Face-Slapping13 min read
I Woke Up in Katharina's Life — and Took Back Everything
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I remember the hospital lights as if they were a city of stars collapsing.
"You're awake," a voice said. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," I answered, but the mouth that moved was not mine.
A nurse checked my pulse and smiled. "Weak, but stable. Family's on their way."
I closed my eyes. The world didn't fit. My own name felt wrong in my throat. I had been a student admitted to the best university, prodigy status locked in the files back home. I had dreams, essays, competitions—my life before a car split me off like a cracked vase.
Now, I blinked into the face of someone else: a girl with tired eyes, bruises like sad stamps on her arms. I forced my fingers to curl. They were small, stained with ink and cheap nail polish.
"What happened?" I asked the ceiling.
"You fainted in the bathroom," a voice said. "They found pills in your bag." The voice was hard, bitter with rumor.
"Who says?" I demanded. "Who found the pills? Who did this to me?"
"It's always the same story," the class teacher said later, when my feet and I stumbled into a classroom that had been waiting for an afternoon drama. "You were always at the bottom. Why make life harder for yourself, Katharina? Vocational school is a good option."
"Vocational school?" I repeated. My mouth shaped the name as if I were testing a foreign coin. I had been admitted to the best university; I had been living in a different life three days ago.
"You don't get it, do you?" the teacher snapped. "We tell you this for your future."
I looked down at my arms. Fresh bruises. Old ones. A diary tucked under the desk like a trapped moth. I pulled it out with fingers that belonged to Katharina Booker, a quiet girl who had carried a whole book of losses.
"Katharina," a hushed voice said behind me. "Don't make a scene."
I turned. He kept his head down, but his handwriting on the page across the room belonged to another world: Elliot Lombardo. He was the kind of boy who wore silence like a clean coat. He had that rare look people called "handsome" and that same distant expression that said he had been taught to love people at a measured distance.
"Don't call me that," I told the room, and it felt like announcing a secret.
A girl with long, glossy hair laughed. Tatiana Francois. She smiled like a postcard of summer and looked at me like someone had told a good joke. "You always were dramatic, Katharina," she said. "Maybe you should go to vocational school. My father gave the school a donation last month. You'll be happier."
"Don't touch me," I answered, and the class burst into the shade of laughter like a flock taking off.
"Is this about the test?" Elliot said quietly. He looked at my table. "You were zero on physics last time."
"That's a shame," Tatiana chirped. "Zero on physics, zero on dignity."
My hand closed around the diary. I read until my eyes blurred: how Katharina had loved, how she had tried to write to Elliot and been thrown into the trash, how she had been pushed, mocked, and finally beaten in the girls' bathroom with no witnesses.
"She took pills," someone muttered. "She tried to stop."
The pieces fit together like a map of bruises. I had died in a car crash on my way home. Somehow I had cracked through the world and landed inside Katharina. The living body was fragile, but the mind that had loved the books and the competitions—my old mind—was awake and furious.
I put the diary in my bag. I closed my fingers around the memory: I had been a student who had won national competitions, a name on a prestigious list. I had privilege of knowledge. I had been sent to the highest levels. I had been told that if I wanted to, I could fold fate like a paper crane.
"You're going to do what?" my new reflection asked when I found a mirror in the bathroom. "You're going to pretend?"
"Not pretend," I said. "I'm going to take back what should have been hers."
*
"This is my body," I told myself when I first walked into physics class acting as if I belonged. "This is Katharina's life for now. But everything else—no."
I let them think I was still the same beaten girl for a week. I let them talk. I let Tatiana laugh and slip my physics paper under her sleeve. I let the teachers say what they wanted.
Then I started to answer.
"Hold the formula here," I said aloud to the room one afternoon, voice steady. "This one cancels. See? Substitute here and here."
"Who said that?" someone shouted. Heads turned. Tatiana's smile froze like sugar in the rain.
Elliot looked up from his notebook. "You did that?"
"I did," I said. "It's a standard technique. Why didn't anyone teach you this?"
"Because you never asked," he said, and something shifted in the air. For the first time, his face stopped hiding.
I passed my answers to everyone, offered small corrections. When a physics problem that had been declared unsolvable for our class appeared on a review sheet, I solved it at speed. Tatiana stood in the center of the classroom like a queen with a fake crown, and I watched her crown wobble.
"She copied me," Tatiana hissed after class. "She stole my chance to be the center. She must have cheated."
"Why would she cheat?" Elliot asked, and I saw he was asking the right question. "If she had good answers, why hide them?"
