Read Paw Enforcement 02 - Paw and Order for Free Online Page B

front of a crowd of hundreds at a local high school, a spotlight shining down on her, warming her face and illuminating her as if she were some type of angel, as if she were somebody, as if she were special.
    It was the last time I’d felt like somebody, the last time I’d felt special.
    The pink polka-dot dress she had worn was a hand-me-down, having already served her two older sisters, who sat in the third row with her parents. The frock had faded some, but at least her mother had ironed it and tied a pink bow in her mousy brown hair. She’d have preferred a new dress, but she wasn’t going to let her secondhand outfit spoil her moment in the spotlight.
    She’d stared down at the judge’s table, her heart pounding so loudly she feared she wouldn’t hear the judge when he assigned her final word.
    The judge leaned forward to speak into the microphone on the table before him and looked up at her. “Your word is privileged. ”
    Privileged. A word that didn’t apply to her at all, yet a word with which she was far too familiar.
    Privileged. Those families who hired her mother to clean their enormous, custom-designed homes.
    Privileged. Those church ladies who brought her and her sisters donated Christmas gifts, who came after bedtime when the girls were supposed to be asleep rather than staring out the window, dreaming of a better, easier life. On Christmas morning, when she and her sisters opened their presents, Robin Hood had to bite her tongue not to tell her parents she knew the gifts weren’t from Santa Claus, that she’d seen the church ladies drive up to her family’s rusty singlewide trailer in their sleek, silver Mercedes with a trunk full of wrapped boxes.
    Privileged. Those junior high school girls she spotted from the school bus window, the ones who had their hair professionally highlighted, who wore Juicy Couture and carried their M.A.C lip pencils in their Kate Spade purses.
    When she had hesitated, the judge again leaned toward his microphone. “Would you like me to use the word in a sentence?”
    As if I were so poor I wouldn’t even know the word.
    â€œNot,” she hissed into her own mic, “necessary.” She knew this word. She’d practiced it, multiple times. She took a deep breath and began. “P-R-I.”
    Uh-oh. Not only was her dress a hand-me-down, but so were her panties. She’d begged her mother for new underwear— my God, it was the least my parents could give me! —but her mother had refused.
    â€œThere’s plenty of life left in these panties,” her mom had insisted when she’d pulled them from the dryer. “And I washed them twice so stop your complaining. Don’t you know there are kids in India who don’t even have underwear?”
    On stage, in the bright glow of the spotlight, she felt the waistband loosen as the worn elastic began to give way. “V-I-L.”
    The panties began to slip down over her backside. She reached down and tried to grab the waistband through the fabric of her dress.
    But I was too late.
    The panties slid out from under her dress, over her knobby knees, and down her skinny legs, pooling around the scuffed patent-leather Mary Janes her mother had bought at the thrift store.
    She continued to spell over the crowd’s deafening laughter, the heat on her cheeks now coming not from the spotlight above but from the shame and rage within her.
    â€œE-D-G-E-D.”
    When she finished, she looked down at the judge’s table. One of the judges looked down at his lap, his shoulders shaking with barely contained guffaws. The other male judge, the one who’d assigned her word, had a hand crooked over his mouth to hide his smile. The female judge had bit her lip in an effort to keep her giggles from escaping, but the pity in her eyes was far worse than her amusement.
    I didn’t want pity.
    I wanted my fair share.
    When the crowd settled down and the