Healing/Redemption13 min read
The Cake, the Bracelet, and the Loud Truth
ButterPicks15 views
I remember the first time the world noticed him without meaning to notice me.
"You've been trending," Eliza said, tapping my phone.
"Who?" I managed, because the studio smelled like charcoal and turpentine and his shoes—Eliot Marques always left an oil-smudged trail.
"Your boyfriend. The video is everywhere."
I held the phone in front of him. He had his leg thrown over the easel, a piece of paper crushed between his long fingers. He looked up at me the way he always did—like I was an interesting blemish on his view.
"Move," he said.
"Move?" I repeated. "You got a million views."
He glanced at the phone, then at me. He smiled the tiniest bit.
"Let go of the easel," he said, and went back to the drawing.
"Are you my boyfriend?" I asked, half teasing, half needing to hear it.
He pinched a charcoal stick between two fingers and tapped my forehead mockingly.
"You? A red apricot," he said. "Go sit."
"You're not even—" I started.
He lifted his head then, for once looking like he might actually be present.
"Don't be an idiot," he said. "Those people are sick."
"People love you," I said. "And I—"
"Of course you love me," he interrupted. "You always did."
I wanted him to laugh once properly. He never did. So I turned my phone on, pointed the camera at him and begged.
"Smile for me, Eliot. Just once."
He looked at me, annoyed, obliged me with a careful half-smile, and I snapped a picture because his face was everything I wanted to keep.
At night I painted that photograph until my wrist ached. Painting him never tired me. When I finished, I posted the study to my friends.
"Next time, I want him to smile like this," I wrote.
He commented under it: "Idiot."
I deleted the post with my hands trembling. Then I texted him a dozen times.
"Are you mad?"
"Did I make you unhappy?"
"Answer me, please?"
He didn't answer. Not until two in the morning.
The next day I went to the studio early. Eliot's easel had half a face drawn, a mouth that didn't belong yet. He walked in while I was staring.
"Why didn't you reply?" I asked.
"No reason," he said.
"Are you cheating on me?" I blurted, because jealousy felt like a live animal under my ribs.
He looked at me like I was a puzzle with a missing piece.
"No," he said. Then he did something he never did: he reached out and put his fingers to my forehead.
"You are the apricot," he said. "You get it."
Later, when I told that story to a friend, she laughed and said he was poetic. But the truth is, he moved in and out of kindness like a tide. Sometimes the warmth was a blaze; sometimes it was a cold stone.
"Smile," I begged again and he gave me a brittle, professional smile. I kept it in paint.
We kept the rhythm of our days: I cooked a little, I modeled for him when he needed a face, I answered his calls. I came to class early because I liked the quiet. I remembered the first time I met him: a pool of light at a window, a boy with a clean shirt bending over my ruined sketch, telling me to lift the cheekbone. He had reached across me like an apology.
"You're my only light," I whispered to myself then.
He was the only one who ever noticed me in the bad days. I got picked on in the training camps. They tore out my practice pages, smeared pigment on my jacket, wrote cruel things. And I cried in the toilet. He found me there once and handed me a pack of tissues, then told me what to change in the drawing.
"Lift the cheekbone," he said. "Be brave. Draw the light."
Later, when everyone laughed at me, he laughed too, but he also showed me how to hold the charcoal like it could be a sword. I thought that made him my hero.
Years passed like that. My devotion hardened into habit. His indifference hardened into something else: a way of being where he could hurt me and then make a joke about it and everything would fall into place again. Only it didn't.
The change didn't happen all at once. It grew fainter and then loud. He started missing my calls. He started coming to my class to sit behind a crowd of students who wanted to learn from him. He started to be treated like a star.
"Why are you here?" I asked him once when he sat at my side in the canteen.
He shrugged. "I like your soup."
"You always go where the people are," I said.
"It's efficient."
The first time I saw him with her—Annette Heinrich—was at the exhibition. She play-acted surprise, walked behind him as if they were old friends, crowned him with a silly plastic crown while the crowd clapped.
I had the cake in my hands. I had a stupid, crooked message I had practiced piping for hours: "Happy Birthday, my favorite Eliot." I had stuffed strawberries for his mouth because he loved them. I had a million small reasons to stay.
I stood behind the glass wall and watched them make a show out of what used to be ours. I called him.
"Can I come?" I asked.
"Don't," he said.
"Please," I said. "It's your birthday."
He was busy. The crowd cheered. Another girl placed the crown on his head and they laughed.
That night I threw the cake into a dumpster because the world had turned the soft thing I made into trash, and I wanted to be the one who threw it in.
