Face-Slapping16 min read
When I Rode a Bicycle Back to 1990 and Saved Her Future
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"I scored two hundred and ninety on my mock exam," I said to myself, lying flat on the cheap dorm bed as if facts could soothe me.
"You flunked the real thing, Aliana," the streetlight outside my window hummed back, and the city smelled like gasoline and late-night instant noodles.
I had let my college entrance exam slide — 290 — and my parents had packed their bags and left town in a fury straight to Hainan. The neighbor who rarely came by, a stooped woman who smelled of oil and boiled cabbage, brought me a brand-new smartphone and squeezed my hand so hard her knuckles went white.
"You did so well compared to me," she said, eyes dim then bright like a lantern someone had just polished. "Back then I didn't even take the exam."
I frowned, because who says that? Who says "I didn't take the exam" like it's a secret trophy? A week later she was gone. The husband and son called her a fool for hiding money; they didn't even prepare a proper grave. The news felt like an ache you couldn't scratch.
That night I woke up choking on a scent of dust and black tea, and found myself sitting in a high school classroom with a pencil between my fingers and a coin jar on the desk.
"I looked down at my own handwriting," I said out loud, "and it still reads Su— no, Aliana. That's me."
"Aliana? Are you okay?" a soft voice said.
I turned. Nineteen, bright-eyed, hair braided badly but eyes like spring: Veronica Barbieri sat in the next desk. She grinned at me like the world was full of good things.
"You're Veronica?" I blurted. "You told me once— someone said they didn't take the exam. You said you didn't—"
Veronica blinked. "Take the exam? Of course I will. Why are you acting like a ghost?"
"I don't know," I said. "But that jar is mine. Where did it come from?"
She laughed and tucked a stray strand behind her ear. "You and your coins. Sit up. We have a mock test."
The mock results were a joke. "I got one hundred and fourteen in math," Veronica said, turning her paper. "You—"
"I got fourteen," I said without thinking. "What the hell?"
"You are joking," she said, and her laugh echoed like church bells.
I wasn't joking. Physics and chemistry added up wrong for me like a puzzle with missing pieces. "How are you this good?" I demanded. "Why would a brain like yours ever miss the real exam?"
Veronica's smile thinned. "My family's not rich. They'll ask me to help build greenhouses. They say boys need a future and girls should keep the home. That's why."
"That's why? You'd stay home because your brothers might need suits?" I grabbed her wrist. "You won't. We will study together. Don't you dare skip."
She looked at me like I had said something ridiculous and a little wonderful. "But my mother will cry. They think a girl's work is in the fields. We'll help, but—"
"No," I said, standing, grabbing my coat. "Come with me. We'll go to the city. I'll help. You help me study. We'll take the exam together."
She hesitated only a beat, and the two of us pedaled out on a battered bicycle like conspirators. The wind tugged at Veronica's too-short sleeves, and I held on, feeling ridiculous and alive.
Outside the small city market we found a pair of shoes and a white dress like something out of a magazine, and I, for no adult reason, bought the dress.
"How did you afford this?" Veronica whispered when she came out of the changing room. She looked like a secret princess in the white lace, and her smile made the fluorescent lights softer.
"You deserve it," I said, and for the first time that day she didn't hide her delight.
"Not gonna lie," said a voice. "You wear that dress very well."
A tall, well-dressed boy we hadn't noticed stood by the suits display. He was crisp in a way the market wasn't. The boy's voice made everyone hush for a second because it fit with him like a proper jacket.
"Thanks," he said politely. "May I buy the shoes to match?"
Veronica was stunned, flushed like a peach. "I can't— sir, I can't accept—"
"Let me," the boy insisted, and he left his card and a smile before we could protest. He left with a driver like the opening credits of a movie.
Back on the bicycle, Veronica's toes peeped out of new shoes, and she pedaled with a lightness that made me think of a different life.
"One day," I told her, "you'll never need to hide your shoes."
She looked at me, eyes bright. "I won't let them sell these."
When her parents saw the shoes and dress, they wavered between outrage and triumph. Her father muttered about boys needing suits while the girls wore patched sleeves. Her mother smiled with nervous pride at the gifts and then said we'd return the items because the family had to pay for her brother's vocational school.
"I sold mine to pay for his fees before," Veronica said at night, voice small. "I used to keep things for myself but—"
"Not this time," I said. "You won't sell these. You're going to study. I swear."
