Sweet Romance16 min read
The Heart-Shaped Mark and the Star Who Stayed
ButterPicks13 views
I had never missed a bell in two years of teaching middle school until that stormy morning.
"Are you sure you heard something like a plane?" I asked the taxi driver, pressing my palm to the fogged window.
He laughed and shook his head. "Girl, with this weather? Planes don't fly today."
I watched rain cartwheels on the glass and felt something like an ache. "Right," I said, but my eyes were wet.
I had not meant to miss him. I had only meant to be on time.
When I was younger, back before this city taught me how to be careful, a boy found me on the curb of a hot street.
"Are you hurt?" he asked without meaning to be cruel.
"My painting," I said, because it was all I had to say. I clutched the torn paper like a small secret.
He crouched at my knees and smiled like the sun. "Let me help."
He offered me a clean sheet, a little box of color. He worked faster than I had thought possible.
"What's your name?" he asked later.
I had been in a hurry then, like I always was. "It doesn't matter," I told him.
He laughed like it was a joke and leaned back on his heels. "I think it matters."
The boy's name turned out to be Rafael Fleming when I learned it properly.
"Kinsley!" a small girl called once, barging into my life like a kite in a strong wind.
"That's my sister," Rafael had said, and I learned then that people have families that keep them heavy in the world.
I never knew those names would anchor me years later.
"You sure you want me to come?" Kinsley asked one afternoon when she dragged me into that bright milk-tea shop.
"You don't have to," I said, embarrassed she had spoken for me.
She just waved a hand at me like the sky was nothing. "Of course I want to. You saved my math quiz life once. Come on."
She chattered like a bird. "My brother's a little strange and very handsome and he will be your friend and also maybe your boss someday. He is a pilot student you know—big, tall, can almost touch the clouds."
I felt my cheeks pinch. "I am not ready for being someone's story."
"Don't be dramatic," she laughed. "You are stuck in my story whether you like it or not."
When I moved to this city we left the sea behind.
My mother, Gabriela Arnold, made our life here because she wanted me to have a chance at a proper school.
"Red-braised spare ribs tonight," she sang once, as if life was always made of small feasts.
I smiled and said, "Okay, I will wash up." I did not tell her about the cracked paint, the hands that had torn my picture.
I taped the paper into my bag like a map, the torn edge a small war.
Daisy Ford noticed me first as a target.
"Lois," they said my name with a sneer once—"freakish scar-face." I learned to fold myself small when they named me.
The mark on my temple was a small red patch, shaped like a heart. In small towns people either hide marks or make names of them. They chose to turn mine into a joke.
They threw a water bottle. I swung back. I learned how to keep my face calm.
Once they ripped my painting, the paper fell like a wounded bird. I wanted to gather it and try to glue it together, but the edges bled like open roads.
That day Rafael found me in the school hallway. He stood between me and the crowd like a shield.
"Who are you?" Kinsley had asked him in the kitchen the night he took one of my soaked shirts and handed me a clean one.
"I thought your sister wanted help," he had said.
"She doesn't have a sister," Kinsley had said. "She has a friend. Natasha the math vampire and oh my god you should help because she is a genius and I am not and also—"
Rafael had smiled and only said, "Eat your noodles, you brat."
I did not know what to do with that much kindness. I was used to hiding.
"You really don't have to come," I told Rafael when he offered to buy me dinner after he had stopped Daisy in the corridor.
His hand rested on the strap of my bag, steady as a pillar. "You did not need me to stop them."
He shrugged. "I don't like bullies."
We walked together like two slow moons, our shadows long on the pavement.
When he asked me what I liked to eat, I admitted, "Tomato soup. Not the sweet kind. I like spicy."
Rafael nodded like he understood a map of me he had never seen before. "Spicy for me too."
"Do you have a phone?" he asked one evening, and I wanted to say yes but I had left it on my desk charging and it died.
He laughed and said, "My password is my birthday." He told me the numbers like a small secret.
When I asked the meaning behind a strange cluster on the planets chart—Pluto and Charon—Kinsley told me how one small moon always faced another.
"Charon is the name," she explained, "and Charon would follow Pluto forever if he could."
Rafael, I later learned, was called like a star himself—named because of that myth, because his parents were stargazers.
"You're coming to the gallery tomorrow," Rafael said before I had a chance to say I could not.
