Face-Slapping13 min read
The Star and the Moon: How I Took Back My Name
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I remember the card first: a cheap, laminated idol photo with a hand-drawn star and a moon on the back. I kept it in my school pencil case like a secret treasure. I would take it out at night and whisper to it until the dark didn't seem so deep.
"Who are you whispering to?" my foster mother barked once, grabbing my hair as if I asked for bread.
"It’s mine." I said, and the truth of that sentence cost me another bruise.
"You think you were born for better things?" she spat. "You’re a factory girl. Keep your head down."
I scrubbed plates until my knuckles split. I slept on a curtain-draped bench in the living room. I washed away smells other girls never had to smell. I learned to be small and quiet. But when the radio played Salvador Church’s voice, the room filled with light.
"Sing that one again," I told the barber shop speaker one rainy afternoon, hugging that card.
A boy on the screen with a light that felt like home sang and the whole place went warm. His smile—two small teeth a little crooked—made my chest loosen. "He’s like sunlight," I said to no one.
Years later, he walked into my classroom.
"Hey, can I borrow your notes?" he asked, poking my backpack with a pen like a prank.
My heart lodged somewhere at my throat. "Yes," I said, and the world made sense for a thin flawless moment.
He was Salvador Church—my star—suddenly sitting behind my desk. He asked to look at my notes, joked in class, sent me messages that felt like gravity.
"You're a good note-taker," he messaged late one night.
"You're a singer," I typed back clumsily.
"Maybe you don't need to sing. Maybe you just need to shine," he wrote.
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to step into that light.
"I'd like to take you to my concert," he said once and dropped a ticket into my notebook like a secret promise.
I didn't go. I wanted to, but the foster mother tore at my hair until blood dotted my temple. I told myself it was fine. He must have given the better seats to someone else. He must have meant nothing.
"You're clumsy," he teased later. "Why would I—"
Then my name was on the internet and I was a target.
"She likes him. Lol, look," the school gossip said, showing me a screenshot of my private messages.
Chants on the forums followed. People I thought were neighbors joined in like a pack. Eggs in the school restroom, insults carved on my desk. Anonymity turns into cruelty so easily.
"Why didn't you stop this?" I demanded once when I saw Salvador in the hallway, egg white dry on my hair.
"Stop what?" he asked, voice silk and cold.
"You told them."
"I never told them," he shrugged, like a boy talking about the weather.
That day a lighter clicked open near my ear. He held it between us like a question I couldn't answer.
"I was playing," he said finally, eyelashes low. "You took it seriously."
"You put it online," I whispered back. "You made it a game."
He smiled and pressed a fingertip to the back of my hand in a way that always felt like a promise.
"You're dramatic. Don't be so dramatic."
I wanted to smash his phone. I wanted to scream until it was muffled by the sound of the world. Instead, I let myself be a small gull, flapping and kept my mouth closed.
When the humiliation peaked, when eggs and spit and lies had formed a small winter around me, he offered a strange coin: a bank transfer with neatly typed numbers and a quiet demand to leave.
"I'll send money," he said, casual as a promise of weather. "Go abroad. You won't have to look back."
He believed he could tidy things with money, as if pain were a bill.
"No," I said, and my voice surprised him.
"You could take it. One million." He named numbers because numbers fixed everything for him.
"I won't be bought," I told him.
He blinked like a hurt child. "Fine," he said. "Then you'll see."
They pushed me into a factory that winter. I learned lines and lathes instead of calculus. My thumb was crushed in a machine, a bone lost to cold metal and cheap insurance. They gave me a thousand yuan and asked me to be grateful. I left with a hand that didn't bend the way it used to, and a heart that was now sensual with a darker currency: pride.
Keilani Mustafa—she who always had better clothes—found me later and smiled with teeth arranged for a fortune.
"You're finally back," she cooed.
"Back where?" I asked.
"Here. To your place." She toyed with my crate of belongings like a cat with someone else's yarn.
She had a mother with a jade bracelet and a whole house I yearned to live in. She had a smile that invited cameras and a voice that made people believe. When she said, "You're lucky," it sounded like a threat wrapped like a gift.
She took my name. Her mother, Kathy Bentley, smoothed her skirt and pretended to cry when she touched my scars.
"They made a mistake long ago," Kathy said, voice trembling with practiced sorrow. "You belonged to us."
I lay quietly in the lap of their version of kindness. I learned mouths that smiled crooked. I learned the value of patience.
"You're not mine," Keilani whispered privately. "You're ours."
