Ashes Learned Human Names novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Nobody Believes That Face

"I said I'd bring a mop," Marta said from the gravel path.

She stood with a yellow mop bucket in one hand and the mop in the other, and she had brought two women from the chapel kitchen with her.

They were big women in aprons, and they looked at Gabriel's friends with great interest.

Gabriel's grip on Paulina's wrist loosened for a moment.

It was long enough.

Paulina stamped on his instep with her whole weight, tore her arm free and snatched her phone out of his hand.

"Run!" Lucia said.

Paulina ran.

She did not run for the dorms.

She ran down the chapel steps and out across the quad, where the noon crowd sat in the sun with lunch trays, and Lucia ran after her as fast as her thigh would let her.

Gabriel came behind them both.

"Paulina!" he shouted. "Stop her! She's sick!"

Nobody stopped her.

By the fountain in the middle of the quad, Paulina climbed onto the stone rim and held her phone up in both hands.

Her hands were shaking so badly that the picture jittered.

She pressed the red button anyway.

"Hi," she said, to the screen. "It's Paulina Ibarra. Some of you know me."

A boy at the nearest table put down his burrito.

"Four weeks ago I told you that Lucia Sandoval pushed me off a stage," Paulina said. "I said it on this exact spot. It was a lie."

Heads turned.

Phones came up in a rustle, table by table.

"I grabbed her wrist, not the other way around. I fell on my own." Her voice cracked and climbed. "Gabriel Castellanos put a pill in a girl's drink at the spring party. Lucia filmed him. I helped him make her look guilty."

Gabriel arrived at the edge of the crowd, breathing hard, with his two friends.

"She's lying," he called, with a smile. "She's having a breakdown. Somebody call her mother."

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