Face-Slapping17 min read
The Wallpaper, the Red Mark, and the Evidence
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I woke up to the wrong ceiling and a wrong, quiet panic. My head swam; the world narrowed to a single sharp question: What happened last night?
"You're awake," a voice said.
I blinked and met a profile—sharp jaw, precise cheekbone, the kind of face you remember from the classroom and then have to look away from because everyone else is already looking. My throat felt odd, my mouth like the inside of a dusty bottle. I rolled up, and the bed remembered all the wrong things for me: confusion, a rustle of sheets, a vague sense of having let my guard down.
"I'm sorry, Professor," I croaked.
Julian Rivera's eyes flicked down at me, unreadable as ever. He had been a guest lecturer back when I was a student. He was a private kind of genius people whispered about—good-looking, cold, brilliant. When he taught, girls pushed, boys watched, and I learned to be early and invisible.
He looked down at me now as if assessing a footnote. "You drank too much."
"I did," I admitted. "I shouldn't have. I—"
He was already pulling on his shirt. The shirt looked better on him than anything I owned, rumpled in a way that made the linen sharp.
"Contact," he said, and pushed a business card across the bedside. His voice was distant; the card landed between us like something official.
"I—thank you," I managed.
When the door clicked, when the apartment's silence creaked back into place, I felt like I might break. I covered my face. The night's haze condensed into one terrible tiny hot spot on my collar: a faint red mark on my shirt's collar. My lips still tingled as if they had been touched. I told myself it had been one stupid mistake, an absurd collision of needs. He was my former teacher; he was a danger. I gathered myself. I told myself I would not belong to that panic.
On the campus that afternoon, people had already left. Julian's office smelled like books and cold coffee. Oscar Foster—who had been Julian's friend since grad school—peered up when Julian came back from somewhere, then ambled closer and pointed.
"What's that on your collar?"
Julian flipped his collar and regarded the red smear like a specimen. "Don't know who it belongs to."
Oscar laughed. "Someone left a lipstick present on you."
Julian did not smile. I stood across from them, barely holding my composure, reading the room as if it tasted like metal.
Later, as I dragged a project that needed financing toward completion, I realized I needed access to one of the files Julian had—an old dataset and a method he'd used in a lecture years ago. My team couldn't reproduce the model without that. Pride told me I couldn't go back to his classroom like everyone else—storming in, waving at him for mercy. So I stood outside his door and waited.
He let me in with the kind of half-annoyed courtesy he kept for inconvenient students. I tried to keep my voice steady. "Professor, I'd like to ask about your old sample—if it's possible to borrow the notes?"
He looked at me like he could see the calculations etched into my bones. "Twenty minutes. I have a class," he said.
"That's enough," I whispered. I tried to sound normal, but then I did something stupid. I sat at his desk, on the spot where people are quiet and behave. Perhaps I wanted attention. Perhaps I wanted to remind him of the memory we had—an accidental, ridiculous tangle—and of my own small courage.
"You know this is a bad idea," he said, eyes cold enough to carve.
"I'm not doing anything," I lied, and then I did the braver stupid thing: I leaned into his lap.
He stared at me, and snorted a sound like wind over metal. "You think you can buy my help with this?"
"I just need the file," I said. "Please."
"Tomorrow," he said finally. "Tomorrow, long skirt. Short skirts are a liability."
I stood to leave, my cheeks cramped with the sudden and ridiculous heat of embarrassment. His tone was teasing and sharp at once. For a moment, I thought he might be different. For a moment, I thought the scarlet against his white shirt meant something. I was wrong.
The next day, I waited at his office door, wearing a longer skirt, as instructed. He let me in. We tried to keep the conversation to the technical—fractions, model assumptions, how the dataset had been normalized. But then a student knocked, and the moment got messy. The office door had thin soundproofing. The student told a question; she left, and in the quiet that followed, I felt like every small movement was an invitation and a public ticket at once.
"Sit on my chair," he said. "Don't mess up the table. It's a pain to clean."
I sat where he told me to. We leaned over the screen together. "You're persistent," Julian murmured.
"I have to be," I said truthfully.
He looked at me, then down at my legs. "You learned your lesson about skirts, I hope." His lips tipped the edge of something like a smile.
I left with a dataset and a desperate flutter of something that wasn't yet named. I told myself he had favored me that night because I had been the easiest person to connect with—a former student—nothing profound, nothing binding.
Then the accusation came.
A formal email requested that I come to the dean's office to answer questions about my undergraduate thesis. I laughed at first, until the dean slid a printed copy of my paper across his desk with a red line running through the middle—an annotation, an accusation. "An anonymous tip," the dean said. "Your thesis shows significant overlap with an earlier sample presented by Professor Rivera."