"Yours?" I laughed once under my breath. "You're a paper crown."
"Paper cuts hurt," she said.
I didn't reveal my plans. I studied them like a quiet student studies a hard geometry theorem. I kept one thing: that cheap card with the star and the moon. I kept the old notebook with the star I'd drawn. They thought they'd rescued me. They didn't see the years of quiet accumulation—of money invested, of smart deals, of learning the sound of other people's lies.
"You're planning to go abroad, right?" Keilani asked once, smooth. "Better make it permanent."
"I will," I said. "But not the way you think."
I left on my terms. I left with a scholarship to a school overseas and a stubbornness like steel in my chest. I worked, I saved, I started a small tech investment that grew because I made smart choices instead of trusting pretty promises. I was careful where I put my trust and even more careful where I spent my time. When I succeeded, it was because I learned to make my own light.
Years later, I returned. I didn't come to beg. I came to claim.
"You're back," Keilani said, with a tilt to her head that meant she expected me to be small.
"I am," I said.
I walked into a shareholders meeting and watched their faces slide like paper. Gustavo Khan, the patriarch whose investments could tilt markets, looked at me with the softness he'd refused me before.
"You're the one to decide," he said, quietly.
"I will put my money behind the company's future," I told them, voice steady. "We will make electric vehicles, not just sell chrome."
They scoffed. Keilani smiled and offered her empty platitudes. "We have a line. We keep what works," she told them.
"Do you know what works?" I said. "You keep selling guilt and presentability. You don't build for tomorrow."
Data scrolled across the projector. Numbers, partnerships, a plan. Every piece I put down was a hand pressed into the choir of my years abroad.
"She lied about being the real daughter," I said, and the room lurch-cried like a struck animal. "She lied deliberately to inherit what wasn't hers."
"That's impossible," Keilani spat.
"A paternity test results…" I produced a sealed file. "Are public now. The nurse who once switched us has testified. Someone paid her to lie. There are messages, bank transfers, and the phone logs."
A cousin shouted. "This is family business!"
"Family business isn't a cover for theft," I said.
Keilani's mascara ran in a nervous way. "You can't do this," she whispered.
"I can," I said.
At the gala that followed, the rumor mill churned. Keilani's phone blew up. Her board allies changed their faces from friendly to fanged. Investors whispered. Photos of her champagne clutched hand slipped into the feeds alongside the nurse's testimony.
"You're destroying our family," she cried in one private conversation I intercepted.
"Good," I said aloud. "You destroyed mine."
Then I did something simple and relentless: I told the truth where it would hurt the most. At a luncheon in a room full of our industry's heavyweights I stood and asked for the microphone.
"You remember the woman who cried at the door?" I asked, and a dozen remembered faces turned.
"It's been two decades," I said. "You all applauded her devotion. You gave her my father's house, my mother's place, and your trust. You applauded wealth and sentiment without looking."
"You're lying," Keilani hissed.
"Are you sure?" I held up a small envelope. "This has her messages arranging the swap."
She staggered as if struck.
"Stop it!" she demanded, voice higher. The crowd had shifted. A few cameras had turned to capture her face. "That's private."
"Everything you made private was stolen," I said. "You used people's sympathy. You used my pain to pad your social feed. You used favors and bribes."
A woman near the back clicked her tongue. Cameras leaned in like bees toward honey.
Keilani's expression went through a parade: First the practiced calm, then the flicker of fear, then anger—sharp and dangerous—and finally an attempt at denial that came out brittle.
"You're insane," she said. "You have no proof."
I placed another folder on the table. It thudded like finality. "These are bank transfers. These are messages. Your mother's name is on them. She paid a nurse ten thousand to make a switch. She paid a gang to make sure I didn't appear during exams. She bribed people to write lies."
The room was a pressure cooker. Whispers rose and formed a chorus. "Is that true?" someone asked.
"Who did this?" demanded a younger board member.
I looked at Kathy Bentley. She had sat at the head of the table with a satin scarf and a face painted in sorrow. Now she had the color of a woman whose sins were suddenly visible.
"Do you deny this?" I asked.
She opened her mouth and closed it. Her fingers trembled over her tea. "How dare you," she hissed. "I gave you shelter."
"You gave me wages below the poverty line and beat me for eating vegetables," I said.
There was a silence heavy enough to be felt. A cameraman caught Kathy's face contorting. She was on a stage she had not rehearsed for. And scenes like this travel: a single camera, a single clip, can travel the world.
