Chapter 23: The Hearing

The lecture hall held eleven hundred seats, and at ten to eight every one of them was full.

Dell had put up a flyer.

It said: OPEN HEARING. FREE. BRING SNACKS.

The panel sat at a folding table on the stage, where Autumn had once confessed to Beckett.

There was the dean, two professors, and a student ombudsman with a legal pad.

Autumn sat alone at a second table in a pale yellow cardigan.

She did not look at me.

Beckett and Rowan sat in the back row, as ordered, in matching gray, two seats apart.

My mother sat between them, with sage in her lap and a look that dared anyone to light it.

"We are here," the dean said, "on the complaint of Miss Whitaker, regarding a scholarship conduct clause. Miss Whitaker, you may begin."

Autumn stood up.

She was good.

She laid it out in a calm, sorrowful voice: a scholar, a donor, ten thousand dollars a week, a half-million-dollar contract, a deceived community.

She used the word transparency four times.

When she finished, a few people in the audience clapped, and then stopped when they saw nobody else was.

"Miss Curry," the dean said.

I walked to the podium with six pages and a pen.

"Everything she said is true," I said.

The hall went quiet.

"I took ten thousand dollars a week from Rowan Ashworth. I took half a million from his brother. I kept receipts for all of it."

"Then you admit..." the first professor began.

"I admit I'm a vendor. Now I'd like to show you the date on my scholarship."

I put a page on the projector.

It was an award letter, with a seal.

"I was named an Ashworth Scholar on the ninth of May. The committee was four faculty members and a blind ballot. Rowan was not on it."

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