My Roommate Tried to Frame Me for Giving Her Syphilis, So After Rebirth, I Went on the Warpath Chapter 05
The screen filled with a scanned medical record on Mercy General letterhead, signed and dated by the doctor
who treated her.
I lifted the microphone, and my voice carried clean to the back of the hall
“This visit is dated two weeks ago.
“The patient came in with sores and was diagnosed with primary syphilis.”
My eyes settled on Chloe’s bloodless face in the front row, and I read the name off the chart one word at a
time.
“Patient name. Chloe Marsh.”
The room went dead silent, and then it erupted loud enough to lift the roof.
Chloe shot to her feet, shaking all over. “You faked that! It isn’t real! Mr. Mercer, what she’s doing is illegal!”
“You know better than anybody whether it’s real.” I laughed under my breath and clicked the mouse.
The billing statement Bree had used against me a minute earlier came up on the screen.
“I have my wonderful roommate to thank for tearing my cabinet apart to find this and calling it hard
evidence.
“So everybody take a good look at the contact number in the bottom right corner.”
I zoomed in on the digits.
“It ends in 8826. Chloe, would you like me to dial it right now so we can all hear whose phone rings?”
The color drained out of Bree and Kayla at the same time.
Neither of them had actually read the statement. They saw a prescription for an STD and couldn’t wait to
nail it to me.
“You did this.” Chloe dropped back into her chair and couldn’t get another word out.
I clicked through to the next image, the CDC’s published guidelines on syphilis.
“Even if you give her every benefit of the doubt, the CDC says the shortest incubation period for syphilis is
ten days.
“Chloe says she used my towel on Monday night and was diagnosed Tuesday morning.
“So which is it, Chloe? Did you catch some mutant strain from outer space that cuts the incubation down to
under twelve hours?”
“Or did you pick it up two weeks ago, realize you couldn’t hide it anymore, and borrow something personal of mine so you would have somebody to pin it on?”
The questions landed like stones, and the mood in the auditorium flipped in a heartbeat.
“Holy shit, that is evil.”
“She set her up! Does she think we’re all stupid?
“And Bree brought in Chloe’s own receipt to bury Mia? Were they in on it together?”
Sweat broke out across Grant’s forehead.
“That’s enough!”
He lunged for the computer, all bluster and no nerve.
“Mia, even if Chloe lied, this is a private dispute between roommates. Shut the projector off and get down.”
“A private dispute?”
I shoved his hand off the keyboard and gave him a look with nothing warm in it.
“That isn’t what you called it when you were working with students to fake the story and push me out of
school.”
“That’s not true! It was a misdiagnosis!”
Chloe hung onto the edge of the podium, shaking, still scrambling for a story.
“I barely leave my room. My weekends are the library and my work-study job.
“How would I ever catch something like that? Mia, if you’re going to forge a medical record, at least make it
believable.”
“Work-study?”
She wasn’t going to quit until every last thing was on the table, so I laughed once and opened the next file.
A video came up on the screen.
The setting was a VIP booth in a nightclub, all colored lights and bottles.
Chloe was in a low-cut slip dress with her makeup done heavy.
She sat curled against a middle-aged man, laughing as she took the whiskey he handed her and drained the glass.
The footage cut to a different night.
She had a cigarette between her lips and a dice cup in her hand, running a drinking game like she had done it a hundred times, with three tattooed men crowded around her.
The last clip showed her on the arm of a balding man, room key in hand, stepping into the elevator of an
upscale hotel.
Every clip carried the original security camera timestamp in the bottom right corner.
The earliest one was two months back, and the most recent was last Friday night.