She looked at me, then at her parents, and something in her shifted like winter turning into spring.
The week after we worked in the cold, we learned formulas and the way she explained a physics problem made my teeth ache with envy. She had a way of turning slow-swinging equations into a small, ordered world. The greenhouses went up in the village, the men using crude tools and calling it family pride, but Veronica returned each night with scraped hands and a mind that kept sharpening.
One afternoon when an accident left her leg twisted on a ladder, the town did what towns do: they fussed and pretended everything was normal. Her father came back with money he said he'd spent at the market. Her shoes were gone.
"Where are they?" I demanded at once.
"Sold," her father said, voice tight. "They were gathering dust."
"You sold the shoes she wore today," I said. "Yesterday she was chosen by a man who might help her. You sold them because you wanted money for your son's suit?"
The man's jaw went white then red. "Do you want trouble from neighbors?" he barked.
"Then you want her to lose her exam to feed your son?" I said. "You should be ashamed."
Her mother sighed like someone used to keeping secrets. The next morning Veronica limp-walked to the school, a brave front as if her course were a straight line.
When the transfer papers arrived — signed the day her father brought her home — I nearly collapsed. "You were almost signed out of school," I said. "You should have protested."
She looked at me as if I had given her a map. "I protested," she said. "I ran back and paid my own fees. I tricked my brother into lending his school funds. He hated me for it, but he didn't answer me. I had to fight."
The boy who had bought her shoes, his name Hudson Campbell, kept appearing in pockets of our days: at the hospital when I fell and cried so loud an elegant car stopped; at the cafeteria where he took her home; and at a hundred small moments when his presence pushed her from rumor circles.
"Why him?" I asked once. "Why does he care?"
"Because I sold him a pair of shoes," Veronica said in that small, embarrassed voice people use when something huge has happened and she isn't sure how to hold it. "But no — he doesn't want to 'help' me like that. He said he'd study with me. He'll ask for nothing but answers."
School can be a cruel stage. Small-minded girls found gossip a sport and pinned it to Veronica like a vulture pins prey. They plastered a test with someone else's name; they whispered about the shoes and the boy. The worst were the ones who made up stories and then believed them.
"She's after Hudson," one girl hissed as if the phrase were a verdict.
"She's a country girl!" another said. "Think of us."
I climbed a desk and slapped one of them, the move ridiculous and heroic at once.
"Shut up!" I shouted. "High school is for tests, not for gossip."
Our teacher looked like he'd seen this all before. "Aliana, calm down," he said. "There are three months to the exam—"
"That is exactly why," I said, "you waste time on rumors."
Veronica was stronger than I'd thought; she answered back when accused of cheating and produced torn scrap-paper evidence to pin the real cheater. A boy named Dion — ugly in his boldness, loud in his threats — and Veronica's own brother Gerardo were in the center of the cheating scheme. They had tried to sell answers, to make a fast buck by messing with high school futures.
"You sold it?" Veronica said quietly to the headmaster when he threatened expulsion. "Tell everyone what the paper looked like and who brought it."
She held up a torn strip of paper we had kept. "It's false," she said. "It doesn't match the real exam."
In an ugly, tense meeting, a small group of parents and teachers gathered. "If you find one cheat, you found a scandal," said the principal. "If you find conspiracy, there will be consequences."
Dion's face flushed with stupid bravado. "So what if we sold a sheet? This school's full of kids who'll never make it anyway."
Gerardo muttered like a cornered animal. "I only did it to help my brother live like other kids."
"By stealing futures?" Veronica snapped.
The police came. The village rallied. The community breathed like a beast that had a new wound. Dion laughed too loud at the station as if the danger had teeth he could bite back.
"They'll scare you and let you go," he told Gerardo. "It's how it works."
"They will not," I said. "Not when they lied about someone's work."
The investigation turned. Evidence collapsed under scrutiny. The papers were traced, the handwriting compared, and the lies tumbled like rotten fruit. The principal, who had been nervous about the school's image, made a choice: that morning he called a special assembly at the town hall.
"You can't stage the feeling of the hall," Hudson said to me when he led me by the elbow. "People gather differently when a thing is public."
"Good," I answered. "I want them to see everything."
The hall filled with murmurs. Parents, teachers, villagers, and the entire school trickled in, a dozen rows of faces lit by yellow bulbs. On the raised stage, the principal opened a folder.
