When you wake up on Feb. 24, 2015, your first thought is: today is your 23rd birthday. That means a trip to Colchester’s Athens Diner with your grandmother Phyllis and your boyfriend, Jared, for a spinach and cheddar omelette with wheat toast and, as always, strawberry jam. Tonight, you’ll celebrate with your family — though without your brother, Jordan — at Waterworks in Winooski, where you’ll order the 14-ounce coffee-rubbed bone-in rib eye and look out on the frozen river, daydreaming of warm sun.

But first, there’s the matter of your second thought of the day: the presentation to your PA 206-Introduction to Public Affairs class taught by Professor Catherine Finley Woodruff, who has encouraged you to tell your story. You have butterflies.

You are Sierra Thompson, a senior public communications major from Milton, Vt. At 1 p.m. on a frigid February afternoon — temps fell to 37 below zero last night in the Green Mountains — you’ll stand in front of Aiken Room 102, where almost nobody knows it’s your birthday. They don’t know, either, what happened to Jordan back in 2011, behind closed doors with pool sticks, broomsticks — by teammates.

Your best friend, Abigail, is ready to click through the PowerPoint for PA-206.

You take a deep breath. “I’d like to, I suppose, warn you that what we will be discussing can be controversial,” you say. But you smile, your green eyes that mirror a jade-colored scarf you’ve chosen, flashing kindness at the classroom. Your family has come to a place of peace with the information you’re presenting, so please, ask questions.

Aug. 28, 2012. You repeat the date shown on the slide. Your stomach has calmed, and now it’s your hands that shake and then fly gracefully, moving like birds as you explain with a slight tremor in your voice how you learned, through an indelible chain of communication and events that Jordan Preavy, your brother, committed suicide a year after being hazed and sexually assaulted by fellow members of the Milton High School football team — friends. Jordan was 6 feet, 3 inches, a “big frickin’ kid,” you say. Thoughts unspool of what it must have taken to hold Jordan down in order to sodomize him. “Goofy. He was a boy.” Several of your classmates’ own hands cover their mouths in horror and empathy as the presentation unfolds; you take notice, but you are composed. The more you talk, the stronger and more serene you seem.

“I like to think that Jordan was channeling strength to me,” you tell a reporter later — no stranger to the media after the coverage of your brother’s death. But the most recent news hits a more positive note, on the progress of H.41, otherwise known as Jordan’s Bill. Initiated by your family in the wake of the humiliating hazing and the suicide, it seeks to clarify muddy legal language around the sexual abuse of minors.

No more loopholes, balls dropped, silences, early retirements, medical leaves or mysterious disappearances, as were all the case among officials after the Milton incidents surfaced. “There was no documentation of any kind,” you’ve written in your presentation notes, “nor was there any reporting done within the chain of command.” Current child welfare law, you explain, lets adults off the hook with the phrase “reasonable cause to believe that any child has been abused or neglected may report.”
 
Let’s remove the reasonableness standard, you and your family propose, and turn that “may” into “shall.” Let’s break the code of silence, insist on stronger and clearer definitions of abuse, and demand for action among those who are responsible. Your family — unconventionally large, you explain to PA-206 and later draw a color-coded tree that branches out to your 21-year-old sister, Sam, a fellow UVM student — has allies in public administrators including Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donavan, Burlington Detective Sgt. Michael Warren, Milton Town Representative Ronald Hubert and Victim’s Advocate Armina Medic. They help not only in the healing, but in the introduction of Jordan’s Bill to the Vermont State House in January 2015.

“My family and I, we are going to change the law,” you tell your classmates. They ask questions: “Did you do your own investigating?” “How did you handle the media attention?” “Wait, the coach wasn’t fired?”

“Sam, you would have loved that one,” you tell your sister of that reaction during a follow-up phone call in which you both speak of the support that Kappa Delta sorority, and, now, a widening expanse of the UVM community, has given you and Jordan’s Bill. Sure, anger and hurt simmers, but hope is beginning to percolate. “I’m absolutely amazed how word is getting around,” you say, admitting that all this adding to your already busy schedule, as you’re trying to make up for lost time and lost credits in the months after Jordan died. Before all this, you wanted to be a wedding planner. Now you have your eye on a career in politics, maybe moving toward Washington, D.C., once you graduate in May. “I never would have known this life before,” you say, seeming so ready to accept the surprises ahead with your newfound poise and grace.

But first there are a couple of surprises in PA-206. First, you reveal that your family has been sitting toward the back of Aiken Room 102, and you introduce them one by one as they rise from their seats. Then, Professor Finley Woodruff presents you with a bouquet of birthday flowers. Now is when the tears arrive, though backed by a smile.

“I would never have guessed that I would be writing and implementing a policy that would change lives,” you say to your classmates, words that will grow and bloom into something even greater in the coming days as you look back on your 23rd birthday and say, “I felt so empowered in the moment.”