The floor dropped out. "That's impossible. I did that work."
Katalina Belov smiled as if she were watching a play she'd already written. She had a way of saying things that sounded like sugar and landed like barbs. She had been on campus after studying abroad and she had placed herself, carefully and purposefully, at Julian's side. It was Katalina who had the privilege of leaning on his shoulder in public, who touched his arm and smiled in a way that made people think she owned him.
"Proof matters," the dean said. "Bring any evidence. Otherwise, we'll refer this to the academic tribunal."
Katalina watched me as they said it. Her smile widened. She folded her hands. "I'll help wherever I can," she said. "It would be a shame if any of us were involved in an academic impropriety."
I wanted to tell her what I'd been through—that he had held me with one hand on the edge of his desk, that he had given me the dataset he had promised. I wanted to ask Julian why he would not stand in the doorway and say the paper was mine. But he didn't. He did not lift a finger. He seemed content to watch as events played out.
I texted him. I pleaded. He replied with a single, red exclamation mark.
Katalina did not stop there. She waited until an exchange trip and then pushed me into the kind of trap that would humiliate me publicly if anything grew louder. At the hotel, she sent a boy named Ravi—thin and nervous—to my door, an arranged actor of sorts. Ravi knocked and entered, and before I could explain, Katalina and Julian walked in like two actors arriving on cue.
"Look what we found," Katalina said, loud enough for the dining room to hear. Her voice became the stage whisper that gave my life away in that moment.
"You shouldn't have called for—" I began, but Julian’s face went distant. He told me quietly, "Rest. There are meetings. I will handle it."
"Handle it" turned into leaving me in the corridor as the rumor spread. People stared. They murmured. At lunch, Katalina and Julian sat together while I flinched with every barbed comment from the audience. Guests recorded, whispered, and smiled as if they enjoyed a public spectacle.
By the time we returned to the city, the accusation had gained traction. The dean's phone calls arrived like a slow freezing. My job was threatened. The project my team needed me to keep on track was in jeopardy. The company manager—Tomas Beck—left me a voicemail that said, "Finish or leave; those are your options."
And yet, the worst of all that pain came from how Julian looked at me. He had put my photo—one stolen snapshot of the night in his office, me half-closed eyes, hair scattered—on his phone's wallpaper as a joke, a hold, a promise, or a threat. He sent me a copy.
"If you want me to help you," his message read, "come with me to H City. Pack."
I almost spat at the screen. I sent back, "No. I will not be coerced."
His reply was short: "You will sit with us."
So I went, because I had no real choice. Every step felt like stepping through honey: sticky, slow, humiliating. Katalina lounged against him, a practiced tableau. She whispered things he couldn't be bothered to deny. I tried to stay professional—notes, charts, the reasons anyone with a brain should care about the model—but Katalina's words were a targeted erosion: "Studies show people cheat; unfortunately, some people simply don't have the discipline to do honest work."
I tried to speak up in the seminar, but Katalina interrupted with patrons' laughter and Julian's noncommittal look. It was theater and I was cast as the fool. I wanted to storm out, to cry, to do anything but the slow acceptance of what's done to you.
When we returned, the academic tribunal lined up the evidence against me. Katalina had quietly slipped copies of my report to old rival minds, and a small-time professor—Fielding Rodrigues—tried to stir trouble as a matter of professional grudges. He had his own reasons to see me fail; his hand found my paper and noted similarities through a sharp, hungry lens.
"Evidence," they told me. "If you cannot provide raw data, proof of original drafts, independent witnesses from your methodology, we'll proceed."
I had files. But someone had to go to Julian's archive—the lecture notes, the raw dataset he had lectured—because the overlap only made sense in context. I asked him to check. He looked at me as if I had asked him whether to turn left or right.
"I don't keep things for students," he said. "If it's important, you will find it yourself."
Those words stung. I realized I had been dangling in a net of my own making, and the person who had the scissors to cut me free had left them where I could not reach.
I started to fight. I called the vendors, the libraries, dug through my old backups, begged friendly professors to check the timestamps on emails. I rented time in the university's database and poured over my old notes until my eyes burned.
One late night, when the pressure had crushed the air out of me completely, I found a saved copy of an email Julian had sent his grad assistants years ago. In it, the dataset he had used was referenced. The metadata matched timestamps that could exonerate me: the dataset Julian taught had been published publicly with a date before my graduation, but my paper included a pivot and unique code that proved my original contribution. The overlap, when examined, was not theft; it was inspiration and expansion. I printed everything, compiled a chronology, and I waited.