I blocked him and left the studio and everything that smelled like his shirts. I said we were over. I told friends that we had split.
A stack of his studies fell out of my art bag as I cleaned. They were all of me. He had painted me many times. I had been his model through those training days—small, broken, respiring in the shadows. Why would he paint me if he never cared? I kept thinking that painting is worship; painting someone is saying they matter.
I began a part-time job teaching kids to mix color—children don't ask nasty questions. They only ask if you like purple. So I let them teach me to look at the world again.
Then one afternoon I walked into the teachers' lounge and heard a voice I knew too well, laughing like a man proud of a secret.
"Remember when we set that up? She thought it was your rescue. She cried for days." Annette's laugh was bright and clean.
My feet locked.
Eliot's voice answered from beside her, not the quiet tutelage voice I'd loved. "You did the setup."
"You mean you didn't? We made the video, remember? We filmed it while she was sobbing in the bathroom. It was too good."
"You were the instigator," Annette teased back.
I stepped forward. All the light in the room seemed to tilt.
"Eliot?" I said, and my voice was small.
He looked at me and I expected—I don't know what I expected. Defense? Shame?
He blinked. He said my name like it might be the last thing on his mind.
"Sit down," he said, urgently. "Please, sit."
"Did you—were you laughing as they hurt me?" I asked.
He swallowed.
"It was a joke," he said. "It wasn't meant."
"You watched. You conspired." The words were brittle knives.
He reached out. The silver bracelet on my wrist knocked to the floor. It clattered like a bell.
"I—" he began.
"You let them film it," I said. "You let them set me up. You told the teacher it was my mistake. You torched my reputation."
Silence. Then people came out to see what was happening. Voices like rain.
"She made a scene," Annette said, smirking.
I grabbed him then. It was animal. I grabbed his collar and screamed everything: the loneliness, the nights I stayed awake, the ways he had turned me into something to play with.
"You are a bastard," I told him.
"You're overreacting," he said, and like a reflex I watched the calm slide off his face and a rawness show itself. He raised his arm to ward me off and cut his knuckle on a shattered cup. Blood trickled. Someone cried out. Someone else tried to pull us apart.
"I hate you," I said. "I hate you for everything."
He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The room had eyes now. He looked small.
The next morning, I moved out. I moved like you move when a room catches fire: you throw a bag in a chair, you lock the door behind you and you run even when you don't want to run.
Three nights later a whistle in an alley changed everything. A cluster of rough kids stepped out from shadows. They circled me. One of them grabbed my wrist.
I couldn't breathe. But before I could get to the right frightened sound, a figure sprang into the light. He took the blows without crying out. He stood between me and them like he'd decided to be my shield out of some reflex I couldn't own.
"Eliot!" I screamed at him later, when we sat in the laundry-basket light of the street.
"Go," he urged me. "Run."
"Why did you—" My anger was high and raw like salt. "Why didn't you stop them earlier? Why didn't you stop them when it mattered?"
He looked at the ground. "I tried." He touched a bruise forming on his ribs.
"You let it happen." My voice finally made it past my teeth. "You let everything happen."
That night, after the thugs were gone, he didn't go to the hospital. He didn't call the police. He vanished. Days passed. The school sent letters. No one knew where he was.
Then one evening my phone rang with a strange number. I answered because part of me couldn't help it.
"Hi, it's me," he said.
"You left," I said.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
I asked the question everyone asks when a wound is revealed: "Why?"
On the phone he laughed like a thing tearing. "Do you want the truth or the fiction?"
"Truth," I said.
He told me his secret like a man admitting to a crime. "I have bipolar," he said. "I didn't want to tell you."
He told me about the edges of his days: how light would turn itself into a sound and the sound into fury. He told me he sometimes hurt himself when he couldn't make the world stop, how the cuts made his feelings make sense. He told me about medication. He told me about nights that were too loud and days that were too empty.
"I didn't want to drag you in," he said. "I thought I could contain it."
"And yet you used me," I said. "You made me your play-thing."
He didn't deny it. He tried to explain.
"I thought I could control it all," he said. "I thought I could invent pain for you because I could then be the rescuer. I thought—"
"That's cruel," I said. "Intentional cruelty."
He laughed, a strangled sound. "Maybe."
"Do you love me?" I asked, and the badness in me wanted to hear the clean truth.
"Yes," he said. "But it's messy."
I put the phone down and walked until the city felt different, less a place for us. He called later, months later, asking for forgiveness with the same clumsy words. I said no.
Then the word "exhibition" came into being again. He was being honored. He was up for a major student award. I knew all the people who would be there, all the teachers who had praised him. I knew the crowd would gather like a tide.
