Face-Slapping12 min read
They Called Me a Thief — I Took a Car and a Hiring Letter
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I didn't expect to be hauled off a pole by security and called a thief the day my life changed.
"I told you to climb down," the guard barked, hands on his belt.
"I'm not a thief," I said, voice muffled by wind and distance. "I have paperwork. I'm with the SkyNet team."
"You don't look like any technician I've seen," another guard said, circling below.
I hugged the pole tighter. The camera I was about to retrieve sat above me like a small white eye. I could feel the metal buzzing under my palms. "I'm Gabriela English. Corbin sent me. I can access the logs right here."
"Corbin who?" a woman asked from the sidewalk.
I peered down. A group had gathered — familiar faces that made my chest go cold. My old class, my high school, a half dozen people from the spots that had been mine for the last three years of pretending to be a normal student.
"Karin?" I heard.
Karin Ramos pointed with a pretty, mocking finger. "Isn't that our school's resident delinquent? Look, she's on a pole stealing our building's camera."
"No, she's the one who skipped tests and still thinks she can do whatever," a boy snickered.
Aiden Dickson's face appeared in the crowd. He looked exactly as he had back then: too clean, eyes that judged. His gaze cut me and a slow, awful recognition passed across his expression — the kind of look that says he had once cared and now felt triumphant about my disgrace.
"Is that... Gabriela?" Karin laughed. "You always did like dangerous hobbies."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. I began to slip down, thinking of Corbin's urgent message and the data I needed to collect. The pole was my worksite. The cameras had to be replaced; the logs had to be preserved.
"Catch her!" someone shouted.
In a second, guards were beneath me. They grabbed my coat. Pain flared where a wrist bent wrong. I tried to explain, but the voices around me multiplied.
"She stole the camera!"
"She's got wires!"
"She could be planting evidence!"
Aiden walked forward, expression pale. For a second I thought he might help. Then he reached out, but not to defend me — to take the camera.
"Hands off," I snapped, clinging to the hardware. "This device is my responsibility."
He hesitated, then used a hand like a judge would. "Why would you be up there? Why be so low?"
"You wouldn't understand," I said, breathless. "I'm not what you think."
Karin's laugh was cruel. "You? Working? The Gabriela who couldn't be bothered to study? Please."
A guard pressed his knee into my ribs. I coughed, winded. My lungs felt small and hot.
"Stop!" a voice cut through the crowd. Corbin Bacon barreled in through the throng, breathless, followed by two colleagues from the SkyNet team. "Let her go."
The guards stood down when they saw official vests. Corbin's eyes were huge and apologetic. "I'm so sorry," he said to me, then to the guards, "We have the paperwork. She was authorized."
I slid off the pole before I thought. My legs trembled. I clutched the camera to my chest as if it were a living thing.
"Karin," I said, because anger could hold up where tears were imminent. "You lied."
She smiled like she had won a game. "I called security. Someone's got to keep the neighborhood clean."
"You could have asked. You could have looked," I said, voice small.
She tossed her hair. "And what, take orders from you? Please. You were always running away from schoolwork."
Aiden stood silent. The look on his face was a very old, very sharp thing: shame folded into disgust. He had loved me, once or in rumor, then found a reason to show me down. I had learned to let go of wanting his respect. I had learned other things.
Corbin crouched beside me, steadying me. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I lied. "Finish the readout."
We left then, camera tucked away, data in hand, and humiliation weighing heavy at my back.
One hour later I sat in the property manager's office, air conditioning too loud, the manager bowing and apologizing. "The notice didn't reach us," he repeated. "My mother was in the hospital. It was a mess. We didn't mean—"
"An apology won't fix how I felt," I said. "It's fine. People make mistakes."
In truth, I was thinking of a three-year history no one around me knew. I had doctoral degrees and patents, friends at labs, and code that ran systems that watched thousands of cameras and turned faces into names. The SkyNet face-recognition framework I had written was the core of the latest model. It was what had put me on poles and in server rooms instead of copying notes in homeroom. I had come back, not to be the girl they remembered, but to be the engineer I had already been.
"Why didn't you tell us?" Corbin asked later as we drove away.
"I tried," I said. "I told them I wanted to be normal. I wanted to sit in class, to learn what I'd missed. Then projects came."