"I didn't even make that painting," I told him. I had painted as a child, yes, but the one they wanted for the contest had been drawn when I was angry and small, in the dark corner of a museum. I had taken the brush as if to make a shelter.
"That makes no difference," Rafael said. "You are going to submit something. I will come with you."
Kinsley chattered a storm the night before we left for the gallery.
"I am setting you up for success!" she declared, juggling her phone and a pack of stickers. "Do you know that Rafael used to know this teacher? He literally does everything. Loosen up, Lois!"
I did not relax. I folded the jacket close, and the heart on my head seemed to burn.
At the gallery, a woman named Gerardo Wells—no, he was a man; I had met him once, his voice a warm baritone—asked me about my work like he was peeling an orange slowly to find its sweetness.
"Your lines are honest," he said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
I told myself that if a grown person could say such a thing, then perhaps my torn painting could be something like a prize and not a punishment.
In the days that followed, Rafael taught me to paint the deep blues and the black lines of space.
"Use darker pigment for the outer rim," he said, placing a small tile of mixed color near my wrist. "And this color—this is loneliness."
I made a half laugh and said, "Lonely looks like ice to me."
He smiled and said, "It can look like anything you want."
When I came back to school the next week, someone had posted the photos of my torn canvas online. The comment section was cruel, a sea of small, bright toothless bites.
I knew Daisy had been right behind them. I knew the wind carried me into harm's jaws more than once.
"I can help you," Rafael told me quietly. "Let's go to the teacher. Let's make them own what they did."
But I was a coward about the loud things. I let time do the work and kept my head quiet.
Until one afternoon, the whole school gathered for the Youth Arts Award. Parents filled the gym in a hum. The stage was bright and the air smelled of coffee and shoe polish.
Kinsley had begged me to go up on stage if they called my name. I had said no. I stood at the back, tucked beneath the rafters, and watched the world clap for people who had not been brave enough to make me feel smaller the way they had.
Daisy's face was one of those polished, practiced faces bullies wear to win in public. She shushed people with a smile. Her parents were there in a suit that matched her shoes.
When the director started the slideshow, I thought it would be pictures of paintings and little blurbs.
Instead, the large screen flicked and the lights dimmed and someone pressed a button.
People think they can control the shape of a story when all they hold is a simple switch. They are wrong.
"Uh..." a voice said through the hall, and the sound of it was like a dropped pebble. "We had materials to share about a complaint. It seems a recording was submitted."
A hush slid over the room.
The projector threw light like a knife and then the video began.
It started small: three teenage faces pushed into frame, laughing. Their fingers tore a sheet of painted paper until the fibers broke like small bridges.
I felt the floor tilt. I recognized the hands, the sneer, the precise, ugly laugh. Daisy—Daisy Ford—leaning in to say the words she had said to me before.
"She's a freak," someone in the clip said. "Her mark is disgusting."
Daisy's mouth moved. "Who cares? She looks like a villain in a movie."
Her friends are in the clip, the three or four who had been the knives that year, and then—then a camera shifted and it caught them posting the pictures, spreading the cruelty like warm jam over bread.
The video cut. The gym had gone very still.
"What is that?" someone in the crowd whispered. Phones lifted like a forest of tiny eclipses, fingers trembling.
Daisy blinked. Her smile stayed for a breath too long, like a mask pressed to the face of a statue.
I did not plan the next part. I did not mean for it to happen.
Rafael stood where he had been standing at the edge of the audience—he had been asked to sit by the principal for a student escort—and he walked to the microphone as if it belonged to him.
"Is the person who submitted this here?" he asked. "Because we are going to talk about this."
Daisy's eyes widened with something I had not seen before—not triumph, but confusion.
"That's a private moment," she said at first, so small it barely reached the nearest row.
Someone behind the stage had the microphone on. "This was submitted on behalf of the school investigation committee. We have more evidence."
Her face changed. It is a slow thing when someone first listens to a new truth. Daisy had lived by the safe currency of sneers, and now the stage was asking her to trade it for honesty.
"What do you mean? I didn't—" she began, and then the word stopped in her mouth like it was something heavy.
People around me gasped, small noises like glass underfoot. Phones lifted and the red little dots of recording winked on.
"That's not me," Daisy said, the sound of denial a thin thread.
