by Anthony Alba
This story is set fifteen years after twins Jennifer and Jessica graduated from Kessler Girls Academy as described in A Matter of Perspective in Volume One. The seeds of their futures were sown at the Academy and their lives have taken very different paths.
Jennifer
Guilty; the memory of that single damning word still haunted her two weeks after she had climbed to her feet and heard the verdict delivered by that dried up weed of a man they had picked as foreman. The memory was enough to bring her wide awake in the middle of the night and leave her body covered in sweat. Not that it was possible to get much sleep in that torture rack they called a bunk bed that they gave her. Gone were the fine silk sheets that she was accustomed to, the room service, the luxury spas. With one word it had been replaced with the hell on earth that was the County Jail.
Jennifer still felt nauseous at the way they had taken away her fine Versace dress, her Rolex watch, her pearl choker and the diamond studded earrings she favoured, and replaced them with this eye-watering orange jumpsuit and canvas sneakers.
Didn't they know who she was? Over and over she had asked that question both aloud and in the silence of her mind as she fought back the tears that threatened to break free whenever the latest indignity was heaped upon her. The guards had laughed when she refused to bend over for her cavity search. Her defiance had been magnificent right up till the point where they had grabbed her arms and pulled her over the table while one of those beasts had gone to work.
The crude vulgarity used by the guards when they groped her during the search had been bad enough, but to be thrown into the showers without a stitch on, into a throng of low life offenders and hardened criminals, she still shuddered at the memory. Fresh meat they had called her, with the hungry look of wolves suddenly presented with a deer ripe for feasting on.
Something had gone very wrong with the world when a Farnsworth could be thrown in with riffraff like that. Every night was a struggle to escape from the nightmare of the day, but how could one be possibly expected to get to sleep when the bunk were so hard and bumpy? The place was never quiet with shouts and cries echoing around the jail. Even when they shut up, some idiot would insist on banging something against the bars of her cell. As for those bed sheets, she was certain that they still bore the stench of sweat from whatever criminal had used them last.
How could this have happened? She had done everything right. The very best attorneys had been hired; their hourly retainer was enough to wipe out the national debt of some small countries. The jury consultant had come highly recommended and she had done her part as well. Jennifer knew how the world worked.
Each day of the trail she had worn a different dress, one cut low enough to show off her generous cleavage to the male jurors and with the hemline of the skirt high enough above the knee to give an occasional sight of her thighs. Not that she flashed too often - give a man too much and he became complacent - but a few glimpses here and there and he was like a drooling dog lusting for a bone. The heels had been killers and thank God she was able to sit for most of the day, but when she had stood and displayed such shapely calves, Jennifer had no doubt that every male eye in the court room had been glued to her legs.
She had everything going for her. She was rich, white and beautiful, and this was America. That should have gotten her an acquittal on the first day alone without the need for a tedious trial before her so called peers.
The guard seemed to take particular pleasure in the way she had to shuffle into the room. Trying to walk with any hint of poise in those damn ankle chains was impossible. Even if her legs had been free and she could walk freely, Jennifer knew that anyone seeing her in this orange jumpsuit with the words 'Department of Corrections' deliberately prominent both front and rear would think she was a criminal. Her, Jennifer Farnsworth!
The room was tiny, almost claustrophobic, with barely enough room for the small table and two chairs on either side of it. They had not given her a choice of which to use, the prison officer had forced her into the far chair and the moment she was seated the man pulled some sort of metal cuff that was fixed to the floor and snapped it around the short length of chain that joined her ankle cuffs. At best she could move her feet a few inches over and back, but getting up and walking would be impossible until she was released.
When the attorney entered, Jennifer would have gladly throttled him were her hands free. Even that small release had been denied her. The belly chain, as the officers called it, had been pulled particularly tight around her waist before they had taken her from the county jail, and each of her wrists was circled by cold steel secured to each side of her waist. Effectively her arms were locked by her sides; there was not enough give in the restraints to allow her to even clasp her hands together. When she had protested that they were far too tight and demanded that the cuffs be loosed if they wanted to keep their employment, one of the guards had deliberately ratcheted the cuffs even tighter. She made a note of his number; she would have his job for this.
