Bleed Until You Heal

28- Wars

"Hello?"

"Hi. Is this Riley Kessing?"

"Yes it is."

"Okay, hi, my name is Jo and I'm calling from the Art Institute of Atlanta. I'm calling because I have a record that says that you worked as Sebastian King's assistant for two years, is that correct?"

"Um, yeah, that's right."

"Alright, well I know this is going to sound a bit weird but we have reason to believe that Dr. King has been fraternizing with his female employees and we're trying to get enough testimony from his past employees to take to the school officials. Were you ever sexually harassed or coerced during your employment with Dr. King or do you have any reason to believe that he was sexually harassing another girl during your employment?"

"Is this phone call being recorded?"

"No, it's not. But if you'd rather meet in person, we can meet for coffee or something to talk," I suggest, crossing my fingers for her to agree.

"Sure," She decides. "I'm leaving town soon but I can meet you on Sunday. How about five o'clock at Bernie's Coffee. That's close to campus, isn't it?"

"Yes, Bernie's at five. Okay, great, thank you so much," I grin and give Noah a thumbs up, who's sitting beside me on the couch going through the files. He offered to make phone calls too but I decided that was a bad idea since I think that a woman is likely to talk more about sexual harassment to somebody of the same gender and we need as much help as we can get with this.

"I'll see you then," Riley says on the other end before hanging up the line.

I check her name off of the printed list of girls along with a few names of the other girls that I'd called already. I also write beside her name "Bernie's Sunday @ 5" so that I don't forget to meet her there.

"We're making a lot of progress," Noah says, reading through the papers that I'd printed out from Sebastian's employee records.

"We are," I agree excitedly. "I still don't know how I'm going to put it all together. It has to be presented to the school officials and it has to look really good so that they take it seriously. But I'm not sure how to do that."

"Well, you go to an art school. Do you know any film majors?" He wonders.

"Kind of. Why?"

"Okay, so what if you film all of the testimonies from the girls and put it all on DVD. If they want to stay anonymous, you can wash out their faces and warp their voices but they can sign a form that confirms that it really is them. That way, only the people who absolutely need to know who they are will know who they are. I can talk to my dad about it but I think that it could work."

"You are such a genius," I grin at Noah. "Thank you so much for your help."

"Sure, this is kind of fun."

Yesterday, on Thursday, I'd been going through everything upstairs, trying to figure out where to start when Conner and Noah showed up at the house to hang out with Jasper. Ever since I started dating Scott, I haven't really talked to Noah that much because it's a little weird but it's not like we don't like each other or anything, we still get along. So when Conner and Jasper went up to Jasper's room to do bedroom things, Noah looked all bored and alone downstairs and so I invited him up to help me figure out the papers. And, because his dad is a lawyer, he's picked up some lawyer knowledge during his life and he's actually been really helpful and as a result, he offered to come back today after class to help me out again, which is really nice of him.