Chapter 3

Tuesday January 22

Yesterday was Martin Luther King day, so the court building was closed. The trial started today. I was almost late: when I got to the security checkpoint I realized that I still had my lock picks in my purse. They’re not illegal, and they’re not weapons, so technically I probably could have taken them inside, but there’s no point in making people suspicious. I had to run back out to my car to drop them off.

The lawyers gave their opening statements, so now we know what the case is about. Lina, they say, was a young Saudi Arabian woman visiting the US to work on a medical degree. She was a joyful pious smart young woman with the whole world ahead of her until she fell under the spell of American bad-boy Trent.

Apparently, a month ago, Lina crashed her car into a row of pumps at a gas station. The state claims that this was a direct result of her boyfriend Trent’s “reckless endangerment”. They claim that he forced her to wear a remote-control vibrator all day in public. He supposedly “tortured” her with it, even while she was driving, and that the distraction caused her to crash, nearly running over a couple kids and doing $100,000 of property damage. Talk about unsafe sex!

The defense lawyer says that we can’t know what really happened in the moments leading up to the accident. Lina left the country a day or two after the accident so she can’t tell us. Even her statements to the police and EMTs are unavailable. The defense lawyer said that the prosecution is trying to make a case using smoke and mirrors due to political pressures, but that we don’t know anything about Trent and Lina’s relationship, we don’t know what happened at the time of the accident, and most importantly, we don’t know what caused her to crash her car.

The prosecution called a few witnesses to testify. One was a fireman who spent an hour explaining to us that crashing through gas pumps is dangerous. The second was a medical professional who explained in clinical terms that sexual stimulation is distracting. If the body is receptive, with or without climax, it can cause a release of hormones that influence decision-making and measurably alter response time. If the body isn’t receptive to it, it can be uncomfortable or painful, which likewise diminishes driving ability.

At first I thought it was stupid that they would waste all this time telling us that orgasms are distracting. Isn’t that obvious? But then, you sometimes hear about adult women who’ve never had one, so maybe it was necessary. I was sitting in the back row of the jury box, so I was able to steal glances at how my fellow jurors were responding to the testimony. There was one girl - about my age, blonde with pink highlights - who was taking notes obsessively during that witness, so I wondered about her.

The final witness of the day was a forensic technician - a thirty year old woman with glasses and a ponytail - who explained how the particular vibrator worked. It was sort of U-shaped. The big end is meant to be inserted into the vagina. Its motor stimulates the G-spot. The smaller end has a separate motor for the clitoris. The two motors can be controlled independently with a phone app, either with pre-programmed vibration patterns, or with freestyle adjustments. If you give another user permission, they can control your vibrator with the app on their phone as well, through the Internet.

There were a lot of breaks during the day, with plenty of chances to chat with the other jurors, so we’re all starting to get to know each other.

Wednesday January 23

At court today they walked through a bunch of details of the accident. They had diagrams of the intersection and the gas station. They showed pictures of swerve marks, and had police experts testify about how fast Lina was going. They showed security video of some kids who had just left the gas station, and how if the accident had happened ten seconds earlier she would have hit them.

On the morning in question, Trent, the defendant, made Lina wear the vibrator while they had breakfast together at a cafe near the university. He “tortured” her while they ate: she had to “endure” intense sexual stimulation in public, designed to embarrass her. Even after they went their separate ways, at several times during the day, he activated her vibrator.

At one point she left a school lab session to go to the bathroom. From there she texted a message to her friend:

Lina: My BF is trying to kill me with my vibe! ^^;

<REDACTED>: He better make it up to you with some good old human dong tonight!

Lina: NOOO! After today I don’t want anything near my pussy for a month!

Then, at 2:34 P.M., while Lina was driving, she unexpectedly crashed into a row of gas pumps, impacting at 30 miles per hour. She was disoriented when the EMTs arrived, and they discovered the vibrator while examining her.

The logs of Trent’s remote-control activity, subpoenaed from the sex toy manufacturer, showed that he had activated Lina’s vibrator no fewer than eight times that day, averaging ten minutes per session. The last session began at 2:27 P.M.

I got to know some of my fellow jurors more over the day. Courtney is the blonde girl I mentioned yesterday. I mean really blonde: as blonde as hair can get without being white. The pink in her hair really pops. Her left ankle has a tattoo all the way around: penguins sliding on ice after each other. She’s a grocery store clerk by day, but she’s supplementing her income with money from Patreon as a cartoonist. She hopes to be able to support herself that way some day.

The other person my age is a guy: Matt. He’s got British Invasion hair, and he wears a suit, but his tie is always loose. If you put a cigarette in his hand, he’d look like a struggling stand-up comedian. He’s actually an electrical engineer though, working for a company that makes agricultural equipment.

Plenty of the other jurors seem cool too, but I just haven’t connected with them. I can’t remember her name, but there’s a woman who home-schools her five kids. She’s really into politics.

Then there are a few that I already know I don’t like: There’s a semi-bald guy who keeps leering at me, making slightly suggestive comments. And there’s the thirty year old woman who is ALWAYS late coming back from breaks. I don’t know why the judge puts up with it.

Enzo sent me some video of a club he DJed at this evening. I don’t understand the appeal of night clubs.

Thursday January 24

Court porn! Today at the trial, they cleared the courtroom of everyone non-essential, and actually showed us Trent and Lina’s sex video. To me it looked like good clean rope play, but the prosecutor clearly wanted us to see it as sadistic and degrading.

Lina was tied up face-down on the edge of a bed. The camera was positioned to show her face, but also look down the length of her body. She had amazing long black shiny hair, and eyes that could stop a tidal wave. She had a rectangle of duct tape across her mouth. There were ropes crisscrossing her body in elaborate designs - far more than necessary to bind her legs together and fix her arms behind her back. In some places the ropes seemed to dig into her flesh. She was naked except for black panties. Her skin was flawless and, as best I could tell from the position she was in, she had a dancer’s body.

We heard a door open, and a shirtless man entered. It was Trent of course. In court Trent has a short neatly-trimmed beard, but in the video he was clean-shaven. He wasn’t muscle-bound but he was fit, with a stomach a girl could get lost sliding her hands up and down. His entire left shoulder was covered by a tattoo, although I couldn’t make out what it depicted. There were smaller tattoos on his right arm, neck, and side.

He crawled on the bed next to her, pulled her hair to tilt her head up, and asked in a menacing tone, “So are you ready for a little alone time?”

Lina’s eyes snapped to him and she mumbled inarticulate noises, but then her gaze returned to the camera.