It was all the lawyer's fault that she was here. She had trusted him, paid him and his team of morons a small fortune and still she was locked up like some sort of zoo animal. And now he had the gall to scowl when he caught sight of her. How dare he!
"What are you doing to get me out of this mess you created?" she demanded before he had fully taken his seat. When she had secured her release she was going to make it her business that everyone knew what an ambulance chasing shyster this guy was. By the time Jennifer was finished with his precious firm he would be flipping burgers for a living.
He said nothing as he took his seat and took his time opening the briefcase to pull out a pen and a yellow legal pad. Jennifer was not accustomed to being ignored and his insolence only drove her anger to new heights.
No one had ever dared treat her like this since she turned twenty-one and gained access to her trust fund. Oh that witch of her step mother had tried. After she escaped from that concentration camp of a school she had been exiled to in England, the woman had insisted on hiring a tutor for her so that she could be home schooled. A tutor that had been told it was perfectly acceptable to take a paddle to Jennifer's bare behind whenever she failed to do her lessons properly.
Jennifer had been forced to accept it too. The choice had been stark and Ellen, that viper who had somehow enchanted her father, had taken particular pleasure in laying out her options. The first choice had been to accept the tutor and her weekly paddlings without complaint.
Option two had been even more unpalatable. She would be hired as one of the domestics, and she would have to work in her own home as a maid earning the same money and doing the same duties as any of the other hired help. If she chose neither she could move out and support herself until she turned twenty-one. They would cut her off without a cent, leaving her with just the clothes on her back. No charge or credit cards, no bank accounts, no high end sports cars, no cash, no jewellery, nothing.
It would have been a cold day in hell before she put on one of those dowdy maid uniforms that all the help wore, and wait hand and foot on that bitch Ellen. But if she was kicked out without the family support... she had no idea how she would survive.
Once, she could have presented a united front with her twin, Jessica. Their father had rarely been able to deny them anything when they double teamed him, but Jessica was now a lost cause. Something had happened to her in that damn school. To hear Jessica talk you might think that her precious Ms Havelock was the second coming. There was no mention of the way the old bat caned Jennifer to within an inch of her life her very last day in England and forced her take the flight home in that dreadful school uniform with the welts of the cane on her legs clear for everyone to see.
No, Jessica had actually signed up to their summer school where the inmates at the Academy who had pissed off their guardians the most spent the summer. That had been the first sign her twin sister had gone mad. Any doubt on her mental state had been removed when after summer school she had enrolled at Kessler College to do a degree. Why the hell would she want to study for a degree? She was rich?
A few more years to party with frat boys, that was something Jennifer could understand, but Kessler College was the last place to find fun. It was linked in some way Jennifer did not fully understand, to the Kessler Academy for girls and the Kessler Preparatory for Boys. What she did know was that all the female students no matter how old wore a uniform not dissimilar to the Academy, and as for the male students, why they wore a uniform as well... a uniform with short pants. Not shorts, but short pants! She had even heard that the college employed corporal punishment on its students but she could not believe that. Some of their post graduates would have been in their twenties if not older. Why would they accept such a thing?
Her treatment by the Academy first, and then by Ellen and her tutor, had been a valuable lesson - though she suspected that it was not the lesson Ellen had wanted to teach. She had learned that there were people with power and people without power. Those with power did whatever they wanted and those without took what they were given. When she turned twenty-one and had finally gotten unfettered access to her trust fund, she had become one of the people with power and she had never loosened her grip on it, until now when it had been prised from her hands.
"Ms Farnsworth," the lawyer began in a tone of forced patience, and Jennifer ground her teeth in frustration, hard enough to make her jaw ache.
"You told me you would get me off!" She all but screamed the accusation at him.
He held up a hand, cutting her off. "Ms Farnsworth, I told you that I would use every resource at my command to try and get you acquitted. I never guaranteed success. If you might recall, given the weight of evidence against you, I advised an early plea deal with the District Attorney. Now after a jury trial you are facing a much stiffer sentence."
"You're a lawyer; you're supposed to fix things like evidence."
He gave her that look she had grown accustomed to getting all through the trial.
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