Face-Slapping15 min read
The Little Prince, a Stamped Ticket, and the Quiet Reckoning
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I remember the moment I told my mother I wanted to leave. The living room smelled like boiling soup and the late sun made stripes across the floor.
"Mum, I want to go abroad for an exchange," I said.
Lillian Elliott stopped scrubbing the dish, blinked, and sat down. "Why now? You've never been away from home. Can you take care of yourself?"
"It’s not alone," I replied quickly. "Dillon Ball, an older senior at college, is going with me. He offered to help." My voice tried to sound casual, like I was announcing a tea party.
Lillian looked at me as mothers always do—reading every falsehood like an open letter. "Dillon Ball? Is he your boyfriend?"
"No," I said, and the denial left the same dry taste it always did. "I don't have someone I like."
Her hand found my shoulder and squeezed. "If you want to go, go. Whatever you decide, I support you."
My eyes filled before I could stop them. I rested my head against her shoulder and let the small, muffled sound of a childhood home hold me for a breath.
After she left the kitchen, I climbed the stairs to my room. The cardboard box beside my wardrobe waited like a small island of the past. I shoved clothes and passports into a suitcase and at the very end my fingers brushed the spine of a hardcover I'd loved since childhood—The Little Prince. A bookmark slipped out and the paper was full of one name in neat, looping letters: Emmett Youssef, over and over.
I had been twelve and the world was simpler then. Emmett—he'd never been anything but the boy who lived a few doors down, the boy who slept over and traded comic books. Ten years of neighborliness, a gift of an ornate copy of The Little Prince on a birthday, promises whispered like bargains in the dark. I had promised to be by his side forever. Ten years of simple things had taught me how to fold my life around him.
I wrote on the margin in a small, sharp script: Emmett Youssef—I like you.
I had carried that one line for longer than anyone should carry anything so sharp. I tucked the book back in the box and closed the lid as if the cardboard could keep secrets.
Monday morning I met Dillon at the school gate. He teased as he took my suitcase with an easy hand. "No backing out this time."
I watched the campus recede as we drove toward the airport. The buildings flowed by, monuments to a life I had decided to walk away from. Emmett's face flashed behind my eyes again and again like a picture I couldn't focus on.
Three days later, on a different campus, Emmett paced the hall of the men's dormitory and refreshed my name in his phone until the battery whined. Our silence had become a kind of punctuation between us—short, sharp, unresolved. He had a right to be hurt, and when he finally came to my house, there was a box on the porch.
Lillian Elliott shouldered the box forward without noticing Emmett's face pale. "These are the things she doesn't want," she said. "Can you help throw them out?"
Emmett caught the book before it hit the pavement. When the little square of paper fell free, his name was written on it in a dozen small loops like a secret tattoo. He read it and his breath changed.
In March, years before anyone thought carefully about love, I chose a university because Emmett would be there. We had been neighbors since we were children; his family and my family had been woven together by casual, expectant duty. He was my safety and the curve of my days, and I thought I was content being the friend who would always be a friend.
On the bus to the orientation, he asked a small, bright question. "Do you ever think we'll get tired of being together?"
I said what I had always said, "No."
He smiled in a way that made the world small and quiet, a smile that never seemed to change. I never told him the truth about how long I'd loved him. I could not risk losing even the easiest parts of him.
The semester opened like a book. We settled into classes; old rhythms softened into new ones. And then he said things that rocked me in a way I hadn't been ready for.
"I want to be in love," Emmett told me one day at the edge of the auditorium when the crowd thinned and the afternoon sun made the glass glow. "I think I fell in love at first sight."
"Who?" I blurted, and the stupid question came out a second before my brain could stop it.
He looked at me, eyes steady. "I don't know her name yet. I saw her and I wanted to know everything."
I understood then: he could love someone else entirely and still be my friend. That knowledge pressed on my chest like a heavy, indifferent hand.
He didn't find her then. Weeks passed. He tried his best to explain the feeling, but I knew the truth in the way his attention slipped away. Soon he did find her—Laure Tariq, the former school beauty who slid into hearts like a silk ribbon. The campus noticed; the forums gossiped. Emmett introduced her to his family as if she were meant to be a part of all the plans he'd ever held. He called her his girlfriend in a voice I had saved for me alone.
