Charming by Haig Moses (1st Draft)

Chapter Forty-One

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

Everything started to move faster than expected after Tatiana and Ana gave their statements the following morning. The public arrest of their perpetrator was casted around not just Cambridge, but the nation. They held him for twenty-four hours and then released him which sparked outrage.

    It took a day for me to gather all the Kappa sisters past and present as well as sisters form other sororities to march across Cambridge and through Boston. The news and paparazzi caught the attention of this and followed us all the way to liberty bell. Though, we all knew what was causing such a panic was me. Each headline that came printed our way read: PRINCE LOUIS'S NEW GIRLFRIEND THE ACTIVIST, or something along those lines.

    "How are you two?" Tatiana had asked right before the march as she put another magazine down.

    "Fine."

    "Just fine?" she probed. "You two have been all over the papers and social media for weeks. They've already started to speculate when your wedding date is going to be and what your children are going to look like."

    I hummed at her excitement explicitly aware that the large diamond engagement ring was sitting upstairs in my bag of school textbooks and my mother's journals. Since I arrived back in the states I'd been ignoring Louis's phone calls and text messages to me. I didn't want to face him I couldn't and there was some part of me that wished he would forget me and vice versa because ever since I landed back on American soil I realized how much better I could breathe. I was free here. To speak. The protest. To march. To live my life the way I wanted to. "Yeah," I released. "We're just fine."

    The march took us four hours to complete from Cambridge all the way to some park and by the time we reached the crowd had grown exponentially; a crowd of men and women who wanted to all hear what we wanted to say. "Thank you all for joining us today," I shouted until a microphone was placed in my hand. "This year has been terrifying, especially for women. We've been confined to our rooms and houses. Dependent on others to get us from point a to point b. We have been victimized and have had our liberties stripped from us even more than usual and now it's time for us to take it back. It is time for us to demand justice for Alice and Bethany and Noel and Ana and Tatiana," I looked back at the girls beside me and smile. "It's time we all got justice for that they've taken from us!"

    The crowd around us roared to life and Ana stepped forward to speak. "Hello everyone, my name is Prathana Balakrishna and I was attacked a few days ago and almost raped, by someone I thought I knew. Someone I trusted and for a while I was conflicted whether to not to go to the police because rarely do we have women who are believed and rarely do we as women get justice for the horrors that is brought onto us," she swallowed and looked beside me. I took her hand and her breathing seemed to steady. "But I was told by my friend here, that there are women who are hurting and that I could help just by speaking up. So, for everyone out there and everyone watching. You know his name and you know what he's done. Stand with us as we reclaim our space and our bodies."

    The crowd roared through the television screen and I swallowed the heaviness inside my throat. Our march had been broadcasted on every major news station and as we neared the trial date which had been set the anxiety in the house had been raised. "So what happens next?"

    "Nothing," Olivia Thompson said. The high-profile attorney had come to our defense out of a favor to Professor Aude, but also because the case was so sought after. "The trial has been set so all we need to do is prepare to go to war. My crisis management team will be contacting you all in a few days listen to them. They'll be your life jacket because the questions they'll be asking you all on the stand will be brutal and evasive and meant to break you, but you can't break. If you show too much emotion your lying and not enough well... your lying, so don't lie. And carry on with life as normal, but just for the sake of everything stay inside please."