Face-Slapping14 min read
The Bitter Recipe
ButterPicks17 views
I stood on the cracked porch and told the woman in the blue smock, "I'm Mila's roommate. The counselor asked me to check on her."
The cleaner blinked. "Mila's not seeing anyone. She—"
"I'll just say hello," I said.
She hesitated, then the front door swung wider. A heavy man in a worn coat came into view. He stared at me for a long, strange second like a man looking for a ghost.
"You're—" he began, throat working. "You're Fang Xueyue's daughter, aren't you?"
I smiled the simplest smile I could. "I'm not who you think I am," I said. "Call me January. I'm the class rep. My tutor sent me."
He flinched like someone had struck him. "Oh," he mumbled. "I'm sorry. I thought— you look so much like him. I thought—"
I let the silence stretch.
When the girl came down the stairs in a loose sweater—Mila Atkins—I recognized the angel-smile I'd seen in photos and in nightmares. She looked at me and said, "You're the rep? Are you here to see me?"
"Yes," I said. "How are you feeling?"
She considered me like a curiosity. "Better, I think." She reached past me to the man and said, "Dad, someone came by."
Gonzalo He watched my hands as if facts could be read there. I could see him putting pieces together, then pushing them away. "You have a face," he said finally, "that makes old things ache. Forgive me."
"Forgive what?" I asked.
He opened and shut his mouth. "No—no, it's nothing. I thought— I'm sorry. I thought you were... I was mistaken."
That was more than enough. I thanked them and walked away, palms sweating.
When my mother died, she left me one strange rule: "January, no stupid endings. Don't make our deaths stupid reasons for yours." I promised her I wouldn't be stupid. But promises are elastic things when a life is built on a sharp, hot ledger of loss.
I had changed my name from Fang Wei to January Watts. I had left the old town. I had learned how to make a face that did not tremble. I had learned how to be patient.
So when Mila began to smile at me at college like I was a necklace worth wearing, I let her.
"You helped me," she said once, thumbed through my hair as we sat in the cafeteria. "You're my best friend, January."
"Friend," I repeated, tasting the word.
I fought three fights for her reputation. I bought her medicine when she was sore. I listened. I laughed. I offered her my shoulder.
While I smiled, I planned.
"Do you remember when you said you loved me?" she asked one night, and I thought of the voice that would sell a lie for pocket change.
"Of course," I answered.
"What did you do that for?"
"For you," I said.
It wasn't that simple. I had been two when my father died—told dead. Thirteen years of a story that kept me small, waiting to taste the teeth of those who had eaten him.
When I met Zane Hart in an online "art job" group, I knew the type. He was smooth, man who sold promises. He was the crooked hook that baited small greed into bankruptcy. He flirted like a veteran. He said, "You have a good eye for value. Want to meet?"
"I'll bring a friend," I said.
"I like that," he said.
I brought Mila and sat back, let them circle. Zane smiled at both of us like a predator who insists on charming before he bites. He told Mila about easy money—groups that flipped work and paid quick. He called them opportunities. She greedily swallowed the word "opportunity."
"You have to invest," he told us. "A hundred thousand gets you in. I can pull strings."
She believed him. She believed him because the numbers flattered the hollow where patience should be.
She emptied accounts. She pawned things. She cried to her father. He sold, gave, put trust where trust ought not go. The money vanished into a man like Zane and men like the night.
When the shell of the scam collapsed, Mila called me from a shabby inn. "They took it all," she whispered. "They took everything. Zane—he says don't tell the police."
"Call them," I said. "Call them now."
"He says there's nothing to do," she said. "Please, January. Please come."
I told the station, circumvented protocol, and then, with officers waiting, we found her at a countryside inn, cheeks stained, posture small and guilty.
She was arrested with a crowd around us. She turned and screamed, "This is her! She set this up! She gave me pills—she wanted me arrested! She wanted my father dead!" Her voice broke the room into pieces.