Tatiana's smile cracked. "Because—because—"
"Because your circle of influence only grows when you keep others small," I finished for her.
She flinched. Nobody expects the quiet to speak. People expect the quiet to obey. I had lived in worlds where quietness was a strategy. Now, I made it a weapon.
*
I needed allies, and I found one where I didn't expect to: Denali Mariani.
He was the kind of bright boy who should have been a model in family albums—wealthy, lazy, bored with the world. He called himself "the second worst in school," and he laughed like the world was a joke someone else had paid for.
"You're the girl Elliot's looking at, right?" Denali asked, leaning against the gutter where an accidental towel had landed. "You took the towel off my head."
"You dropped my towel," I said. "And you smell like expensive shoes. What do you want?"
"I want tutoring," he said, suddenly earnest. "My parents think I should be shaped into something useful. They also think you might be useful."
I taught him on the sly. He improved. He paid me what he could—money I used to buy basic things: cheap conditioner, an old coat that hid the bone of the body I had borrowed. And he shielded me. He rode his bike out front when I left class and made sure no one followed me to the bathroom.
"You could have hired the best tutor," I told him once when he rode me to a coffee shop with a bag of pastries. "So why me?"
"Because you were honest," he said. He grinned. "Also because you humiliated Tatiana and I like that."
"You like humiliating other people," I shot back.
"Not humiliating." He rubbed his thumb across the pastry wrapper. "Leveling. I hate that smugness."
*
Rumors have short legs. When I scored 150 on math and 141 on language in a test the whole class thought impossible from someone like me, they stumbled.
"She cheated," Tatiana declared at the whiteboard, theatrically offended. "There are cameras. There are monitors. Who would help her?"
"Who said you were alone?" I asked, ignoring the teachers.
One by one, the small things I had done—returning a disappeared test, leaving a corrected answer where the peacock would find it—began to undo the web of cruelty Tatiana had woven. She had been careful: always watching, always pulling strings, always safe behind parents who paid for prestige. She thought money shielded her.
Money doesn't stop the truth. Truth, if loud enough, is a social tax that cannot be bought.
"You're making a scene," the class teacher warned me when I refused to be quiet about the bathroom assault.
"I'm making a testimony," I said.
"Either way," the teacher muttered, "you're asking for trouble."
"Then I'm prepared for trouble," I answered.
It would not be a private revenge. It had to be public. I had promised the life inside this body I would not let their story end the same as before.
*
The punishment began small: a leak of a message, a video clip of a whispered plan. Then a larger thing: a confession.
Louise Hahn sat with her hands trembling. She had been the kind of person who did not want to see anything that made trouble. She wanted safety more than spectacle. But she had a conscience hiding under her fear.
"I can't keep living with it," she whispered to me in the corridor. "I carried a bag once. I told them what to do. I... I didn't stop it."
"Tell them," I said.
"I can't."
"Do you want me to stand with you?"
She looked at Elliot, at Tatiana, at the lines between them. "Yes," she said.
We planned it for the assembly. There would be television cameras because my exams had already shaken the city. There would be officials in suits. There would be busloads of reporters who loved a good unexpectedly ugly truth.
When the day came, the auditorium was packed. I felt the weight of every pair of eyes like a callus. I sat at the front because I was the subject everyone wanted to see. Elliot sat next to me, his knuckles white because he had something he did not yet know he needed to say.
"Today is not just for celebration," the principal said into the microphone. "We have recognition. And we also have to face what happened in this building."
A hush fell like a hand over a lamp. The lights felt brighter on Tatiana. She smiled at the cameras as if smiling could rewrite what she had done.
Louise stood up.
"I am Louise Hahn," she said. "I am telling the truth about what Tatiana and her friends did to Katharina."
Silence. People shifted. A camera banked its lens toward the lone student who had been too scared to speak for months.
Tatiana laughed, a sound like a coin drop. "This is absurd," she said. "She's lying."
"No, she isn't," I said, and I told the story in pieces: the hidden tests, the bathroom, the pills, the public reading of my letters. I showed the diary. I read the passage where Elliot had been mentioned and dismissed.
"You didn't—" Tatiana started, and her face went through the stages I had been told villains show when their house of cards is upended: arrogance, denial, fluttering panic, and then the pale hollow where a person realizes their currency has become worthless.
"Why would I lie?" I asked simply.
"Because we can," she spat. "My father gives money to the school. He will—"
"Turn his donations into a shield?" a reporter said into his recorder. "So what happens when the shield is taken away?"
