I practiced small liberties.
One morning I opened my shoe closet and took down the pair of sneakers I'd kept boxed because I was afraid of tacks and nails and of old tricks. They were plain, white with a faint scuff. Frederick smiled when he saw them.
"You're wearing them?" he asked.
I tied the laces.
"Why now?" he said.
"Because," I said, and the sunlight cut across the laces as if to underline truth. "Because I can."
I walked out of the house and felt my steps land like new promises.
The End
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