"We have concluded our inquiry," he began, voice thin. "There were those who planned and those who followed. For the sake of our young people's futures, we will make this demonstration public."
Dion scowled. Gerardo sat with his head down, hands shaking.
"I stand here," the principal said, "to read the testimony and show the evidence in front of everyone. If you refuse to face your acts, then you refuse to face your neighbors."
A dozen phones came up — not to spy, but because villages are homes for gossip. "They'll post it," someone said. "This will be in the newspaper."
"Let it," Veronica said softly. She didn't sound angry so much as steady.
The principal slid photographs and papers across the lectern. He read each transcript. "This paper was found in the possession of Mr. Gerardo Reed," he said, naming Veronica's brother. "It has the official stamp of the mid-level technical college and the marginal notes of the one who sold it, Mr. Dion Chapman."
The room filled with a low, unpleasant sound. "What do you have to say?" the principal asked Dion.
Dion's bravado cracked. "I— I sold a paper," he said at last, words small. "But I thought it was just a test for practice. I didn't know they would—"
"You didn't know?" a mother in the third row shouted. "You robbed their lives!"
"You think this is petty? How many of you would pay for your child's future if you had the chance?" He tried to throw the burden onto them.
People turned. A retired teacher in the front row, a small man with a history of bitter eyes, spoke up. "You made money by stealing the chance of a girl to rise. What will you do when your children ask you why you spent your life on other people's ruin?"
Dion's face went from cocky to startled to pale. He looked at the crowd as if the faces were suddenly knives.
Next the principal read Gerardo's statement. "He says he wanted money for his family," the principal recited, voice flat. "He says he thought 'sharing' answers would help. He thought his sister would understand. He thought wrong."
I felt a primitive hunger eavesdropping from inside: the desire for justice — or at least to watch the façade crumble.
Dion's thin smile slid off. He stood there while the principal described, in a neutral tone, the student's confession, the falsified notes, the money exchanges. People murmured and then grew louder. Mothers pressed their hands to their mouths. Old men spat on the floor.
"Why did you do it?" a father bellowed. "You ruined a girl's exam so your mate could sell answers. How will you live with that?"
Dion's voice caught. "I thought— I thought we could share—"
"Share?" the crowd repeated.
Veronica stepped forward then, her voice brittle but calm. "You told my mother to hire you to keep me home. You called me a waste of resources. You thought I'd be gullible and weak. You were wrong."
She turned and walked down the steps. "Look at him," she said, pointing at Dion. "He had a mouth full of threats and a pocket full of other people's pain."
People gasped.
The mayor, who had been sitting silently, rose and asked for order. "We will not have violence," he said. "But we will have public accountability."
"What does that mean?" someone shouted.
"It means they will answer to us here," the mayor said. "They will say to the families they hurt, to the students they cheated, why they chose money over decency."
Dion tried to be defiant. "I didn't mean—"
"You did," a woman said sharply. "And you will be asked, under oath at the school tribunal next week."
The crowd wanted more than the tribunal — they wanted the thrill of watching consequences. A few villagers proposed symbolic acts: returning each coin, handing over any profit, public apologies in the local paper. The mood wore into a legal shape.
Over the course of the next hour, people hauled out receipts, notes, and the paper trail that had been kept in drawers and backpacks. A math teacher pointed to a sloppy series of calculations the pair had used to fake answers. They were exposed for the lazy swindle they were.
Dion's face collapsed through five stages: insolence, surprise, denial, anger, and finally panic. "This is slander," he growled.
"Is it?" said an elderly neighbor, voice like dry cotton. "When the proof sits on the table, is it still slander?"
Phones recorded. A girl took photographs. A man from the little county newspaper muttered into his tape recorder. You could feel Dion shrinking as if the village air had been proportioned to him and was being slowly taken away.
"Apologize," the principal demanded. "Publicly. To the girl. To the school."
Dion opened his mouth and shut it. He could not find the words that would make the lovers of easy money love him again.
"Say it," Veronica said.
He stuttered a shallow, mechanical apology. The crowd hissed. Some clapped sarcastically. Others spat on the floor. The humiliation was not theatrical but it was real: the man who had tried to wield power with cash now stood naked before the people he'd tried to use.
Gerardo finally spoke. His voice trembled. "I am sorry," he said. "I only— I didn't think—"
"You put your sister's life on a ledger," someone said. "What good does apology do when the deed is done?"