Keilani tried one final gambit: "She's delusional. She's sabotaging the company."
"Why would I sabotage my own future?" I asked. "Would I give away everything I worked for?"
"You can't prove—"
"Watch," I said. "Call the accounts. Call the bank."
Phone calls began. My evidence was procedural, documented, and undeniable. The nurse's notarized statement was attached. Kathy's credit card payments to unsavory numbers were listed. The room was cleaved in two.
Keilani's smirk drained. Her lips quivered. She paced like a caged animal.
"Everyone, calm down," she implored. "This is private family business."
A junior shareholder laughed, then covered his mouth. "Private? You tried to buy a company."
"You're being cruel," she said, and for the first time her voice cracked.
The crowd had people who had once adored her; they now watched the mask slip. An investor—a man who had once called her 'dear'—rose and delivered the first blow without intending to.
"You lied to us," he said. "We trusted family."
"And you stole with eyes open," another said.
A camera pushed in on Keilani. Her mascara was smeared. She looked small and feral. Her earlier threats—"you'll pay"—had nothing behind them now. She attempted a rebuttal, clutching at our shared history as if it were a raft.
"People will stand by me," she cried. "People will understand."
"They won't," a woman said coldly from the third row. "Because you lied and you profited from someone else's life."
Keilani's face flickered through disbelief to panic. She tried to compose herself. "You're a liar. You're trying to ruin me."
"Do you see how people look at you?" I asked softly.
They looked at her with something like pity turning to disgust.
Her voice slowed. "I—" She looked at Kathy. "Mom!"
Kathy's face, once a shield, now betrayed calculation. She reached out and grasped her daughter's hand as if to anchor herself, but the cameras were already recording the twitch in her mouth.
A group of shareholders stood and walked out. "This is untenable," one said. "We will pursue a forensic audit."
Keilani's face was a sunset of rage turning to ash. She tried to fling at me a last sharpness.
"You think you're righteous?" she spat. "You think you can take everything just because you have money now?"
"Righteous?" I said. "No. I think I finally have the means to stop you. And I have the right."
"And I will make you pay," she said, voice low and venomous.
"You already did," I replied. "By proving what you are."
Her eyes darted to the doors. The press had begun to mill in the foyer. I watched her unravel: the practiced smile collapsing into the flares of a woman who had never learned to stand when everything else fell away.
"People are recording," someone warned. "It's already online."
Keilani's reaction was instructive. First, she blinked in violent denial. "They'll see the other side," she shouted.
"Which is?" a journalist asked.
"She's a liar," she stammered.
The room laughed, but it was cruel because it was final.
Security arrived, not to arrest but to separate. Keilani kicked, then lunged for me. "You'll pay!" she screamed one last time.
"You already have," I said.
They carried her out. As the doors closed, a single phone captured her face at full close—smudged makeup, open mouth, the fragile cruelty.
Outside, the crowd's murmur was a chorus of judgment. Some people cheered. Some recorded. A few spat. A woman who had once served Keilani tea now watched with a hollowed expression and turned away.
Kathy Bentley's punishment was different. She had not been the bravest, but she had been the most calculated. Her public unraveling came later: an imposed audit, the freezing of assets, subpoenas, and calls from old friends who now refused to be associated. She stood in a press courtyard, hands shaking, as reporters asked whether she had traded a child's life for comfort.
"Is it true?" someone shouted.
"I never thought—" she began.
"You knew," I said, and a microphone recorded the final act. She walked away into a car whose windows closed like a tomb.
Keilani’s punishment did not end at that luncheon. Contracts were torn, influencers turned on her, and the market reacted like a living thing. But the tableau—the moment of the reveal—was the public slow undoing: the shift on people's faces, the cameras, the march of colleagues away, the small childlike shriek of a woman who had thought herself crowned and found the crown stripped.
Watching all that, I felt no joy. I felt a cold, precise satisfaction: the world had seen what I had always known. The people who had cheered for Keilani's smiles now saw the thinness of them. The corporation's board demanded restitution. The aunties who had once clucked at my table now steered clear.
They called it justice. I called it balance.
But there was another punishment no one planned for: Keilani, in a rage at being cornered, attempted violence at a later event—the acid bottle at Salvador's concert. When she lunged, it wasn't just ambition; it was a woman's final attempt to erase what she'd lost.
Salvador stepped between us and took the burn meant for me.
"No!" I screamed.
He knelt on the concrete, hands over his face, and screams ricocheted around the stadium. In the weeks after, his face changed into a cartoon of scars. He lost more than a career; he lost the easy light everyone loved.
