Face-Slapping12 min read
The Birthday Cake That Unmasked Him
ButterPicks16 views
I put the photo up for five minutes, then went to bed.
"You're going to regret posting that," Hattie texted before I even opened my eyes.
"Why?" I typed back, blinking at the sunlight. "It's just a picture with Leon."
"Because the internet is hungry," she sent, with a laughing emoji. "Also, don't be surprised if you get weird comments. People are hungry for drama."
I laughed and left my phone on the desk. We had a quiet morning—lectures, coffee, the little rituals that had made the last year feel safe. Leon was a perfect sort of safety: steady, polite, the sort of person who smiled with his whole face and remembered to ask about my ankle he hurt after that stupid winter fall. He'd kissed me in the ER and stayed outside my dorm until the taxi arrived. He was proof, in every friend’s mind, that love could be ordinary and unthreatening.
Then the messages came.
"You're a homewrecker," one read.
"Stop posting pictures with taken men," another said.
"Go away. You know better."
"Don't pretend. You're the third wheel."
My fingers shook as I scrolled. "They've got the wrong person," I wrote into the comments before I could think. "This is my boyfriend."
A direct message popped up from an account I didn't recognize. It had one image attached: a grainy, dimly lit photo of a crowded karaoke box. Balloons hung from the ceiling. A three-tier cake sat on the table. Two people were kissing, and the girl—tea-colored curls—looked like a model. The boy—God—had the face I had memorized for a year.
I stared until the kitchen blurred.
"Leighton? You okay?" Hattie asked at my shoulder.
I wiped my face and lied. "Just saw a sad ending in a film."
She hugged me, handed me a tea. "Then we'll make our own happy ending today—study date at the library with snacks."
I smiled, but the smile felt like a costume.
When I asked Leon about the photo later that day, he blinked as if I had asked him a riddle.
"Who sent it?" he asked. "I'll handle it."
"Who is 'it'?" I tried to keep my voice light.
"You. Someone thinks you're someone else. I told you I'd take care of it."
He wrapped his hand around mine and was careful, the way he always was. 'Careful' used to be comforting.
"Did you meet her before college?" I asked because the doubt had a terrible habit of moving from the edge of my mind to the center like a storm.
"Neighbor? Maybe," he said. "When we were younger, yeah. She said weird things, tried to force things—"
He told me a story: a girl who'd once come to his house with blood on her arm, threatening, begging. "I blocked her," he said. "She kept texting. I blocked her."
He said it like a thing he had done to protect me. His thumb traced the back of my hand. "I won't let her bother you again."
"But she sent a photo," I said.
He shrugged. "Probably photoshopped. Terrible lighting."
"Okay," I lied. "Okay."
But the question took root.
The next trip we took—two nights in a hot spring guesthouse—should have been a break. It became a pattern. Leon's phone buzzed, he checked it, and he answered in a different voice, quick and clipped. Sometimes the call was "family stuff." Sometimes he said "my cousin." Once, I saw a city code on his screen that wasn't from his hometown.
I dug, like people do when sleep is full of holes.
"You should be careful," Hattie said one evening as I stared at my laptop. "Don't start an investigation into your boyfriend. Either he's an angel or a demon. Both are dramatic."
"I already started," I admitted.
The other account, the one that had sent the kissing photo, answered when I messaged it.
"Talk?" the girl wrote. "He keeps calling me. I'm at the airport. Give me thirty minutes."
"Who are you?" I typed. "Why are you with him?"
She told me. Her name was Delilah Neumann, and she said, "We grew up together. We were... we are together."
"You're his girlfriend?" I said.
"Ten years," she replied. "You were my fantasy girl until... well."
We began to talk, the kind of raw, slow conversation two women forced into the same plot of someone else’s life have to have. I told her about the winter night, the hospital, the quiet days. She told me about ten years of a different history—schoolyard kisses, shared sunsets, calls that crossed midnight. She sent me a picture from her phone: a selfie of long curls and a sunlit smile. The girl in the karaoke photo and the girl on Delilah's profile were the same.
"Do you want to meet?" she asked. "His flight lands in half an hour. I'm at the arrivals."
