They Borrowed My Surgery Fund To Leave Me Behind novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Numbers

Nobody in the hall made a sound.

Behind me my face was still on the screen, thirty feet tall, with the date under it.

"That's a video Halyard showed investors in the spring," I said. "It says I died on March 14."

A glass clinked on a table and went quiet.

"I didn't die. I have a heart valve that's been failing since I was nine. I paid for my own surgery, and a lot of money that was supposed to be mine went somewhere else."

Wyatt stepped toward me with a smile pinned to his face.

"Mara, sweetheart, we have a program," he said into his own lapel mike. "Let's let the nice people..."

He was looking past me, at the booth in the back.

My microphone went dead in my hand.

The speakers made a small soft pop, and my voice, a second ago filling six hundred seats, shrank to what one girl could say.

"They've cut the sound," I said.

A few people in the back leaned forward, trying to hear.

Wyatt held his hands out, calm and apologetic.

"Technical problem," he said. "Please bear with us, folks."

"Turn it back on!"

The voice came from the front row and carried to the back wall.

My neighbor stood up in her church hat.

"I drove a school bus for thirty-four years," she bellowed, "and I know what a liar sounds like when somebody pulls his plug! Turn that microphone on!"

Somebody laughed.

Then somebody else clapped, and then it was a lot of people.

In the booth, a technician put his hands up, and my microphone crackled alive again.

"Thank you," I said, and the room laughed again, softly, on my side.

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