He was punished and punished deeply by reality, but Keilani's conviction for the attack and the criminal sentence were the public pieces—media, courtrooms, news cycles, a jail cell with fluorescent light and a line of other women's faces in cheap orange.
That day in court—packed with cameras and the smell of polished wood—Keilani sat small and fierce. I arrived early and watched as the crowd formed: old fans who had once adored Salvador, stockholders, and strangers curious for spectacle.
"Keilani Mustafa," the judge read the charges. "Attempted grievous bodily harm."
"You were going to hurt her," the prosecutor said, voice sharp. "You tried to erase the person you thought stole everything."
Keilani's expression shifted during testimony: first shock, then denial, then a methodical defense unraveling like a ship taking on water. "I didn't mean—" she tried. "He seduced me. She has always—"
A witness snapped back. "You sent messages. You made payments to those who would turn violent."
The room responded as if a chorus had been cued: gasps, cameras clicking, someone whispering "No" so quietly it was nearly prayer.
Keilani's mother watched with a face that had once been fury—now a mask of disbelief and regret. The guard next to her held a file. The gallery began to murmur about how cruelty returns.
When the verdict came, the judge's voice was a hammer.
"Guilty," he said. Keilani's body folded in a way the cameras could not ignore. She stopped speaking. Her eyes ran rivers of mascara onto a face that had always been practiced for applause.
Outside, a dozen phones recorded. People filmed her being led away. A woman hissed, "You made your bed."
Another shouted, "Good!"
I didn't clap.
I felt an emptiness that wasn't victory.
Salvador left the hospital months later with half his face bandaged and a voice that slid like paper against fingertips. He ambled like someone who had learned the taste of certain regrets.
"Why did you stop her?" I asked the first time I saw him, standing over him like an awkward domestic god.
He couldn't look me in the eyes. "Because I couldn't—" he said. "You were the target."
He reached into the blankets and shoved something into my palm—my old laminated idol card, the star and moon visible under the coffee stain.
"Keep it," he croaked. "Don't throw it away this time."
I laughed at the irony and felt something like guilt.
"Why now?" I asked later, when the cameras had stopped and the press had been sated with their footage.
"Because you came for justice and I was afraid you would burn my house with me in it," he said. "Because I could finally see what I'd done to you. Because I wanted to save you and I thought—" his breath hitched, "I thought saving you might make me worth something."
I listened to him plead and wept once, not from tenderness but from an understanding of how complicated people can be—how a star burns and yet hurts the ones closest.
I married the work and the company. I moved the lines, fired the people who propagated lies, and invested in a future that smelled like electric motors and clean air. Gustavo Khan, who had once looked away when family strife mattered more than profit, now clasped my hand publicly and called me "the future."
"You're not the little girl who used to wash dishes," he told an industry panel. "You are the person this company needs."
That statement cost me a private silence.
I kept the card around my neck sometimes, a cheap red gem tied to a ribbon, not for sentiment but as a record. Salvador kept writing songs badly and beautifully in a small room by the mountain. Guadalupe D'Angelo, Salvador's manager, learned how to be more human than most managers, and sometimes called to ask where he should send the groceries.
Keilani had been sent through courts and media and into a prison cell who had no mirrors. She would have time to think, to be small and public in ways she had never imagined. Kathy Bentley lost houses, assets, and a few old friends.
On the day I signed the final papers transferring the last of the company's controls to the board that favored innovation over vanity, I walked out and opened my palm.
"Is this everything?" a young executive asked.
"For now," I said.
I kept thinking of the bathtub and the way Salvador's hand still trembled. I kept thinking of a star and a moon drawn by a girl who had been fed lies and egg-shell fear and yet refused to disappear.
"Are you happy?" someone asked.
"Content," I answered.
I didn't promise anything else. I had learned to measure words like bridges: meant for crossing, not for hanging.
When I lock the office at night, I hold that card up to the light. The star is smudged but visible. The moon is a crescent that closes and opens like some private clock.
"Keep the card," Salvador had said once, voice small. "You'll know when it's time."
So I keep it in the drawer with a red bracelet and a receipt from a concert where a man cried on stage and the sea of glow sticks glowed like a memory.
I don't know if he will ever sing again on the stage he once owned. I don't know if Keilani will ever forgive herself. But I do know that when I look at the card with the star and the moon, I remember a time I was smaller and someone was cruel.
I remember that I chose not to be small anymore.
The End
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