Face-Slapping18 min read
I Saved Her, Stole Her Life, and Nobody Believed Me
ButterPicks9 views
I remember the exact crease of the paper before it hit the air.
"How did you do on your exam?" Kylie asked, leaning on my shoulder outside the school gate.
"I'll show you." I flicked my wrist and handed the score paper to her. She squinted, then stuck her head close, making a mocking sound.
"Two points more than me," she crowed. "You sneaky brat."
"I sneaky? You were the one who secretly studied," I shot back.
Kylie laughed and draped an arm over my neck. "Fine, fine. We're both losers anyway. No decent high school will take either of us."
"Where are we going to go?" I asked, scanning the street.
"To the net café. Beat the world into submission with a game."
We walked with the bravado of kids who had nothing left to lose. Kylie in her borrowed brand-that-I'd-never-own attitude, me in a faded denim dress that made me look thinner than I was. We were loud, we were petty, and most of the time we were hungry.
"Got money?" she asked at the net café door.
"No," I said. "You?"
"Nope."
We trailed back. The city was a maze of opportunities we couldn't afford.
Kylie's house was small, the kind of place where the refrigerator hums the name of poverty. Her stepfather, Henry Tucker, ran a busy food stall, and her sister Giselle Atkinson—top of the class, the family's pride—floated in and out like a planted orchid.
"Eat some watermelon, Giselle," their mother, Gina Dickson, urged, hovering like a nervous moon. "You've worked so hard."
"I don't like cold food," Giselle replied, sounding bored.
Gina's eyes dropped to Kylie and then narrowed. "Kylie, start helping at Henry's stall tomorrow. You can't keep wasting time."
Kylie stuck out her tongue and pulled a face. "Mom, I need to breathe. Besides, I got three measly points."
Gina snorted. "Where did I go wrong?" Her voice hardened. "Kylie, I told your father. You're going to help at the stall. Maybe in a few years we'll find you a good husband."
I was stuffing rice into my mouth with the casualness of someone who didn't expect to have a future. If you asked me then whether the world would flip, I would've laughed.
That night, after a stupid, sleepless stretch at the net café, we wandered by the river. The air smelled like iron and late cars. We saw her then: a girl in a red dress, like a bright wound, standing on the edge of the stone rail. She was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen—sharp, fragile, and unbelievably calm.
"Is she going to—?" Kylie started.
"She's going to jump," I said. Then, feeling something sour and urgent, I did the stupidest brave thing I'd ever done.
"Get away! Don't," I shouted. Then the red dress made a small movement and she jumped.
I dove.
Water closed over my head. It was cold and crushing and blessed. I grabbed at arms and hair and air and swam like I could only swim when I was desperate. The other girl was rigid, her mouth a line of refusal against breath.
"Come on! Come on!" I cursed to the river and to myself. She wasn't fighting me. She was going down.
I felt myself slipping—my muscles were burning—and then darkness.
When I woke, I wasn't in the net café. I wasn't in the small room I knew. I sat up in a bed made of fog and white light, and an elegant woman cried, "Xixi, you woke up!"
"You're the wrong person," I said, which was the truest sentence and the most useless.
The woman—thin, formal, Matilda Bishop—came closer to my face. "Xixi, it's me. Don't speak—you're weak."
"I am not Xixi," I hissed. My voice felt different. My hands were—small, manicured, pale.
Matilda's smile wavered, then brightened. "Cameron, they called you Xixi because that's your name. Your doctors say you've been through a lot."
"Who saved me?" The question came out as if it had already been asked. I pictured the river, the black water, and the cold bite of it.
"The young woman who fell in for you," Matilda said. "The village girl—Dani Price. She saved you and then... she didn't wake up."
"She didn't wake up." My throat tightened, and I understood in a way that made my ribs ache: the person who had fallen into the river to save me—the me in the red dress—was only a name I had just been handed. The body I was in was warm and perfumed and belonged to a life I didn’t know.
I was Dani Price.
"She didn't wake up?" I repeated. "Is she—alive?"
Matilda's face softened. "Not yet. The doctors say it's touch and go."
I needed to see her.
"Take me," I said.