"You're the reason the recognition accuracy jumped from seventy to ninety, aren't you?" Corbin grinned, switching lanes.
"One hundred," I said.
"One hundred percent?" His voice climbed. "No errors?"
"No errors," I repeated.
He laughed and then grew serious. "The patent royalties are—"
"Two hundred million," I cut in.
Corbin's jaw dropped. "Two hundred million? Gabriela."
I hadn't paid much attention to bank numbers. Money had been a side effect of work, not a destination. But the idea of spending something wild after years of pretending to be poor tugged at me.
"Let's go to the mall," I told him. "Throw money at the air for once."
We did. Bags piled up like a private parade trailing two people: me, an eight-feet-tall former lab recluse in a school uniform, and Corbin swamped with shopping sacks, looking proud to be my assistant and my muscle. He carried my coats and smiled like someone who had just learned how to laugh properly.
That night in the lab, the supercomputer hummed like a ship's engine. I worked till my fingers cramped, optimizing the framework for the national servers. Then my phone buzzed: a message from Karin, sweet and false. "Gabriela, graduation tomorrow. Everyone will be there. Come and show your face."
I typed back, thinking of last day's humiliation. "I'll be there."
I wasn't going to come as a supplicant.
The morning of graduation, I walked into the 4S dealership with an appointment and an electronic key in my hand. The car company — Gwendal Mortensen's firm, the ones who had used my patent in a flagship model — had presented me with the first concept vehicle produced from my work.
Inside the showroom, Karin and Aiden were arm in arm, eyes on a display of a production prototype. "There she is," Karin breathed when she saw me. "Still scraping by, Gabriela?"
I smiled. "A lot can change in a year."
"A car won't change who you are," she said, loud enough to draw the attention of a sales associate.
"Would you like to see the concept, Ms. English?" the salesperson asked me.
Aiden scoffed. "On what grounds does she deserve to buy a Gwendal? She can't even keep her shirt clean."
The salesperson looked at him, then at our faces, and spoke good business sense: "Everyone who walks in here is a potential client. We help anyone who comes through the door."
I pressed the key fob. The vehicle answered with a soft, satisfying chime. The crowd around us shifted. I opened the door and slid into a seat that fit my hands like it had been waiting.
"I'm taking this one home," I said, sliding the contract across. "It's paid."
Karin's face went white. She shoved Aiden at me with a hiss of triumph. "You're not driving that, you—"
"I am," I said. "Bye."
I drove away with the kind of calm that tastes like victory. Later that day I went to school. The graduation photos were nearly done, and the sun caught faces I had learned to ignore for three years.
"Wait!" Karin blocked the path. "You can't just—"
"I can," I said. "Smile."
She tried to keep up her performance, but when the teacher announced the media, the crowd stirred. Reporters were here for a rumored top scorer and maybe a story about the city's brightest. Aiden held himself like someone ready for a camera. Karin primped.
Then the principal called my name.
"Gabriela English, step forward."
The room settled like someone holding their breath. A photographer waved. "Is she the one?"
A reporter with a familiar face approached and asked sharp questions. "Gabriela, we've heard you were offered a professorship before the exams. Care to comment?"
I blinked. Edward Calhoun, the university president, stepped forward, smiling as if he had been saving his announcement for a special moment. Corbin mouthed a warning at me, but I stood firm.
"Would you like to say anything?" the reporter pressed.
"I don't plan to enroll," I said. "I plan to teach."
Gasps ran across the field. Karin's face crumpled. Aiden's jaw clenched.
"What?" Karin cried. "You—how—"
Edward reached into his bag and produced a glossy red folder. He opened it and read my name aloud, the words feeling heavy and true in the light. "For contributions to national technology — an invitation to join our faculty as a young professor."
Aiden's mouth moved. "This is wrong," he said hoarsely. "There must be a mistake. She had twenty-five points on the exam."
"Twenty-five points?" a reporter echoed. "Is that fact?"
"The exam's last physics question was worth twenty-five points," Edward said. "This question was equivalent to an international physics competition's final problem. Gabriela solved it. That was the reason for the special admission."
Karin's eyes had the glazed look of someone realizing a party trick won't save her. "You cheated," she accused. "You didn't even show up in class. You just—"
"I wrote the code to analyze the problem and I solved it," I said. "That does not make me a cheat. It means I worked on different problems."
