America 1982-Chapter 424 - 60: Jason’s Healing Girlfriend_3

"Back then, I was completely addicted to making phone calls. I even skipped classes to go to the school library or the public library—anywhere I could access books for free—to pore over every piece of information about phones. Eventually, my studious self figured out the dialing mechanism of the rotary dial. The lock my mom installed was no longer a hindrance; I didn’t need to use the dial to make a call. I could just strike a metal piece in a specific way between the number slots to accomplish the dialing of my desired number. After that, every phone booth with a rotary dial became free for me to use. If I were to count the start of my hacking career, I’d say it began when I was nine years old."

"Did no one help you? Out of all those calls, not a single one?" Susan asked upon hearing Susy’s words.

Susy shook her head, "Not a single one. Who would believe a kid telling stories on a public phone? In reality, even I saw making those anonymous, free calls more as a prank and a way to vent. Each time that man hurt me, I would skip a day of school to spend the whole day making calls, hypnotizing myself with the thought that once I turned eighteen, I could move out of that home."

"You held on until you were fourteen?" Susan remembered that Susy said she dropped out of school at fourteen, and interjected at this point.

"No, I held on until I was eleven. That year, the man tried to lay his filthy hands on my eight-year-old sister. I couldn’t let my sister go through my nightmare. So, I gathered my courage and spoke up to my mom about the unspeakable things. I explained to her in detail what ’dirty deeds’ meant—how the man would pull my hair, strip off my clothes, press on top of me, and even said that he had begun doing the same to my sister. However, my mom questioned my honesty, and even slapped me for using the term ’male genitalia,’ yelling at me for my shamelessness, scolding me for speaking such indecent words as a girl. She wouldn’t allow me to slander her boyfriend because she believed he was helping her raise the three of us." Susy drained the beer can in her hand, then with force, twisted it into a wad and threw it towards the corner trashcan:

"In the end, I could only tell everything to my brother, who was two years older than me. Fortunately, he believed me. So together, we called the police on that demon dragging my sister into the bathroom and had him arrested and taken to the police station."

Relieved to hear that the police had apprehended the man, Susan exhaled deeply, "Good, they caught the bastard."

"It wasn’t that easy. I told the police everything the man had done to me over the past two years, naively thinking he would be jailed. Do you know what happened? He was a military officer, with a special status and his lawyer questioned the authenticity and exaggeration of my descriptions, suggesting that he had not forcefully pulled my hair or pinched my chest. His lawyer proposed a lie detector test to ensure that my testimony, as an eleven-year-old girl, was credible." As Susy reached for another new beer can and opened it, she continued: 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"I want to say, in these two years he’s already used up who knows how many Trojans on me, and you’re questioning these minute details for lies? I don’t know if officers have special privileges, but anyway, the judge believed him. He decided to schedule a lie detector test before continuing the case. My court-appointed lawyer told me that if even one question during the test was determined as a lie by the polygraph, it would likely lead to all my statements being dismissed, possibly resulting in his release without charges. My mom didn’t believe that man had done such things to me and my sister either and kept advising me not to lie."

"To get that man jailed, I went back to the library. This time, I brought along a thick dictionary to look up material about polygraph tests, read those obscure words, understand their meanings. I figured out how the polygraph worked and found out that home polygraphs for kids were available for sale on the market. I ordered one using a public phone from the advertisement’s phone number, arranged for cash on delivery. The address I gave was another household in the same community. They didn’t have children, just a couple that worked until late. I waited in their yard, pretending to be their kid, and when the delivery person arrived, I politely asked him to return the next day. Of course, he was reluctant to take the machine back since the customers might change their minds. But in the end, he left the machine, saying he would send them the bill later, and then he left."

"I took the machine back to my bedroom, and according to the working principles I had learned from the library, I ran a test on myself. I learned that the machine’s electrodes would measure my real-time blood pressure, detect sweat on my skin. Using the questions provided by my lawyer that the judge might ask, I interrogated myself over and over, watching the polygraph’s reactions to determine which questions might be judged as lies. After countless rounds of Q&A, I had psychologically reinforced the answers to those questions. I successfully passed the lie detector test and sent that bastard to jail. He was sentenced to fifty years and stripped of his military status. Even if he lived to be released, he wouldn’t be allowed within a kilometer of me and my sister."

"At least there’s a good ending to the story." Susan seemed to understand what Tommy meant when he said this woman was a lot like her; as a young girl, she had managed to save herself and enact her revenge without relying on anyone else.