Outside the room the hospital smelled like bleach and fear. I found the ward where the other girl lay: the one with the cropped hair; the one who had shoved herself into river water to save me.
A woman named Gina Dickson—Dani's mother—was arguing with a doctor. "I'm not paying for this," Gina said. "If she's not going to wake up, then euthanasia. Put her out of her misery."
Her words were knives. "Euthanasia?" The word hurled me into a place I couldn't get out of. I saw the girl's pale face under the sheet and, in an absurd and terrible flash, I imagined waking up in Dani's family. I couldn't let that happen.
"How can you say that?" Matilda snapped, stepping between Gina and the doctor. "You don't get to make life and death choices like it's a bill."
"It's my child!" Gina shouted. "She has cost me wages and time. She ruined my life. Let it end."
"You're not her family like this," Matilda said, cold as polished steel. "You are cruel."
The door to the ward had a handful of nurses and visitors and a dozen eyes focused on the scene. I could feel the judgment like a second pair of hands squeezing my lungs. Gina scoffed and turned to leave—her words still ricocheting—when Matilda's voice rose and wrapped around the room.
"Do you hear yourself?" she said. "Do you hear yourself calling for this girl's death?"
Gina's shoulders trembled. The room's murmurs rose. One of the nurses—Jillian Martin—stepped forward with a phone in her hand.
"You want to say that again?" she said softly. "Because if you do, that will be on record."
Gina's face went white. She hadn't expected anyone to take her at face value; she had expected silence and compliance.
"Then I will tell everyone what you said," Matilda said. "You want the record? Fine. You want to say 'euthanize her' in front of a dozen witnesses? Stand here and say it now."
Gina opened her mouth and closed it. "This is my daughter," she croaked.
"Your daughter needs you," Matilda said. "Not this." She stepped into the fluorescent light and called out, "Security?"
The hospital corridor filled quickly. People had phones out. Someone filmed. "Euthanasia," Matilda kept saying—slow as a sentence she wanted to make true. "You suggested ending her life because she costs you wages."
Gina's face went from bravado to horror, then to flustered denial. "I didn't—," she started.
A nurse touched her arm in a stopped-hold. "Ma'am, your words will be recorded," the nurse said. "You said that the girl could be 'put out of her misery' to stop taking your wages. That is a statement everyone heard. The hospital will have to act."
There are moments when the world rearranges itself around a truth. This was one. The crowd's whispers were not sympathy; they were outrage, the small bright kind. Someone laughed, not kindly.
"What are people calling for?" Matilda asked loud enough to echo down the corridor.
"Justice. An apology," Jillian said. "And a public one."
Gina finally bent like a branch breaking. She tried to walk away and was stopped by a dozen glances. "I'm sorry," she flung out like a coin. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I—" Her voice trembled, and her face crumpled. "I was angry. She cost us money. I said something stupid."
"Stand up," Matilda ordered.
Gina looked around, confused. "What—"
"Stand and apologize to every person in this corridor," Matilda said. "And to your daughter. And to that woman who kept you both alive."
People began to crowd in. A reporter's phone lit up. Someone started a live video. The woman who had first filmed pulled away, eyes like a hawk. Matilda didn't let up. "Say it. Say it to their faces."
Gina's eyes shone with tears. There was a long pause, the kind of silence that stays between two people after a cloak has been ripped. "I... I apologize. I was wrong," she said. "I apologize to Dani Price. I apologize to your hospital. I apologize to the girl you saved."
Not everyone was satisfied. A man who had been waiting by the drinks machine stepped forward with a small, quiet voice. "What she said—that's domestic abuse," he declared. "If she thinks a person is disposable because of wages, she should be investigated."
Someone else chimed in. "She wants euthanasia for wages? That's criminal. Who are you?"
The room swelled with statements. "Shame on her!" "She should be charged!" "You can't just—"
Gina's shoulders collapsed. She dropped to her knees in an old-fashioned, theatrical way, one that people expect only in melodrama. "Please," she begged, hands clenched to her face. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The sound of a camera clicking was like a metronome for humiliation. People clapped in the way crowds clap when the wrong has been called. They didn't clap because they were mean; they clapped because someone had been stopped mid-cruelty.
