True Crime obsessed (short story)

 “Yay! I have jury duty!” She rushed in to tell her roommates. They both groaned simultaneously.

“Haley, you know you can throw that out, right? There's no way they can prove you got it.”

“Yeah, Haley!” Simon chimed in. He seemed in a better mood than usual, which was a bit like being the tallest dwarf, but it was nice to see him a bit more put together than usual.

“You said you would help me with my paper!?” Simon exclaimed with that magical mix of not caring about his work and being constantly stressed out about it.

“I’m sorry, I’ll help you on Wednesday, but this is an opportunity I can't pass up,” Haley said, her palpable excitement still coursing through her.

“You're such a true crime nerd, Haley,” Sarah said with a sly smile that she usually saved for Simon's crappy jokes.

“I just can't help myself,” Haley said as she plopped herself onto the couch with the rest of them with a dramatic thud.

“The betrayal, the deceit, the raw emotion,” she said, acting like she was starring in an overdone production of Hamlet(Sarah's favorite), finishing with an overplayed faint on the comfiest cushion.

The next day, everyone in the flat was woken with a start by the stressed B-flat scream of Haley that they were overly familiar with at this point, followed by, “Oh no, oh no, I slept in!”

“Haley, it's fine, I’ll drive you,” said a very tired Sarah, her eyes glazed over. She emerged from her room smelling of cheap incense from Kmart, her hair lopsided. She had clearly forgotten to take her hair product out yesterday.

As they sped around the corner in Sarah's cherry-red Honda (her prized possession), Haley began to remember why she had wanted to take the bus in the first place—Sarah could make 30 feel like 100.

“Watch out for those people!” Haley shrieked in a tone that suggested half-seriousness, the way your mum asks you to clean your room or she’ll kill you—you don’t believe she’ll actually kill you, but you don’t trust her to do nothing if you don’t listen.

Sarah yelled back in their normal routine, “They’re on the road; they know the risk!”

They sped to a weirdly calm stop. Haley, shaken by the experience, grabbed her phone, wallet, and sketchbook. She leaped up the courtroom steps, clutching her sketchbook like she thought someone might steal it.

“Have fun in true crime heaven!” Sarah yelled just loud enough for everyone to perk up but not so loud that they thought it was aimed at them.

Haley skipped past the weirdly ornate wooden plaques glorifying people with far-too-long names. She wandered past three vending machines that felt quite out of place.

She passed a lawyer with a scruffy ponytail as he flicked through a cherry-red binder with far too many post-it notes. She thought to herself that he would be a good character in a true crime film—a lot of personality, but not enough for a TV show.

She walked past a man in chunky handcuffs, wearing an orange jumpsuit that was clearly not the color for him. She even walked past Room “32C” and then took a couple more steps, saw Room “33C,” and took three big steps backward. This was her homecoming—she was finally experiencing true true crime.

The room was what real estate agents would describe as cozy. There was one small clock, the kind you might see in a classroom, just off-center from the converted snack table. An old, dusty biscuit tin lay on an old tablecloth where people clearly didn’t notice it contained sugary things—well, do wine biscuits have sugar? It didn’t really matter to Haley. She had skipped breakfast, and it was solid food.

She sat down with one too many biscuits and put in her headphones. She wore wired headphones because her AirPods were out of power. As she fumbled with the adapter to plug them into her phone, she opened her favorite true crime podcast, Crime Files.

“In a misty Midwestern town where everyone knew everyone, there was one person they didn’t know—the man who killed their daughter,” she heard in her right ear as she tried to violently shove the left one in.

She opened up her sketchbook and started to draw the suspect that the podcast was describing, just for a bit. She didn’t expect to finish it—it usually took about an hour to complete a simple drawing.

Three drawings later, two criminal convictions in a misty Midwestern town, and an amount of biscuits that was worrying, she was called into the court.

“Please leave your phone in here, ma’am,” said a woman who had had to say that far too many times in her life, and she knew it.

She ushered Haley into the courtroom and asked her to sit down on chair number seven. She saw the man with the scruffy ponytail—calmer now. He seemed in his element. He seemed happier… not happy, that was the wrong term for what he was doing now, but he clearly loved his work.

They asked her a series of dull questions that she could hardly remember, and you wouldn’t care if she told you.

Finally, he asked her things like whether she had any criminal convictions.

“No.”

“Do you have any criminal complaints?”

“No.”

“Do you have any relationship or knowledge of the alleged victim?” He quickly checked his notes—not because he had forgotten, but because he would hate to get it wrong.

“Katie Ever-Swine.”

“No,” she said almost on autopilot as boredom began to take over. (This was always the most boring part of any true crime film, she felt.)

“What is your current employment status?”

“I’m currently unemployed. I am a student.”

“We, the plaintiff, would like to challenge juror number seven with cause,” the scruffy-haired man said with the decisiveness of someone who had made up his mind a while ago.

Haley was surprised at this—had she done something wrong? She hadn’t even been asked about the case yet.

“Please state your cause.”

“She may become irrational and be unable to be impartial.”

“Because?”

The judge responded with an abnormal amount of snark—she was clearly bored with this routine.

“She is a young university student who identifies as a woman, just as the alleged sexual assault victim.”

The fuck? What?

“Objection, Your Honor. The defendant’s representative can’t just dismiss every woman who comes in. My client is entitled to a jury of her peers.”

“Accepted. Do you have any other reasoning, or can we move on?”

“We would like to challenge juror number seven peremptorily.”

“Accepted. Juror number seven, please exit the chamber.”

She stood up, went to the claustrophobic room, collected her things, and kept walking. She walked past every letter of the alphabet. She walked until, before she knew it, she was outside again.

Haley was not prepared for this. She had wanted a different story.

Sexual assault isn’t fun.

At that moment, Haley was upset. She started crying.

She liked the taste of salt water. It reminded her of the beach.

She missed the beach.