Freshman Just Wanted Dinner — Until Three Bullies Made a Mistake That Cost Them Everything
Chapter 16
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She went to the library between classes. She sat at her usual table near the east windows. She pulled out her casebook and her highlighter, and she read for two hours.She was on her third chapter when her phone buzzed. She looked at it: it was not a message she had expected. The subject line was:Official Complaint Filing Notice – Hartwell University Office of Student Conduct.She read it twice. Then she read it a third time.Tyler Weston had filed an official complaint against her. The complaint alleged that on the evening of Friday, October 18th, Claire Matthews had made threatening remarks toward Tyler Weston and his companions at Miller's Diner. The complaint included screenshots of what appeared to be text messages sent from a phone number associated with Claire's student account. The messages were aggressive, threatening; they said things Claire had never said to anyone in her life. She did not recognize them; she had not sent them.She read the complaint again. Her heart rate was elevated. She noticed this the way you notice physical facts when you are trying to stay calm: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, a tightness behind the sternum. She put her hand flat on the table. She breathed. She did not do anything else for thirty seconds.Then she forwarded the email to Carol Whitfield with a single line:"Just received this. I did not send those messages. I have never sent those messages."She put her phone face down on the table. She picked up her highlighter. She went back to chapter three.Carol Whitfield received the forwarded email at 11:42. She had already spoken to the IT department twice that morning. She had already begun pulling the original metadata from the files in Rachel Brennan's complaint. She had already made one call to a colleague at a law school she trusted.When she saw the forwarded complaint, she read it in full. Then she called the IT director again. "I need you to analyze the metadata on the screenshot files attached to this new complaint," she said. "Same protocol as what we discussed this morning. I need device origin, creation timestamp, and modification history.""I can have something to you by 3:00," he said."2:30," she said.He said he would try. He had it to her at 2:17.She read the report standing at her desk. The screenshots had been created on a single device. The device identifier matched a phone registered to a Hartwell student network account. The creation timestamps showed all six screenshots had been generated within a forty-minute window: the window was 8:43 to 9:23 on Friday, October 18th.