Page 9 of Small Sacrifices

He settles for re-reading his conclusion before Marisol knocks on the partition between their desks to attract his attention. "C'mon. We don't wanna be late."

They don't indeed. When they leave, there are still a fair few people puttering about at their desks. But there are also many people already in the meeting room. Mr. Wright has secured one of the few chairs with a desk in front of it, and is shuffling sheets of familiar color-coded notes. Reid smiles to himself. Not only has Mr. Wright read the report, but he also brought it along. That's good, right?

They find seats somewhere around the middle of the room, not too far back to not be noticed when they raise their hands, but also not terribly exposed. As they wait and the surrounding seats fill, Reid distracts himself from his boredom and nerves by spinning the ring on his pointer finger. His hand is laying in his lap, but when he tilts it just right, the light catches the hammered surface of the silver and projects little spots of light across the room. Next to him, Marisol chuckles when she sees what he's doing.

And then, suddenly, the low din of voices that had been humming around them drops off. Reid frowns, but it takes Marisol poking her finger into his knee to raise his head and—yeah. That explains it. He would also stop talking when the governor unexpectedly entered a meeting room.

Was this planned? Had it been on the agenda that Governor Mackenzie would attend this meeting and Reid had just missed it? It's possible. But there are quite a few pale faces around. And Marisol, while she looks calm as always, has an eyebrow raised. It seems Reid isn't the only one who didn't expect this.

The governor waves away an offered seat and goes to lean against the wall at the front of the room. He appears relaxed, but his eyes are sharp as they follow the movement of his personal assistant, who sets up a laptop for a presentation.

Reid thinks he looks like a lawyer on his lunch break—no tie, his top button undone, blond hair just slightly disheveled, blue eyes brought out by the color of his suit. A suit that probably costs more than a month's worth of Reid's rent. He's exuding that aura of natural authority that Reid always knew he had when he saw him on television.

A titter goes around the room.

"Right!" The governor claps his hands and then rubs them together. "Now, I think we all know why we're here."

There's a wide grin on his face while he steps forward and looks around the room, garnering acknowledging nods and making eye contact with select people—though not with Reid, thank God. There's a certain showmanship about it, beyond the level that any politician needs to bring to a job. Reid has heard people call it annoying, but he himself kind of likes it. Governor Mackenzie is always very aware that he has an audience, and he engages with it actively. It's nice.

To Reid, it seems genuine, even if it's kind of scary in person. It's why he worked so hard to get this job. He doesn't just want to work for the governor—he wants to work forthisgovernor, who seems so concerned that people actually engage with politics. He knows that he, personally, won't be able to move people this way, so he wants to help someone who can. If only his parents understood.

"Part of that is my fault," Mackenzie continues with a good-natured grimace. "But sadly, even I don't completely know how we got here. So I asked Trevon to catch us all up with a brief presentation. I want us to all start from the same point."

There's a bit of shuffling when Mr. Wright first steps up to the front of the room to set up his laptop—good planning, really, to only do it now when he apparently knew beforehand that this would happen, what an efficient use of all of their time—and then, when another staffer tries to give up their chair for the governor and then freezes in indecisiveness when the man refuses and instead just leans back against the wall.

It's a weird place to choose to watch a presentation. He's only going to be seeing the back of Mr. Wright's head and none of the slides. But he seems to be content to let his eyes rove across the room while Mr. Wright struggles to plug the HDMI cable into one of his laptop's USB ports.

Finally, there's a picture of the school projected onto the white wall behind him. Reid looks over to see one of Mackenzie's assistants step away from the desk where Mr. Wright is now so thoroughly clearing his throat that, just for a moment, Reid wonders if there might actually be something physically stuck in it.

"Alright, team," Mr. Wright says. It sounds like he's imitating someone else, all sticky honey and good nature. That's an inflection that Reid's never heard from him, not even during the interview process. "I figured we would be best served by using theNew York Timesarticle as an entry point and then going into the actual timeline. That way, we form our strategy based on what the public knows, what they think about it, and how they found out about it—which is probably the biggest issue here."

Hm. Weird.That's remarkably close to how Reid started his brief. But okay. If they had the same approach, then that has to mean that Mr. Wright will appreciate what Reid has done.

Mr. Wright presses a key on his keyboard. The presentation now shows an image of a physical copy of theTimes, the headline"Children poisoned by contaminated schoolyard—endorsement a legacy issue for Governor Mackenzie as he plans to run for re-election?"looming ominously above the fold. It's quickly followed by many others—Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube thumbnails, all with varying focus on either the contamination and resulting health issues or the governor's possible connections to the entire issue.

Reid knows all of them. He did, after all, spend about eight hours trawling the internet for information about this yesterday. There isn't really that much he could have missed, except for the posts that were clearly screenshotted this morning. A not insignificant number of Republicans is delighting in how bad this makes the governor look.

Reid tunes out most of Mr. Wright's summary of the news coverage. He's read all of it before. The words sound almost like his own in the privacy of his own head.

But he starts paying attention again when Mr. Wright announces: "And now for the timeline of events, as far as I could retrace them."

The key points on the next slide of his PowerPoint presentation are word by word the same as what Reid wrote in that section of his handout.

His hand twitches, but thankfully he catches himself before he crumples up the notebook page it lies on top of. The timeline of events as far asMr. Wrightcould retrace them? Reid blinks, just in case his lack of sleep is making him hallucinate. But the words don't change. And the words that Mr. Wright says out loud are pretty much the same. So much so that if he'd done that in university, Reid would have been marked down for not preparing his presentation correctly and just reading out his bullet points.

He releases a slow, controlled breath and tries to calm down, ducking his head and closing his eyes to escape the bright lights for a bit, in hopes that'll help. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding. Maybe Reid is misremembering. Or maybe Mr. Wright was only told that he would need an actual visual presentation an hour ago, and this was the only thing he could think to do?

Reid tries to tell himself that Mr. Wright was just strapped for time and breathes through it. It's not the best feeling, but it works. After all, it's just talking points. However you summarize them, the events that happened just happened that way. And Reid, apparently, summarized them well. If he were a more relaxed person, he might even take it as a compliment.

Everything is fine until Mr. Wright says, "And if I may, I have compiled a proposal for an action plan on how I think we should approach this," and the next slide in his presentation also has points from Reid's handout copied onto it.

There are the tweets and Instagram posts of Stephanie Greene, who is the mother of the child affected, and also a teacher at the school. For days and weeks, she's been trying to raise awareness—and not just with her school district, but also with Agrifarm and Governor Mackenzie. Reid is reasonably certain that she’s the first to draw the connection between the two publicly.

Every single post of hers that Reid found and compiled for this was screaming with anger and fear. But the reason he chose her: For the longest time, she wasn't blaming the governor."@CALgov: Children are getting sick on the grounds of the elementary school you sponsored in @BeechValleyTownOfficial. We need help!"was the first thing she sent their way.

There are pictures of her little boy, Robbie, displeased with having his photo taken and even more unhappy with what looksto be a painful rash spreading not only over his face and from his hands up his arms but also down his shins. She documents nights spent holding a bowl for him to throw up into and days where he's so weak that even watching TV makes him cranky. And she speaks of upset tummies and itchy skin on children she teaches, even in those who aren't severely ill. But she always just asks for help, she never accuses.

At least not in the posts that Mr. Wright now shows while he talks about what a great candidate she would be for an in-person meeting with an interview and photo op. People love teachers, apparently, and they’re going to love her. When they see she doesn't bear a grudge, they’ll be reassured that they don't need to, either. Or so Mr. Wright says. "She won beauty pageants when she was still in school. She knows how to act in front of a camera."

---