"Get up," Matilda said. "Say it like you mean it."
Gina forced out the apology again. Nearby, a nurse called someone from social services. Another person whispered, "This will be on the internet in two minutes."
In the end Gina was escorted to a small consultation room. The recording had already been shared. Matilda stayed until the security guard led Gina away, until she could be sure that the woman had been humiliated enough to remember the truth of her words.
It wasn't enough. No punishment ever is. But the room's witnesses felt it in their bones: this woman who had tried to trade another's life for money would not be able to hide it.
When the crowd broke up, Jillian looked at me with earnest eyes. "You saved her," she said.
"I did," I said. "But I can't let her stay lost in a body that's not her own."
"Then we will find a way." Jillian squeezed my hand.
That night, Matilda sat by the river in a chair that didn't belong to her and told me everything I didn't know. Cameron Baldwin—Xixi—was an only child, heir to a house that smelled of lemon and quiet. Her father, Mason Kraus, was a reserved man who had given everything to make her world soft. She had been engaged in name to a boy from the Chu family—the arrogant, handsome Hunter Kovalev—yet she had been lonely enough to walk to the river.
I had to fit into her life for a while. I had to keep the person who had saved me alive. That meant pretending I was her. That meant learning to climb the stairs of a mansion I hadn't earned, let alone been invited in.
"Act like you know what you're doing," Matilda said with a hard laugh, tucking my hair back. "No one will suspect a thing if you don't give them reason."
"You mean everyone? Her father? Her doctors? The man she was engaged to?"
"You'll bluff," she said. "You bluff like the rest of us. And one way or another, Cameron gets her life back."
I took a breath. I had to be patient. I had to be small in the middle of big rooms. I had to pretend I had manners.
In the days that followed, I discovered that the house came with people who assumed: Jillian Martin, efficient and loyal; the family doctor who wore a face like an inkstone—Doctor Kevin Andreev; and a household of servants who bent like wheat under their wife's smile.
Then I met Hunter Kovalev for the first time in a corridor. He was the boy who had smirked the day my paper airplane hit his head outside my old school. He bent down and lifted me by the chin like a cocky prince.
"Xixi," he said. "You caused quite the scene at the hospital."
"I caused no scene," I said, and the phrase came like a pistol. His eyes flicked—interest, irritation, amusement.
"Very well," he said with a half-smile, and left me there, the absurdity of being married to a man I didn't even know settling in like a fever.
Within a week it became clear that being a woman in a rich house was a different kind of survival. People were always around: Matilda fussing; Mason reading the paper; Jillian like a constant peace. I was learning to speak the right sentences, to eat with the right fork. The hospital calls were the worst. The girl who had jumped—Dani Price—lay in a neighboring ward. She had not woken.
The doctors had done tests. They had tried. But the neurologists had little to add beyond sympathetic shrugs. That's when the name slipped in, as if someone had thinned the air and a single idea had floated into the room: Kevin Andreev.
"He's the one who can wake her," Matilda said.
"And he said no," Jillian answered, handing me a warm cup. "He said he doesn't accept patients that way."
"Because you offended him," Matilda said.
"Who offended him?" I asked.
"You did," she said. "You used his name like a toy."
I had no memory of it. But apparently, before my jump and subsequent swapping, I had been to an arranged meeting—an engagement mediation—and been rude to him. Or so Matilda said.
"This is ridiculous," I protested. "I will go find him. I will ask."
"Kevin's no one's for the asking," Jillian said softly. "He doesn't bend."
He also had the reputation of being impossible: Kevin Andreev, surgeon and physician of guarded fame, rumored to take one patient a year at the request of those who could afford his time. He didn't do casual favors. If you wanted him, you had to earn him.
I found him at the Chu family's house. He had been treating Hunter Kovalev's grandfather, a man wrapped in more power than care. The sweeping corridors smelled of sandalwood.
Kevin was as disarmingly plain as rumors had never been able to dress up. He wore an old coat and had a face like weather-worn marble. When he turned, I knew. He had met me once before—outside a school gate, when a paper airplane had landed in the lap of whatever car he had been riding in.
