To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Microphone

The microphone was warm from her hand.

The hall had gone so quiet that I could hear the cider urn ticking in the kitchen.

Four hundred people looked at me.

I looked at the easel, at my own bald face the size of a door, and I made myself breathe.

"Hi," I said, and the speakers squealed, and somebody laughed nervously.

"I'm Laurel Pinkney. Most of you know me. I teach your kids to sing, badly, in a room that smells like glue."

A few people made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

"Some of you have seen my face on a flyer this week, and I need to tell you where that picture came from."

Shelby stood at my elbow with her smile fixed in place.

"I have Hodgkin lymphoma. It is curable. My doctor says so, and I plan to hold her to it."

A woman in the third row put her hand over her mouth.

"I did not ask anyone to raise money for me. I did not know about this night until Tuesday."

"I did not know about the picture until it was already online."

"The picture on that easel was taken in a waiting room, while I sat there bald and scared and trusted the woman behind the desk."

I turned my head.

"Teddy. Lights, please."

The projector hummed, and a white square bloomed on the wall beside my face.

It was the fundraising page.

At the bottom, in small gray letters, it said, Funds go to the organizer.

I let them read it.

"The organizer is her," I said. "Not me. Not my father. Her."

Shelby laughed, bright and wounded.

"That is just how the website words it. Everybody knows I would never."

"Mrs. McCracken," I said, "do you have something?"

Marge got up from the front row with a manila folder against her chest.

"I keep the parish office email," she said, in a voice that carried to the back wall without any microphone at all.

"Miss Pullman put that address on the fundraiser as the contact, so it would look official."

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