It’s the beginning of what belongs to you.”

Part Thirty-Eight: Nine Seconds

Here is what the source of every version of this story gets wrong, including mine for about a year.

The room did not go quiet.

Four hundred people in a hot gymnasium at the end of a forty-minute alphabet do not go quiet for anything.

The rows behind the front four had no idea anything was happening.

There was a baby crying near the door the entire time.