Every time Leon used the "family" excuse after that, my stomach clenched. He joked less. He seemed to have more small evasions.
"Bring her," Hattie said when I told her the plan—tongue loud and reckless. "Let's go to his anniversary thing and throw confetti in his face."
"Not confetti," I said. "Something he can't spin."
We set up a plan: keep things normal until the day we picked. The day was our anniversary. I told a few people to meet at the south athletic field at dusk—friends, classmates, even a couple of juniors who knew Leon as the model student with the neat blazer and clearer conscience. I invited Delilah. I got Laney Mahmoud—who had once been denied a scholarship she should have had—to accept a quiet invitation.
"Why would I come?" Laney asked when I told her the rough idea. "He's the one who…"
"It will help," I said.
Laney had always been the kind of person who put her head down and worked. She had the scar of humiliation: a scholarship that vanished, an explanation that didn't sit right. She'd left campus for another department to protect herself. But the lines of injustice had been drawn, and she wanted to cross them.
"You sure?" She asked.
"I'm sure."
The night came down soft and warm. The field hummed with people—ball games, joggers, students wandering between building lights and the smell of dinner. I felt like I was stepping onto a stage with only half my script memorized.
"What's your surprise, Leighton?" Leon asked, shoulder brushing mine, the warmth of him ordinary and invasive.
"Just something small," I said. "You'll see."
He walked with me to the middle of the field, smiling in the practiced way that had gotten him a people's trust. "Everyone here for us," he joked.
"Everyone's here to celebrate two years," I said.
"Two years," he repeated. "Happy anniversary."
I turned to the crowd. People clapped, and our friends who knew what I planned held their breath as if the sound might break the moment.
"Everyone, I want to introduce someone," I said.
I did not call his name first. I pulled Delilah into the light.
She stood there, flowers clutched to her chest, and the breeze blew her hair in a way that made her look small and fierce. Leon's face drained of color like paint washed from a wall.
"This is Delilah Neumann," I said. "She and Leon were—are—childhood friends. She thinks they're in a relationship."
The field went quiet. The expectant hush landed heavy. Leon's jaw tightened. He took a step back.
"Delilah says she was his girlfriend," I continued, hands steady, "for ten years. She says he came home, lied, left, promised things she believed. We all have our stories to tell."
"Leighton—" Leon tried.
"Let her speak," Delilah snapped. "Tell them what you told me at the airport."
Leon looked like a man watching a building burn slowly. He opened his mouth. No sound came out. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.
"Which is it?" I asked. "The girl who claimed you as hers at seventeen or the girl who fell for your hospital hands at twenty? Which are you choosing to be now?"
"Leighton," he said again, but there was a hollow in it, a pleading tone with no anchor.
"You said she was stalking you," Hattie called out from the crowd. "You said you blocked her."
"She P-ed a photo," someone else shouted.
"Which of the lies is true?" Laney asked, voice sharp.
Leon looked around, seeing not people but a jury. For the first time, he was losing even the language he'd rehearsed.
"It's not what you think," he said finally, voice raw. "I didn't—"
"Then explain why we all have different stories," I said.
He faltered. "I—"
"Leon," Delilah said, stepping forward until she hovered inches from him. "I dated you for ten years. We were together. We thought we would be together forever. You told me you loved me. You told me you'd wait. You told me you'd come back."
He made a small sound. Not a denial. Not a confession either.
"I know you have a neat life here," she said, voice cracking. "I know you wanted to wear that neat life like a suit. But you can't have two suits and expect both to look good on you."
The crowd had been swelling for minutes; the field's lights were a halo of expectation. People shifted on their feet. Phones lifted, some to record, others only to shine screens like a modern aurora.
Then I did the thing we'd planned. I held up an envelope. "This is from the administration," I said. "We decided to invite some witnesses."
I passed the envelope to Calder Arroyo, the program counselor, who had been tipped off and who had come because he believed in fairness. Calder opened it and read aloud.
"It contains a complaint," he said. "A formal signed complaint alleging misuse of office and favoritism in academic awards."
I watched Leon's face change. First confusion, then the last residue of smugness peeling like old paint, then fear.
Someone from our year—a junior who had been in the scholarship selection committee—stepped forward. "There were irregularities," she said. "Documents not timestamped. Recommendations called in late. Names switched."