He glanced at me and said, "You're not the girl from the river."
"You're right," I said. I understood then: I could tell him the truth insofar as it would help me.
"There's a girl in a ward," I told him. "She saved me. Please help her."
He looked at me with an expression that was older than the room itself. "I can help," he said finally. "But I have rules."
"Anything," I said. "Name them."
He folded his hands. "One: I don't accept bribes. Two: I will see the patient if I am called. Three: I take one special kind of bargain."
"What bargain?" I asked, a scent of dread rising in my chest.
"A marriage."
I laughed like someone whose head had been nutshelled. "What? Are you joking?"
He didn't laugh. "I don't joke. You have two choices: I marry you, or I don't. If I don't, then I refuse to see the patient."
I stared at him. "You are insane."
"That's charitable," Kevin said. "I don't work for free. But I will help if there's something I receive in return that I value."
"And what will you do if I refuse?" I asked.
"I will leave and you will continue pretending," he said. "If your father is smart, you'll take it."
The room tilted. Marriage? Me? For a doctor to help the girl who had given me everything? The thought burned like iron. I thought of Dani, the mangled, generous thing who had saved me. I thought of cold water, of lungs collapsing, of madness.
"I will not marry," I said. "But if you won't help because I asked you to tie your life to mine, then you will have to live with the fact that a girl you could have saved will remain sleeping."
He was still, as if considering everything like a doctor does a pulse.
"All right," he said finally. "You saved a life once. Save another."
He agreed to operate on Dani if I would accept to bind myself to him...in word only. He wanted a public engagement of sorts—a promise that would be witnessed. He wanted leverage.
"You're bargaining with human lives," I said. "How is that different from... from stealing a body?"
"Different people do different things to make the world easier for themselves," Kevin said.
"I would rather not marry," I said.
"You're not asked to be loyal or affectionate." He shrugged, as if that was no comfort. "You're asked to sign. In three months, no one is bound to anything. Or sign and do something for me in return. I have ways."
I hated him a little for that. But I hated the thought of Dani sleeping forever more. And I was not too proud to make a deal if it saved a life.
"Fine," I said.
He looked at me with a trace of something like approval. "You bargain well," he said.
The operation was long. Kevin worked like a man who forgot everything else. He operated with hands that did not shake. I sat on the edge of the ward and watched the monitor like a watcher of stars waiting for constellations to shift. After hours the nurses came into the room and whispered together, and I felt the universe's axis move.
She blinked. Dani breathed. Her eyelids fluttered like a bird's.
I let out a sound I had not known I had. Kevin did not look at me when she opened her eyes; instead he looked at the ceiling as if measuring the distance between a life and its bargain.
"You're alive," I said, and the sentence shattered.
She opened her eyes and the world righted itself. The woman who had once stood on a river rail sat up and looked around, dazed, small as a moth under a lamp.
"Who—?" Her voice was raw.
"It's me," I said, hunching forward. "It's Dani. You saved me. You saved me and—"
She stared at me with an expression I could not read, and then recognition flitted and she tried to smile.
"Thank you," she breathed. "Thank you."
Outside, Matilda clapped her hands, and Jillian cried tears that marked the third time that week I'd seen someone weep for joy. Kevin stood with his hands in his pockets, looking like the man who had been moved by the problem of other people's stubbornness and made it solvable.
For a few days the world seemed to hold its breath. Dani wanted to go home. Matilda insisted she be showered in care. Gina, humiliated, had gone quiet. The hospital's front page feed had a dozen comments.
And then, as if to remind me that life is always partial, Mason Kraus—the reserved father—came to me in the drawing room and said, "You know this isn't your life."
"Of course I know it's not," I said. "But this is how we keep hers."
"It's dangerous," he said. "What if she returns to find herself like this?"
"She will," I said. "I will—"
He looked at me for a long time. "You—have some soul," he said.
"You mean I saved someone and then hijacked her life?" I asked. "Yes. That's one way to put it."
He smiled at that. "That and a thousand others."
Days passed. Dani got better and stronger. She hugged Matilda and the doctors and cried a lot. She left the hospital and we thought we could go back to being who we had been.
