Chapter 7: Notice of Hearing

By noon the clip from the gym had nine hundred thousand views.

Noemi read the comments aloud on my grandmother's porch steps, while I held a mug of hot chocolate in both hands.

"This one says, The nurse is her mother. Listen to the nurse."

"What does the next one say?"

"If the mother is the nurse, why was the pen locked in an office?" Noemi scrolled.

"That one has four thousand likes. The mother nurse thing is not going well."

"What about my father?"

"Half of them say he's a hero. Half of them say he waved off an empty ambulance." She looked up.

"Nobody is neutral, Marisol. It's the most awake the internet has ever been about a lunch."

My grandmother came out and set a plate of toast on the railing without being asked.

Lindsey sat on the step below mine, still in the green dress, with her shoes off.

She had stood in front of six hundred people and said it.

Then she had sat down and shaken for ten minutes.

When the board chair had tried to wave her to silence, she had kept going.

I thought about that, and I thought that I had never seen anyone my age do that for someone she barely knew.

"Are you in trouble?" I asked her.

"My mother called nine times." She pulled the sleeve of her cardigan over her hand.

"I turned my phone off. Then I turned it on and it was ten."

"What will she say?"

"That I embarrassed her. That the Salcedos can handle their own business." She shrugged.

"It's weird. She's never said that about anyone else's business. She just said it about yours."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Sacrificed Me to Avoid Favoritism from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.