I kept my face like boiled glass. "I don't know what she's saying," I told the nearest detective. He was young and clean-shaven—Fraser Kraus, I would later know. He smiled like a man who kept secrets for a living. "Excuse me. She's delusional."
People gawked. Phones lifted. A woman from the district whispered, "Fang Xueyue's daughter? She looks just like him."
Mila's voice rose, "You liar, January! I didn't want to—"
"You don't know what you're talking about," I said softly.
Mila's crowd pushed closer. The detective held her wrist. The public recognition of her face—angelic in photographs, monstrous in accusation—was a kind of theater.
"Who told you to do this?" a reporter shouted. Cameras clicked.
"She handed me pills," Mila insisted, "and took the bottle away. She whispered—"
"You've gone to the police about being scammed," I said, "not about pills. If you have evidence, show it."
They led her past me, and she spat my name into the air. "You can't silence me," she screamed. "She poisoned a man once! She comes to take what's left!"
The crowd shifted. A man near the entrance said, "Isn't she the teacher's daughter? The math guy? I read—"
A woman made a video with her phone. Others began to shout. The detective's face tightened with the knowledge that the scene was already part of the narrative.
I let them take her. In custody she sobbed and told the same story: "It was her. She gave me the pills."
Fraser Kraus asked me a question in a low voice: "Do you know her?"
"I do," I said.
He watched me like a man cataloging birds. "She accused you of giving pills to her father," he said. "That's explosive."
"She lied," I said. "She always lies."
He smiled with his mouth only. "People say a lot in front of cameras. Later, bodies remember the quiet."
That day, the crowd saw only a girl in handcuffs and a woman who did not waver. They saw the perfect tableau: the dangerous angel reduced and carted away.
The headlines stayed for a week. "Student Arrested in Scam," one said. "Heroic Class Rep Helps Police," another chirped. They never wrote "poison" in any large type.
Three months later, a rumor wound through the holding center that Mila had hanged herself in the night. I listened to the news with a hollowed mouth and felt nothing but the worth of a well-placed plan.
Mila's arrest was not the end. It was an opening.
I had stayed with the plan I had built since childhood—patient, surgical. My father, Roberto Mikhaylov, had not been a saint. He had left, remarried, moved on. He had pretended to die once, and lived another life in a city with a new family. Finding him was not the sweetest of triumphs. It was a curiosity. It was a piece I could move.
When I saw him for the first time driving away from his school in a black sedan, I wrote down the plate number as if it were a prayer. He greeted his new wife like a man returning to warm linens, and introduced me to a new life with the crisp, practiced affection of a man who had made a ledger and balanced it.
"January," he said under the glazed sun, "this is my wife, Angelina. This is our daughter, Kaori."
"Hello," I said. "I'm January."
"You're like him," Angelina said in that syrup voice people use when they want something. "You look so much like him."
I let them see me as a reasonable girl who had forgiven. I sat in their dinner and gave them the right lines, the script of a daughter reintroduced.
"You're my daughter," Roberto told her, pulling me closer. "We always wondered—you were the only one left."
"I know," I said. "It's good to meet you again."
It is far easier to plant than to harvest when you are patient. I did not want to kill them with a blade. I wanted them to unravel in public, to see themselves stripped of the comfort of their respectability.
When my first class learned that their new math teacher had a relationship to a famous "model teacher," it gave me access. I used access like a key. I learned things: Kaori's ignorance in math, her secret crushes; Angelina's vanity; Roberto's pride in not being caught.
I began with a small thing: the rumor of private tutoring.
"Do you think your dad gives private lessons?" I asked Kaori in the corridor.
"Maybe," she said. "I hear he won't, but sometimes he—"
I set a trap. I made a fake call to the education bureau with a disguised voice and detailed accusation: "Private fee for tutoring," I said, "collecting thousands behind closed doors." They came quickly. A sting. Papers. The kind of bureaucratic thunder that can topple a good name.
Roberto was humiliated in front of colleagues. He was called to the office, handcuffed by the light-handedness of protocol rather than the gruffness of evidence. He cried. I buried a smile.