The moment for confrontation came in the faculty lounge the day of the tribunal. I had a folder of proof under my arm. Katalina perched on the edge of her chair, all poise and patience like a lioness choosing when to pounce. Julian stood near the coffee machine with his back turned, hands in his pockets. The room smelled like anxiety and reheated meals.
"All right," the dean said, "we will hear the evidence."
Katalina opened her mouth, ready to speak, and I stepped forward.
"You have a copy of my work," I said. "You have copies of my drafts. You have signatures. You have timestamps. Here is the chronology of data release and here are the unique scripts I wrote after studying the sample. I did not steal. I extended a published sample. If you look carefully, Katalina's hand appears in the chain of custody for the files she presented."
A murmur moved through the room like a brushstroke. I watched faces change as if cloth had been draped over them and then removed.
"Where did you get those files?" the dean asked.
"They were forwarded," Katalina said sweetly, but the thread of falsehood pulled. "I just wanted to make sure we kept standards high."
Fielding smirked. "We found that the copies she gave were amended. There are notes, cut-and-paste edits. Someone tried to make a pattern appear where none existed."
Julian raised his chin. He did not speak yet. The dean looked at him. "Professor Rivera, you were cited as the source of the original sample. Can you comment?"
Silence. Then Julian's voice came that quiet, dry thing that made people listen. "Those were my lecture samples. Yes. But academic work is iterative. I don't own ideas. I protect my students' ability to produce work that builds on examples. It appears some edits were fabricated to suggest direct copying."
Katalina started to smile in the way one smiles when a joke will soon belong to the other side. "I never—"
"Ravi Gomez," I said suddenly. "The man who went to my room in H City. He answered for Katalina."
Heads turned.
"Yes," I continued. "She arranged for a scene to be made, recorded a narrative, and fed it to a few people who have influence. She paid—through a third party—to manufacture headlines and 'evidence.'"
The dean's eyebrows climbed. "Do you have proof?"
I pushed a small packet across the table: bank transfers, a taxi receipt, a text message from Ravi admitting to being paid. It was messy, but it was a thread.
Then Julian surprised me by pulling out his phone and holding it up for everyone to see. It was a simple gesture. "I set the photo as wallpaper to keep her quiet," he said. "I never intended to make it public. I sent it to her to ensure she came."
A ripple of sound traveled. Katalina's smile twitched.
"You threatened me to 'come to H City,'" I said. "I felt coerced. But please note, coercion is not the same as guilt. If you had simply asked as a colleague, I would have produced the files sooner."
Katalina's expression hardened. She had been playing a long game, betting that humiliation would finish me. She had not counted on the small, stubborn fact that I kept copies, saved emails, and had the stamina to stare down a tribunal.
The dean set the packet down. "We will investigate the chain of custody for these files. If the evidence you brought is genuine, Miss Belov, there will be consequences."
Katalina's face was the shape of a carefully set mask, one that had been pried open. At first she tried to scoff, to laugh, to claim misunderstanding. Her supporters in the room—minor committee members who had appreciated her charm—shifted, suddenly uncertain. The rumors that had built momentum by whisper and false witness stuttered.
"How dare you," she hissed through clenched teeth when people began to murmur.
It was not enough. The dean asked Katalina to step outside, to answer questions, and a few minutes later she returned pale and thin. The news moved the room like a current. A senior professor, who had previously been quiet, got to his feet and spoke.
"Katalina, I'm ashamed. You are accused of fabricating evidence, manipulating witnesses, and corrupting a junior scholar's career. This assembly will document your actions and forward them to the ethics board and the patron's office."
"Patron?" someone asked.
At that, the door opened and Kendrick Bradley—the man behind several of the grants and a figure who had quietly influenced many pairings and placements—entered like a storm. He had been listening from the outer corridor. He looked at Katalina with an expression that had cost her before: a man disappointed with a toy that betrayed him.
"You engineered this," he said flatly. "You used my name, my funds, and my connections. I have no patience for such deception."
Katalina's face fell. She tried to smile. The smile collapsed. She went through the stages you see in bad films—denial, anger, bargaining, breakdown—but here, the audience was not indulgent; they were professional, witnesses who had suffered through decades of similar petty cruelties.
Then the punishment started: official, public, and humiliating enough to echo. The dean read the charges, each word loud and procedural. The academic committee announced an immediate suspension pending a full inquiry. Kendrik Bradley's assistant removed the engagement ring he had once mentioned, an emblem he had once hoped would align his interests with hers. Friends stopped smiling. Her name in the local circles began its downward tilt, and people I had only recently known as polite turned to the study of Katalina's face like they had a right to dissect it.
