They Rejected My Daughter novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Books

By seven on Friday night the Ridgeline gym held three hundred parents on the risers Lorna had bought.

I sat in the last row in my gray coat, with Ruby on one side and the woman in scrubs on the other.

I had told the board president I wanted no seat at the front and no mention in the program.

"I'm a parent tonight," I had said. "That's all."

At the center of the floor stood a folding table with a laptop and a projector, and a tall father in a plaid shirt was adjusting the cord.

The vice principal had asked him to do it because he kept books for a living, and no one on the board could be trusted to read a ledger without a lawyer.

Lorna sat alone in a metal chair at the end of the table with her hands in her lap.

She wore the navy suit and the pearls.

The father cleared his throat and the screen lit.

"I'm just going to read the numbers," he said. "I'm not going to say anything about them."

The first line came up.

He read a date from three springs ago, a deposit and a name.

"That's the week a boy was cut from the roster," said the bus driver, in the row ahead of me, not loudly.

A murmur ran along the risers.

The father read the second line, and the third.

When he read the fourth, he stopped and looked up.

"Ridgeline Booster Fund received fourteen thousand dollars from the district education foundation on the ninth of November," he said. "Mrs. Staniforth signed for both accounts."

Someone swore under their breath.

"On the twelfth of December," he said, "nine thousand of it went to the principal's discretionary account. The roster was typed that morning."

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