by Mary McCoy
“What are you two doing downtown?” Hector asked coolly. “Not exactly your neighborhood.”
“Maddie Urrea’s quinceañera after-party is somewhere around here. Are you guys going?” Before Hector could answer, though, Cal kept talking. “I mean, if you weren’t invited, I don’t think anyone’s going to kick you out.”
“Quinceañera after-party?” Now Hector had a sneer on his lips to match mine, but Cal was oblivious—or didn’t care. He brushed his sun-streaked surfer hair off of his forehead and flipped through the pages of Helter Skelter.
“Yeah, you know how Maddie is. I think she’s looking for fifteen people to make out with, and the later it gets, the less discriminating she might be.”
I didn’t know how Maddie was. I didn’t even know her well enough to get invited to her party, but what I knew did not align with Cal’s hopes and dreams for the night.
“At least you’ve got that going for you,” Hector muttered.
“I hate it when there are no good pictures in these things,” he said, slipping the book into the breast pocket of his coat. Kian’s eyes got big and darted back and forth, looking for any sales clerks who might have seen. I wondered if Kian was beginning to have second thoughts about his Saturday night plans, and found myself hoping that Cal wouldn’t do anything to get him arrested. He was a freshman. Maybe he didn’t know any better yet.
“And now, it is my intention to get drunk as a lord,” Cal said, “and high as a viscount.”
“That expression seems about as plausible as a quinceañera after-party.” Hector’s voice dripped with contempt as he stared at the pocket where Cal had hidden the Manson family book.
The look on Cal’s face reminded me of that night at the Venice Pier when Julia insinuated he couldn’t actually use the skateboard he was carrying around. Back off, Hector, I thought. Retreat. That was the look Cal got on his face right before he made you sorry you’d pushed him at all.
“I mean, if your dad can hook me up with a few of his horny interns, I could be persuaded to change my plans,” Cal said.
Hector’s face went still and blank. He had no snappy comeback, not even the barest of responses for whatever it was that Cal had just shoveled his way.
Cal, of course, took advantage of the dead air to strike a cheesy bodybuilder’s pose. At least that’s what I thought it was at first. He flexed a bicep in front of his abs, bit his lower lip, and gritted his teeth, his face grotesque and straining with effort. Then he pulled out his phone and pretended to take a selfie.
That was when it clicked. The disgraced state senator. The sad, shirtless bathroom selfies that had been plastered on every clickbait news-aggregating website and every political talk show for a week last year. Apparently there had been other photos too obscene to show on television.
“I see the two of you don’t have the same taste in women,” Cal said, gesturing toward me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hector asked, still rattled.
“I mean, if Claudia is, like, your gateway drug to making out with dudes, I get it.”
He doubled over giggling at this, loudly and for much too long. I wanted to run away. I wanted to find the two most obscure shelves in the store and hide between them for the rest of the night. But all I could do was stand there, my cheeks flushed, my eyes locked on the floor so I didn’t have to look at Hector. My throat tightened as I willed myself not to cry.
Hector didn’t move either, but he did take my hand. When Cal finally pulled himself upright and wiped the tears from his eyes and patted the book in his breast pocket, Hector gave my fingers a squeeze and let go.
Kian fiddled with the buttons on the sleeve of his white button-down shirt, his eyes trained on the floor, like as long as he did that, he wasn’t there and it wasn’t happening.
“Anyhow, toodles,” Cal said, waving over his shoulder as he breezed past the register and toward the door. Kian tried to meet our eyes, mumbled an apology, then shuffled after Cal.
“You know, I don’t believe he’s going to pay for that book,” Hector said.
My chest felt hollow, my throat raw from holding back tears, but it was over. My insides uncurled. I lifted my head, and I made myself look at Hector like everything was okay and whatever had just happened, I was over it.
“You know, I believe you’re right,” I said as I watched Cal leave the store, jumping up to slap the top of the doorframe on his way out. He missed.
“Do you want a ride home?” Hector asked, his voice softer now.
“Yeah.”
We were quiet as Hector pulled out of the parking garage and drove through the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Since he was doing me the courtesy of acting like the conversation with Cal had never happened, I thought I’d do the same.
Still, it hung in the air between us, the difference between talking about it and not talking about it, and the kind of friends Hector Estrella and I were going to be depended on what happened in the next ten minutes.
I didn’t want to be the one to ask, and Hector didn’t want to talk about it, but at the same time, we came out with it.
“What Cal said back there . . . ,” he started, but I was already talking.
“You can talk to me,” I said. “I mean, I never talk to anyone, so if you ever want to talk about it, you can talk to me.”
I saw Hector’s face relax and his shoulders go slack. Under the downtown streetlights, his skin glowed, soft and warm and peaceful.
“It’s true,” Hector said. “What Cal said. That’s my dad. He sent a bunch of dick pics to some of the interns in his office and they got leaked and he got caught, and it was gross and embarrassing, and that’s why I’m at Imperial Day.”