But people are not tidy; they do not plug themselves back into sockets with a polite clunk. The townspeople had filmed Gina's apology. It had been shared. A radio show called for investigations into "moral negligence." Dani went home to a family that had been publicly shamed and made to look like villains, and Gina's neighbors watched her as if fault were a contagious disease.
If I had thought the worst was over, I was wrong. Because when you steal someone else's life, the world catches wind. The people who had been cruel had to answer for themselves in a way the law can't always build. Public pressure finds its own theatres.
A week later, at a charity event for the hospital much lauded in the press—hundreds gathered, camera lights glittering like flies—Gina, in hushed tones, started sulking like an offended queen. She'd come to collect some of the last leftovers of sympathy. She thought perhaps the crowd had forgotten her words, or that a thousand apologies might cover a crime.
The host of the event announced a segment. "Tonight," he said into the microphone, "we honor the girl who saved another tonight and a woman of courage who stood against cruelty."
The spotlight landed on Matilda. She walked to the stage with dignity. Her speech was sharp and well-rehearsed. She spoke of kindness, of insistence on humane care. She spoke of how one woman's suggestion—to end a human life for the sake of wages—was something a civilized crowd would never accept.
The cameras turned to Gina. She was in the back, face a white mask, fingers twisted.
"Now," Matilda's voice soared, "I would like to ask the woman in our audience who suggested ending her own child's life for convenience to stand forward."
The room was hushed as tide. I felt the edges of the light like a blade.
Gina's face went red with a shame that was the color of poison. She stood as if pulled and made her way to the stage with a shuffling gait.
"Say it," Matilda said, without bitterness. "Tell them."
Gina opened her mouth and did not know the sentences. The cameras were up-close now. I could see the sweat on her lip. She tried to speak and failed.
"Tell them what you said," Matilda reiterated.
"I—" Gina started, and a long list of excuses poured out—about work, about stress, about not thinking.
"No," Matilda cut across the noise. "Tell them the exact sentence."
Gina stopped. "I... I said—"
The phrase came out like an animal: "Put her out of her misery."
The cameras snapped. People gasped and then did what people do best: they performed indignation. What followed was ritualized punishment. The host asked Gina to step down to the front and apologize to Dani, to the hospital, to the cameras.
She was forced on stage like an offender in a public square. The artificial lights burned her like a confession. People around her cleared seats; no one offered a friendly edge. The city critic—who had spent half his life stirring trouble for ratings—leaned into his mic and said, "Such words are not private. They live in the open air. You must be accountable."
"Say it," Matilda said again—and the microphone trembled.
Gina begged. She cried. She tried to explain. It was pathetic and terrifying to watch: a woman brought from a borrowed sense of control to a place where nothing could save her pride. She collapsed onto her knees and begged for forgiveness with the kind of public supplication that only ancient texts had previously recorded.
"People are filming," a young man behind me whispered. "She will never be able to live this down."
The humiliation was public, and it was perfect, and I felt a cold relief seep into my skull. Justice is never tidy, but sometimes the world insists on showing itself.
After that day, Gina's neighbors avoided her. The food stall had fewer customers. Henry Tucker's hours were cut by a landlord who had eyes on scandal. Dani's family wasn't saved by the punishment of the one who hurt them, but the world made its mark.
In the messy audio-visual age, where gossip survives like bacteria on a keyboard, Gina's name floated in a viral tide. People who had been indifferent were suddenly disgusted. Matilda watched from the edge and shrugged.
"Not my business to relish," she said. "But it's a start."
The path forward was not simple. Dani wanted her life back. I wanted mine. Kevin Andreev had done what he could and demanded his due in a way that took on a life of its own—a binding promise that was both absurd and necessary.
But life has a way of tripping you. Plans unravel. Dani's return to her family was nauseous and tender. She hugged Matilda and Mason and thanked me with a kind of raw gratitude that made my own chest ache. We had both been changed.
"Will you come back?" Dani whispered the night before she left the house for the first time since the river.
"I will," I said. "I'll be here."
She kissed my forehead like an apology and went home.