I watched them together at a student festival, his hand on her shoulder like a scene I had practiced in my imagination and never thought would end like this. They kissed at a dare and the applause was a single blade.
"Are you all right?" he asked me later, standing nearby but not quite seeing me.
"Yes," I lied, the sound of my own voice foreign.
He was gentle, the kind of gentle that made a person think everything would be all right—even when it wasn't. "I want you to come with me on Saturday," he said. "We said we'd always be friends."
"I can't," I said. "I've started some things. I'm busy."
He looked at me—the same eyes I had written his name under in a sloppy childish hand—and for the first time I felt the ease between us sluice away like water.
A few small fires of rumor and a big messy misunderstanding made things worse. Kendra Zhao—Laure's rival at school for beauty and attention—one evening accused me in front of a crowd of students of losing a sheet of the competitors' list. The accusation was loud and precise. Heads turned. A small scandal bloomed.
Emmett didn't defend me.
Then Dillon Ball stepped in.
I had known Dillon from class—steady, older, patient. He had found a stack of the vital lists in a trash bin when he left the building late that night. He brought them to the auditorium and unrolled them like evidence, and he looked at Kendra with a face that did not ask the room's opinion.
"You should apologize," Dillon said to Kendra.
Kendra took the pages and smiled like a girl who had just been handed a crown. She laughed it off as a misunderstanding. But Dillon did not stop. He pressed the lists into Kendra's hands and made sure she read the lines she had once claimed missing. "You made a public claim against someone without proof," he said, and he would not let the matter rest there.
In a room full of students, Kendra's smile shrank. "Maybe it was misplaced," she said.
Dillon's voice was even. "Then you should say that."
People turned their phones out of their pockets like mirrors. One by one they began to record. Kendra had a moment of triumph and then a slow decline. Her face changed, and I watched the color go out of her as if someone had pulled a plug.
But Emmett—Emmett apologized to her. He said, "Don't make a big deal out of it. It's a silly thing."
He walked away from me in that moment too.
I sat in the back of the hall and watched the two people who mattered to me—Dillon and Emmett—handle the world differently. Dillon steadied it. Emmett let it float where it pleased.
"For what it's worth," Dillon said later after he had handed the evidence over to the student council, "I thought you did the right thing by leaving."
"Why do you think that?" I asked.
He looked at me like a man who reads maps for a hobby. "Because you deserve a place where they value you and the small, honest things you do. Come with me. There's an exchange in Washington."
I thought about Emmett's name in a lined margin and how it had never changed despite the years. I thought about a life measured in quiet, faithful gestures. Finally I decided I would go.
"Okay," I told him. "Let's go."
We left school on a morning where the air smelled like paper and the sky was clean. Dillon carried my suitcase with an arm that did not tremble. I kept my apartment key in my pocket like contraband.
Washington changed me more than I expected. There were new habits: a small ritual of coffee, an easy friendship with a woman who called herself Bella Britt in the office where I worked. Dillon helped at every turn in a way that was practical and kind without requiring repayment. He was not the kind of man to make promises he couldn't keep.
When the program ended and I came back, things had shifted. Emmett had been promoted at his company to a chief translator—talented, neat, someone who could command English in a room and make the room bend to grammar. I had a job too, and Dillon and I had a quiet, professional affinity that others mistook for romance.
We resumed a version of the old lives, but the map had been redrawn. Emmett and Laure's relationship dissolved with the sort of neatness that happens when two people decide to stop trying. He went through a period of being both unavailable and sharp—an anger I could see in the corners of him. Then one evening, he came to my office with a paper bag.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
He didn't answer directly. "I wanted to say thanks," he said. "For helping with the translation last week."
I took the bag and peered inside. Coffee, tea, a pair of gloves. "You're welcome."
He looked at me like he had found a book he'd misfiled. "Can we talk?"
We did not talk in a tidy way. He was not the kind of man who arranged words neatly when he was nervous. He asked small, sharp things and then left a silence where big things could grow. There was no dramatic confession. There was, instead, a date in a hospital early in winter.
