Chapter 18: In Person

On Wednesday evening I was alone on my grandmother's porch with a geometry book, and my father's gray sedan turned onto the street.

My grandmother and my mother were at the lawyer's.

Noemi had the school paper. Lindsey had gone to the library, because she said she needed to be somewhere that wasn't a house.

I closed the book.

He parked at the curb and got out without a tie, in a rumpled shirt, with no one behind him.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps.

"May I come up?"

"You can sit on the steps," I said. "You're not coming in."

He sat on the bottom step with his back to me, and for a while he looked at the street.

"I'm not here as the principal," he said.

"Then who are you here as?"

"I don't know. That's the honest answer."

I waited.

"Your mother told the whole city that I ordered her to lock your pen," he said. "She's right. I did."

"I know you did."

"I want you to understand why."

"It was the board vote."

"No." He rubbed his face. "The vote was only the reason I gave myself."

I didn't move.

"I have kept one rule for seventeen years, Marisol. I never choose you where anyone can see."

"What?"

"If I picked you first, even once, people would look at what I had picked instead.

"They would ask who gets the front seat, and who gets the wall of photographs."

His voice dropped.

"So I made myself a man who is hard on his own child. It was the safest thing I could build."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Sacrificed Me to Avoid Favoritism from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.