My Parents Begged for My Execution on Live TV novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Stop Pretending

Stripped of her badge and her dorm room, Nina copies the security footage and finds her best friend standing at the back of the hall.

I looked down at my plate.

Three golden ravioli sat on it, steaming.

Nothing was in them that didn't belong on a dinner table.

"What did I do?"

My roommate was already on her feet.

My other two roommates backed away from me and went to stand beside her.

"We've lived with her for a year," the first one said. "I feel sick just thinking about it."

They turned to the dean of students.

"We want her out of our dorm tonight."

"Brooke told me to eat it!" I held the plate up. "You all heard her. What did I do wrong?"

Nobody answered me.

Brooke lowered her eyes and wiped her hands on a napkin, one finger at a time.

I turned to the dean.

She had always praised my work.

I waited for her to say something, anything.

She stepped forward and unpinned the ambassador badge from my jacket.

"I regret writing that letter," she said. "How are the other students supposed to feel safe with you in the dorms?"

The trustee threw his napkin on the table.

His face had gone gray, and he would not look at my plate.

"I'm filing a formal complaint with the university," he said. "This will be investigated."

He walked out of the hall, and half the donors followed him.

*****

By ten that night I had an email stripping me of the ambassador position.

It ordered me out of the dorm while an investigation ran, and it warned me I could be suspended.

The explanation was one sentence.

Greyport University: Multiple students have reported that your behavior made them feel unsafe.

I read it twice.

Then I opened the campus forum, because my photo was on it.

Someone had taken it at the table, with my fork halfway to my mouth.

A hundred people had commented. Some said I should be expelled. Some said they were embarrassed to share a classroom with me.

I answered them one at a time.

I wrote: Please tell me what you saw.

The replies were almost all the same.

Stop pretending.

When I got to the dorm, my things were on the front steps in the rain.

A photograph of Maeve and me at ten years old lay in a puddle, the paper curling at the edges.

A window opened above me.

My roommate threw down the last cardboard box.

It landed on one corner and the lid split.

Inside was my competition model, the one I had built for three months.

It lay in pieces on the wet concrete.

"Don't come back," she said, and shut the window.

I knelt in the rain and picked up the little wooden walls one at a time.

I was still doing it when campus security told me I had to leave the grounds.

That night I rented a basement room off campus, paid by the week in cash.

The heater smelled of burning dust and the pipes knocked over my head.

I sat up with the light on and did not sleep.

Near dawn a thought came that I could not push away.

Maybe I was the problem.

Maybe I was seeing ravioli where there was something horrible, and I was the only person who couldn't tell.

*****

At nine I walked into the security office and lied.

I said I had lost a bracelet at the dinner and asked to see the hall camera.

The officer was bored enough to let me sit beside him.

I watched myself stand up from the table.

I watched Brooke step into my way and hand me the plate.

I watched myself cut a ravioli in half and eat it.

Nothing else happened on the screen.

There was no blood and no hand. There was only a girl with a fork, and then a hall full of people standing up all at once.

I asked him to copy the clip to my phone, and he did.

I played it again on the walk back, with the sound up.

On the second pass I stopped looking at myself and looked at the room.

There were forty people on the screen, and every one was looking at me.

In the corner, by the side door, stood one person who was not.

She wasn't looking at my plate.

She was holding her phone up, filming me.

She had a green wool scarf around her neck, the one I had knitted her in tenth grade.

Maeve was supposed to be three states away.

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