I also knew I couldn't keep the story in my chest any longer. I couldn't let him drift away with a polite applause and a life that had pretended to forgive him without ever asking how he had hurt me.
So I made a decision.
The punishment was not physical. I didn't want his blood. I wanted the part he had hidden—the part where he had been cruel with an audience—to face an audience itself. I wanted the people who cheered for him to look at the truth.
The night of the ceremony, the auditorium smelled of lemon polish and new program pamphlets. Chairs filled. Eliot stood at the back, hair trimmed, posture correct. He smiled like a man who knew the room. He had a plaque in his hand.
I had a flash drive in my pocket.
Before the event started I slipped it onto the guest table where the press sat. They were young reporters who loved a scoop.
"What's that?" one of them asked when they found it.
"Probably a promo video," another said.
They plugged it into a laptop by instinct.
"Play it," a voice said.
And the room watched.
First there was a quiet clip: me, sixteen, in the art wing toilet, mascara streaking, a girl laughing behind the metal stall, a hand filming. Then the clip of teachers being led to believe I had stolen work. Then the little staged "rescue" where Eliot dramatically intervenes as if he had saved me from being torn down.
The video rolled on. There were screenshots of messages, threads where Eliot had joked with the girls, laughter in text about "what a show." The camera showed the bracelet falling, the different angles, the other students chuckling. Someone in the crowd gasped.
"Eliot," I said aloud. My voice carried through the speakers because a microphone had been left on for the next segment by mistake.
He turned. His smile faltered. It was the beginning of the transformation: from calm to confusion.
Then the feed switched to recorded interviews with classmates—some solemn, others embarrassed. "I thought he was the hero," one girl said. "He set it up," another whispered.
The volume rose. The truth filled the air like paint filling a blank canvas.
Eliot's face went from pale to the color of old paper. He walked up to the stage before anyone could stop him. The announcer stammered.
"What is this—" the announcer started.
"Stop it," Eliot said. He tried to speak. The room hummed.
Some people stood. Some sat. Someone recorded with their phone. A woman near the front made the sign of disbelief. A man whispered, "He looked like that?" The audience murmured. A few people clapped ironically. Someone laughed once, too loud.
"Is this a prank?" a young teacher demanded.
"No," I said. My hands were shaking, but my voice didn't. "It's the truth."
Eliot's reaction came fast and messy. He attempted to deny.
"This is a forgery," he said. "They edited—"
"Enough," Jonas Ribeiro, the head of department, said. He had the look of someone watching a mural crack. "We need an explanation."
Eliot's chest heaved. "You don't understand," he said. "I was trying to—"
"Trying to what?" I demanded. "Be the rescuer of your own story by manufacturing someone else's suffering?"
He faltered. The first of his faces—smug and managed—cracked into panic.
"I didn't mean—" he stammered. "I didn't think—"
"Did you ever think about how I felt?" I asked.
"I loved you," he said, and his voice was thin. The room watched him change. He moved from denial to pleading.
"It was a game," he tried, now with a beat of shock. "I didn't—"
"You're a liar," someone shouted from the back.
He looked around. The faces were not kind now. They were full of discovery.
"How can you stand there and say—" Annette's voice cut through the crowd like bright glass. She had stepped forward. "We thought it was funny. He encouraged us."
The crowd began to split into sides. Some recorded. A few students approached and put their hands on Eliot's shoulders; some of those hands were hard, accusing.
"This is shameful," the dean said. "We must investigate."
Eliot's shoulders sagged. For the first time he was undone in public. He moved from feigned control to bewilderment, to pleading, to collapse.
"Please," he said. "Please don't."
"Don't what?" I asked. "Don't be exposed?"
He began to cry—shuddering, ashamed, like a man realizing he had been seen.
"Forgive me," he begged. "Please."
A chorus of reactions rose up. Someone muttered, "He always had that—" and then covered their mouth. Phones flashed like a swarm of small stars. A teacher who had once praised him had tears. A friend who had cheered earlier looked away, embarrassed.
"You betrayed trust on purpose," Jonas said, and his voice had the weight of a gavel. "You manipulated students. You abused power. This is not art."
Eliot attempted a final defence.
"I'm ill," he said, his voice raw. "I—"
"Ill or not," the dean said, "we cannot ignore documented harm. You will be suspended pending a full review."
People started talking at once. Some called for his expulsion. Some whispered, "He should get help." Others said, "How could he do that to her?"
Then he did something I had not prepared for. He dropped to his knees in the aisle.
"Please," he cried. "I didn't think. I didn't think it would—"
"Stop," Annette snapped coldly. "Stop playing the victim."