At home, the house grew colder. Angelina looked at me with strain. Kaori hated me like a neighbor hates a weed. The family frayed. Their wealth was still there, but respect can be harder to reclaim than money.
The bureau called him a violator of policy. The school dismissed him. He had no income. He sold things quietly to keep the bills paid. Hunger makes soft men hard again.
"You're slipping," I murmured in his ear one night as I handed him a bowl of soup I had cooked. "You should sleep more."
He blinked. "Thank you," he said.
The "soup" had a micro-dose of something I had studied—too small to kill, enough to gnaw at the edges of temper. It made nights restless. It made words shorter. Days grew heated. He would slam doors he rarely slammed. He would pick at Kaori. He would scold gently, then sharpen into rage at the wrong moment.
I did not want him dead when his cruelty would not do for public ruin. I wanted him to lose everything but dignity, then to watch him claw for it.
At the hospital, a rumor rose of his hand in the wrong pocket. A man with a leather strap, a petty criminal I had used, Chance Brewer, seduced Angelina with promises. He was young and greedy; he had sense enough to move in for the rich woman who had just been made vulnerable.
"You'll be safe with me," he told her. "I'll take care of him."
She wanted to believe. She wanted to be beautiful, to be wanted by someone who would flatter what she feared losing. I paid Chance and whispered to him the idea of the house, the safe rooms, the locks. He listened like a boy learning how to steal.
One night, when shadows were long and the house silent, I loaned Chance a car with a burned-out plate. He drove, lights darting low, and staged the motorcycle grab that would ruin Angelina.
She clutched her designer bag, dragged by a thief who caught the strap. A crowd came. She was rushed to the hospital in shock. The baby, the one she pined for so badly, did not survive.
She lay in a hospital bed with visible edges. The public whispered about "that woman" who lost the baby. She screamed my name at police in the lobby, "You pushed me!" she wailed. "You, that January—"
Roberto, helpless and raw, defended me. "She was home cooking," he told a policeman. "She was there all night. You can't blame her."
"Then who?" Angelina screamed. "Who tried to run me down? Who—"
The cameras turned toward Chance and then back to the emptying house where the money thinned into the hands of younger men. The public forgives the poor faster than the greedy. Angelina's public fall was loud and ugly. She returned to the world with less aplomb than she had left it.
But the show was not enough. The law took its slow shapes. People who wrong you do not always get the perfect end in the courts of men. They get small, bureaucratic punishments. They get phone videos and comments. They get the vibration of shame.
Sometimes they get worse. Sometimes a trap you did not plan snaps.
I had told Chance to take what he could, never to search for my name. But greed is a contagious animal. After Angelina's estate settled, he left with the loot into the night.
He did nothing to me. He only took his gains and vanished.
When the police pulled on the thread, I kept my distance. I was careful. I had become a shadow who wore a face of a smiling teacher.
My campaign culminated not in a single blow but in a series of collapses: Mila's arrest and disgrace, Roberto's ruin and then his final suffocation by slow poisons, Angelina's miscarriage and social unraveling, Chance's disappearance with the money.
Once, though, in a public square where the school held a commemoration for academic honors, the world converged in a place I had chosen like a theater stage.
"January!" someone called. "Please sit!"
I took a seat in the front row. Roberto, weakened but present, sat on the platform. Angelina perched like a woman grateful to be seen again. Kaori glowered beneath a ribbon of honor meant for another child's excellence. Parents and cameras roared like winter wind.
"Today we honor the teacher who led us," the principal said, pages crisp. "Roberto Mikhaylov—"
An uproar of applause. Flash bulbs flooded like tiny summer storms.
A reporter whom I had met in the coffee shop leaned over and whispered, "We have a live channel if you want your moment."
I turned to him and said nothing.
When the applause dwindled, a woman in the crowd pointed. "Isn't that January?" she said. "She looks like him."
The reporter nodded. "Yes. January Watts. The new math teacher."
Someone from the bureau moved like an orchestrator. He had read the records, the small complaints, the patterns. He whispered to me, "We have something for you to see."
