Instinct

30. Welcome to the (Freak) Show

“Your biological mother was a teenage drug addict, and your father was likely mixed up in the same stuff. Who’s to say you haven’t gone down the same road and used all this Facility malarkey as a cover?”

Stephanie set her jaw and levelled her gaze with the woman interviewing her.

“My mother made bad choices, yes, and I wouldn’t be here without her or the man she was with at the time. But that doesn’t have anything to do with me,” she replied. “Laura and Matthew Armstrong are my parents – they always have been. To say that these people I’ve never met have more influence over how I’ve lived my life than them would be the worst insult anyone could ever throw at us. It’s ridiculous and untrue.”

Susanne Bridgewater, the TV personality with the flat-pressed auburn hair and excessive makeup pursed her lips into a forcedly polite smile and nodded, as if pitying Stephanie for her belief. Stephanie fought the urge to curl her lip at her.

“So you never got involved with the things your mother did?” She pressed.

With only a moment’s hesitation, Stephanie nodded.

“That’s what I said.”

“I see,” The woman surmised. “But we actually got into contact with your foster parents. Linda and Herbert Shaw, right?”

Stephanie gritted her teeth, trying to contain her latent and obvious lack of surprise that those two had saw fit to capitalize on the situation and get back at her for making them look like fools. She had expected no less, but had clearly hoped that they wouldn’t. It opened up a whole new line of questioning that she, quite frankly, did not want to deal with publicly. Or in private, really.

“They testified that you were – and I quote – ‘out of control’. They said you got into trouble at school, that you hung out with the wrong kinds of people,” she said, mock surprise raising her eyebrows into her hairline. “Oh, and it looks as if they thought you were into underage drinking and drug use. You didn’t come home for – and again, a direct quote – ‘days at a time’.” Susanne rested the cards with her notes on them in her lap, leaning forward as if to intimidate Stephanie with her sharp feminine cunning.

Stephanie thought that she might like to see how confident this woman was if her words weren’t her only weapon – if all of America didn’t tolerate her awful personality. She suspected this would go completely differently if they weren’t in a controlled environment live in front of a hundred people.

Nevertheless, Stephanie hadn’t betted on Linda and Herbert, the cowards they were, coming forward with this blatant slander. They hadn’t been in her cards as people who would single her out like that. There were many more that had more reason to come after her than them.

It was becoming a frighteningly recurrant theme, but Stephanie hadn’t exactly told anyone about her foster parents. Sure, she’d talked about Eric Bradley and everything that had happened after, but embarrassment had kept her from mentioning the fact that she’d gotten stuck with those two as guardians along with everything else. It was stupid, but she hated the thought that she’d allowed them to treat her the way they had.

Stephanie was determined not to be looked at like a victim, and with all that was going on, it was becoming increasingly hard to strive for that. It made her sick to her stomach that the wording in that interrogation laid out to her by Susanna Bridgewater was ambiguous enough to be technically true, innocently damning.

The media wanted Stephanie to defame other people, if only to spark a backlash of hatred from those who thought that she was an attention-seeking brat. She wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.