Rafael stepped forward, his jaw steady. "You can deny it, or you can explain it. But there are witnesses," he said, and the camera cut to a still of the group chat that had been shared with the school office—the screenshots, the slurs, the laughing emoji. The hall hummed with the sound of low voices.
"You wanted to humiliate someone," he said, and he did not shout. He never needed to.
Daisy's arrogance cracked like old paint. For a moment she was exactly where I had been—small, exposed.
"No, I'm sorry, I—" Her words were in pieces now. She reached for a line to hold onto. "We were just... we were messing. It was a joke."
"And who found it funny?" someone in the crowd yelled.
"Nobody," Daisy said. It fell apart. She shuffled like a child caught hiding a secret.
A cluster of older parents murmured. Someone took a photograph of Daisy's face where the light caught her like whitened paper. Clicks rippled in a slow chain as the crowd's phones recorded history.
"You told others to post it," Rafael continued, and that was when the first true shift happened. The small, confident smirk she wore for weeks vanished. The denial ran thin. "You laughed about making someone else small to make yourself large," a woman near the front said. Her voice was like a bell.
Daisy's breathing changed. She tried to call out a name, a wild grasp for a scapegoat. "It was Lila, she—"
"Lila is your friend," someone said. "Lila has denied it. You can't keep pinning this on people."
Shock flowed over Daisy like cold water. She walked in steps that were too quick and then too slow toward the center of the stage, toward the light. The camera recorded each moment. People around me shifted forward, as if pulled by the same invisible thread of curiosity and justice.
"No, you don't—" she tried, but the sound failed her. Her eyes were wide then, like saucers, but they were not proud. She looked like a child who had been surprised into knowing that the world could see her.
She looked at the faces around her—there were teachers, parents, strangers, and students who had felt afraid to press back. Some of them were crying quietly. Some had their mouths open. Some whispered, "I didn't know." Some raised their phones higher.
"Stand down," Daisy said, the first bark of command given with the last of her safety, and then it all crumbled as the principal stepped forward, voice calm but full.
"There will be a formal hearing," he said into the mic. "But we also have to face how we let this happen. For now, we ask Daisy Ford to stand here and tell the school if she admits to participating."
Daisy's face did not answer, but her lungs did. "I—no," she started, then more honestly, "I did help. I was mean. I am sorry."
Her apology landed like a pebble in a pond. The splashing around it happened fast: whispers, the quiet shock of the parents, the relieved sniffle of the students who had been the target.
Someone recorded her saying those words and sent it everywhere. Phones flashed like a constellation.
Denial fell to desperation. "It wasn't just me!" Daisy's hands reached for the air as if to catch anyone at hand. "I didn't mean—please don't—"
She sank down, knees hitting the stage floor. Her knees left dark marks on the pale wood. A student near the front stood up in furious motion.
"Get off the stage," someone hissed. But no one grabbed her. She had chosen the fall and had to take it.
Her fingers dug at the floor in the way a small animal claws for cover. Her mouth opened. Her voice broke. "Please," she whispered. The word had the naked tone of one who has lost everything in an instant and is making a last, frantic bargain.
A group of teachers moved forward, stern. One teacher called out, "Take her to the office. We'll call her parents." But the crowd did not part like water at that command. People stayed, curious, angry, careful.
"She started it," a boy near me hissed, "and now she is crying."
"She hurt Lois," the mother behind me said. She pulled a small handkerchief from her purse and dabbed her eyes, quietly furious.
Someone farther back, a teenager with an old phone, laughed a single sharp laugh and then turned it into the kind of sound that can make a room colder. "Look at her now," she said to her friend, and the friend answered with a soft, "I can't believe it."
Phones were like eyes. Photos went up. Videos were uploaded. A hundred hands reached for the exact moment of her collapse and turned it into a thousand small judgments that would follow her.
Daisy knelt on the stage. At first she kept her hands pressed to the floor like they could hold the world from shifting.
"Please, I'm sorry," she whimpered once more. There was a crack in her voice like an old photograph torn at the corner.
Rafael did not clap. He did not raise his voice. He simply looked at her with a tired, steady gaze that said, "We have to do better." His face was calm and his shoulders did not tremble.
Around us, people started to whisper and then to talk louder. "She has to be disciplined," one parent said. "There should be consequences." "She should apologize in front of the class," a teacher said. "We will do an investigation," the principal repeated.
