Face-Slapping10 min read
The Paint, The Poison, The Show — My Return
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I remember the exam hall like a stage with one spotlight. I left later on purpose.
"How was it?" my father thundered when he saw me. "Clear—Peking and Tsinghua, right? We'll celebrate!" Cyrus Soto beamed like he owned the sun.
I looked back at my mother, Daphne English. Her face had gone cold-green. Yelena Smith and her children stood a little apart, pretending they didn't hear.
"Low profile," I whispered, tugging his sleeve. "I told you—low profile."
He laughed, louder. "Low profile? My daughter deserves the world."
My father had a mine. He had hands that dug wealth and a mouth that fed vanity. He also had more women than sense. Daphne stayed, endured, and kept the home. Yelena’s children—Jazmin and Drake—grew up thinking pride was a right.
"Mom," I told Daphne later, "you're my anchor. Don't move."
She smiled once, small and brittle. "You be the good one," she said. "Give me a reason to show my head."
I worked for every grade. I painted while others laughed. I practiced when friends slept. I learned that excellence could be boiled down into numbers, trophies, and money. When Cyrus found out I was top of my year, he put two wads of cash into my hands like an offering.
"Buy yourself nice things," he said, the chest-beating of a showman. "You're mine."
I bought a small jar of pride and tucked it in my pocket. I bought medicine for Mom. I boiled chicken. I learned to keep my anger patient, useful like a blade.
When Jazmin and Drake came to town, they came polished. Jazmin had a gift for charm; Drake had a gift for turning cruelty into a joke. They followed their mother’s script: make the other family small, then make themselves larger.
"You're so pretty," people said to Jazmin. "Of course she steals the boys."
I kept my head down. I wanted art school, not attention. Cyrus wanted the city to know he had a genius daughter. He booked a whole floor of a five-star hotel for my celebration.
"You're my pride," he kept saying with a goblet in his hand.
Daphne showed up with two tables. Yelena arrived with swagger and a suitcase of false smiles. Jazmin found an empty moment and slipped her shoes off my mother's feet, smirking. I watched it all like a painting in progress.
"Why are you here?" my mother hissed when she saw Yelena.
"To celebrate," Yelena sang, eyes glittering. "I wouldn't miss it."
The room buzzed. Phones lifted. The cameras feasted. People whispered. Her arrival was a challenge. Mine was supposed to be the centre.
"Sit down," Cyrus barked when Yelena tried to take my place. He tried to smooth things with applause. "Everyone, everyone—come, sit."
Jazmin walked up, chin high, and mimicked me. "You and I both wore the same dress," she said with poisonous sweetness. "Cute try."
Her voice carried. I didn't mean to, but the microphone was in my hand. My heart was quiet and cold.
"Did you learn manners?" I said into the mic, careful and loud. "Coming here to steal the stage? What kind of etiquette is that?"
She laughed, and a voice lifted across the room: hers, loud, cruel.
"You're ugly," she said, “and poor looking in that dress."
The hall heard. Everyone heard. My father's face split between anger and embarrassment. A guest from a nearby table stood up, whispering into their phone. A camera zoomed closer.
Then Yelena did a thing so stupid I almost couldn't believe it. She set a small box on our table and pushed it forward.
"A little gift," she sang. "For the clever girl."
I took it like a museum curator accepts a donation. "Thanks," I said. "Dad, try this."
He smiled and bit.
The world went sudden and wrong.
He coughed. Then he retched. The guests stood frozen. Someone shouted, someone else recorded. Cyrus fished the sweet off his lips, splatted it back into Yelena’s face. Tea flew; a napkin slapped her cheek. Then he shoved the rest of the box at her.
"Get out," he roared. "Get out of my house."
It was chaos. Phones exploded across social platforms. "Millionaire eats—" someone typed. The video went viral while the guests debated whether to cover their noses or keep filming. Yelena screamed and then kneeled, begging. Jazmin and Drake scrambled, trying to wedge apologies between the booms of cameras.
I sat quiet, hand on Daphne's. My throat was tight and empty.
After the feast, life split into before and after. People's voices changed. Jazmin got a taste of shame. Drake tried to rebuild himself with the brazen laughter of boys who never learn.
One summer later, I left for the big city to study. I changed my glasses. I erased a little of the home-grown dust. I sold sketches on the street to buy paint. I learned the city's rhythm: midnight quiet, morning light, painting like prayer.
Time does strange things. The one who hurt you can come around and ask for your help. Jazmin, whose life had been feed with my mother's humiliation, came to me years later like a penitent cat.
"Teacher," she said then, all sweetness and oil. "I need your advice. Come see my work."
I agreed. I am not immune to the easy vanity of correction. I am not immune to the pleasure of being the better painter. I took her to my studio.
Her smile dropped when she saw me studying her canvas.
"It needs depth," I said. "The tones are flat. A good gallery can sell this for a little, but not for what you want."
