Chapter 4: The Friday Huddle

On Friday night Teo put a bowl of candy on the crew room table, because it was Halloween.

Nobody touched it.

Nobody ever touches anything on a Friday, because of the huddle.

Thirty of us stood along the walls in our hard hats at ten o'clock, with our lunch coolers at our feet.

I stood by the door with my arms crossed and my face blank.

My body was not blank.

I had spent two days replaying a desk, a couch, a red cord and a key in my fist.

Every time I thought of it, I had to look at a wall.

Royce Brockman came in at one minute past ten.

He wore a dark jacket over the white shirt.

He took a white card out of his breast pocket and stood in front of the whiteboard with his eyes on it.

He does this every Friday.

The crew had told me in my first week.

He reads four names off a card, and then the huddle begins.

He read the first name in a flat, level voice.

He read the second, and he didn't look up.

"Ramón Escobedo," he said.

My father's name went into the room and fell on the concrete floor.

He read the fourth, and he put the card back in his pocket.

"Lock your valves," he said. "Go home alive."

That was all.

He had read four names off a card to a whiteboard.

I stared at him with my jaw set so hard that it ached.

Ten months, and he had never once looked at anyone while he said them.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Broke His Rule to Get Near Him, So the Billionaire Made Me Count from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.