"Why teach?" a cameraman asked as cameras swung around.
"Because when I started, I wanted to share the tools I use," I said. "I want students to understand systems, not memorize answers. I want to build better things."
That day, reporters packed my phone with calls. The story went viral: the girl who had the lowest exam score yet solved an impossible final question and got a professorship offer. The internet invented hashtags. Friends from labs sent congratulations. My old classmates felt like the subject of someone else's satire.
Karin couldn't stand the fallout. She tried to spin the narrative, to dig up gossip, to point fingers at me, at Corbin, at Edward. Aiden tried a louder angle of outrage: "There's foul play!"
The world, for once, did not listen to them.
I accepted Edward's offer. The red hire letter sat on my desk, a bright, unbelievable smallness of paper that meant something huge. I became the youngest professor at a leading university. My work moved from prototypes to labs with names and budgets. The SkyNet framework was rolled out nationally built on the code I had perfected.
Two things needed to happen next: public clarity for the attack that had landed me on the pole, and a reminder that cruelty has consequences.
Weeks later the chance came.
There was an alumni symposium at the university — a media event bright with cameras, donors, and a crowd of students. Edward invited me to present a short demo on recognition accuracy. The hall was full. Among the audience, predictably, sat Karin and Aiden, their faces like stone.
"Are you nervous?" Corbin asked, setting up the laptop beside me.
"A little," I admitted.
"Good," he said. "You'll be sharp."
The lights dimmed. I spoke about algorithms, data pipelines, ethics. Cameras shot close-ups. Reporters whispered into their translation modules. I was poised when the final slide came up. It wasn't a slide at all but a video.
I clicked. The screen filled with a grainy clip from the previous week at a residential district: guards arriving at a pole, Karin speaking into a phone, a clear view of Aiden watching, smartphone in hand, recording. The video then switched to security camera footage showing Karin at 9:01 a.m., making an exaggerated phone call, then pointing to guards when they arrived at 9:03. Text captions appeared beneath the footage: "INTENTIONAL MISDIRECTION."
Gasps rolled through the hall. Someone whispered, "Is that—?"
I continued. "We have jurisdiction over national camera logs," I said. "This is not just about a misunderstanding. It's about a targeted attempt to discredit and humiliate a colleague, orchestrated with the help of false witness statements and selective video leaks."
Then I played another clip: their group chat, where Karin joked about the "perfect setup" and Aiden shared the plan to "watch her squirm." The chat messages were timestamped and verified. The audience reacted: a rustle like wind in dry leaves.
I felt nothing so much as relief. The accusation that had been used to shame me was now a public exhibit. The room filled with murmurs — anger, disbelief, the slow tipping of sympathy toward me.
Karin's face changed first. The self-satisfied composure fell away and was replaced by a tightness at the mouth. Her palms were damp. Aiden clutched the edge of his chair as if to hold himself upright. Their bravado had no foundation; they had been archers who missed and now saw their arrows land at their own feet.
A journalist stood, microphone raised. "Ms. Ramos, is it true you asked security to detain Gabriela?"
Karin's answer came out thin. "I... I wanted to teach her a lesson. She always acted like she was better than everyone. I didn't think—"
"You didn't think what?" Edward interrupted, voice steady as a judge. "That orchestrating a false accusation would have consequences?"
"I—" Karin's lips trembled.
Aideon stood, voice breaking. "We were angry. She humiliated us by ignoring our standards. It was a prank. We didn't mean—"
"That's not how it looks." Edward turned to the cameras. "We have the logged communications, the timestamps, and the security recordings. This is harassment and deliberate fabrication. The university will not tolerate this."
"You're going to expel us?" Karin asked, panic flaring.
"There's more," Edward said. "The footage you took and uploaded from the dealership breached privacy protocols and violated city ordinances. The district attorney has been informed."
At that, the murmurs swelled. Someone in the crowd muttered, "Arrest? Really?"
Police officers in plain clothes had been in the gallery as per the event security plan. They stepped forward. One took out a folder and read a brief statement: "Due to repeated harassing behavior and deliberate fabrication of criminal activity for personal ridicule, Ms. Ramos and Mr. Dickson are under investigation for harassment and misconduct. We have warrants for questioning."