The mayor, an old man with more sense of justice than many would credit, announced a formal sanction: the pair would be suspended from the community youth program, their names would be listed in the school file as responsible for exam tampering, and they would perform public service — tutoring younger kids for a full term under oversight — and be forced to return any money they'd gained.
"But what of criminal charges?" someone asked.
"The evidence will be given to the right authorities," the mayor said. "We will let the law take its course."
Dion's face imploded. He had been arrogant enough to think he'd escape with a nod. Now his errors had become a ledger of shame, and the village would remember. He went from haughty to hollow, and the crowd's energy turned from curiosity to moral satisfaction. People wanted the world tip to the side that day so that the weight of wrongdoing could be seen.
Above all, they'd made themselves witnesses.
"We will not forget," a mother near me said. "Not for the sake of revenge, but so we teach our children what not to be."
The humiliation stretched, long and public. Phones flashed. Neighbors shook their heads. Some cheered when the sanctions were read. Dion, who had once sneered at the idea of consequence, now found himself in the hardest place to survive: stared at and remembered.
By the time the assembly ended, the two boys left under a chorus of whispers and the occasional thrown insult. Their faces were wet; not only from shame but from the understanding they'd been stripped and left with no easy cover. They had been punished publicly — not by whips but by the close attention of a small town that would echo their shame for months.
"That was necessary," Hudson said softly, holding my hand. "So no one else will be tempted."
"It didn't make me happy," I said. "But I wanted her to have a fair chance."
Veronica squeezed my hand. "I want to study," she said. "And I want them to face what they did."
The punishment scene didn't end their lives; it redirected them. The authorities did their paperwork and sent them on to the juvenile office. Gerardo's father got called in, and their family had to look people in the eye and explain. They were publicly chastened in a way that made their arrogance impossible.
Weeks later, the school awarded the mock test prize to Veronica anyway. Her name in the announcements glowed like a small lamp. The village started talking about how the girl who might have been sold away had fought to stay and now had a chance.
"And I remember the coin jar," Veronica told me in a voice that trembled. "You didn't have to, but you found the courage."
I blinked. "I don't know how I did most of this."
"You do know," she said. "You rode beside me. You got angry. You did not let them take you."
I did not know that by changing small moments — buying a dress, refusing to let her be signed out, exposing cheaters — I would watch a life alter its course.
"Why did you help me?" she asked one night after a long study session, while streetlights patterned our dorm window like old film.
"Because someone once bought me a phone when I did badly," I admitted. "And when you were the one who didn't take the exam, I wanted to see what would happen if you did."
She looked at me, steady and serious. "You saved me."
"No," I said. "We saved each other."
The rest of the year zipped like a clock. We studied, fought, and sometimes cried. The town gave us a small, loud victory at our model exam. People who had once laughed had to eat their words. Colors shifted. Hudson stayed by Veronica, gentle in public and rough with the press only when needed. The parents who had scoffed at her wore thin smiles when she placed first in the county mock exam.
Then the family tragedy hit: her brother got into trouble and was attacked by men who wanted revenge for the exam scandal. The hospital door swung open and shut like thunder. Veronica ran there, her hands torn and raw, and I followed.
"I will not let them take anything else from me," she said that night in the cold corridor, each word like a promise.
By the time the surgery room light dimmed and the doctor shook his head, the precariousness of everything pressed on the family. But something had moved finally: the parents who had once pointed at Veronica's ambitions now sat with empty eyes, remorse settling like ash.
They begged forgiveness in private, and Veronica refused to give it cheaply. She did not want to rescue those who had repeatedly sold her, but she would not undo the effort she had made.
When the week before the big exam arrived, everything condensed. She took the test in a fury of cold purpose. I sat three seats away, scribbling numbers and fighting a fear that had nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with the fates of two girls who had shared a bicycle.
The phrase I had pettily invented in the dorm — "steam-shrimp CP" between Hudson and Veronica — became part of our jokes. He waited after tests to say things none of us would have expected.
"Aliana," Hudson said once as we walked out of the exam hall, voice low. "When you finish, come sit with me. I have something to tell you."
"Is it a lecture?" I said.
"No. It's important. But first—" He grinned. "You need to go and write your name legibly."
I rolled my eyes but later did as he asked. I found out, years after, that a small thing like legible handwriting can change how a person is recorded.
Then all at once I pitched from consciousness — a sudden fall on a stair, and then darkness. In that moment between, Veronica's hand on my shoulder had been warm, her voice a whisper: "Write the truth, Aliana. Write for both of us."
