I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Conference

"The main stage," I said.

"Twenty minutes. Then questions."

"In front of every incident commander in Alaska."

"Most of them," the professor said. "A few will be on fires."

I sat down in the ash behind the instrument truck.

"Carmody? Are you still there?"

"I'm here," I said. "Tell them yes."

I built the talk in the crew tent at night, with a headlamp and the lab laptop on my knees.

When we rotated home, I practiced it in the station kitchen for anyone who'd sit still.

The crew sat still.

Dodie timed me with the oven timer.

Gavin asked questions in a fake deep voice, pretending to be a fire chief.

"Young lady, what is a humidity?"

"Gavin."

"I'm a very old chief. I need it simple."

The captain listened from the end of the table with his mug and said nothing until the last run-through.

Then he pointed at the screen.

"Go back to the first slide."

I went back.

It said STATION 3 RIDGE MODEL, and under it, Weather logs by the Station 3 captain, 1994 to 2025.

"Where's your name?" he said.

"It's your logs."

"It's your model." He took a sip. "Put it on."

"I don't need it on there."

Dodie reached over my shoulder and typed it in herself, in big letters, before I could stop her.

J. CARMODY.

I reached for the delete key.

The captain set his mug down.

"Leave it," he said.

I left it.

The conference was in the big hall on campus on a Thursday in the middle of July.

Three hundred seats.

Every one of them full of people in fire-department polos and crew T-shirts and a few in uniforms with gold on the collar.

The incident commander from the Goldstream fire was in the fourth row.

He nodded at me when I walked in.

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