The hallway was full of cameras—faculty smartphones, students' devices—because everyone loves the downfall of someone arrogant. People whispered and some clapped with a cruel rhythm. "Serves her right," an older woman said quietly. "Enough games."
I watched Katalina move from stage to stage, from being taken aside for questioning to being asked to explain money trails. She was alternately defiant and trembling. At one point she tried to speak to me across the room.
"You don't get to smile," she hissed.
I turned my face to the window. The late afternoon light carved strips across the carpet. I had a strange, steady calm. Months of terror and humiliation had not been undone by this single act of justice, but they had been acknowledged.
Katalina took a final, shuddering breath, and then she sat in a chair like someone folding under a weight. People clustered in knots and began to talk more loudly about ethics and fairness. Julian did not celebrate. He stood with hands in pockets, face smooth as before. But there was something different: he said my name in the hallway later as if it had weight.
"You're leaving, aren't you?" he asked.
"I have to," I said. "They want to investigate. I have to finish my project."
He looked at me for a second so long that it became a small merciful thing: the longest attention I'd gotten from him since the night on his desk. "I'll help," he said. "Not because of what we were, but because this should never have happened."
"You could have," I said. "You had the evidence."
"I know," he said. "But I also know how fast a career can be ruined for the wrong reasons. I didn't want to add to it until I had to."
That was the moment my confusion crystallized into something else. He had been passive. He had kept me at arm's length. But when the crowd had decided to grind a person into the dust, he did not watch idly. He spoke when it mattered.
Later, in a hallway with no one else, he handed me a flash drive. "Digital copies of my lecture archives," he said. "Stamped and signed. Present them at the tribunal. It's not just about correcting your record—it's about how we handle evidence so it cannot be misused."
"Why now?" I asked.
"Because the truth finally demanded it," he said.
We both knew it was more complicated than that, because the truth always is. But it mattered. I took the drive with shaking hands. I was exhausted and raw and, suddenly, not alone.
Katalina's fall was public and complete in the short term. The ethics committee published a preliminary statement: suspicious evidence, possible misconduct, pending hearings. Her engagement was called into question. The train of her social life—the invitations and the casual contacts—unraveled. People who had previously queued for her favor now avoided her eye. The punishment was designed to be visible and irreversible—an academic penalty and a social crucifixion.
At the public hearing that followed, Katalina's face moved through the well-known spectrum: scorn, denial, rage, collapse. She tried to manipulate the narrative: "I only wanted to help maintain standards." Her words were hollow. People who had known her rose and told their versions: petty tricks, attempts to sabotage others, bribes disguised as favors. Fielding Rodrigues lent credibility by detailing how smeared documents had been inserted into the chain of evidence. Ravi—shaky, pale Ravi—took the stand and confessed under oath that he'd been paid to create a scene. He handed over partial recordings he had been forced to make.
The room reacted. The trustees called an extraordinary session and one of them—a woman with a voice like glass—said, "This is not an error of judgment; it's a pattern. We will not have academic life treated as a playground."
Teachers who had smiled at Katalina's charm a month ago now read statements about "deliberate victimization," "manufactured evidence," "fabricated quid pro quo." Students who had gossiped about the scandal had to step forward and admit they'd shared things they shouldn't have. People wrote statements of shame and apology for believing nasty rumors.
Katalina was escorted from the building under a cloud. Her face was streaked. "You will regret this," she said, not to me but to the crowd. "You will not be spared."
But the crowd's appetite had shifted away from spectacle and toward a slow, forensic interest. Punishment in academia is measured and painful, with documents and hearings and a trail of consequences that outlast a moment of viral ridicule. It was public and it was also procedural—worse, in some ways, than a dunk in the court of public opinion, because it contained records.
I watched that scene with a strange dispassion. Part of me wanted to gloat; part of me felt queasy. Justice does not always feel like balm. Sometimes it feels like a ledger being closed. But I had my project to save, my job to keep, and the feeling that someone had finally looked up from the math and seen me.
After months of hearings, the university issued a conclusion: Katalina had been found to have manipulated documents and witnesses; she was expelled from certain committees and placed on suspension pending full revocation of credentials. Fielding Rodrigues' role was examined. The dean apologized publicly for the oversight. I received a formal letter overturning the suspicion on my degree, with a note that the committee regretted the distress caused.
It was not all fireworks. My social standing had frayed. Some people would always whisper. My company remained skittish for a while; Tomas Beck's voicemail needed more than a few polite emails to be placated. But the worst thing was gone.
