Chapter 8: The Pie Auction

On Thursday night the Founders' Day committee held its pie auction in the school cafeteria.

I went because Selena chaired it, and I did not know how to say no to her.

Forty pies sat on a long folding table under little paper tents. Every pie had a name card.

Dot stood on a chair at the front with a gavel in her hand.

"Pie number nineteen," she announced. "Brannigan apple. Baked by my son, who has never lost a county fair."

Gus, in the back row, closed his eyes.

"Do I get a ruling?" I said to Selena.

"A ruling on what?"

"Do I have to eat this man's pie?"

"Nobody's making you," Selena said, and squeezed my arm. "But everyone will be watching."

Everyone was.

The room held about two hundred people, and most of them looked at me, then at Gus, then away.

A woman in the second row whispered.

A man said "amnesia" and moved his chair a little farther from mine.

"Who'll start me at ten dollars?" Dot said.

I raised my hand before I had thought about it.

"Ten from the lady in the green sweater."

I had worked it out in my head.

A pie was an easy debt.

I would pay ten dollars and eat the pie, and nobody would owe anybody.

"Fifteen," said Gus from the back.

Dot lowered the gavel.

"Gus, honey, that's your own pie."

"I know."

"Twenty," I said.

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