I did not know what he meant until the stage screen flickered and a video played. It was taped months before—camera-phone footage from a doctor handing a small envelope over, a nurse pretending not to see. The footage showed a man—Roberto—pacing, small pills spread on his table. Then a hand reached into a bowl of soup, adding a pale powder. The hand was not mine.
The hall held its breath like stage curtains.
"Where did that come from?" Angelina cried, rising. "That's false! Who filmed this?"
The screen cut to a second clip. It showed a car in a dark alley, a motorcycle's trace. It showed a man with a face half-hidden by a cap. Then it cut to a receipt, a phone interaction, a burned SIM card—the chain pointing toward a man I had introduced to Angelina.
A ripple of cameras, then hard eyes.
"Chance Brewer?" someone in the audience guessed.
"Zane Hart?" another voice guessed, because the mind wants a villain face it recognizes.
The principal stepped down from the dais. "This is not the place," he said. "But we cannot ignore what is—"
A phone lit up in the principal's hand. It was Fraser Kraus's number. He had been the one quietly pulling edges. He stood and said, "We will be filing reports today."
Angelina's face drained to a white sheet. "This is slander," she said. "This is—"
"You're wrong," the reporter said, voice small. "We have footage."
People leaned in. Kaori watched her mother shrink. Roberto's mouth opened and shut like someone struggling to breathe.
"Who provided this?" a father shouted.
I could have said nothing. I could have watched them collapse like a theater set after the night's show. Instead, I walked to the stage.
"Stop," I said.
Every head turned. Phones turned like compasses.
"You all think you saw one truth," I said. "You think you know everything because you watched a clip or read a headline. But grief and rage make people say things that are convenient for them."
Angelina's eyes flared. "You monster!" she screamed. "You plotted—"
"Listen," I said, and the world went thin.
"You can watch cameras," I told them. "You can watch editing. You can call it justice on a loop. But do not mistake spectacle for the bone of the thing. If you want justice, look at the ledger. If you want to know who took what, go to the bank. If you want truth, follow where the money ran."
A silence like frost spread.
Roberto's voice was small. "January—"
"Call Fraser," I said. "He will tell you why we have these pieces. He will tell you who took what."
Fraser stood, eyes steady. He had found threads in places I had not touched. He had tied a rope. "We are launching an investigation," he said. "Publicly. We will look at every transaction. We will follow every call."
The crowd hummed.
A mother near me whispered fiercely, "Good. They deserve to be shown."
The scene had all the elements of public punishment: cameras, witnesses, the moral chorus. Angelina's lips trembled. She looked older than she had, something peeled from her face like paint from wood.
"This farce is over," someone cried. "You—"
"I didn't plan her suicide," I said quietly. "I didn't push her to the edge. People make choices in the gaps you leave."
"You don't get to say that!" Angelina cried. "You don't—"
Fraser's voice cut like a knife. "Mrs. Hassan, you are alleging crimes and losses. You will have your chance to speak. But right now, we need to understand everything."
The crowd pressed in. People recorded. A woman leaned to me and said, "You're very calm."
"I'm cold," I told her. "Calm is the nearest warmth."
A week later, Chance Brewer was arrested in a teahouse. He sat on a plastic chair, hands cuffed, the echo of gossip like a chorus behind him. He shouted about being owed money. He cursed the people who had put him there. "She made me do it," he insisted. "She paid me. She told me—"
"You did it for greed," Fraser told him. "You did it because you wanted money."
Around them stood reporters who had waited for spectacle. They got their story. Chance's face shifted from bravado to confusion to terror when the cameras turned and the facts came out: receipts, transactions, calls. His face crumpled.
Angelina stood on the platform outside the courthouse, hand folded like a bird's wing. She had lost trajectory. Where she had played the injured queen, the public now watched her as a possible conspirator. Her cries became quieter; people recorded them, called them "the whine of a mother undone."
I had expected joy. Instead I felt the mechanical click of a clock. Each exposure burned one more piece of them away, until the family that had been my private grudge became a public cautionary tale.