He let out a mortified sigh after he’d finished talking, and gripped the steering wheel.
“I thought you were there because you were some kind of multibillionaire legacy genius,” I said, and Hector burst out laughing.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“You kind of are, though,” I said. “You must be. They hardly ever take transfers.”
Hector’s cheeks reddened. “I was at Harvard-Westlake last year when it happened, and things got mean in a hurry. I’d hear people whispering the things he texted to these girls when I walked past. It was embarrassing, but the part I couldn’t deal with was that to so many people—not just students, but teachers, too—it was like I was disgusting by association. It changed the way they looked at me. My mom ended up meeting with Dr. Graves and getting him to agree to take me in. I go by her last name now, not my dad’s.”
I thought about what Maisie had said to me in the InVigor parking garage that summer.
“You don’t have control over what other people do. The only thing you can control is the way you act. Whatever kind of person you are or aren’t, it doesn’t have anything to do with him, Hector.”
“I know.”
“And you are definitely not disgusting by association.”
Hector released his death grip on the steering wheel.
“That means a lot, Claudia,” he said. “Now, what about you? Is there anything you want to talk about?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I could tell you were upset back there, that Cal hurt your feelings. Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t need to talk about it,” I said.
Cal was a jerk and a bad person, and I didn’t care what he thought of me. On the other hand, when he turned all that contempt in my direction and focused it, all I could think was, Am I really that hideous and pathetic?
“You sure?”
I gave Hector a smile that I hoped had at least a little verisimilitude in it. “I’m over it. I’m good.”
A few minutes later we were sitting in my driveway. Hector gave me a hug. We said good night. I went inside and went straight to bed without watching my Duomo documentary.
“Do you think talking to Hector would have helped?”
“How so?”
“After Hector opened up to you about his father, he said that your words meant a lot to him. I’m just wondering if you might have felt the same way.”
“My situation was totally different. Those things that Cal said about me . . . talking about them with Hector would only have given them time and attention and psychic real estate they did not deserve.”
“You’re telling me about them now. Is it possible that they’ve been in there taking up psychic real estate all this time?”
“They’re part of the historical record now. Part of the story. Just neutral information.”
“Since when do you believe history is neutral information, Claudia?”
XXIII
A Criminal, a Collaborator,
or a Rat
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Official Summons
You are summoned to appear before the Honor Council on Monday, October 1, at 7:30 a.m. At this time, you will be called upon to give witness testimony in an ongoing investigation.
If you are unable to appear, you must provide written documentation at least 24 hours in advance. Failure to do so may result in disciplinary action. Please note that extracurricular activities are not excused absences.
***
The email had been sent exactly thirty hours before I was scheduled to appear, so technically, I’d had six hours to feign some wasting illness and produce a doctor’s note. As it was, I hadn’t even seen the message until the night before. I didn’t even know the Honor Council had hearings before school started. The first thing I did was text Hector, but after a fitful night of sleep, a miserable shower, and an anxious commute, I still hadn’t heard from him.
“What’s the matter with you this morning?” my father asked as I twitched in the passenger seat.
I could have told him nothing was wrong, but I’ve never seen the point in spinning elaborate lies to tell my parents when a truthful answer would end the conversation more quickly.
“I have to testify before the Honor Council this morning,” I said.
“What’d you do?”
“I found out that some people embezzled $5000 and were going to use it to throw themselves a party.”
“Did you do anything wrong?”
“No.”
As the Chief Operating Officer at InVigor, my father organized his day into various piles of tasks and interactions that varied in priority. I saw him consider his reply, as well as the pile upon which this particular story belonged. If I had to guess, I would have said, “Noncritical, but Requires Follow-Up.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about,” he said. “Don’t let them intimidate you.”
Though I remained largely mysterious to him, he had endured a science-nerd adolescence and had some sympathy for my position.
“Okay.”
“Walk into that room with your head up and tell yourself, ‘They can’t touch me.’ ”
If only it were that simple, I thought as I got out of the car and walked through the doors of Imperial Day to find out what the Honor Council was going to do to me.
I wouldn’t have put a blindsiding past Livia, but still, it seemed low to do something like this to me without warning when I’d had the decency to rat to her in the first place.
Whether Livia was behind it or not, the suddenness of the hearing had to be on purpose. I wouldn’t have time to think. I wouldn’t have time to weasel out of it, and most importantly, I wouldn’t have much time to get a story straight with Hector. Lying to the Honor Council was an automatic suspension, but lying to Hector felt almost as careless. I could explain that I’d left out his part in the story to protect him, but I doubted Hector would see it that way.
I took the elevator to the top floor, then rounded a corner and made my way to the end of the hall and the classroom where the Honor Council held their meetings. The Senate met on the first floor in the main hallway where anyone could—and did—wander in. If you didn’t have business in the Honor Council hallway, though, you didn’t go there. People didn’t even like to be seen heading in the direction of Room 305 because it meant that you were a person under suspicion: a criminal, a collaborator, or a rat.