And there was Julian. We were never neat about each other. We had no grand confessions. He declined to become my knight in shining armor. He did what he could and he showed us both the limits of his indifference. He had put my photograph on his phone the way a man might mark a map—a possession, a hazard, a reminder. He had used it as leverage. He apologized once, quietly, for that. "I didn't mean for it to hurt you," he said. "But I see how it did."
"You could have said something earlier," I told him.
"I know." He looked at me then in a way that was softer than before. "I was a coward," he said simply.
The honesty mattered more than the words. Later, in the slow days when the tribunal had become rumor and the project had started to breathe and grow again, we began to talk properly. He was not suddenly warm or altruistic. He had his edges. But there were moments—small, uncluttered—when he did things that felt like decisions instead of reflexes.
"You always were persistent," he said once when we were in an empty lab at night, the hum of refrigeration like a far-off city. "You asked for help. You deserved it without barter."
"What would you have done differently?" I asked.
He smiled, just the corner of his mouth. "I would have said sooner that I had what you needed."
He took me for coffee sometimes, or rather he chose a table at the far end of the faculty lounge and watched me choose my sentences carefully. There were moments that made my chest catch: when he offered me his sleeve because I shivered; when he straightened a stray strand of hair back from my face with a careless thumb; when he looked up at me in a seminar and said, "Her method is sound."
There were three moments that felt like electricity and that I still kept in the small, secret pocket of my memory where I keep things that matter.
First: The night in his office when he paused, and for one breath he smiled at me properly—an unguarded, real smile—and said, "You did well, even when you thought you didn't." He had never praised me like that before. I felt less small.
Second: When he shut down a rumor by placing himself between me and the room—when he said, "We're done"—and turned his back on the petty noise. His gesture was small, but it reverberated in the way walls do when someone finally opens a window.
Third: Months later, when we stood at the podium accepting a minimal departmental award—hardly anything, just recognition of a technical improvement—and he reached across and, in front of everyone, pressed the small medal into my hand. "You earned this," he said, not for me to share but for me to have. The auditorium was full of faces that had once watched and judged us both, and for one bright, ridiculous second, the look on his face told me we had moved from theater to truth.
Katalina's public downfall had been cruel and satisfying in one and the same breath. She had created a drama and then misjudged the audience; she'd tried to carve a groove for herself, and in the end she would be measured by the stone of her own choices. She crumbled in a way that left behind a clean ledger. I think she would have preferred scandal; the slow dismantling hurt more.
And in the middle of that slow dismantling, I did what I had to do. I presented the data. I fought. I accepted help when offered. I learned that asking for help is not the same as admitting defeat. Julian learned that some things are not best kept until pressure forces them into confession. We both learned, stubbornly, like two people who had been rude to each other but understood the mechanics of saving someone.
At the end, when the tribunal closed its files and the university published its statements, Julian and I stood on a short balcony outside his office. The city's noise was a faint rumor below. I could see the thin red mark on the inside of my thigh—the last physical reminder of that night on his desk. He noticed me looking and raised a brow.
"You still have it." His voice was dry, and his mouth tipped like he was about to smile.
"It's a souvenir," I said. "A very stubborn one."
He looked at me for a long second, as if measuring. "Keep it," he said. "If it keeps you honest."
I laughed—once, quick. It was absurd and curative.
"Thank you," I said then, because I meant it, for the evidence, for the public reckoning, for the fact that he had finally used his tools to help.
He answered with a rare softness. "You did it, Ella," he said, using my name the way a professor rarely does. "You did it on your own."
I did not know then whether the man who had been my teacher would become the man who walked with me through recovery. I only knew that we had each shifted an inch toward mercy. I tucked the little flash drive in my pocket like a talisman and left the balcony.
The end of the story was not a perfect ribbon. Katalina was disgraced and suspended; she had to face firm consequences in committees, in private, and in the rusted circle of those she'd used. The public punishment had been searing and thorough: an academic suspension, revocation of privileges, the end of favored invitations; even the man who had hoped to use her influence withdrew support. People who had watched the whole drama clucked like hens sorting truth from lies. There was noise; there were broken trinkets of pride.
But the last image I kept with me was simple: the slight, ridiculous red mark on the inside of my thigh, the flash drive with archives that proved my point, and the thin laugh Julian gave when he said, "You did it on your own." It was not a perfect ending, but it was a true one. It held the tall things: a scandal resolved, a career saved, a woman who had refused to be ground into dust. It had the smell of coffee and the hum of the lab and the small, private victories that matter.
Later, months after the tribunal, I found his email signature buried in an odd place: "Julian Rivera, Department of Finance, Julian.Rivera@uni.edu." I replied with a single sentence: "Thanks for finding the files."
His reply was a single word. "Always."
The End
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