Chapter 21: Parking Services Wins

The clip ran for three minutes, and nobody coughed.

On a screen eight feet high, Camille asked a boy to a gala, and her thumb dragged across her palm in loud slow circles.

Tap, drag.

Then the camera caught her clipboard, and her thumb on it, and her mouth moving as she read the empty air.

She had not known that she did it.

The room understood in pieces, from the front to the back.

Somebody laughed once, softly.

A woman said, "Oh, she's doing it too," in a very small voice.

A donor in the third row leaned toward his wife and said, "I thought it was only the girl."

Camille stood in front of the screen with the remote in her fist.

She pressed the button.

It paused, on a freeze-frame of her thumb the size of a canoe.

"This is a mistake," she said. "The AV club made a mistake."

"The files play in order!" Beau called, with his hands cupped around his mouth. "Yours was first!"

Rosetta stood up beside him and raised a laptop over her head.

"Nursing club!" she shouted.

The dean rose from Table Nine.

She had a plate in one hand, and she did not hurry.

"Ms. Doran," she said. "Come and sit with us a moment."

"Dean, I can explain."

"I'm sure you can. Come and sit."

It was a long walk from the stage to the back of the room, past the lanterns and the donors and the bar.

Camille made it with her chin up.

She sat at Table Nine, between a parking officer and the ficus, and the whole room watched her do it.

I stayed where I was, with the microphone in my hand and Griffin's shoulder against mine.

The dean sat down across from her and took a bite of brie.

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