Laney told the story, step by step, of the scholarship that had inexplicably vanished from her life and reappeared in Canyon Carver's. Canyon, who had friends in high places, who had a comfortable home, who had spoken at freshman orientation and smiled bright.
"What are you saying?" Leon's voice was small in the great hush that followed.
"I'm saying," Laney said, "this isn't just about hearts. You used your position. You used connections. You helped his family get what wasn't theirs. You asked people to look the other way."
"He was my classmate," Leon said weakly. "I was helping."
"Helping?" Laney laughed, a thin, brittle sound. "Helping who? Your conscience?"
At that point something shifted in the crowd; whispers became a current that ran through the people around us.
People who had seen Leon at parties, at faculty events, clapped politely for him. People who had trusted him looked betrayed. Someone muttered, "He represented us."
Calder cleared his throat. "This complaint has been filed," he said. "There will be an investigation. The university will reexamine the award."
Leon stared. "You can't—"
"Why not?" I asked. "Because you look good in someone else's story?"
He stepped toward me so close I could feel the heat from him. "Why would you do this?" he hissed. "Why would you bring Delilah, bring Laney, make me... make me look like a monster?"
"Because you gave us no other choice," I said. "You asked us to live two lives for you."
His face crumpled. First he tried to control it with a practiced charade of wounded dignity. Then he lost balance, and the actor fell into something else.
"No—no!" he said. "You don't understand. I—"
"Do you understand what ten years feels like?" Delilah shouted. "Do you understand what it does to a person to wait for someone to come back?"
People around us had phones out now, recording, but that didn't matter. The thing that mattered was the sound of his voice, the way it changed.
His expression slid through stages: composed, then desperate, then anger, then shame. He tried to deny, then to charm, then to accuse.
"You're making it worse," he said to us at one point. "You're making it public for no reason."
"No," I said. "You're the one who made it public, Leon. With your lies."
He turned to the crowd. "I didn't—" he began. "I had good reasons—"
"Good reasons?" someone yelled from the edge. "For lying?"
Another voice: "A leader should have character."
The surrounding students were no longer passive. I saw an older girl raise her hand with a pile of printed screenshots and message logs. Someone else whispered that the counseling office had files open; someone said the dean had been emailed. The crowd's attention was not merely entertained; it was focused, grave.
"Please," Leon said finally, and then, because his world had crumbled, he tried one last gambit. "We can talk. Quietly. We can fix this. I'll—I'll explain. I can make it right."
"Make it right by telling the truth before anyone else has to," Laney said. "Start by telling the truth to Delilah."
Delilah stepped back, eyes sparkling wet. "Tell her why you lied. Tell her why you loved me and hurt me."
For a heartbeat, he looked like a man with all exits blocked. "I—" He looked at me. "You betrayed me."
"Betrayed you?" I repeated. "Betrayed you by exposing the truth you refused to live with? That's a new definition."
People murmured. Some faced him with pity. Others with disgust.
Then he slumped, the last of his color gone. "I'm sorry," he said, a raw apology. "I'm—I'm sorry."
The apology fizzled like breath on a mirror. People kept circling like tides, the spectacle of the fall sharp and public. Phones clicked, a handful of students clapped contemptuously. A group started a chant: "Accountability! Accountability!"
That was the public punishment we had promised ourselves would feel like justice. It was not a court; it was, somehow, worse. It was the daily currency of reputation that leveled him. It was the look in Delilah's eyes as she saw the costume he'd worn peel away.
For twenty full minutes the scene unfurled: Leon moving from denial to entreaty, to rage, to a kind of stunned collapse. He tried to bargain, then to bargain with charm, then to beg, then to make sly accusations. Each phase was a small ruin. The crowd shifted from curiosity to fury to a kind of solemn satisfaction.
"You will be investigated," Calder said when the hubbub dimmed. "And we'll see the consequences."
"People used to trust you," one of our seniors said. "You've been a model student. That matters."
"Model," someone echoed, and there was a hiss of derision.
"Apologize!" someone else barked, and Leon obeyed; he said sorry in a voice that had no claim to absolution.