I woke up in the present with the light on my poster and the phone ringing in the drawer. It was June 7, 2022, and my mother was hollering through the door about the exam and about neighbors.
"Aliana," she said, barging in later as if she'd run a marathon. "Don't sleep now. Your neighbor will take you."
My heart made a strange duet with my ribs.
At dawn, a gleaming BMW rolled up under the block. The driver door opened and Veronica — forty-nine, luminous, wearing understated jewelry, hair pinned with a single jade pin — leaned in like someone returning from a movie premiere.
"Aliana," she said, smiling in that calm way she had learned in the years I had rewritten for her. "Get in. Today you're taking an exam but you're not alone."
Hudson was in the front seat, hand on the wheel, and he looked at us with the soft, steady expression he had used to calm storms months before.
"You look different," I whispered to Veronica as I climbed in.
"You look like a girl who once bought me a dress," she answered, and her hand closed over mine.
"Who then?" I asked, and the memory of the police hall, the public shaming, the hospital, the torn papers came back brightly. "Who bought the dress?"
"You did," she said. "You bought it and you bought my courage. You rode on my bicycle when the wind wanted to push you off."
The car smelled like leather and old money. Hudson looked back at me. "You know when you're done, you promised to listen to me," he said. "You still have one of my things."
"What thing?" I asked.
"A promise." He smiled like the boy at the suits' counter years ago. "You have to hear me say why I kept showing up."
We went through the exam together like ghosts with wristwatches. When I left the building I felt too big for my skin. Hudson met me at the gate as promised.
"I told you I'd say something," he said. "I saw you in the market that day. I saw the dress. I found here the coin jar you've kept all these years."
"You did?" I asked.
"I did. You helped my mother understand something. You helped a girl who forgot to be proud remember. I wanted to say thank you."
His words were small, but they sat in me like a bell.
"There's one more thing," Veronica said, tugging my sleeve. "You changed more than one life. You remember that phrase you made up? People still talk about it. But the best thing is this: the coin jar is empty now because you spent it wisely."
"A jar?" I asked, fingers suddenly cold.
She laughed. "Yes. You bought a dress, and a girl's life. You wrote lots of torn notes and kept one scrap that later became proof. You fell on the stairs and woke up. You triaged mistakes and gave people chances."
I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell her the whole story of the public hall where Dion and Gerardo stood and were forced to name their shame. I wanted to tell her about the way the village used phones as mirrors and held them up until the boys could see themselves.
"Why did you tell me now?" I asked.
"Because you needed to wake up and remember," she said simply. "We had to both try."
Hudson took a deep breath. "Aliana," he said. "There's something else. Years later, at an awards dinner — the one your neighbor's boss invited us to — I asked Veronica to marry me properly, not as a deal. She said yes. She did not sell herself, and she never stopped owning her choices."
Veronica's fingers found mine in the car, and she squeezed. "We made choices."
We drove past the school with its familiar tower. "You ever think," I said, half a joke, "that we— me — could have failed and she'd still be in that old life?"
Veronica's head tilted. "Maybe," she said. "But I think we don't live on 'maybe.' We live on what we do with now."
On the edge of the city, Hudson stopped the car. "There's one thing," he said, "you promised to let me tell you after the exam."
He looked at me and then at Veronica, and the three of us laughed like conspirators.
Hudson's question came then like something that had been waiting. "Aliana, will you keep being the kind of person who buys dresses for other people's futures?"
I thought of the town hall, the way everyone had held the two boys up to the light, the trembling apology, the way the world had re-leveled itself by seeing. I thought of Veronica on a bicycle with white shoes, of my mother’s impatient voice, and of the exquisite sweet panic of an exam hall.
"Yes," I said, quietly, "and I'll teach others to do it, too."
He nodded then, as if satisfied, and Veronica reached over and kissed him on the cheek like she'd done a hundred times before.
When I climbed out of the car, the coin jar felt inside me heavier and lighter all at once. The exam was only an exam; the world was not a single test.
Veronica's fingers brushed mine as she pushed me toward the gate. "When you finish," she said, and the phrase had the power of a vow, "meet me. There is one more story to tell you."
I walked into the hall and into the bright, noisy world where answers are hard and people are harder, and I promised, silently and loudly, that I would write truth wherever it was needed and that I would buy dresses where courage seemed thin.
The End
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