Chapter 6: Founders' Dinner

The Founders' Dinner was on Friday, and I had been dreading it for a month.

Every year the biggest donors ate roast beef in the Great Hall under portraits of dead headmasters.

Every year one scholarship student stood at the podium and thanked them for their generosity.

This year that student was me.

I wore my mother's good black dress, taken in at the waist with safety pins.

My mother sat at the very back table in her church coat, her hands in her lap.

She had come after all. She said, "I'm not going to hide, baby."

Her last shift was tonight, and she still came.

At the head table sat Mr. Hargrove.

I had only seen him in photographs.

In person he was bigger, silver-haired, in a suit that cost more than my mother's car.

He ate slowly and said little, and everyone else talked to him.

Drake sat at his right hand, in a dark suit, not eating.

Our eyes met once, across the whole room. He looked away first.

"Maisy." Cassie appeared at my elbow in her black A/V shirt, with a headset over one ear. "Two minutes. Cards."

I took the stack from my clutch.

I had worked on that speech for three weeks.

It thanked everybody and said all the right things in the right order.

I flipped the first card.

It said, in neat round handwriting that was not mine, "Thank you for letting a poor girl eat in your fancy room."

My face went hot.

I flipped the second card.

"My mother cleans old men for a living, and it prepared me for this school."

The third card. The fourth.

Cassie read over my shoulder and went white.

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