bound; governed by fate or extremely likely to occur.
"Face it, Marco. You and I are bound to one another. Even after all this time, even despite the consequences of our love, you can't keep yourself away from me-and neither can I."
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M A R I N A — Fear and Loathing "I live my life in bitterness, and fill my heart with emptiness."
—
Romessa was not the same woman that she'd been two years ago. After enduring the trauma caused by her sexual assault and the pregnancy which was discovered afterwards, she decided that if she wanted to erase her scars, she would need to erase herself.
So she did just that—total erasure. She became a firecracker the moment she stepped foot on her University's campus, assuming a new personality and a new demeanor. She devoted herself to her studies—in part because knowledge made her feel powerful, in part because it was the only distraction strong enough to fend off her lingering misery. The insomnia she'd already developed over the summer meant that she could easily spend 16 out of 24 hours studying. Summer, winter, and spring breaks weren't breaks at all for the Moroccan, who instead used those times to take accelerated courses. Months after her 20th birthday, she finished all of the coursework necessary to earn her degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and subsequently graduated two years earlier than the rest of her class.
Unlike most women in her profession, Romessa prided herself on having a striking appearance. She'd developed incredibly since she was eighteen, shedding baby fat and learning how to do her hair and makeup. Rarely could she ever be caught dead without a beautiful red lip or dark eyeliner, and she preferred to wear heels far more often than not. Her dark, angular eyebrows were always neatly groomed, allowing her to appear drastically more mature than she actually was at the young age of twenty. This was exactly how she wanted to be. She'd established an appearance and demeanor which was intimidating—it demanded respect and envy in a field where plenty of people like her received the opposite.
"Frau Bensaïd, I read an article about your new project with the Bundesliga. The technology you've developed is absolutely amazing. Do you think they'll fully implement it throughout the league?" One of Romessa's students approached her after her second lecture at Dortmund's Technical University, where she taught a course in Computer Science with two other professors. She'd only begun her new faculty position two weeks ago, and found that it was far more boring than what she'd expected it to be. She was anxious to begin testing her own technology, and even more so to develop it.
"Hopefully," Responded Romessa, in her elementary German. It was only a week ago that she'd spent two hours pitching her technology to the top executives who ran the Bundesliga. Before that, she'd been planning to pitch to the NBA—but her deportation ruined the entire deal. It was an incident that had shaken her entire family to its core. With her mother and father being sent back to Morocco, she was worried sick for their well-being, constantly calling and texting to make sure they were safe and to ask if they needed any money or help from her. All of her parent's savings had already gone to an immigration lawyer—they were desperate to get American citizenship in order to go back to their old lives, but Romessa knew it would be less challenging to go to a different and smaller country. She was her family's only hope. If she could make a name for herself in Germany by using her program to improve the way athletes participated in the most watched sport in the country, certainly she and her family would be granted permanent residency in the country.
