Skipped Thanksgiving Because of My Family's Favoritism novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Thanksgiving Eve

The turkey was the first thing to go wrong.

The man with the beard had put it in the break-room oven at noon on Wednesday, and by four he was standing in front of it with a thermometer and a face I had learned to read.

"It's raw in the middle," he said.

"It's been four hours," said the woman from the data team.

"It's a small oven."

"It's a toaster," my lab partner said, without looking up.

Somebody had brought a folding table from the storage room, and somebody else had spread a bedsheet over it.

There were twelve paper plates and a mismatched set of forks, and a pot of mashed potatoes with garlic and too much butter.

I stood in the doorway with a laptop under my arm.

"Koster, you're not allowed to help," my lab partner said.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to carve it."

"I do it every year."

"Not this year."

She took the knife out of the drawer and pointed it at me.

"You sit. You work on your thing. We are going to feed you."

I sat in the corner with the laptop on my knees.

On the screen, the cloud drive was open, with eighteen years of folders in my mother's tidy labels.

I started with a clip from when I was nine.

It was the five of us in the street under the willow tree, the summer a storm had taken its biggest branch.

Daphne stood on a tipped-over bucket giving orders to Maxine.

Ingrid held a clipboard, and Bridget carried a wagon.

I was the one holding the camera, and my voice came from behind it, saying, "Say cheese, you dorks."

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