When the night ended, Leon walked off, shoulders hunched, dragging the last of his dignity. He left with no theatrics, just the sound of his suitcase on the path.
Afterward, the campus never spoke of nothing else for a week. Screenshots went viral. The investigation started. Calder forwarded the official complaint to the committee. Their whispers became documented proceedings. The student union rescinded a title he'd held. The dean's office flagged his application for awards. The wheels turned slowly, but they turned.
Social media at first turned its knives at me—"Was she the other woman?" people asked. "Did she know? Is she cleaning house for revenge?" But the scholarship complaint shifted the narrative. People began to look more closely.
"Why are you doing this?" a friend asked the next day.
"Because it had to be done," I said.
"Do you regret making it public?" she asked.
"No." I paused. "I regret that someone I loved didn't love me back the way I thought. But I don't regret the truth being told."
Days later, after the formal decisions, when Leon had applied for a leave of absence and the university had revoked honors and frozen his promotion processes pending the inquiry, I ran into him one last time.
He stood by the library steps, eyes hollow. "Do you have somewhere to be?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "Class."
"You could have told me," he said. "We could have handled this privately."
"Privately? You had ten years to be private with someone else," I said. "Private isn't what you wanted. You wanted two lives."
He said nothing. He left again, shrinking in a way that had nothing to do with his physical frame and everything to do with the reputation that had been stripped.
Weeks passed and life resumed its rhythm. People came back to the library habits and the dinner table jokes. The story became a lesson on gossip boards about boundaries and privilege. Some people still whispered that I had staged it for fame. Others thought I was a hero.
Delilah and I met again, this time in the quiet of a small tea shop. "Thank you," she said, and she meant it. We shared the sort of laughter that softens bruises.
"Do you think about him?" she asked suddenly.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "When he ordered the taxi for me, the winter night, when he wrapped his scarf around me. The part of it that was real—was real."
She nodded. "Some things were true. That doesn't excuse the rest."
We visited Laney's classes when the committee reopened the scholarship files. The university admitted to procedural problems, and in the end they corrected the award and issued an apology that read like a formal stitch in a wound. Canyon Carver faced disciplinary actions too. His scholarship was revoked and reassessed. His cushioned future got a sharp nick.
"Did you ever think you'd be the kind of person to do this?" Hattie asked me months later over late-night noodles.
"No," I said. "But people change. Circumstances change. Sometimes, you have to be the one to step on the stage and pull off a mask."
She slurped. "Do you feel lighter?"
"Yes," I said. "And sadder."
The Lina bear my boyfriend had once fought to get for me sat on my bed with one eye slightly crooked. It was still soft.
I picked it up, flicked the sewn eye with my thumb, and whispered to it like a small oath: "You were real when he held you and when he said he'd pick you up for class. I will keep those small truths. But I won't live inside his lies."
Delilah moved back to her city to study for exams. Laney continued, head down, but she smiled easier now. Hattie never stopped making corny jokes when I needed them.
As for Leon, he applied for a leave, packed his bags, and left campus like someone who had lost a map—searching the pockets, finding only lint and receipts.
Sometimes, when I walked past the south athletic field where we had stood that evening, I would pause. The lights threw long palms on the grass, and I would think about the three-tier cake in that faraway photo, the balloons, the music, and how one image can start a chain reaction.
"What do you miss most?" Delilah asked me once, before we hugged and said goodbye.
"The safety of not asking questions," I said. "And the small ordinary things that were true."
She smiled sadly. "Me too."
I kept the Lina bear. I kept the memory of the winter hospital corridor. I kept the knowledge that some loves are real and some lies are glittering masks.
On the first night after the official report closed, I sat on my dorm window seat and wrote a small sentence in my notebook. I wanted it to be a line I could return to when the noise crept in.
"I put the photo up for five minutes," I wrote, "and in those five minutes I lost a version of myself and gained the right to claim my days. The bear still smells like him; the truth smells like rain."
Later, when someone scrolled through the university posts and typed a wry comment about karma, I thought of the field and the way the crowd had shifted like weather.
It had been public and messy and human. It was punishment, yes, but it was also accountability made visible. And that visibility—more than anything—felt like a small, stubborn justice.
The End
— Thank you for reading —