A month later, I walked into school as Cameron Baldwin and sat beneath a ceiling full of banners. The school assembly had me speaking in front of a thousand earnest faces, because some people found that the station of "top student" followed the body even if the soul had left. The speech was written in an elegant hand. I read it as if it were foreign: complex English sentences like birds that did not belong. The crowd applauded. Cameras flashed. Friends found me and introduced themselves. The city moved onward.
And yet the undercurrent of all of it was this: I had Dani's life. For a season I'd been honored with marble and pandas and polite people who couldn't imagine what it meant to be broke and terrified. I had also been given a mission that belonged to no one but me: return what had been taken, right what had been broken, and make sure that when the sky tilted, no one else had to beg for a life as if it were a seat in a theater.
There were setbacks. There were people like Gina who made foolish choices that demanded punishment. There were men like Hunter Kovalev who pretended to be indifferent and were not. There were nights I stayed awake, imagining the river and the way water had tried to take us both.
"Why didn't you just tell them?" Giselle asked one evening, half drunk on the safety of someone else's money. "Why not say you weren't the daughter and give it back?"
"Because," I said. "I needed her alive. That was the first rule."
"And the second?"
"The second was to keep her safe."
Giselle smiled a smile like she had been given candy. "You're mean."
"Sometimes I have to be."
"You're going to be a good liar," she said.
In the coming months, events unfolded like a play with too many acts. Hunter Kovalev was humiliated publicly at a dinner where he'd expected willing laughter; he resented the way his family had been manipulated into breaking the engagement and he resented himself more. The plugin of our lives into larger games left me ragged. But Dani was home and awake and learning to choose again.
There was one more thing I had to do: undo the transactions I'd made with Kevin Andreev.
He had not lied about his rules. He had wanted a bond, a promise. He had not demanded my heart, only a performed engagement that would keep his name in everyone's mouth. I had given him what he wanted. And then I had to find a way to unbind.
I told him everything frankly as he sat in his office, a sliver of a man in a room full of glass. "You were crude and brilliant. You demanded a thing that made me sick. But you saved her."
"I did," he said.
"You can have a file from me—proof of what was done, a public statement. Or you can walk away with nothing and be that man who once made a bargain with a life. Which man will you be?"
He looked at me like someone assessing whether to cut a thread or keep it. "I have rules," he said. "You have taken them apart."
"I need you to choose now," I said.
He did. He chose a small, dignified resignation: no more public binds, no more bargains made in private. He called a press conference in which—calmly, formally—he explained the mechanics of what had happened and why but refused to revel in triumph. In the release, he apologized for any coercion but emphasized the life saved. It was a masterstroke: it freed Dani from being indebted and it unbound me from marriage. It also poisoned his reputation among peers who prized detached avoidance—but even that was acceptable.
I had not meant to fall into anyone. I had not meant to become a player in the kind of social chess that eats young people's futures. But fate is not a tidy mistress, and we were both left with marks.
At the end of it all I discovered something simple: the life I had stolen from the rich didn't make me any richer inside. The river had taken one half, and returning it left me with a pulse and a kind of quiet that came from having been intimately near death. Dani and I became allies—awkward, tangled ones. She learned to forgive her mother. Gina learned to keep her mouth shut. Matilda kept her hands busy. Kevin learned that bargains cost more than men are willing to pay. Mason learned to look at the world with less suspicion and more fear.
There was one last scene that stayed with me.
We stood on the river rail where everything had started. It was twilight. Dan—Dani, not me—touched the stone where she'd once stood and said, "It never feels like anything more than a decision, does it?"
"No," I said. "It's a stupid, sudden decision. You made it out of pain."
She turned to me with eyes that had not yet forgiven themselves. "You could have left me asleep," she said.
"I couldn't live with that," I said. "So I lied and stole and pretended. And now—"
"And now?"
"Now we are two people who have to live with each other's courage."
She smiled. "Then let's go back to our lives."
We did.
And sometimes, when I feel a chill at the back of my neck, I think of a paper airplane that hit an expensive car window. I think of a man with cool hands who asked for marriage in exchange for a life. I think of a mother forced to kneel in public. These are not the tidy endings people write about. They're messy and real.
I learned to breathe when someone else had already breathed for me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —