Her Brother's Innocence

4: 4

The whole office went dead silent.

Every administrator, every teacher, stared at my brother with nothing but contempt in their eyes.

I stepped right up to the two girls and lowered my voice.

"Slandering someone, giving false testimony on purpose—that's against the law. That's a crime. It goes on your record, you go to jail. You're lying right now. Can you really live with what comes next?"

Savannah blew up on the spot.

She shot up out of her chair, jabbed a finger at my face, and shrieked through her tears.

"Professor Pruitt, this is going way too far!"

"The dean is standing right here! You're openly threatening witnesses!"

"Your brother did something filthy, and the proof is right there! Now you want to use your position to bully students and force us to shut up?"

The second the words left her mouth, every teacher and administrator around us erupted, all of them pointing at me, all of them shouting me down.

"So arrogant! Threatening students in the open!"

"Throwing her weight around, plain and simple!"

"The two of them, brother and sister, both running wild! What a disgrace to the profession!"

Savannah looked at me and said, cold and flat,

"If your Pruitt family doesn't give me an answer today, I'm calling the police."

She fixed her eyes on me, certain of herself.

I suppose, in her mind, at this point I should have been panicking.

I laughed out loud.

"Stop crying," I said coldly.

Her sobbing caught in her throat. She frowned at me.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

"This call to the police—let me make it for you."

Right in front of everyone, I dialed 911.

Savannah's eyes went wide.

The line connected, and I said calmly,

"Hi, I'm in the dean's office at Blueridge University. Someone here is accusing my brother of sexual harassment."

The officers arrived quickly.

Savannah launched into her tearful account, talking fast, running through the "details" again and again, each pass more specific than the last.

The two girls stood beside her, nodding along without a break. One said, "I saw him touch her." The other said, "When he threatened us, his voice was really vicious." The three of them meshed together without a single seam.

An officer turned to me. "Do you have anything else to say?"

"No way."

I stood beside my brother.

"My brother would never do something like this."

Savannah started crying again, harder than before.

"I know… I know your Pruitt family has money and power. I'm just a girl from the country. I can't afford to take you on…"

She lifted her head and looked at me, her whole face wet with tears.

Her voice climbed. "But I know that if I don't stand up, more girls like me are going to get hurt later on!"

The people around us picked up the cry, one after another.

"That's right! We're behind you!"

"They can't get away with this!"

The shouting rolled over me like water.

Then I clapped my hands.

"Wow, wow, that was really something. I almost got choked up."

"Oh, but I forgot to mention—I signed my brother up for a hidden-camera driving show. The whole time he was in that car today, they were filming him in secret."

"And the episode airs in five minutes."