I had been at the university reunion when a lamp fell and threw shards of metal like stars toward Emmett's head. He saved me from the falling wreckage and hurt himself in the process. There was blood at his temple and a hospital smell that made the world taste like metal.
The ambulance quieted the noise with a white blur. He came around with my hand in his.
"You frightened me," I said, ridiculous with relief.
"Not as much as you," he replied. "You moved faster than I did."
There were murmurs of concern. A nurse teased, "His girlfriend is very kind." Someone else laughed. Emmett's friends hovered, awkward and solicitous. I remembered when he had held a handful of my papers all those years ago like treasure. There was a tenderness that did not require explanation.
After that night, someone—Boris Washington, a loud friend from Emmett's college days—sent a message that read like advice and a dare. "If you want him," Boris wrote, "decide."
The world made me small and large at the same time. I wanted nothing unfair. I wanted Emmett to be happy even if it wasn't with me. I wanted Dillon's steady hand and the promise of work we had forged in the United States. I wanted to be myself without losing measure.
Everything grew complicated when Kendra found opportunity and turned it into a weapon.
Kendra's strategy was quiet at first: a little whisper here, a narrower look there. She had joined our small company and had enough charm to plant herself like a vine against trust. She started to turn things into stories—documents misfiled, emails delayed, contracts that had gone astray. She smiled as she walked past the copyroom and left a trail of suggestion.
One afternoon the heart of the problem unraveled in a way I could not have imagined. A key translation file was missing and an entire corporate negotiation stalled because one page was incorrect. The error cost money and made offices tense as winter. Fingers pointed. The executive team at Pierre Schulze's firm called for an emergency review; clients leaned on their phones like fragile instruments.
I had been in charge of delivering a dossier. I had given it to Kendra because she had asked to help. Later the document did not arrive. People cited names and rumors and then—most dangerous of all—people started to believe Kendra's version of events.
The meeting where the accusation came to a head was held in a glass boardroom with sun that turned the table into a slice of daylight. Kendra stood in front of them with a practiced face.
"Cameron Omar misplaced the file," she said.
I felt something like a cold hand press against my throat. Dillon's eyes narrowed like a man trying to read a map through rain. Emmett's expression was not cruel; it was weathered into caution. We were all exhausted.
"Why would Cameron do that?" Kendra continued. "She has a nice resume, but mistakes happen."
Dillon stood up. He had found the original set of files in a trash can inside a copy room—someone had thrown them out. Someone had sought to erase the trail. He slid the neat batch of papers across the glass.
"These were not lost. Somebody removed a copy and then disposed of it. We need transparency."
Kendra's smile thinned. She postponed touchy details and redirected the room's focus. "Maybe it was an accident. We are all human."
"Show us your system access logs," Emmett said, voice like a knife rinsed in ice. He had always been precise with methods. The logs showed Kendra's access at odd times that did not match her schedule. Kendra's expression cracked.
"That's impossible," she said, and her voice punched into the room. "I only worked late once because I had a deadline."
"These times don't match what you just said," Pierre Schulze said, leaning forward with the weight of a boss. "Explain."
The office lights hummed. Phones were out; people recorded. Kendra's face flushed as the evidence stacked up against her. Her previous charm was no longer armor.
"What are you suggesting?" Kendra challenged.
"That you moved the files," Emmett said quietly. "Tell us why."
At that point, the room was a cannon of gazes. Chairs creaked. The client representatives who had lost weeks of progress watched like a jury. One person pressed a phone to the table and everyone heard the room's breathing on the live feed. Kendra's mouth worked.
She used a ploy I had seen before—distract, diminish, and then become the injured party. She raised her voice and called me arrogant in the same breath she denied any wrongdoing. She tried to redirect blame and make others feel sorry for her presumptions.
I did not want the spectacle. I did not want anyone to be hurt. But the rules of public humiliation had been set by the enterprise itself. Justice in a corporate world has the shape of lights and witnesses.
