My Roommate Tried to Frame Me for Giving Her Syphilis, So After Rebirth, I Went on the Warpath Chapter 06
The auditorium came apart.
“Holy shit. That is the innocent girl? That is her work-study job?”
“Nobody drinks and works a table like that without two solid years in the club scene.”
“She was escorting, caught syphilis, and came back here to frame her own roommate? Who does that?”
The wave of jeering coming off the floor pushed Chloe over the edge.
She charged the stage screaming and grabbed for the computer’s power cord.
“Turn it off! All of it is fake! You paid somebody to deepfake my face onto that! I hope you rot!”
“Falling apart already?” I caught her wrist and threw her down onto the stage.
“If it’s fake, the police can have it analyzed.”
The words were barely out of my mouth when the auditorium doors banged open.
Four officers came through them at a fast clip.
The one in front, Officer Doyle, swept the room with a look, and his voice cut straight through the noise.
“Which one of you is Chloe Marsh? Where are Bree Walsh and Kayla Brooks?”
One look at the uniforms and Chloe’s whole body gave out, and she lay on the stage without moving.
Doyle held up the warrant and raised his voice.
“We have pulled your actual medical records, along with the club’s payment logs and its escort schedules.
“Chloe Marsh, you knew you had a contagious disease, and you deliberately framed a classmate for it in a way that caused serious public harm.
“You are being taken in on charges of criminal defamation and harassment.”
“No. I didn’t do anything. I’m the victim here.”
She kept fighting them anyway.
Two officers stepped in without a word, took an arm each, and hauled her out.
Doyle turned and found my two roommates shaking in the corner.
“Bree Walsh, Kayla Brooks. Based on the footage Mia Lawson turned over, you’re looking at criminal destruction of property.
“The damages come to more than $10,000, which clears the threshold for charges. You’re coming with us.”
Bree and Kayla dropped to their knees and crawled toward me, wailing and reaching for my legs.
An officer barked at them, and both of them got dragged out of the auditorium like a pair of sacks.
Whitfield, who had watched all of it from the floor without changing expression, finally stood up.
He came up onto the stage with a face like thunder and locked his eyes on Grant, who had gone gray.
“Grant Mercer. You are an academic advisor. You took one side without investigating anything, and then you worked with the people spreading the lie to force the victim out of this university. That is a gross abuse of your position.”
Whitfield took the microphone and made the announcement in front of the entire department.
“Effective immediately, Grant Mercer is relieved of all duties pending a full review by the university.
“Every honor and every scholarship taken from Mia Lawson is reinstated as of right now.”
Grant’s legs went out from under him and he sat down hard on the stage.
I watched the clown show end and felt absolutely nothing.
Two days later a man and a woman blocked my way at the campus gate.
They were Chloe’s parents.
In my old life these two staged a screaming fit outside my family’s house and slapped my mother across the face.
They kept it up until both of my parents lost their jobs.
“You’re Mia Lawson?”
Donna Marsh came at me with her eyes red and her hand already up, swinging for my face.
“You put my daughter in a cell. I will tear you apart!”
I had been expecting it, so I watched her wind up and stepped clean out of the way.
She had put too much into the swing, and her own momentum carried her stumbling into the hedge.
She landed face first in the dirt, and a branch opened a bloody scratch across her cheek.
“She hit me! This college girl is trying to kill me!”
She gave up on getting back to her feet, sat there in the dirt, and started slapping her thighs and howling for an audience.
