Rumor (5)

After giving the crowd an appropriately long time to process the information she revealed Sarah decided she should use the opportunity to paint herself in a good light so that more people would be interested in her and want to work with her.

"The reason I've chosen to reveal this is not just because I suffered at Aria's hands personally. I also realized that I had a responsibility as one of the people who knew about it to do everything I could put an end to it. Not just for the good of us all, either. I feel like it's my responsibility as someone who used to be friends with you, Aria, to do this so you can get better."

When she finished speaking she turned to Aria and gave her a sad smile, her eyes wet with held back tears.

Everyone who saw her couldn't help but sympathize with this poor girl. She was doing all of this in the name of justice to help those who've been hurt, including the one she's revealing.

Not only that, many students in the crowd realized that she wasn't from a large or influential family and must be there through hard work and was no risking it all to go against this giant.

They began to see this girl in a new light, at first they assumed she was doing this for revenge against Aria for wronging her, but the more they saw the more the felt ashamed for their earlier views.

Slowly, the majority of the room turned condemning gazes full of hatred and disgust towards Aria. Even after committing so many wrongs, she was now causing this poor girl to risk her future for the sake of justice and even then as someone who had been hurt by Aria still spoke out in her defense and wants her to get better.

The longer the crowd thought about it, the stronger their feelings that Aria needed to be punished severely grew.

"Expel her!"

"Let everyone see how dirty she is!"

"Slut!"

"Take your money and get out! We don't want criminals!"

As the insults increased, the look of anger on the deans face did as well. Before things were able to escalate any farther, he stood up and held up his hand.

When he reached the podium, he cleared his throat and then sighed. Standing there, he swept his gaze across all of the students in the hall, focusing on the ones who were yelling about money and her abusing it.

"I would like to make a statement on behalf of Miss Song. She applied to transfer here before 11th grade, as anyone of the staff members could tell you. She got 100% on the transfer test and is here on a full scholarship. Maple-leaf Academy has never received any money from or relating to Aria Song."

With a final glare at the crowd, he walked back to his place on the stage and let the normal events proceed. As Sarah had finished speaking beforehand, she had no chance to say anything to weaken the effect of the dean's statement. The single statement was enough to set several of the students to questioning the claims because they seemed far less likely if she was there on scholarship as well.

Aika squeezed Aria's hand and smiled reassuringly at her before moving forward to do it on her behalf. When she saw Aika walk up to the podium, Emma finally figured out where she had seen her before. She was the heir of the Suzuki family. Slightly less confident, her sneer fell and was replaced with furrowed brows and full attentiveness.

Looking out at the crowd, all Aika could think about were the horrible words they directed at Aria and their mindless assumptions of guilt.

"Almost none of you know me, unless your family does business with mine. However, I transferred to this school yesterday and can, for one thing, safely say that there was no man in Aria and my dorm room last night."

She clicked a button and the screen switched to show a CCTV video of a girl who was clearly Sarah leading a drunk man up to the door. The girl in the video posed the man for the picture and then lead him back out of the scene. Several moments later, one of Sarah's friends, Jasmine was shown walking down the hall from the direction the picture was taken. As she left, the camera switched to the one on the bottom floor several minutes later and showed the same girl from the first shot paying the drunk man.

"As shown clearly in this video alone, Sarah clearly framed Aria to get some form of misguided revenge. But, because we wish to fully clear her name, we collected evidence to disprove every accusation."