The Diary That Held the Votes Against Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Back Step

Rafe says the fourteenth vote isn't his and evens her bangs on her mother's porch; Chef emails that a hearing will be held in eight days and Hattie must bring the diary.

By dark I had looked at my forehead in the bathroom mirror eleven times and hated it every time.

The bangs Rafe had left me stopped at different lengths, one side almost at the hairline.

I sat on my mother's porch step with the Line Diary in my lap and a bag of frozen peas on my eyes, which I had no reason to ice.

The porch light next door came on.

Rafe's back door opened and shut.

I heard him cross the strip of grass between our houses, the same strip he had crossed ten thousand times since we were six.

He stopped at the bottom step with the kitchen shears in his hand.

"Get off my porch," I said.

"It's your mother's porch."

"Then get off her porch."

He didn't move.

I lowered the peas and looked at him with my whole face, because there was nothing left to hide it behind.

His eyes went to my forehead and stayed there.

"It's crooked," he said.

"You did that."

"I did it fast."

"You did it in front of twenty-three people."

"I know."

"Fourteen of them voted me off the list, and you cut my hair so they'd have something to laugh at while they did it."

He pushed his hand through his hair.

"I didn't vote."

I held up the diary and opened it to the page.

I turned the book so the porch light fell on his own name.

AGAINST. R. DILLARD.

He read it, and I watched his face change.

"That's not mine," he said.

"It's your handwriting."

"It looks like my handwriting."

"Rafe."

"I never wrote in that book, Hattie. I never even signed in. Delaney hands it to people at the pass, and I always said I'd do it later."

I shut the diary.

"You've got a reason for everything."

"I've got one for this."

"Then tell me why you held me by the neck and cut my hair in front of the whole class."

His jaw worked.

"Because it was your third slip. If Chef writes it, you're off the list by lunch. A corrected violation voids the slip, and that's in the handbook."

"So you did it for me."

"Yes."

"Without asking."

"You'd have said no."

"I would have said no!"

I was standing now, and so was he, and the diary was against my ribs.

"It was my decision," I said. "My mother's hands were the last ones on my hair. You know that. You were at the funeral."

He took a breath and let it out slowly.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. I'd do it again, and I'm sorry."

That should have made me angrier.

It made my throat hurt.

"Sit down," he said quietly. "Please. Let me even it out, or you'll walk into service Monday looking like I used a lawn mower."

"I'm not letting you touch me."

"Then do it yourself, and I'll hold the light."

I looked at the shears, and then at his hands.

They weren't steady.

Rafe Dillard has plated for forty covers without a tremor, and his fingers were shaking over a pair of scissors.

I sat down on the step.

He came up beside me and tipped my chin toward the light with two fingers.

His thumb rested along my jaw.

I held still and kept my eyes on the grass.

The first snip was soft, almost nothing.

His knuckles brushed my cheekbone, and something in my stomach turned over, and I told myself it was the peas.

"Stop breathing on me," I said.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"Then stop leaning in."

I wasn't leaning in.

I checked, and I was.

I sat back.

He trimmed the left side, then the right, and for a while the only sound was the shears and the crickets.

When he stopped, he didn't take his hand away.

"Better," he said, and his voice was rough.

I touched my new bangs with my fingertips.

They stopped straight across my eyebrows, even and short, and the air on my skin felt strange.

It looked like me.

It looked like someone I used to be.

"This doesn't make us okay," I said.

"I didn't think it would."

My phone buzzed on the step between us.

It was an email from Chef, sent from the school account, and I read it out loud so I wouldn't have to read it again.

"A hearing on the externship list will be held a week from Saturday at eight in the main kitchen. The full cohort will vote aloud. Hattie Sorrell must bring the Line Diary."

Rafe read it over my shoulder.

"Eight days," he said.

I closed my hand around the diary.

Somebody had put my name in that book fourteen times, and I had eight days to find out who.

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