Daisy's face changed from pride to panic to denial to collapse to pleading. She had run a map to cruelty and hit a wall that did not bend.
Someone took a picture of her kneeling and posted it, and the people around us murmured in a prickled chorus. The sound was heavy. "Shame," someone hissed from the back.
A boy across the hall, who had once been quiet when I was pushed, pulled out his phone and sent the image to a friend with a caption: "She got hers." That note, cold as a nail, traveled.
Daisy begged for mercy. Her voice shook. "Please, please," she said, tears streaking mascara down her face. "I'll do anything. I didn't mean—"
No one gave her a microphone to say more. Phones recorded every tremor. The principal met her eyes and said, "There will be a formal review. Do not leave the school grounds."
She nodded, wordless, and someone guided her toward the back where adults took her away like a tide breaking.
The crowd buzzed. Some students clapped—soft, hesitant claps that sounded like relief. Some parents stood and whispered. Some people took pictures and started to type.
Later, the video clipped and the gym slowly returned to other noises—the scrape of chairs, the clack of shoes. People had not forgiven her; people had not forgotten. The recording of her apology spread by evening.
You could feel the slow change in the school. The things that had been shrugged away would be spoken about now.
When I went home that night, my hands trembled for a different reason. I had walked into a storm and the center had finally been seen.
After Daisy's public collapse, the world did not flip into a golden dream.
There were meetings and apologies and punishments handed down by the school board. Daisy had to stand in front of the student council and read pages of what she had done and why it was wrong. Her parents were called in. She had to work on community projects. She had to write an essay about the pain she had caused and present it in assembly.
The crowd's reactions shifted from shock to murmurs, from whispering to loud debates. Some students filmed, some clapped, some turned their faces away.
Daisy's reaction went through the stages we had seen on the stage and more—pride to shock, shock to denial, denial to collapse, and then a long, quiet begging that followed her like a shadow for weeks.
She learned, in the open palms of others, what cruelty costs.
After that, things changed between me and the kids who had been cruel.
Not all of them became my friends. Some stayed away as if they had been burned by my presence.
But with Rafael, there were small things that came afterward—extra brushes left on my desk, a text to check if I was home, a quiet mouthful of compliments when my painting did something brave.
"You did well today," he told me once over coffee.
"I only watched," I objected.
"You stood in the same room," he said. "That counts."
Kinsley tried to act like a matchmaker in the silly ways she knew best.
"You two are obvious," she said one day, peeking into our shared lesson when Rafael came to help me with a shading method.
"I am not obvious," I said, but my hands were steady as they moved a brush across a canvas.
"That's what makes it obvious," Kinsley said, and she left like a small comet, pleased she had thrown light.
At a small show in a side gallery, Gerardo Wells introduced my work and said, "It has a simplicity that is honest."
I wanted to tell him how smallness had once been my only shield and how some people had tried to make it a prison.
Instead, I just nodded and said, "Thank you."
Months passed, but not the kind of time that flattens everything. The heart-shaped mark on my temple was still there, a small proof of all the ways life had rubbed me raw.
Sometimes children asked about it. "Why is it there?" They were curious, not cruel.
I told them, "It's just a mark." I let them see it without shame.
Kinsley once told a boy in class, loud enough for everyone to hear, "That's not ugly. It's a love mark. It makes her brave."
The boy looked at me and smiled in a way that asked permission. I nodded. He said, "That's cool."
Rafael and I sat once on the roof of the school at night, watching the sky like a pair of amateur astronomers.
"You always look like you are holding something back," he said, handing me a small cup of cheap tea.
"I used to think being small was protection," I told him. "But it was only hiding."
"Boundaries then," he said, and his voice was careful like he was learning how to handle a delicate instrument. "Not hiding."
"Boundaries," I repeated, because I liked that word better.
He taught me the way the constellations seemed different when you were close to someone.
"Pluto is lonely and small," he said. "But Charon's side never looks away from it."
"Are you going to be Charon to my Pluto forever?" I teased.
He smiled and said, "I will face you as often as I can."
Sometimes Kinsley would drag us to ridiculous midnight snacks and drag the whole group into laughter.
"Come on, Lois! Life is a buffet tonight," she shouted at me once.
"Then pass the napkins," I answered.
