The Diary That Held the Votes Against Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Slips
At the morning hair check, Rafe cuts Hattie's bangs in front of the class and Delaney reads fourteen votes against her; Hattie takes the diary and finds the fourteenth line signed by Rafe.
On Friday morning, in front of all twenty-four of us, Rafe Dillard cut off my bangs.
Chef checks our hair every day before first service.
Hair off the eyes, whites buttoned, nails short.
I had two written warnings already, and I wore my bangs long enough to hide half my face anyway.
Delaney Trask caught me at the coat hooks and pressed a bobby pin into my hand.
"Pin them back, Hattie. Chef's checking slips today."
She smiled when she said it.
She was holding the Line Diary against her chest, the blue spiral book that lives on the pass.
"Thanks," I said. "What's the diary for this morning?"
"Just Thursday's sign-in. Everybody signs one page, and I carry it so nobody loses it."
That sounded fine to me.
I put the pin in my pocket instead of my hair.
My mother cut my bangs every month until she got sick.
I hadn't let anyone touch them since her funeral, and I wasn't going to start in a classroom.
Chef came down the line with her clipboard.
She stopped in front of me and looked at my face, or at the part of it she could see.
"Sorrell. That's a third slip."
"I'll fix it after class, Chef."
"You'll fix it now, or you're off the Cleveland list."
The Cleveland externship is one paid placement, given to one cook from our cohort.
I needed it to keep my mother's house.
Behind me, a chair scraped.
Rafe had come up the aisle with the kitchen shears from the knife roll.
I have known Rafe my whole life.
He grew up in the yellow house next to mine, and he left Harlan Ridge once without telling me why.
Now he was back in my class, and I had barely spoken to him in ten months.
"Hattie," he said. "Hold still."
"Don't you dare."
He took me by the shoulder and turned me toward the front of the room.
I grabbed his wrist.
He didn't let go.
He walked me to the whiteboard with twenty-three people watching and a hand on the back of my neck that I couldn't shake off.
The shears closed at my forehead.
I felt the first cold snip, and then a long piece of hair slid past my nose and landed on my shoe.
"Rafe, stop it!"
He cut again, and again, hard and uneven, as fast as he could.
Somebody in the back row had their phone up.
Somebody else laughed out loud.
The last of it fell on the floor around my clogs, and I could see the whole room at once for the first time in two years.
Chef didn't say a word.
She wrote something on her clipboard and tore off the slip.
"Violation corrected," she said. "Slip withdrawn."
I should have felt saved.
I felt bare from the eyebrows up, with the whole class looking.
Rafe lowered the shears, and he wouldn't look at me.
"That's the hair," Delaney said gently from the back. "Chef, can I read the diary now? Since we're all here."
Chef nodded.
Delaney opened the book on the pass and ran her finger down a page.
"Externship list, final confirmation. More than half the cohort has to sign for a name to stay on."
She turned a page.
"Fourteen signed against Hattie Sorrell."
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Bridget, my station partner, said, "What?"
"I'm so sorry," Delaney said, and she sounded it. "I just write it down. I don't decide."
Fourteen of twenty-four.
That was a majority, and a majority plus a slip is the rule.
The slip was gone.
The votes were still there.
I looked at the faces in the room, and half of them looked at their shoes.
Rafe still hadn't spoken.
I crossed to the pass and put my hand flat on the diary.
"Can I see it?"
Delaney's hand lifted off the cover at once.
"Of course," she said. "It's the class's book."
I picked it up.
I had hair on my jacket and on my shoes and in my collar, and I could feel the cold air on my forehead.
My choice took one sentence, and I made it standing there.
So I walked out with the diary.
I made it as far as the stairwell before I opened it.
There was a ruled page for every Thursday, and a column of names down the left.
Beside mine were fourteen lines in blue ink, each one signed.
I read them from the bottom up.
The fourteenth line was the one that decided it.
The name under it was written in square capitals that I had known since third grade:
AGAINST. R. DILLARD.
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