The hall seemed to tilt. The camera zoomed on Tatiana's father arriving—one of the patrons of the school—expecting a triumph. He stood at the back, looking for applause.
"He paid the school," someone in the audience whispered. "He was the reason the headmaster smiled."
The truth landed like a hand on his shoulder: when the media dug, the headlines found that the donations had been used in ways that blurred accounts. The father, a man of status in our small city, had more questions than answers.
Tatiana's reaction met the public gaze like a collapse. Her mouth opened and closed. "I didn't do it," she hoarse-voiced. "You wait—it's a lie."
"Show us the evidence," Elliot said quietly, and his voice carried.
"I have money," Tatiana sobbed suddenly, a change from armor to pleading. "Don't destroy my life."
"Why not?" a teacher asked, plain and steady. "You have destroyed someone else's."
The crowd around us split into currents: disgust, curiosity, and a kind of delighted hunger for punishment. Phones rose. People recorded. A dozen different reactions swelled: some whispered "finally," others muttered "performance," and the worst kind watched for a fall.
"Did you ever stop to think how that feels?" Louise demanded. "To be pushed down until you can't breathe? Are you proud?"
Tatiana looked as if she might be sorry once, then shook it off. The public scene turned her shame into a commodity. Clips of her smugness played on the school monitor; the diaries were shown; classmates told of the time she had made the "love letters" public by reading mine aloud like a stage script.
Her father tried to speak, but the reporters did not need him. The damage was already a film rewinding across feeds. The principal, who had once considered the donation a blessing, now had to consider the legal consequences of failing to address bullying.
"You're on camera," a news anchor said into the microphone like a scalpel. "People will see this."
Tatiana's face crumpled. First she was arrogant—she believed money would fix everything. Then she snarled with denial. Then she tried to bargain with pity. Then, exposed, she fell through astonishment into a visible collapse: cheeks wet, mascara streaks like black rivers, the mouth making silent prayers to people who would not answer.
The crowd reacted.
A woman near me whispered, "Good. She deserves worse."
An older man clapped quietly, not for the fall, but for the courage to speak. A teenager filmed the scene and uploaded it with one ugly caption; within minutes it had thousands of views.
I watched Tatiana's world shrink. Her father was asked to speak to the board. The school agreed on the spot to open an investigation. The local education bureau stepped in. The donors who wanted to avoid scandal found out they were tied to someone who had been publicly exposed. They withdrew their support. The father faced scrutiny, and the school's administrators found their careers at stake.
Tatiana's allies withdrew. Friends who had laughed at my bruises now begged for distance. Parents called the school to say they no longer wanted their children in a place that tolerated such behavior. The principal, who had tried to handle this quietly, now had to hold press conferences.
I heard her voice crack as she tried to tell people she was sorry. I watched the stages I had been taught to watch: she went from smug to stunned, she denied, she blamed, then she begged. More and more, people recorded. Children who had once followed her now turned their faces away.
"Please—" she said to the crowd. "Please, don't—"
Crowd noises grew: some spat, some hissed, someone shouted, "Shame!"
A teacher I had once respected walked to the microphone and said, "We failed Katharina. We will do better."
Tatiana's punishment was not a single moment. It was a public unmasking that touched every person who had profited from silence: loss of reputation, the withdrawal of donors, the parents' humiliation at PTA meetings, her dismissal from a national scholarship, the cancelled interviews she had hoped would spin into social endorsements. The legal inquiries that followed meant that doors closed where money had once opened them.
When she tried to step back into the sunlight of status, the sun would not touch her the same way. The same TV crews that had followed the school now followed her as she packed a small bag and left town in a car that did not belong to her. People told tales that multiplied: about hypocrisy, money, and the fragility of a public image built on other people's scars.
But punishment is not only what the press does.
At a parents' meeting, her father stood and apologized with a face drawn like a person who has been robbed of everything except the dignity to say he was wrong. He collapsed in the parking lot afterward, held by his own shame.
Tatiana's reaction changed as the days went on. The first day she was indignant. The second she was imploring. The third she was hollow. Then she tried bargaining—"I'll give money back"—and later, she begged for privacy. Finally, in empty rooms, she collapsed into a hand that used to be relied upon: a mother who feared social ruin.
Around me, people clapped in relief like the breaking of a long-held bruise. Some cried. Louise's voice was small but steady. Elliot's hand brushed mine and for the first time in days his eyes were warm with something like pride.
When the cameras left, the wound had been opened and cleaned. There were bandages to tend to: the school's policies, legal processes, counseling. The world had watched and judged. Some called it spectacle; I called it justice.