Kinsley turned serious for one second and said, "Promise me you will let me be your friend anyway. I'll keep being the loud part if you are the steady part."
I promised, in the small way friends promise—by showing up.
When people asked me how I felt about Rafael, I would stammer. He was not a boy from a fairy tale. He was a student, proud and stubborn and patient in the ways that mattered.
"You should let him know," Kinsley told me. "He is like... a very tall, handsome lighthouse. He points you to shore."
"He points at things sometimes," I said.
"But which way do you point?" she asked. "Toward him?"
I thought of the roof and the quiet tea and the way his fingers brushed paint from his own nose and left a mark like a punctuation on his face.
It was hard to answer.
The art contest had been the turning point for some. The school had to learn how to hold hurt and the people who hurt others accountable.
Daisy left eventually. She came back months later and apologized in a letter that went to the school magazine. It was honest and awkward and watched over by teachers. Some of us accepted it. Some of us did not.
She had to stand before a crowd and speak her wrongs. She had to look at those she had hurt and accept the fact they might not forgive her.
For me, the act of forgiveness was not a single sentence. It was a series of small choices—letting my anger cool, choosing not to answer cruel messages, and sometimes giving space when people tried to reach out with clumsy sincerity.
"Are you okay?" Rafael asked once when the school quieted down.
"I am learning to be," I said. "That is different from being okay."
There is a small cat that lives around Rafael's house. We named her Little Ice Cream because Rafael promised once that I would buy him an ice pop next summer and then never let him forget it.
She sleeps in my lap sometimes when I visit and purrs like a machine that thinks it is a clock.
"She likes you," Rafael said one evening, watching me scratch the cat behind the ear.
"She seems to know how to choose people," I said.
Rafael put his hand on the back of my chair like it was a small promise. "Choose me sometimes," he said.
After the chaos and the awards and the long meetings, the school felt like itself again but not in the old ways. It had new rules and a newer memory.
I finished another painting and this time I signed my name across the corner. It felt brave to put it there like a stamp.
"You signed it," Rafael said, with the small smile he kept for me only.
"Someone has to take credit," I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders and said, "I like your name on it."
The public punishment had been ugly and necessary in its way. Daisy's face had gone through the stages of hubris to collapse and pleading. The audience had reacted in confusion and shock, some whispering, some filming, some clapping. She had learned, as the crowd watched, that cruelty is visible and that actions leave marks on everyone nearby.
She had broken down in front of hundreds and begged for mercy. The shame made her small, and sometimes that smallness is the teacher we need.
The town's response was messy: some took photos, some cried, some cheered. The city talked about what had happened for weeks. For a while, it felt as if the world had remembered it needed to be kinder.
"Kinsley stole my pen," Rafael sighed once, smiling, as we walked home after a long studio night.
"I stole it back," Kinsley said, triumphant.
"You are a ridiculous child," Rafael told her, but his voice was laughing.
There is a little habit I have now. I lift my hair every morning and look at the heart-shaped mark. It is as soft as a bruise once was. It is the place where I learned that people can be mean to make themselves feel big, and that some people will stand up anyway.
Rafael once touched the mark gently with a fingertip and said, "I like it."
"Don't say that like it's a prize," I told him, and he laughed like a small bell.
On a night when the stars were cold and clear and the city below smelled like toasted bread, I found Rafael on the roof watching the sky as if it were a book he wanted to read.
"Do you ever get scared?" I asked.
"Every day," he said. "But then I figure that the sky never leaves. Maybe some things are meant to stay."
I looked at him and at the tiny, quiet cat sleeping in a box below our feet and thought about how we choose our small constants.
"I will stay," I told him.
He did not smile in any way that mattered less than the way his shoulders dropped, easing into me. "Good," he said. "Because I am tired of standing alone."
The heart-shaped patch on my temple is a map. It reminds me where I came from and what I have learned and who I will walk toward.
"I will come to your shows," Rafael promised one night.
"I might come to yours," I said, and we laughed because promises have seasons and sometimes take their time.
In the light of the rooftop lamp, my small scar looked like a quiet heart. The cat snored and the city hummed. Rafael wrapped his arm around me and the world felt, in that small instant, like it had room for both my old smallness and a new kind of beginning.
I clip my hair back and see the heart-shaped mark where paint and rain once mixed.
I breathe. The mark is mine, and the star beside it—Rafael—keeps facing me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —