4: 4
The foundation's public review panel was held Friday afternoon in the main auditorium, hundreds of people packed into the tiered lecture hall.
Even the associate dean and several foundation representatives sat in the front row.
Lucretia had deliberately changed into an old shirt washed pale, canvas sneakers worn through at the toes.
She'd left her hair dirty on purpose, so she looked utterly haggard.
As the first speaker, the representative for the hardship students, she took a deep breath, gripped the microphone, and the tears came right on cue.
"Teachers, fellow students. I come from a remote little mountain village. My parents are both farmers who work the land. Even the tuition to send me to high school was money they had to beg and borrow from everyone they knew."
"I've always believed knowledge can change your fate. But once I got to college, I found out that some people have wealth we could never touch in our whole lives, without even trying. And people like us have to read someone else's face just to breathe."
She paused on purpose, eyes red, her gaze swinging precisely toward me where I sat in the back row.
"I'm not afraid of being poor. I'm only afraid of my dignity being trampled by people with privilege!"
"My roommate, Marion Harding. One of her dresses costs eighty-eight thousand dollars! I only borrowed it for an event and got it a little dirty by accident, and she forced me to sign an IOU for an outrageous sum! She even used a police report to shake down someone like me who can't afford to eat!"
"I don't understand why the school lets a person like this, someone with a loose private life who gets chauffeured around every day in a luxury car, bully us bottom-rung students however she pleases!"
The whole hall erupted. Hundreds of furious eyes snapped along her line of sight and fixed on me.
Several boys in the front rows shot to their feet, righteous, slamming the tables and shouting.
"This is too much! This is blatant campus bullying!"
"We have to trace where her money comes from! Throw someone like her out of the dorms!"
"Protest! Expel her! Give ordinary students justice!"
Down in the crowd, Cicely led the chanting, her face lit with satisfaction.
Mr. Chavez jumped up in a panic and tried to restore order, but there was no holding back the crowd's anger.
The panel's moderator, Dean Lawrence, frowned and pointed at me sharply.
"Marion Harding! What exactly is going on here?"
Up on the stage Lucretia sobbed until she couldn't speak, propping herself weakly against the podium. "Dean Lawrence, you have to stand up for me! If I weren't pushed to the end of my rope, how would I ever dare to say something this shameful out loud in front of the whole school…"
I sat there watching this sob story and couldn't help laughing out loud.
I stood, smoothed my jacket, and walked toward the stage step by step through the crowd's curses.
Cicely rushed up and jabbed a finger in my face, screaming. "Marion Harding, haven't you humiliated yourself enough? The facts are right in front of us, what are you still trying to argue? You think money can seal everyone's mouth?"
"Move."
I shoved Cicely aside and strode up onto the stage, wrenched the microphone out of Lucretia's hand, and looked out over all those angry faces below.
"Lucretia, that little speech of yours about struggling from the bottom was really moving."
"But maybe you've forgotten one thing."
"You keep saying I'm an evil capitalist, that I use power to crush you, that I make my money off some dirty old man who has to hide in the shadows."
I pulled the data cable from the console, plugged in my own phone, and hit enter to cut off her slideshow.
"So do you even know who set up this Harding Sunshine Foundation, the charity money you'd all fight tooth and nail over?"
Lucretia's tears froze on her face. She stared at me blankly as the image on the big screen changed.
It was a document establishing a dedicated fund, stamped with a red official seal.
In the field for the legal donor: Graham Harding, Chairman of Harding Group.
"See it clearly now?"
"Graham Harding is my father. And the old man who picks me up in his car is also my father."
"So you curse my money for being dirty while wracking your brain to get your hands on money my family gave out?"