Dillon tapped his pen on the table, slow, steady. "Either you show us proof of your account activity that matches your actions, or we will have to file an internal investigation."
Kendra's eyes darted around as if searching for an escape. "You can't—"
"Stop," Emmett said. His voice was cold. "Stop accusing others so quickly."
Kendra's facade melted. She tried to laugh. And then she lost it.
Her reaction moved faster than any of us expected. The smile curdled into denial and then into a rough, ragged insistence that she had been framed. She claimed we were conspiring and that the logs were manipulated. The room's atmosphere condensed into a thin, hot line of resentment. Phones clicked. Someone whispered, "Why would she do this?"
Kendra, losing footing, tried to cry. Her sobs at first looked like performance. People in the back recorded—naturally—as if evidence needed every angle. Her colleagues, who earlier had applauded her energy and charm, folded their arms and retreated. I saw faces that had smiled at her dinners now narrow into suspicion.
The escalation took on the shape of a public unmasking.
An hour later, the company arranged an emergency meeting in the atrium where the staff had gathered in clusters like flocks. The CEO stepped up onto a small platform and spoke plainly. "We ran a full audit," he said. "The file was mishandled. The access logs show multiple anomalies. Kendra Zhao has been suspended pending investigation. We will cooperate with legal measures."
Phones lifted. Someone yelled, "She's a liar!" Another person laughed nervously and said, "What a scandal."
Kendra's smile had gone entirely. She stood on the fringes, looking small. Then something happened that I had never expected and which felt too harsh and yet too inevitable: she moved toward the center of the crowd, pushed past a few colleagues, and shouted, "This is a smear campaign! You all are jealous because I am competent!"
Her clutch of denial collapsed into raw pleading. "Please, please—this is a mistake. I did not do this." Her voice shook; now, finally, it sounded human.
A junior manager who had supported Kendra in meetings but had seen the logs stood up. He'd been quiet all morning. "If you didn't, show us the files you had access to," he said. "Prove it."
Kendra's reaction map was a classical arc of emotion: from pride to confusion, to denial, to bargaining, to despair. She had no documents to present. She could not produce what she did not have. The crowd pressed forward with their phones held like torches and their faces a mixture of shock and hunger.
She began to beg. There, on a marble floor with the whole company watching, she fell to her knees with a sound that shook like a bell. "Please—please, I'm sorry!" she cried. "I'll do anything. Please, don't make me lose my job."
Workers around her filmed, some with anger, some with the guilty curiosity of bystanders. Someone clapped. A few people laughed or scoffed. A woman in a navy suit hissed through her teeth, "You set us back weeks."
Kendra's speech changed tone. The initial bravado had thinned into a pleading ache. "I can't lose this job," she said, voice tearing. "I need this."
"Confess," said a voice from the crowd. It was sharp and simple.
Kendra's face scrunched in terror, then in resolve. "I took them," she confessed at last. "I thought it would make me look better—everyone is always talking about who stands out. I didn't think of the damage."
The reaction was not the slow, private realization of guilt. This was public and instantaneous. People shouted. Phones rose higher. Someone booed. The environment tightened.
Kendra then tried to explain—rapid speech, reasons, excuses. "I was desperate. I knew I could make myself look important. I thought I could put things back before anyone noticed."
The crowd hardened. A man near the front who had been personally affected by the pause in negotiations stepped forward and with a voice that carried across the atrium said, "You ruined people's careers. You could have cost this company millions."
Kendra's hands trembled. "I'll pay them back," she said. "I can—please—"
"You'll be fired," he answered. "And you should be."
She went from composed to shaking and then to collapsing. Her denial had become a plea so raw even strangers felt their faces blench.
Emmett looked at her with an expression that I have not seen often—something like pity and disgust braided together. He turned away and walked past the marble columns without a sound.
When the human spectacle ended, the CEO called security and legal. Kendra was escorted out. She cried and begged and pleaded as if she could rewind the tape of her life with her mouth. People who had once wanted to be in her orbit snapped selfies or stood in clusters whispering. The event made the evening news in the company app. A thousand small, private reputations had been exposed under electric light.