"Karin," Aiden whispered. The floor tilted under them.
Aiden's face moved through stages: shock, thin anger, denial, pleading. Karin tried to keep control but the letters of her demeanor dissolved into panic. "You can't do this to us," she shrieked. "You're ruining everything!"
People around them took phones from their pockets. Some filmed; others called friends. The crowd's reaction was a complicated shape: a mixture of outrage toward Karin and Aiden, sympathy for how public exposure could feel humiliating even when deserved, and a noisy sense of justice being served. A few people clapped, sharp and brief. One man stood and shouted, "Good! About time!"
Karin's voice curdled. "This is a setup. You had access to everything—you're using your power!"
"I used the evidence you gave us," I said. My voice was quiet but carried. "Your messages were public enough. The evidence speaks for itself."
Aiden made a last, desperate attempt to reach someone in the audience. "My uncle works in the media! He'll—"
"He already called a lawyer," I said, letting myself feel cold. "He did the right thing."
They were escorted quietly but firmly out by officers. As they passed, I saw Karin's mascara had streaked, her nails digging into her palms. Aiden's jaw had slackened, his anger replaced by a helplessness I had seen in children who dropped their ice cream.
The DA filed charges for harassment and unlawful dissemination of private footage. The school revoked Karin's student leadership and opened disciplinary hearings. Aiden lost a scholarship when his family pressed for the college where he had matriculated to reconsider recommendations. The car dealership issued a restraining warning against public harassment.
For a week, social feeds carried the footage. "Poetic justice," some said. "Too cruel," others argued. I read it all and felt a small, steady calm. Cruelty had consequences, and the consequences were a public accounting. It was not my aim to break them, but to make visible the harm they had tried to inflict.
When the trial-like university hearing convened, it played out like a public theater. Karin and Aiden were forced to read their own messages aloud. They stumbled. Forgiveness was offered by some; condemnation by others. The most harrowing moment was when Karin, realizing that every lie had been recorded, began to cry with a sound that was not performance but raw regret.
"You never thought we'd rise," she sobbed. "We thought you'd stay small."
"I didn't stay small," I said. "I just chose a different kind of growth. You, however, chose cruelty to feel larger."
The room watched as heads turned. Some students wept. Some walked out. The dean read the sanctions: suspension and community service, public apology, and mandatory counseling. The DA's office scheduled interviews. Their parents called lawyers. The public watched. The humiliation they had tried to place on me had become a mirror they could not ignore.
Years later, on a quiet afternoon, I learned the legal consequences had been harsher than most had expected: fines, probation, and a notation on academic records that closed doors. Aiden's uncle couldn't pull strings to erase the evidence. Karin lost the chance to join a scholarship program. They had been actors in a cruel farce and were left with the cost.
As for me, I kept working. The university lab grew around me — a crew of grad students, servers humming like a library, a car in the parking lot that still smelled like leather and victory. Corbin stayed by my side through long nights, then through grant proposals, then through sleepless tests.
Two years later he surprised me in a small lab corridor, hands sweating, cheeks flushed. "Gabriela," he said. "I've been foolish. I keep trying to catch up to you. But I want to ask if—"
He blurted out, voice raw: "Would you marry me if I win the Nobel Prize?"
I laughed at the absurdity and honesty of it, and then I kissed him because it felt right to build life from the truth. "I'll take it seriously," I said. "Work on the prize. I'll be your number one fan."
He grinned, half disbelief, half hope. "Deal."
We both joked, but I meant it. He later told me the story of his research, late nights rewriting code, learning to be relentless in a way that fit us both. The Nobel came many years down the line, but that was another story — one of persistence and the quiet humor we kept when things grew too large.
In the end, the red hiring folder stayed in a drawer, sometimes tapped when I needed a reminder. The key fob with its tiny beep lived on my desk. Once in a while, late at night in the lab, I would press the fob and hear the car answer across the parking lot, a small, personal bell that meant a world I had built was real.
"Self-strength and duty," Edward said once, quoting old words. "And don't forget, Gabriela, keep your hands on the devices; they will change the world."
I smiled and answered, because I'd been taught to value truth more than applause. "I will. And I'll make sure they watch differently."
The End
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