The Diary That Held the Votes Against Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sign-In

Bridget finds her own signature on the Thursday she was in the emergency room; Delaney texts to ask if she can come look at the diary.

Bridget lives over the hardware store on Main Street, and she opened the door before I finished knocking.

She was in a bathrobe with her red curls standing straight up.

"Oh my God, your hair," she said, and pulled me inside by both arms.

"Don't."

"It looks good."

"Bridget."

"It looks really good, and I'm going to kill him."

She sat me on the couch and put a cup of coffee in my hands.

Then she dropped down next to me and said, "I didn't vote against you."

I hadn't asked.

"I know you didn't," I said.

"You came here with the diary in a tote bag. You've been hugging that bag with both arms since you walked in."

She had a point.

I put the cup down and took the Line Diary out and opened it on the cushion between us.

"Fourteen names," I said. "Count them with me. I need to know which ones are real."

Bridget leaned over the page, and her mouth moved as she read.

She read them all.

She was fine until the sixth line down.

"That's my name," she said.

"Where?"

I looked where she was pointing.

AGAINST. B. OAKES.

It was in the same blue ink as the rest.

"I never wrote that," Bridget said.

"It's your signature."

"It is my signature. I signed a page. I just didn't sign that."

"Delaney said it was the sign-in."

"It is the sign-in!" Bridget said. "Every Thursday she walks around the kitchen with that book and a pen, and you sign next to the date so Chef knows who came. You don't read it. Nobody reads it. It's a list of names."

"So the lines above the names. Who wrote those?"

"I don't know."

"Bridget, someone wrote against beside my name."

"I know that!"

She grabbed the diary and turned it toward the window.

She ran her finger down the page's left edge, to the date written at the top in Delaney's neat handwriting.

"October eleventh," she said slowly.

"What about it?"

"That's the Thursday I got food poisoning from the gas station burrito."

I stared at her.

"I was at the emergency room until midnight," Bridget said. "My mom drove down from Mansfield. They gave me a bag of fluids and a bill I'm still paying."

"You didn't go to class?"

"I didn't go to anything. I missed two services, and Chef gave me a make-up shift."

She was holding the diary open with both hands.

"I couldn't have signed this page, Hattie. I wasn't there."

It took me a moment to understand what she was telling me.

Either Bridget was lying, which she wasn't, because she has never been able to lie to me about anything.

Or somebody had signed her name on a day she was lying in a hospital bed.

"Maybe you signed it the day after," I said. "Delaney could have caught you on Friday."

"Then it would be dated Friday."

"Unless she writes the date at the top herself."

"She does."

We sat there.

Down in the shop, somebody dragged something heavy across the floor, and the whole apartment shook a little.

"Okay," Bridget said. "Okay. Who else is on here?"

She turned the page back, then forward, then back again.

"I'm going to text them. All of them."

"Don't."

"Why not?"

"If I'm wrong, I've called half the class liars before the hearing."

"And if you're right?"

"Then whoever did this knows we're looking."

Bridget thought about that, and her face went from angry to scared.

"Hattie, that's what I don't get," she said. "Who would do this? Nobody in our cohort hates you. Rafe is the one who cut your hair in front of everybody."

"His name is on the fourteenth line."

"His name is on the line that decided it," Bridget said. "That's not the same as him writing it."

I didn't answer.

I had known Rafe Dillard for fourteen years.

He had never once lied to me, and he had left town anyway without a word, and I didn't know which of those facts to trust.

Bridget put her hand over mine on the cover of the diary.

"Then we find out whose hand it is," she said.

My phone buzzed against my knee.

It was a message from Delaney.

Hey Hattie! I heard you took the diary home. Totally fine, I only need it for the hearing. Can I come by this afternoon and look at it with you? I want to make sure it's all correct.

Bridget read it over my shoulder.

"She's being nice," she said, but she said it slowly.

I looked at the page, at fourteen lines of blue ink.

Then I looked at the message, and the way it asked to see the book.

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