In that assembly, Tatiana's fall had satisfied a hunger deeper than gossip. It was something quieter: the knowledge that cruelty is always visible if enough people choose to see.
*
After that storm, things changed. The administration promised stricter anti-bullying measures. People who had been complicit apologized. Louise moved away to start over, handwriting new pages of courage. Tatiana's family left town. Her father lost some of his influence. The world that had once allowed their cruelty began making space for repairs.
Elliot, who had been distant and steady, came closer. "You could have told me sooner," he said one day, voice rough.
"I needed proof," I answered. "I needed what was true to be visible."
"Why didn't you fight before?" he asked, but his question was soft.
"Because two lives were at stake," I said. "Katharina's and mine."
He listened like someone who finally understood.
We were not a simple romance. He was not my rescue; he was a man learning how to be brave when the person in front of him needed it most. There were moments that made my heart skip: when he smiled at me, small and surprised; when he took off his jacket and wrapped it around me in a hallway that smelled like chalk dust; when his pen brushed my hand as he handed me a corrected problem.
"You're brilliant," he said once, almost embarrassed by his own bluntness.
"So are you," I replied. "You just hide it."
He laughed, faint. "I hide a lot. Teach me not to."
I did. He learned. We studied together quietly, sometimes loudly, sometimes in a corner of the library where time folded into easy hours.
Denali, the rich boy, became more than a helper—he was a friend who asked for nothing and gave everything. He joked about being my "sponsor" and actually came through: when my family needed a small thing repaired, he arranged it.
"You're better than I expected," he told me when I corrected his grammar. "You should wear this side of you more."
"Maybe I will," I said.
*
Final exams arrived like a storm with a deadline. I was careful. I checked my work four times on math, took deep breaths in language, and let the chemistry flow as if it were a friendly river. On result day, my number came back and the room spun: 738.
Elliot's eyes went very bright. Denali whooped like a boy at a game. Louise messaged me from afar: "I did the right thing." A city official came to school to shake hands. The media called. Offers came in: scholarships, interviews, spots at top universities.
People said things into microphones about grit, about rising from the bottom to the top, about the phoenix who arose from an ugly place.
"You will be famous," a reporter said, voice almost tender. "Do you want that?"
"No," I answered. "I want a life that's honest."
"Isn't that the same thing?" she asked.
"Sometimes," I said, and watched Tatiana's empty seat in the desks as the story moved on.
Elliot stayed close. He walked me to the parking lot one evening when the sky was the color of a new coin. "Genevieve," he said, saying my true name for the first time as if it belonged to him. "Will you—"
"Don't choose a promise," I warned, because promises were like fragile glass.
"Then choose a plan," he said.
I smiled. "Plan accepted."
We planned little things: which classes to take together, which book to swap, which café to celebrate at. The sweetness of these moments felt earned—woven out of study sessions, public battles, and quiet confessions.
Still, there were loose threads. People asked about the legal outcomes. Tatiana had lost scholarships. The donor in the scandal had to step down from several posts. The school began a new policy that required all bullying to be reported. For a while the city watched, like a guardian at a child's window.
One afternoon, weeks after the storm, I walked past a bench behind the school. A small girl sat there, clutching a worn notebook. She looked up. Her eyes were wet.
"Are you Katharina?" she asked.
I sat. "Not exactly."
She blinked. "Are you the one who helped?"
"I was a voice," I said. "And a pair of hands."
"Thank you," she whispered.
I remembered the diary. I pulled it from my bag and handed it to her. "Keep pages," I said. "Write what you need. Don't let anyone steal your voice."
She hugged the book like something sacred. Her name was new to me, but the look on her face was a mirror of a past I had borrowed.
"I will," she promised.
I walked on, thinking of things that had been broken and the people who had been brave enough to fix them.
At the edge of the school flagpole, Elliot caught up with me. He smiled. "You left your ribbon in the desk," he said.
"I know," I answered.
He reached for my hand. It was a small move, but it meant something large: safety, warmth, a future.
"Let's go," he said.
We walked away from the flagpole where the paperwork and the cameras had stood.
I left a ribbon in the desk, a folded page in Katharina's diary, and a promise to a girl I had borrowed a life from.
When I put my hand on the small worn book, I felt the life inside it breathing like a quiet bell.
"Keep it," I told the school corridor. "Keep it loud."
And like that, with Elliot's hand warming mine and the dust of the auditorium still settling, I moved forward—back toward a world I had known and toward the person I had become by saving another.
The End
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