Page 109 of The Bargain

The door closes behind me with a dry click.

One of the lawyers—Hastings’—opens proceedings by offering me a thin and perfunctory smile.

“Mr Lennox. Thank you for coming.”

He says it with a straight face but the joke writes itself. At least the universe’s still got a sense of humour.

He opens a folder and begins to read. The rustle of paper sounds deafening in the expectant silence. Everyone’s eyes are on him, except mine.

Mine are fixed on the floor as I let the words wash over me.

Most of it is dense legal jargon, but the key concepts are clear enough. Malicious intent, grievous bodily harm, premeditation. They’re not even here to interrogate me—they’re here to stage a grand performance, to paint the narrative they’ve been sketching out between them for weeks, probably.

In their neat little morality play, I play the role of the low-class villain, the corrupt scholarship kid who finally snapped under pressure. A tragic fable, a cautionary tale that will confirm everything people like them have ever believed about people like me.

The Hastings don’t want justice because justice is for people who actually need it. What they want is spectacle. My public dismemberment. They want the world to see that no one, no matter how clever or hardworking or desperate, ever climbs out of the mud without being dragged back down.

And the Pearsons, of course, are ready to cosign. They’ve recalculated the angles, reworked the narrative, rerouted their path to success—bulldozing me right out of the way.

“We did everything we could for him,” Mrs Pearson says, voice thick with the sweet syrup of parental disappointment and regret. “But some children simply can’t be rehabilitated. It’s terribly sad.”

Her husband nods solemnly, as though he’s mourning the idealism they both lost through my action.

My solicitor clears his throat, but whatever he says is immediately crushed under rebuttals, brick after brick in a wall that’s steadily closing in around me.

They talk about Birnam’s phone, about fingerprints, about my pattern of criminality. They drag up my school records, my care worker reports, my detentions, my fights. The reasons behind my actions don’t matter to them—they weren’t there and they’ll never understand the kinds of choices kids like me have to make every single day.

And so, just like that, every survival instinct I’ve ever had has been neatly reclassified as evidence of guilt, my entire young existence an indictment.

And I’m so fucking exhausted of it all.

The solicitor next to me fumbles through his notes, trying to find an angle, a foothold, anything—but there isn’t one. You can’t fight people like this. You can’t reason with them, or appeal to their morality, because they don’t believe in all that. They believe in hierarchy. In their inherent right to win.

When the lead lawyer finally slides something across the table, I glance down, numb. A national newspaper. My own face stares back at me, grainy and unflattering, printed beneath the headline: SPEARCREST SCHOLARSHIP STUDENT ARRESTED FOR VIOLENT ASSAULT.

That’s the real punishment, then.

They’re going to strip me of my future, my reputation, my name. They’ll make sure I never set foot in a university lecture hall again, never cross a door that doesn’t lead to another cage. They’ll turn me into a lesson, a warning to parents and teachers and politicians: this is what happens when you let someone like him in.

I don’t know why I’m surprised; Mrs Pearson told me this would happen.

The room feels smaller with every breath I take. The cage closes in, layers of it spreading out in ripples to encompass me, then the next week of my life, the next years and then decades. My entire future.

I think about saying something—anything—but what’s the point? Even a glib joke would come across hollow. I have nothing left.

So I stay silent.

My appointed solicitor clears his throat again, trying to regain control.

“My client maintains that⁠—”

“Your client,” one of the lawyers cuts in, voice dripping with quiet disdain, “is a violent young man with a history of aggression, whose pattern of behaviour speaks for itself. What you need to realise is that⁠—”

The door behind me opens. I don’t hear it, at first—I feel like I’m a thousand miles away, watching the universe from inside a black hole. But then something happens. The air shifts. The Pearsons stiffen immediately in their chairs, exchanging a sharp look. Every lawyer in the room starts, eyes going wide.

I turn around.

And for the first time since I got here, I smile.