When the hearings came, the witnesses lined up like paper soldiers. Chance named names between clenched teeth. Zane Hart's name surfaced in murmurs. People recorded, repeated, rewound their own versions of truth.
It was not the perfect vendetta I had sketched as a child. It was messier. It cost more than I had expected.
Fraser pulled me aside once, in a quiet corridor. "You did terrible things," he said.
"Tell me which ones," I asked.
He looked at me like a man loading the weight of knowing. "You poisoned a man who pretended to die, or you facilitated it," he said. "You hurt people."
"Did he deserve what he got?" I asked.
He didn't answer the question I wanted. "I don't know what anyone deserves," he said. "I know you could be sent to prison for what you did."
I had not been naive. I had not expected to be the heroine of any moral tale. I had expected a ledger balanced by blood and by exposure. I had expected engines of public shame to do the heavy work for me.
In the end, what the law took was slow, and what the world took was faster. People love a story with an open wound. They lean into an arousal of outrage. They will gather around the spectacle.
When Roberto's death was finally called "sudden and suspicious," it arrived with a small measure of evidence and a mountain of what-ifs. Fraser found a letter Roberto had mailed to the police before he died. "If I go," it read, "understand that I did this for reasons of my own."
Fraser told me gently, "The letter complicated things."
So his second death was written into the ledger as his choice. The public closed the book.
I left that city with nothing but a few boxes and the small satisfaction that some scales had slatted shut. I took a job in a small town where nobody knew Roberto's name and where the rumor wheels were small and slow.
Fraser came to meet me before I left. He stood at the platform, embarrassed and brave. "January," he said, "I want to stay with you."
"You said you'd arrest me," I said.
"I said I'd do my duty," he said. "And my duty is to prod. But my choice is to be beside you."
He asked me to be his. He told me the truth he had learned in ways that did not make me light.
"I can't be loved by you," I said. "Not fully."
He answered, "Then let us like each other wildly, poorly, humanly."
I wanted to believe him.
We tore up one letter he had given me—the one written in shaky hand by Roberto. I tore it into small pieces. The scraps floated like tired birds into the trash can. Fraser watched me and smiled.
"Why rip it?" he asked.
"It is a story he told to justify his choices," I said. "I don't need it to hold any longer."
Fraser put his hand over mine. "Then don't. Keep what you want."
The last night I stayed in that city, I sat at the kitchen table and counted the little pill bottle that had been a prop in my life for many years. I folded it into tissue and put it in the pocket of an old dress I had worn as a child.
When the train pulled out, I watched the city slant away. I thought about blood and ledger and the sky's slow indifference. I thought about a man who had called me "my only" and then traded the place for another life. I thought about the weight of being the child of a myth.
In my new town, the mornings were steady. I taught math until students' hands lifted, filled in the silence with problem sets and the small human mercy of correction. Fraser visited when he could. He brought tea and awkward jokes. He did not ask me for the whole truth. He asked me for mornings.
Sometimes, late at night, I would lay awake and feel the memory of their faces: Mila's scream, Angelina's shriek, Roberto's pleading. I thought of how people punish themselves in quieter ways than the law permits. I thought of my mother's warning: "No stupid endings."
I could not say I had kept that promise. I had kept a different vow, one hollower and colder. I had measured justice with a pair of scales that only bent toward balance when forced.
One day, when a student handed me a pencil with a tiny sticker of a clock, I laughed and said, "Keep your time." The student smiled.
Fraser's voice was behind me, steady and ordinary. "You kept your promise in your way," he said.
"Is that what you call it?" I asked.
He shrugged. "History calls it many things."
I put the bottle into the pocket of the dress and walked out into the hallway. Children passed with laugh and raincoats and shoes. The world kept starting over, even after it had been rearranged.
I folded my hands. "I will teach them to solve for x," I said. "That seems fair."
He kissed my forehead like a man who had decided to risk everything on a small truth.
We stood in the light of ordinary schoolroom windows and listened to the clock on the wall click on.
The click was small. It was honest.
The End
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