interrogations. task 004.
Nat was off her game. She probably had never really been on it in the first place, but today was a special kind of hell. Her time capsule video plagued her, found her jumping awake in the middle of the night in a panic.
That sense of panic and foreboding had followed her here, to where she now sat on one side of a table alone, three pairs of hard eyes staring back at her.
One of them, the decidedly personable one, smiled kindly and introduced himself as Agent Choi before introducing the other two agents on either side of him— Agent Brown and Agent Murray. Nat could only offer a squeak of acknowledgment in return, her heart hammering out a frantic beat against her ribcage.
"I understand it's finals week so we're going to make this as quick and painless as possible, alright?" Agent Choi's smile was still just as kind, but something about this whole thing felt sinister. It set Nat on edge. She only managed a stiff nod, but it was enough. Choi continued, “can you talk about your time capsule video? Give us some context for the clip that was leaked?”
Nat's teeth worried at her bottom lip, clasped hands on the table picking at the skin around her nails. "Um..." she started, voice shaky as the reminder of her current reality sent spears of ice through her guts. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Agent Murray's mouth tighten as she scribbled something in her legal pad. Nat's mouth went dry. "It was just a stupid, split-second decision, I can't really tell you why I did it. I didn't think anyone would be watching it for fifty years. I didn't— I wasn't—" She swallowed thickly, all her words suddenly caught in her throat. She held up her hands helplessly. "I don't know."
Nat was fairly certain Agent Brown hadn't blinked once since she'd sat down, sure that there was a hole in the side of her face where she could feel him staring, studying, daring her to step a toe out of line. He remained in her periphery, but there was something sickenly magnetic in the way he stared her down. She nearly turned to face him when Choi spoke up again. "Were you aware that Greer Morrison submitted a video at the end of last year?”
The question caught her off guard and Nat visibly faltered, brows furrowed as she shook her head. "No? Greer and I weren't close." Hearing how that sounded as it came out of her mouth, Nat rushed to add, "we were different people, and we existed in different social circles."
Agent Murray continued to make notes on her notepad, and Nat readjusted in her chair uncomfortably. What could she possibly be writing? It wasn't a good thing that she was writing so much, right? Was she fumbling the bag so badly?
She hadn't realized she was staring at Murray until Choi was leaning back into her eye line, drawing her attention back to them. “Had you ever heard of anything regarding THE NAIVE NEWCOMER using steroids?”
Again, Nat's confusion shown on her face, brows pinched as she shook her head. "No. I've had one conversation with Kit my entire life and that's it."
Agent Choi's eyes seemed to narrow ever so slightly, and Nat's own eyes widened in alarm as she combed back over everything she'd said, to find where she was obviously bombing this and came up empty.
Silence hung like a guillotine overhead until Choi finally broke it, shifting forward in their seat a little. “Did Greer ever bring up breaking up with him ever? Or anything of the sort, like she did in her video?”
"I already told you, Greer and I didn't talk. We weren't friends."
Murray scribbled away in her notepad, and Nat's eyes cut to her and back again. Unease felt a hell of a lot like nausea.
Choi nodded and Nat thought maybe he finally got it, but then he pressed, “Do you have any reason to believe THE GOLDEN GIRL would want to leave Ogden College?”
Nat threw up her hands in frustration, eyes cutting to each and every one of them in disbelief. "I don't know what you want me to say. I didn't know Greer like that. We were not friends." She spoke each word slowly, as if enunciating might make them finally understand. Agent Brown only smirked in a way that put Nat on edge. All the while, Murray wrote her notes.
Her eyes finally settled on Choi, but the question came from Brown this time. He leaned forward in a move that was the antithesis of Choi's earlier friendly lean-in. "Some other students have brought up your relationship with Greer. Why do you think they thought it was relevant?"
Genuine confusion and true fear fought for dominance on her face. She hadn't had a relationship with Greer, but judging by the way Brown was staring her down, her doubling down on that fact could only sound suspicious now. "What? Who?" she asked before she could stop herself.
It was one of those horrifying moments where she was only aware of just how bad it sounded once it was already out of her mouth, and suddenly, heat prickled the back of her eyes, and she had to furiously blink back tears. God only knew they'd assume she was putting on a show. She was a theater student for God's sake!
"Sebastian Morrison seemed to think you had a bit of a rocky relationship. What was the word he used?" Brown nodded his head towards Choi but didn't break eye contact with Nat, who remained trapped inside his intense gaze. "Hostile." A heavy pause settled over the room, the only sound the scratching of pencil against paper. It might as well have been the ticking of a clock as it counted down to Nat's demise. Or maybe she just wished. "So," Brown said tightly, slicing through Nat's inner spiraling, "why don't you elaborate on what that relationship was?"
"I wasn't lying before," Nat insisted, but she could hear herself now the way they probably heard her. Her voice sounded shrill and tinny, the words sounding like a desperate plea of the dying. And yet, she couldn't seem to stop, as if saying enough words might eventually drown out the bad ones. "It's not a crime to not get along with someone. We don't have to pretend that just because she's rich and beautiful and popular that she couldn't also be mean sometimes. She didn't have to have a reason. I don't think she'd be the first person in the world to just decide she didn't like someone. We didn't have a relationship."
As if he didn't hear her, as if she didn't speak at all, Brown was on her immediately with another question, like some demented game of rapid fire. "Were you aware of Greer planning to travel to Portugal this summer?"
Nat blinked, stunned into silence. Both because what was the point of her answering any of these questions when it was so painfully clear that it didn't matter what she said— they'd already apparently decided what was truth and what wasn't. "Portugal? What does that have to do with any—" She cut herself off, shutting her eyes tight with a shake of her head before they opened again, cutting to Choi and searching their eyes for even a sliver of hope that she could turn this disastrous situation around. That there might still be one person left in the room that she might be able to win to her side. "No. I don't know how to make it any clearer. I didn't hang out with Greer. I wasn't part of her friend circle, I didn't even have any classes with her, I don't know."
Choi nodded, Brown remained unmoved, and Murray's pencil paused for just a heartbeat— Nat's world pausing with it— before Brown shattered the silence with one last question. "Is there anything you know that you’re not sharing?"
Her vision warped, and she knew if she couldn't manage to hold back the tears, she was going to damn herself. She shook her head, lips pressed tightly together until she could trust herself to speak. And even then, she only managed a meek "no."
Like a demented replay of the moment she first sat down, Nat sat on her side of the table alone while three pairs of eyes fixed on her. The silence stretched for a very long, very uncomfortable moment. And then Choi nodded again and stood, motioning toward the door. "Thank you for coming in, Miss Vega."
And that was it. Just like that, she was dismissed.
She blinked and stood in stiff, robotic movements as if she were in a daze. And then, once she'd stepped away from her chair, she scurried away like a roach from a kitchen light convinced that that could not have possibly gone worse.