She left flustered. I breathed. Then the dizziness hit.
The coffee she brought me tasted wrong. My heart fluttered and a blind wash behind my eyes took over. I reached for my phone—too late. The world tilted. The studio spun like a careless wheel. I crashed, glass and canvas cutting out.
"Call—" was the last clear thing I thought. Then a blow at the back of my head. Then Jazmin's laughter ringing like an animal’s.
She kicked. She stabbed plastic into paint and sank it into my cheek. "This is for taking everything," she said. "For stealing my life."
I tasted blood and fire and then nothing but darkness.
They left the studio burning.
Somewhere between the flames and the shadow I met a hand. That hand belonged to Isaiah Youssef. He was a surgeon with steady hands. He and Julianne Saito and a few others pulled me from the ruin. They kept me alive. They kept the world from declaring me dead.
When the firemen came, the charred body they pulled out belonged to a mannequin that Isaiah’s lab had swapped for the real me. It was cruel work, grotesque, but necessary. I learned how a chest could be shut and a death declared on paper when one is still breathing in a hospital bed.
They let the city mourn me. I let the city think I was dead. The world wrote poems about a young artist struck down too early. People hung my half-finished works in auction houses. Jazmin sold a body of work that smelled of my skin and called it genius.
"She stole from you," Julianne said, folding a blanket over my knees in a small rented house outside the hospital. "She used your name like a ladder."
"Then we take the ladder away," Isaiah said simply. "We expose the maker."
We made a plan. It was a cold, careful plan built from small, honest pieces: cameras in my studio, a staged swap, the slow thawing of the city's attention. I would turn my own 'death' into a weapon. I would bring the truth into light.
"Are you crazy?" Julianne whispered. "You just lived through the world thinking you were dead."
"I did," I said. "And I learned that if I want to survive, I must be sharper than they are cruel."
Her eyes were wet. "Be careful."
Time passed. Jazmin rose on my reputation gone public. She opened a gallery and paraded my sketches as her own. She wore my lines like borrowed jewelry. A man named Blaise Weber watched. He was a backer, a name with a wallet. He came to Jazmin’s shows, leaning in like a judge.
He also came to the international meeting where she presented a set of works that were, in truth, mine.
The night of her big unveiling, I sat far in the crowd. I wore a cap and a shirt and a thin disguise. Julianne, Isaiah and a few others sat around me, eyes burning.
On stage, Jazmin began speaking. "These works—" she said, "—speak of struggle and triumph." Her smile had the same old kind of arrogance.
I texted a command to a team. The large screens that projected the gallery images suddenly flipped. The feed changed to raw studio footage—two years ago. There I was, alive, being beaten. There I was, Jazmin's face above mine. There I was, the knife, the flame, the theft.
The crowd fell into a silence like a stopped clock. Someone in the front row screamed. Phones rose. The large screen split to show the crucial clip: Jazmin pick up a palette knife and drive it into my cheek.
"Cut," a voice near me whispered. "She did it."
The murmurs became anger. Hands pointed. People shouted, "Police!" "Murderer!" Jazmin's face changed. The smile melted to drop-jaw shock.
Blaise moved through the crowd like a hawk. He came and stood close. When the guards grabbed Jazmin, Blaise looked at me longer than anyone else. His hand sought mine and didn't let go.
"Mariah," he said quietly. "I wish I'd met you in calmer weather."
"Save your speeches," I said.
The police cuffed Jazmin and Drake soon after, thanks to the live footage and the dozens of witnesses we had marshaled. The cameras kept rolling. Jazmin's pleas were broadcast. She went from queen to caged in minutes.
What comes next happened slowly, and yet in full view. The court took the tapes. The jury looked at the videos. She was convicted of attempted murder and violent assault. Drake, who had helped in the fire and lied in the first investigation, was convicted as an accessory.
But the world wanted spectacle, not just a legal verdict. So I gave them spectacle.
The courthouse steps became a place to deliver justice in public. The day of sentence, reporters swarmed. I stood in the front row. Julianne, Isaiah, and my mother watched. Cyrus did not come. Yelena tried to approach but the crowd wouldn't let her through.
"Stand up," the Judge said coldly. "This court finds Jazmin Mitchell guilty."
Her face drained. "Please," she whispered.
"Enough," I said, and I spoke not for punishment alone but for all the burned afternoons, the ruined dinners, the grinding shame. "Look at her," I told the crowd. "See how small cruelty makes a person."
They paraded evidence on a screen: the studio footage, the forwarded messages, the receipts for incendiaries. Jazmin shrank under the burden. Her voice splintered. Drake tried to plead for leniency.
"You stole my art," I said. "You tried to kill me. You used my name for profit. The law must do its part. The public must see."
Jazmin begged. "It was never—"
"Shut up," I snapped. Someone in the crowd laughed a bitter sound.