By then the auditorium sounded like broken glass. The cameras kept rolling. Phones kept filming. Students crowded the aisles.
His face went from shock to denial to pleading to collapse into quietness. He pressed his butterfly-laced hands to his chest and sobbed. A group of people encircled him like it was a ritual.
"This is public," someone said. "We will not let this be swept."
Expert voices on the feed—professionals—commented into microphones: "This is not to vilify mental illness. He must be helped. But it does not excuse manipulation. People responsible for harm must face accountability."
Eliot's breathing was jagged now. He kept looking at me. Once, his eyes found mine and he mouthed something I couldn't hear. Maybe "forgive." Maybe "I'm sorry." Maybe both.
The punishment had shifted from theatrical humiliation to a more complex, raw place. He was no longer the charming artist who could gently angle light out of a muslin drape; he was a boy with a tangle of problems and a record of betrayal in front of those who had once adored him.
The crowd's reaction was layered: shock, fury, compassion, a small pitying kindness from someone who had loved a broken person and still wanted them to be fixed.
I listened to the clamor. I felt old. The silver bracelet on my wrist pricked me with a cold memory of mountains and cheap souvenirs. The cake, still with its ruined icing registered as a laugh in my peripheral vision. The world that had once been his stage had turned its lights on him.
"You're going to be suspended," Jonas said softly. "We will set up counseling. We will evaluate the harm. But the community must know what happened here."
Eliot's face crumpled.
He looked like a ruin. In the end he was not punished with violence, but he was punished with the thing he had used the most—exposure. The crowd watched him shrink, saw his mask removed, recorded his collapse. They would talk about it for months.
When it was over he was escorted away. People whispered, "He'll get help." Others whispered, "He deserves it." Some filmed the whole thing, the lighting catching the salt on his cheeks.
Afterwards, as the auditorium emptied, I stood by the garbage bin where once a cake box had been buried. The flash drives were examined by dean and press. Annette left quietly, her smirk gone. Eliot's name was on so many screens.
Weeks later the committee decided he would be suspended and required to enter a treatment program. The public record said the school would look into the matter of the recorded incidents, and a formal apology was recommended.
I did not relish his ruin. I did not dance on his downfall. I stood on the sidelines and watched justice be administered in a way that felt both small and necessary. He had to be accountable. He also had to be helped.
I kept the silver bracelet. Once, on a roof in summer, he had slipped it on me like a promise. I had never managed to take it off. It was a symbol I could not easily throw away—the lock of a childhood trick, the laughable superstition that a bracelet had anything to do with fate. But now, when I closed my hand around it, it felt only like a weight.
"Do you regret it?" Eliza asked me months after, over tea.
"Sometimes," I said. "Mostly I regret loving the idea of him. The rest is a lesson."
"Will you forgive him?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I forgave him years ago in tiny ways—by painting him, by answering a call. But forgiveness isn't the same as forgetting or trusting. I think forgiveness is a quiet thing. Trust is louder."
Months later I found myself back at my easel, painting a portrait where the mouth finally and truly relaxed into something tender. It was not his face; it was a memory of his smile. I painted it soft and small and kept it in a drawer because I did not want to display anything that could be mistaken for an invitation.
Sometimes I still dream of the cake with the crooked letters. Sometimes I eat strawberries and remember his stupid smile and shiver. Sometimes I hear a soft voice on the phone and want to pick up.
I don't.
The bracelet is still on my wrist. The silver has dulled. Once, I thought it would lock me to someone forever and that loss would mean my undoing. Now I think of it as a reminder that even bright things tarnish.
At night, when the city is quiet and my lamp is on and the charcoal is soft in my fingers, I paint the line of a cheekbone, the tilt of an eyebrow, the way light slips over a mouth that used to mean everything. I paint and paint until the memory is only an image and the image is only a study.
"Do you ever want to go back?" Eliza asks sometimes.
"No," I say. "But I'm not angry in the taste that ruins me. I'm careful now. I like better things: the small kindnesses, the steady people, the teachers who keep their hands clean. I like me, painting, and a life that fits my hands."
Sometimes the world still points cameras at me. Sometimes people say, "You're the girl he painted." I smile and say, "He used to paint everything," and it is true. He taught me a lot about light.
On certain nights I can still hear a faint rhythm—a little like a knife on skin—and sometimes a voice like his will touch my mind and say, "I love you." And if I answer, it is small.
I put my hand in my pocket and find a crumb of that birthday cake I rescued from the dumpster the night I threw it away. I taste stale cream and strawberries and regret.
Then I paint.
The End
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