The Cost of Standing Out: The letter
809 Words
The scores were not announced that day. Participants would be notified by post within five business days of which six had advanced to Phase Three. Callie rode the bus home in the early December dark and sat at the kitchen table with a plate of food Nana June had left covered on the stove and ate slowly and told the family how it went.
"You talked back to the judge?" Earl said.
"I corrected a misleading statement," Callie said.
Earl was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Your mother would have done the same thing."
Nana June pointed her fork at no one in particular. "The woman had an agenda. I don't need to have been there to know it. Some people decide the outcome before the room is even warm."
"We don't know that yet," Callie said.
"I know it now," Nana June said. "Pass the cornbread."
The letter came on December nineteenth.
Callie was at the Whitfield house when it arrived. Arabella signed for it and set it on the kitchen table and sat down across from it and stared at it until Elise came home from school at three fifteen and asked why Arabella was having a staring contest with an envelope.
"It's Callie's competition letter," Arabella said.
Elise sat down beside her. They both stared at it.
Callie got home at four forty. She saw them both sitting at the table before she had even taken off her coat and she knew.
She sat down. She looked at the envelope. It had the Holt Farms logo in the top left corner and her name written in clean type and it was thin in the way that letters with short things to say were thin.
She opened it.
She read it once. Then she set it flat on the table.
"Cal," Arabella said.
"I didn't advance," Callie said. Her voice was even. "I scored below the Phase Two cutoff. I'm out of the competition."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Elise made a sound that she immediately pressed her hand over. Arabella looked at the letter and then looked at Callie and her jaw was tight.
"That is not right," Arabella said. "Callie, that is not right and you know it."
"I know it," Callie said. "But it doesn't change what the letter says."
She folded the letter and put it back in the envelope and set it on the counter. Then she washed her hands at the sink and started helping with dinner.
She did not cry until later. After midnight, sitting on the porch steps in the December cold with her mother's first sketchbook open on her knee and the winter sky pressed dark and still above Clover Ridge. She let herself have it for a while. The whole weight of it. The forty three days of construction. The cold bus rides. The seized machine and the thirty five dollars and the cracked tension assembly and Gerald Whitfield's laugh carrying through the patio door. The two words on the index cards she had practiced until the edges went soft. The way Judge Hartley had leaned forward to look at the leather stitching. All of it.
She let it come and she let it move through her and when it was done she wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at her mother's sketches in the cold light coming through the kitchen window.
Keep going.
She closed the sketchbook.
What Callie did not know on that December night, sitting on the porch steps in the cold, was that three days earlier Piper had walked into the Holt Farms office on behalf of Victoria and slipped a sealed envelope to the administrative assistant with instructions that it was a personal letter for Patricia Osei from Margaret Whitfield. Nobody thought much of it because Gerald Whitfield was a longtime friend of Mr. Holt's and the staff were accustomed to personal correspondence moving informally through the office.
What nobody saw except the administrative assistant, who mentioned it in passing to her husband that evening over dinner and thought nothing more of it, was that Patricia Osei's score sheet for participant number seven had been amended after the initial submission. The amendment was small. Four points moved from one category to another. Four points that pushed Callie's total below the advancement cutoff by exactly two.
Victoria received her advancement letter the same day Callie received her elimination. She called Piper immediately.
"It worked," Victoria said.
"Obviously," Piper said. "Your mother's idea about Patricia was perfect."
"She's good at people," Victoria said. There was a pause. "Did you see Callie's face during the presentation? When she was talking about the leather work?"
"Don't," Piper said.
"I'm just saying. She's good." Another pause. "She was always going to be a problem."
"Well," Piper said. "She's not anymore."
- Writer
