The first semester in Oxford has already started. Balancing between studying to become a lawyer and life in general, Julia Eden has found herself sitting across from a shrink, or in better words: a psychologist.
It only gets worse when the old man s...
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There was a thin line between humiliation and heartbreak. Liv had never felt so dirty before.
Clutching on the fluffy bathrobe she wore, she lied on Julia's bed and pressed her face into the sateen pillow, hoping that her friends wouldn't notice her crying. To Dee and Julia, it occurred that the best thing was to let her wallow.
Liv knew all too well that her friends were just pretending to be asleep. In the darkness of the room, she stared, her eyes fixing on the balcony. From somewhere, a faint light illuminated the tiled pavement, making the raindrops clear from here. At first she was defensive. What was her fault? Trusting her boyfriend of three years? Loving him so much for so long? As she wondered, she realized that she was now mortified. How long had this been going on, she wondered. Had she been this much of a fool to never see through George?
Perhaps she had brought it on herself. Disgusted, she pushed her face forward to the pillow, squeezing her eyes shut and deliberately moving her frizzy red curls to hide her face. She couldn't control not only her rage, but also her feelings as a noisy sob filled the dark room.
There was a deep, stinging shame. She hadn't lost her virginity but she had lost her dignity tonight. And that was worse.
She was guilty by the midnight. Her shame had probably convinced her that she deserved such oppression and mistreatment. But each person handled crisis differently.
Elle Larsen, after brutally raped, handled her crisis by confronting her rapist the next day. She didn't know that she was going to die but she had stood up for herself.
Liv, however, wouldn't do so.
Fear was primitive. If it could trigger a racing heart rate, it could freeze one too. People needed a lot of strength to admit whatever had happened to them, the courage and tenacity to label it as rape.
The humiliation and violation coming along with it prevented almost ninety percent of rape victim to keep their mouth shut. Now Liv, which percentage she belonged to? Was she going to keep her mouth shut or was she going to be talking?
There had to be some way out. Bad feelings didn't stay forever. Now Liv was safe and sound, inconsolable but yet guarded.
The morning when she would finally wake up, she would know what she really felt with a sober head. Darien had slipped into a dreamless slumber later that night. Only Julia kept staring at the ceiling, dismissing her twin brother's drowning face in the nightmare that had just touched her a while ago. The very next morning, she woke up to the same nightmare.
Liv was up, so was Dee, geared up for college. Red curls slid up for a high ponytail when Julia's blurry eyes followed Liv to the vanity mirror.
"I am not staying in," the red-haired girl responded spookily to Julia's unsaid question.
She offered her a smile of approval. Baby birds might have the smallest wings but they didn't stay in their nests forever. That was their forte.
Darien while tying her shoelaces, smiled too. Although, Liv looked like she was in an insanely good mood, Julia wasn't. And she wouldn't be until she was making Michelson and George regret their actions.
Inside the bathroom, once showered, as she dressed hurriedly and did her makeup, she recognized that her uncertainty could be quenched for a while with a snort or two of coke. From what was still stacked inside the ruby of her ring, she made two neat little lines of coke as quickly as possible on the marble before her mirror.
Holding one nostril closed with her finger, and as she put her head down to the surface, she held a rolled-up banknote (however unhygienic it was) to her other nostril. Putting the other end of the paper down slightly above one of the lines, she breathed in and savoured. Looking up at the mirror, she breathed out her mouth.
Wiping her nose clean, she rubbed the excess into her gums, feeling the numbness in her skin and nostrils. Just as she reached for her stack of cocaine to refill her ring, some notion crossed her mind. Euphoric as she was, she was also very serious about it.
Grabbing two eight balls of coke, she smiled bitterly down at her hands. If she was considered royalty in the college, she might as well exile a person or two.
