Chapter 5: The Sign-Out Sheet

On Tuesday night I walked into the PTA meeting in the school library and took a seat in the second row.

Forty parents turned their heads.

Then they turned them back, quickly.

Brynn sat at the long table by the window with a clipboard in her lap and her volunteer badge on a pink lanyard.

She gave me a small, sad smile.

I didn't return it.

The PTA president, a brisk woman with a gavel she never used, ran through the bake sale and the book fair.

When she asked for new business, I stood up.

"I'd like to ask the librarian to read something," I said. "It's short."

The president frowned at her papers. "Joanna, if this is about Friday, I really think a private conversation would be kinder."

"It's about the costume room," I said. "It belongs to everyone here."

The librarian looked up from the end of the table.

She is a gentle woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain, and she had hugged me in the parking lot at pickup for eight years.

"What would you like me to read, Joanna?"

"The sign-out sheet on the costume room door. For Friday night."

A chair creaked somewhere behind me.

Brynn's smile stayed where it was, but her hand tightened on the clipboard.

The librarian went to the door of the supply closet and took down the clipboard that hangs on the hook.