I still hadn’t heard from Hector, and I half-wondered if he was sitting before the Honor Council right then. I put my ear to the door and heard a murmur of voices too low to make out. Then I knocked on the door and the voices hushed, and after a moment, Zelda Parsons appeared.
“We’ll be ready for you in a moment,” she said, gesturing toward a small room just inside Room 305. “You can wait here.”
It might have been a storage closet at one point, but now it was the Honor Council’s holding cell for the people it wished to question, and it was not designed to make one feel at home. A single light bulb in a cage shone weakly over the cinder block walls, and the room was empty except for a wooden desk and chair shoved in one corner.
“Have a seat,” Zelda said, smoothing the prim Peter Pan collar on her dress. Over the summer, she’d started to dress like Livia, wearing the same kitten heels and gold hoop earrings. She’d held on to her horn-rimmed glasses, though. “Someone will come get you when we’re ready.”
Not who would come to get me. Not when. She shut the door behind her. I didn’t feel like sitting so I paced. I understood the purpose of this room. It kept witnesses confidential. It protected the accused and the accusers from one another, but I understood its implicit purpose as well. When you were in this room, you were on trial, no matter who you were or why you were there. Off-kilter and on edge was exactly how they wanted you.
It was only because I was standing and pacing from one side of the sparse room to the other that I saw the scrap of paper stuck underneath one of the desk legs. If I’d been sitting, like Zelda had told me to, I’d have missed it. It stuck out just the tiniest bit, blending in with the white tile floor, but it had been folded into quarters, and someone had definitely put it there on purpose. I knelt down quickly and pulled it free, looking over my shoulder in case Zelda suddenly came back.
I sat down in the chair and unfolded the paper, the blocky letters so precise and regular that they could have been printed by anyone:
THEY’RE GOING TO ASK YOU TO BE PRESIDENT.
I was glad I was sitting.
So much for all of Livia’s talk about it not being too late, about nothing having been done that couldn’t be undone.
In 1440, the Earl of Douglas and his brother were invited to dine with the King of Scotland, with whom they’d been having a power struggle. The food was good, the conversation was lively, everyone was having a blast, and it looked like they were about to patch things up. Then, all of a sudden, someone dropped a severed bull’s head on the table in front of the Earl of Douglas, which, in case you didn’t know, is a pretty clear indicator that your dinner party is about to go tits up, and he and his brother were dragged out of the castle and beheaded.
This was how Livia had decided to play it: it was going to be an ambush against every upperclassman on the Senate.
I heard the sound of chair legs sliding across linoleum, then footsteps. I folded the note back up and slipped it into my shoe. Then the door opened and Zelda Parsons was there.
“We’re ready for you, Claudia,” she said.
She walked me out of the holding cell and around the corner into a room where the seven other members of the Honor Council were seated in a semi-circle, all of them facing one lonely chair in the middle—mine. Ty and Livia sat in the center. To their left were Cal and the two freshman representatives, Kian Sarkosian, the spineless bystander who’d been with Cal at the bookstore, and a girl I didn’t know. To their right sat Lola Stephenson, the senior who’d taken Maisie’s place, and Esme Kovacs. Zelda took her place next to Esme, and then everyone turned their attention to me.
“Claudia, what can you tell us about Oberlin St. James?” Ty asked. For once, I almost appreciated his lack of social graces. The sooner we got down to business,
the sooner I would know where I stood.
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t know what they wanted out of me. My knowledge was long on the whats and the hows, but short on the whos. What did Ty want to know about Oberlin St. James? That he was a pompous tool? Or that out of all the upperclassman senators, he was the one I suspected least?
“Livia told us that you came to her and what you told her. Since then, we’ve independently verified those details,” Ty said. “The reason you’re here is because it’s serious. A lot of people may be involved. If you know anything else about this, now’s the time to tell us. Holding back information will not only be detrimental to this case; it will also be detrimental to you.”
Ty had an extra-stiff and -formal way of talking when he was in Honor Council mode. I think he was trying to sound like Augustus, but mostly, he just sounded like he didn’t quite understand the words he was throwing around.
“Does anyone else know about this?” Cal asked, his piggy eyes dancing at the sight of me in the interrogation chair. I thought about the vile things he’d said to me at the bookstore, and I realized that out of all of them, Cal was the one I was most afraid of lying to. He’d seen Hector and me together. Maybe he already suspected.
THEY’RE GOING TO ASK YOU TO BE PRESIDENT.
Livia had written the note, I was sure. She was the only one on the Honor Council who’d have any reason to tip me off at all.
But Ty said they’d verified the details of my story. Maybe they’d turned up more. Maybe they already knew about Hector and this was one final test of my honesty before offering me the presidency.
“I don’t kn-kn-kn-kn-kn—” It was the worst, when a word completely eluded me like that, when I could feel it in my mouth, hear myself saying it, but just couldn’t coax it out. I blamed Cal. In cases like these, I’d found the best course of action was usually to abort the sentence and start over. “The reservation was for forty people. I guess someone knows.”