I stayed out of it, because I could not wrench anything meaningful from the performance except the dull, satisfied sensation that truth had, in some form, been served. The satisfaction was not because someone suffered. It was because in that public unmasking justice had a shape other than rumor. Someone had to be held accountable.
But what the punishment did, more than anything, was change the geography of what mattered. Emmett looked at me differently after that day, the watchful look of someone who has been betrayed by someone who once posed as a friend. Dillon, pragmatic and steady as ever, handled the corporate conversation with a coolness that left the room less shaky.
The day the public humiliation occurred, Kendra had one last loop to complete. She knelt on the marble floor in front of a crowd and begged, then tried to script a story that would let her keep her job. "Please," she said with her voice raw. "I'll do anything. I'm sorry." She tried to make her apology cinematic, a sobbing plea. Her friends' faces glowed with the coldness of bystanders. Phones recorded. Colleagues clucked.
She lost everything very quickly: trust, job, dignity. Her progression was in the textbook of what happens when ambition walks over someone else's work. The humiliation had its exact anatomy: surprise, denial, deflection, confession, collapse.
After the storm, people resumed work. The files were recovered and the clients paid. The world turned. Emmett and I found ourselves in small conversations over coffee and late documents. Dillon and I laughed over something trivial. Life, as it always does, kept moving and kept making room for better things.
Months later, quiet and strange, Emmett sat beside me on the same bench where we had once traded secrets as kids. He was still the man I had known—the same hands, the same crinkles near his eyes, a new steadiness in his jaw like someone who had learned to carry weight.
"Why did you never tell me?" he asked.
"Tell you what?"
He took a breath. "When you left for Washington. Why didn't you say goodbye properly? Why did you leave without telling me?"
"I thought I'd only get in the way," I said honestly. "And I was afraid."
He laughed softly. "You taught me not to be afraid with trivial things, and you were afraid of telling the most important thing."
"I used to think being by your side as a friend was enough," I said. "But it's not the same thing."
Emmett's hand found mine like it always had, but now there was a pause between us that had not existed when we were children. "Is it too late?" he asked.
I looked at his fingers and then at the city, the narrow strip of river cutting through it. I could have made a promise then. Instead I said, "We have to be honest. With each other. Start there."
Years later, there was still a small cardboard box in my closet with The Little Prince tucked inside. Sometimes at night I would take the book out and run my finger over the handwriting that had once made me small and brave. I kept the paper forever, a relic of a younger self.
One evening I took the book, slid a new folded note into the last page and closed the lid of that box. I wrote one more short sentence and then pushed the box back into the dark. I left it there, because some things are meant to be kept, like unhurried favors.
"You always keep that book," Emmett said once when he found it on a rainy afternoon and opened to the corner where my handwriting had faded. He smiled, small and knowing. "Do you regret writing that?"
"No," I replied. "It told me who I was."
We leaned into the quiet of a kitchen tasting like coffee and leftover cake. Outside the window the city kept going with its lights. I traced the spine of the book like a ritual and felt the steady pulse of having chosen to go away, to come back, and to return to honesty.
In the end, the biggest punishments were not the ones meted out in a bright atrium. They were the small reckonings—the people who lost jobs because of stupid theft, the friends who learned who they really trusted, and the years of silence that make room for clearer conversation. Sometimes justice is a courtroom. Sometimes it's a busted light fixture and a nurse's hand. Sometimes it's a public fall from grace where everyone watches and records and learns.
When I zipped the box closed and heard the slight rustle of the paper tucked inside, I felt like I had finally set the past in a box where it could be honored but not allowed to make decisions for me anymore.
I walked to the windowsill and listened to the clock. The little watch I had given Emmett once—a silly thing with a cracked face—still ticked somewhere in the living room. It ticked like a small, private witness to everything that had happened: the leaving, the return, the fight, the betrayal, the confession.
The Little Prince, a stained bookmark, and a stamped ticket to Washington—that was my life in three tiny objects. Each of them held a piece of truth. And in the very quiet at the end of that long, slow series of days, I felt a strange peace: a book could be a wound and a comfort both. The wound would not disappear, but the comfort would teach me to keep walking.
The End
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