Left in the Dust: The True Cost of Following a Fool novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: Half the Story
By seven the next morning, the clip had thirty thousand views.
Someone from my class had posted it to the town's parent group under the headline: Class Valedictorian Shoves Classmate Into Wall.
It started at the exact second Keeley fell.
It did not show her lunge or her shove, and it did not show the ring of kids standing by.
It showed me kneeling over her with blood on my hands.
My mother read it to me at the kitchen table in her work clothes, in a voice so flat it scared me.
"Eat your eggs," she said when she finished.
"Mom."
"Eat. Then we go to work."
I ate, and then I went with her, because I did not want to be home alone with the clip.
The Dry Creek Diner opened at six and was full by seven.
I put on an apron and filled coffee cups, and every cup I poured, the customer lifted a phone and looked at me over it.
"Is that her?" a woman whispered at table four. "The one who pushed that poor girl?"
"That's her."
"And her mother works here."
I set the coffeepot down very carefully.
A trucker at the counter, a man who had tipped me five dollars every Saturday since I was fourteen, pushed his plate aside.
"I'll sit somewhere else," he said.
My mother's head came up from the register.
"The seat's yours for as long as you want it," she said. "You can eat here, or you can eat at the gas station. But my daughter doesn't spit in your food, and she doesn't shove people either."
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