The scope of love

Chapter 11

Sunday was spend with me gushing about Friday and Saturday for hours upon hour. Madison didn’t mind she loved it. She was still scared for me, but she loved hearing my love story. She gushed along with me while she hugged a pillow against her chest as both of us sat there with messy buns and warm pj’s. It was friendship therapy. I really needed it because this week we will be a very long week. I need to come up with how I will interview the students. Then I need to actually do the interview to come up with the proof that the program isn’t working as well as they think. This down time has been great, but tomorrow I need to get to it. I don’t want to show up this weekend empty handed. Declan is going to work hard so I need to work hard as well. Declan loves me and he wants this relationship to work just as much as me. This is going to be one step in the right direction. I laid down on my bed Sunday night not being able to sleep. My mind buzzing as I was trying to come up with a plan on how to approach this. I knew I wouldn’t be able to actually fall asleep before I had a plan of action for the next day. So I stayed up until I had a plan. It was a risky plan, but a good one. Once my plan was formulated I drifted to sleep. I slept deeply and peacefully because I knew I’m not going to go into this aimlessly. The next morning I got up with a hop in my step. I got dressed and tied my hair up in a proper tight bun. I got dressed and did my make-up properly. As I got to my classes and planned for my interviews during break. Once it was lunch time I went to the grouping I went to first. I took out a exam pad and a pencil. I walked in there and went to sit at the nearest table. Some of the people recognized me.

“Last time I was here I said that I was looking at the school, that I was thinking of transferring here. That was a lie. The truth is that I was send here undercover to see how the school is doing with the program. Now I need to get everyone's truthful opinion on how the program has influenced you guys. They want to see if they can change a couple of things around, but in order to do that we need to have a truthful and detailed account of your experiences within the program.” I know I looked more official and the story I spun sounded creditable. They still seemed hesitant.

“I am here for you. I know that the program isn’t the easiest thing to go go through there is immense pressure and uncertainty that goes along with it. I want to help with that. I want to see if we can ease a bit of that pressure.” They looked at each other and then they opened up. That is when I noticed that a lot of the students are very upset with the program they still go along with it. Overall the students feel like their voice were being taken away from them. They understand why the program is here, but they don’t understand the urgency of it. The fact that you need to be a couple by the end of high school and get married in university and have kids after that. They felt that we could be given more time. It’s not like we have a shortage of time so why do we need to be limited on time. They felt that at such an age we were unsure what we wanted and them telling us what we wanted was helpful, but a decision that we make when we are eighteen can feel like a wrong decision by the time we are twenty five. If we don’t manage to fall in love in high school we are put under even more pressure in the subsidized living. I couldn’t believe how many people actually agreed with me about the program. If so many people disagreed why am I the only one that is doing anything about it. Where is everyone’s fight? Has this program beat it out of everyone.

“Thank you, please do not divulge any of this to the school. The program doesn’t want them to know that we are investigating this because we don’t want the student to be coerced.” I explained to them. The last thing I need is for rumors to be spread through the school that someone from the program is doing interviews. The school can do a follow up and then I will be busted.

“We won’t tell the teachers. They’ll have to many questions wanting to know what we have to say and what we told you won’t go down so smooth with them. They’ll monitor us more closely to see if we intend to fight the program. Our lives are already so controlled the last thing we need is to be even more monitored. The next thing they’ll do is put cameras in the lunch rooms and analyze us while we are flirting in order to see if they can improve on that as well.” The one guy teased darkly. I knew the students were effected, but not at this level. With this data we have prove of how toxic this program really is. They will have to do something about this. Theses students are pressured, depressed and are being effected mentally. They feel inadequate. That is not a good thing. This is just from one grouping so I can’t say that I’ve seen a pattern in my results, but I will go to a different grouping everyday. I will collect all the data I can and I will show it to Declan. Once we have a consensus of how the average student feels we can come up with our next step. I finally feel like we are making progress. That night I went to my room and made a folder that was color coded according to the grouping and then I sorted the deceleration according to the state of the students. I had white, pink and red. White was for the casual deceleration, pink for when there were some issues and red for the ones where students were really influenced by the program. This is what I did for the rest of the week. I made a folder for each grouping I visited. I even added black tags for the nightmare stories I heard. I knew the program was bad, but I never thought that students took these rules and spun them and misused them. I thought my experience with Finley was bad, but some of these stories where student were being taken advantage of by other students are horrible. No one deserved to be treated like this. When Friday rolled by I realized that I wouldn’t be able to walk out of the school with my folders. So I took photos of everything and saved it on my memory card. If we are ever caught I can hide the memory card. They can take my folders and wipe my phone, but they won’t know about the memory card. I put way to much work into this for it to be destroyed and covered up. I went to meet Declan. We went to a small restaurant that was hidden away and quiet. It will be our spot for when we need to talk about these things. I showed Declan everything. He felt ashamed at his efforts. He had only managed to talk to a couple of his friends and heard their opinion on it. He didn’t have such a great cover story as me which I explained to him to make him feel better. I felt proud at my efforts. The things he read bothered him. He had read every declaration. He wanted to be just as involved as me.

Book entry.

Our investigation proved to be a big success. The stories we uncovered through our investigation showed us that what we were doing mattered. We weren’t doing it just for ourselves anymore. It wasn’t about me being frustrated with the program anymore and it wasn’t about the fact that we had fallen in love and wanted to stay together. No it became about all the people that were being wronged by the program. We knew in that moment more than ever how important it was for us to bring this program down. The other students didn’t have the strength and fight to set out and do it, but I did and Declan decided to choose me. He told me constantly that he would always choose me. I think that their stories gave us even more strength and determination than we already had. Here are some of the stories that we had heard while investigating.