✅ A Dose of Humiliation

59. Parental Justice

Somehow, I ended up in Dad's study, with him and Mum on either side of me like this was some kind of interrogation. I half expected Dad to grab the lamp on the desk and turn it to shine in my eyes, or ro ask some kind of question to make it clear he was being the bad cop today. I wished that I had my lawyer there with me, but Serena was driving Cecilia back to her place now, so they could decide whether she would be staying in her sister's spare room, or if she would stay with Serena upstairs so as to give the happy couple a little privacy on their first night living together. Walt had gone with them too, getting a little overexcited on hearing Serena's descriptions of the space she could offer to Cecilia. He wanted to see it too. And I could see that Mum had been just as curious, but she had decided to stay here for now. She didn't want to leave me and Dad here, because I was al;ready nervous after hearing the aggressive way he'd chosen to greet me.

"So. Mrs Miller tricked you?" Dad's first question was a direct one.

"Yeah. She's got that TV subliminal thing," I said. "It uses some AI to change the image, so that without there being any obvious change, the edges of objects in the picture line up to spell out words. And it turns in on any off at a particular frequency or something, that's supposed to make those words arrive in your brain like an irresistible urge. She uses it to stop Marcie doing her homework, so she's got an excuse to give her a booster."

"I'm not sure if I believe in subliminal messages. It sounds like so much hocus pocus to me. But I've got friends at work who swear by it for getting their kids to calm down, so I guess I have to accept that it's possible. But surely you knew that was an option?"

To answer that, I got my phone out and tapped it on the monitor on the desk. I could bring up my video library on the bigger screen, to show him the bits that were relevant. Just the same way I'd made Mr Becker eat his words in a school meeting, what seemed like an eternity ago. I didn't want them to see us playing truth or dare, but I could show him my conversation with Marcie's mum.

They watched carefully, and nodded when Mrs Miller laid down the law. Even Dad had to admit that I was trying my best to follow the rules they had given me, and that the assertion I'd outright refused to take precautions wasn't quite so believable. I left the recording playing a little while longer, just in case. I quite often left my phone recording when it was locked, just in case it picked up something funny that the people involved would like to have a reminder of; so I had a recording of Mrs Miller coming into the lounge and showing off her 'Sleepy Puff' pacifiers as well. She told all of us that she would use them if we refused to sleep after eleven, which I thought was kind of weird looking back on it. Was that just a decoy, so that we wouldn't think about subliminal messages and turn the TV off? In any case, it showed quite clearly that she had said we would have to go to bed at a reasonable time.

"So where's the problem?" Dad said. "That was really, really clear. You have to get ready before this time, because she's going to put you to sleep. If you're not ready by then, that's your fault. You might not think a fixed bedtime is fair, but–"

"If it was fixed," I growled, and skipped ahead in the video. Our voices were turned into incomprehensible squeaks as the conversation raced past, but I could turn on the time in the top left corner of the image to see what time it was. It wasn't that easy to see what was going on in the room, just because I hadn't expected this video to be useful for anything important. My phone had been on the floor at this point, or resting against the edge of the couch, so it could only show feet, and figures so distorted by perspective that you couldn't tell who was who. It was clearer near the edge of the room, but nobody was standing there except for when Lance got up to refill his drink. I tried my best to remember what had happened in what order, so that I could find the part I needed.

"What are you doing here?" Dad asked, and I tried to make some sense out of what I could see in the image.

"Playing truth or dare, I think." I saw him draw in his breath at that; he probably had the worst impressions of the game, if he'd seen it in the same movies I had. I thought I recognised the gestures that Lance was making as he spoke; standing near the edge of the room where he was more visible than most of us. I tapped play, and the audio resumed. Just in time to catch somebody daring him to play a guitar for us; probably the most innocent moments of the evening. "Look, it's nothing weird, just a bunch of girls having a laugh. With one boyfriend, and a random friend tagging along. But nothing weird's going to happen when we're all together."