The Secret (Boston's Best 1)

Chapter Sixty-Three

Matt

"Can I have your attention, please?" Some blonde woman says, tapping the microphone on top of the podium.

The room falls silent and she smiles. "Okay, before we get started, I would like to remind everyone to silence their phones and to not photograph or record anything that happens in the next half hour. This will be televised from RTÉ News, live, with a three second delay to the public incase of an emergency." She glares at everyone, "To any reporters or anyone from the media, please keep your questions to a minimum and to wait until after Madeleine's speech."

She looks around the room, "Any questions?" There's a mumbling of about forty to fifty people saying various forms of 'no' and the scary woman seems pleased with that. "We go live in three, so find your seats."

Everyone sits down and my group and I find good seats in the middle of it all, so Maddie can still see us but we aren't right in her face.

I'm so proud of her for all that she's overcome, and how much out of her comfort zone this is putting her.

She told me the other day that she's partially doing this to get her side of the story out there but mostly because of how much attention this is getting that many young girls or boys who this could be happening to, can see that they can get out of their situation and everything can work out for them too.

That it ends and that everyone isn't like the person that's doing it to them.

She's never cared what the outcome of this is, she just wants to help people.

"You worried, man?" Darius whispers, next to me.

I shake my head, "No. She's got this."

"D'you know if she's seen the ex since, y'all have been 'ere?"

I don't get to answer because some man starts counting down from ten in Irish, "Deich.. Naoi... Ocht... Seacht..." His voice quietens, "Sé... Cúig... Ceithre... Trí... Dhá... Aon..."

And then the room falls completely silent as Maddie walks onto the stage, I can see her trying to not shake but the pages with her speech on it and trembling. She has her hair down but the top half is tied back and she changed into a denim skirt and black sweater.

Maddie places her pages from on the podium and higher to microphone up to better suit her height. "Hi," It comes out squeaky and she cringes. "My name is Madeleine O'Brien, Maddie. I'm eighteen years old and from May to December or last year I was physically and mentally abused by Seán Johnson, the grandson of Damien Johnson, the founder of Johnson Studios."

No one moves. No one breathes. No one does anything while they wait for Maddie's next sentence. Everyone is already hanging on her every word and she hasn't even started yet.

"Seán and I dated from when we were fourteen up until last December when I finally got the courage to stand up for myself and leave him. As most people know by now Seán is a transgender man, and even through all of this I've never stopped feeling proud of him for discovering himself.

"Back in May, he started making physical differences to himself and some people that we knew weren't the nicest about it. Seán didn't like feeling backed into a corner and feeling like he was being walked over so he took his frustration out on me.

"The first time he hit me, it was because he thought I was flirting with a teammate's boyfriend –which I wasn't, but he didn't believe me and he called me a fat attention seeking whore and slapped me right across the face. And of course, instantly he started to apologise, telling me that he didn't know what came over him and that he'd never do it again. And because I was stupid and in love with the person he used to be, I believed him and took him back."

She shudders and she turns to the next page of her notes. "And it did stop. For two weeks. But then they started coming more and more often and for some reason I covered for him. I blamed it on GAA and falling over things. But he got smarter at it. He would never hit my face or choke me anymore, he'd just do it everywhere else but those very visible places.

"Beating after beating for months and somewhere in my brain it never snapped that this was wrong and this wasn't the person I loved. He started leaving me 'presents' around Halloween time. My cute and loving boyfriend leaving me gifts, adorable right? Wrong. Because inside was usually something that corresponded to whatever caused my previous beating and nearly always there was a threatening message, that was either scary or letting me know what to expect next.

"This continued until just before Christmastime. I was volunteering with my best friend out at her dance studio for a charity thing and my phone was dead and Seán came bursting through the doors screaming at me and grabbing me. After I calmed him down a bit and got him to leave my friend demanded to know what was going on and I finally caved and told her. I'm forever grateful to her, because she finally cleared my head and I broke up with Seán that night."

She clears her throat, "After Christmas break I had a panic attack in front of my mam about going back to school and having to face him, and so I was basically forced to tell her what happened. She kept me out of school for the rest of January and we went to the Gards and I gave my statement and I still had a good few bruises and a broken rib that I'd just been living with, so they got some lovely pictures of them.

"When I finally came back to school, I moved out of every class we had together and he left me alone, but I assume that was only because he didn't know that there was an investigation going on. The news of all of this only became public less than five days before my family and I moved to Boston for my mam's new job.

"Eleanor Roosevelt said; You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do." She exhales, "I thought that I couldn't live anymore, I thought that I let Seán Johnson break me. But I didn't and he didn't. It was just a little bump in the road that made me stronger and left him grasping for straws."

A single tear falls down her cheek. "Well, you know what, Seán? You can drag my name through the mud as much as you want to. You can say I'm a liar, or attention seeking, or a whore, or any of the other false things you've called me. But I'm the one  that still can't breathe properly ever since you broke my rib, that has a scar the whole way down her thigh from when you pushed me too hard and too fast onto a glass table. I'm the one with the proof and you're just a scared little boy running to daddy to fix his messes once again."

Maddie rolls her shoulders back and I see her throat bob, "My name is Madeleine O'Brien. I am eighteen years old. And I am a survivor of domestic abuse by Seán Johnson."

You could hear a pin drop in the deathly quiet silence that follows the first seven seconds after Maddie finishes.

But the second those seven seconds finish it's mayhem. Every single reporter seems to remember where they are and jumps up and starts screaming questions out at her.

Maddie's head whips back and forth between one person to the next. She looks petrified. Like a deer in headlights.

She stutters, "N-no comment, thank you."

And then she not only runs off stage but she runs past everyone else and out the doors, leaving everyone here staring after her.

Shit.