The sentence came down: several years. The public turned on her like a flock that had found its dinner. They spat words. A few shouted for the harsher things that law cannot do. But she had to listen to what people did say. They would remember. They would tag her face when she left prison. They would not let her climb easily.
That was not all. There were other punishments, slower and more painful because they were more public and human.
At the first exhibition after the conviction, dealers and curators who had once applauded Jazmin refused to touch her. Galleries cancelled. Blaise, who had funded much of Jazmin's fake ascent, issued a short, curt statement about due diligence and withdrew sponsorships. Investors who had flirted with her projects pulled away.
On the social platforms where she had once been idolized, the comments turned to stone. "How could you?" someone wrote. "We believed the lie." Another: "You used a dead woman's name."
Months later, in a crowded prison visiting room, Jazmin received letters that people had once signed as praises. They were now cold, thin, and few. Drake received threats from other inmates and ended in a fight that disfigured his face. He came out with scars that never left his mirror, eyes that fluttered with fear. He could no longer level a school corridor with a stare.
The true public punishment rose later, when a recorded hearing of Jazmin's statements played in a panel at a major art forum. The moderator, a well-known critic, said, "Let this be a lesson: art without conscience is theft." People clapped, not for cruelty, but for the reclaiming of truth.
Yelena collapsed under the weight of loss. She lost her boutique, her connections, her pride. The town that once bowed now turned and stared. Once, at a cheap market stall, I saw her—hair thin, hands like damp paper—shivering as she begged for change. Someone snapped her photo. The image circulated with a caption: "The cost of being cruel." She sank into the hum of the streets, a cautionary tale.
In the end, the punishments were many: legal verdicts, social exile, broken reputations, lost money, and the private decay of loved illusions.
The public humiliations were rich with change. I remember the day Jazmin was led out, face raw with tears. "You're the one who killed her!" someone shouted. "You made a ghost of her name!" another said. Her denial deteriorated into mania. She tried to scream, then began to plead, then to bargain, then to break down. Her hands clawed at her hair. Cameras recorded every movement. People in the crowd took pictures, some crying, some fists clenched.
Drake, watching from the sidelines, first wore arrogance, then confusion, then fear. He had been used to swagger; the swagger dissolved. He begged the judge for mercy and was met with a silence that felt like a verdict on his youth.
Yelena approached our table at one point. "I'm sorry," she said in a voice that might have been sincere if it hadn't once been sharpened into command. People around hissed. A woman spat. Men took videos. She knelt, then rose, and the public watched and judged. She was not forgiven.
And there was my father. Cyrus watched the events from a distance. He had lost face and then gained none of the dignity that financial help can buy. His attempts at damage control only made things worse. He realized his boasting had consequences.
Later, Jazmin lost feeling in one cheek from a violent altercation in prison that ended her ability to sneer. Another fight left Drake with a permanent limp and a broken jaw. Yelena, once loud and polished, sat on a bench with a blanket and the wind on her face, watching buses pass. The world had only one thing to say: what you build on theft collapses.
Even so, not everything that falls apart is joy. Daphne, my mother, shrank and grew quieter for a long while. She could no longer bluster: the broken years had taught her caution.
And for me? The city that thought me dead turned my absence into legend. I used that legend to pull down the curtain on thieves. I learned that revenge does not roar like thunder: it tightens a hand and waits. The hardest part was watching the fall of those who had hurt me and not being consumed by the fall myself.
After those days, Blaise stayed. He didn't come as a saviour at first—he stood in the audience and watched. He later told me he had seen me on a plane years ago and kept a memory like a talisman. He helped me establish a studio, never once asking to own the work. His sister, Lacey Dickerson, joked and teased like a guild sister, calling me "our found artist."
We had many long talks. "Why did you let them think you were dead?" he asked one night, eyes soft in the lamp light.
"Because the world believed lies quicker than truth," I said. "And because to fight fire, sometimes you must learn to be smoke."
He smiled. "I love that answer," he said.
I learned to love again slowly. I learned to let a warm hand sit on the back of my neck without flinching. I learned to open exhibits under my name and let my paintings speak.
Sometimes people ask me if I feel satisfied with the cruelty I orchestrated.
"No," I say. "I am not a goddess of vengeance. I only wanted to stop being someone others could burn for sport."
At the last show—the one that reopened my story properly—someone asked me what I feared most.
"Fear?" I said. "Losing myself. Losing the softness that makes art possible."
"Then you didn't lose that," Julianne said, catching my hand. "You protected it."
We stood together in the crowded room. The lights warmed the canvases. Blaise watched from the back. My mother sat small and proud. The past had been loud. The present was quieter, honest like a well-drawn line.
Outside, a reporter shouted a question about Jazmin's fate. I watched a bus drive past, its passengers ignorant and whole. A pigeon hopped on the curb, indifferent.
I lifted my chin, as if recalling a phrase of my own.
"The painting isn't ruined," I told the crowd. "If anything, the light changes us."
The End
— Thank you for reading —