I, Claudia

by Mary McCoy

  “Claudia,” Livia said, and her voice sounded like a warning. “What Cal’s asking is, did you find all of this out by yourself?”

  Ty gave Livia a dirty look, before turning to me. “Before we move on to anything else, you still haven’t answered my question. What kind of Senate president is Oberlin St. James?”

  “Sorry, Ty,” Livia said, demure in her pink cap-sleeve dress. “You lead the questioning.”

  The others nodded.

  “I will,” Ty huffed.

  It couldn’t have been easy being Ty, being the leader in name only, knowing that every time you made a statement, people would look to Livia to see if she agreed with it.

  It must have been frustrating.

  “What kind of president is he?” Ty asked petulantly.

  Before I could answer his question, Cal stood up and walked out of the room, like he had better things to do than wait around for me to stammer out another sentence. Livia’s eyes looked like they might shoot twin rays of butane flame, and Ty scowled and muttered something under his breath, but nobody else really looked all that surprised.

  “Oberlin St. James seems like a good president,” I said. “I don’t really know him.”

  Ty heaved a sigh. He spoke slowly, like he was explaining something to a child. “Does he seem to be in control? Do the other officers respect him?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Does he seem to know what’s going on?”

  I thought about the unaccounted-for $5000 and wondered if that was what they were talking about.

  “Jasmine Park handles most of the money,” I said.

  They all exchanged knowing glances.

  “And you don’t know who booked the Queen Mary with Imperial Day Academy funds?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Whose name was on the reservation?” Ty asked, a triumphant, told-you-so tone in his voice, like he’d just caught me in a lie.

  “Oberlin St. James,” I said, “but anyone could have said that.”

  “But why would they?” Livia asked.

  Livia leaned over and whispered something in Ty’s ear. He nodded, then turned to me and said, “We need a minute to discuss. Kian, could you take Claudia back to the waiting room? And check the hallway for Cal. He should be here for this.”

  Kian had gotten a bad buzz cut since the night I’d seen him hanging out with Cal at The Last Bookstore, but he was wearing the same outfit, the Kian Sarkosian uniform—white button-down shirt, dark jeans, black lace-up shoes. As he walked me back to the cinder block holding cell, I wondered which type of electoral mistake he’d been, something of the Jesse Nichols variety, or more of a Chris Gibbons.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Kian said, holding the door open for me.

  “You realize this whole thing is a shit show,” I said. I never would have talked that way to Ty or Cal or even Zelda Parsons, but Kian was just a freshman. I thought a little intimidation might play well with someone who’d stood idly by while Cal drunkenly mocked Hector and me.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said, gesturing for me to go into the holding cell, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about, Claudia.”

  I hadn’t rattled him in the slightest, and that was when I saw the first clue to whatever it was that Kian Sarkosian was doing on the Honor Council. For all his gawky weirdness, Kian had a steely, decidedly un-freshman-like confidence that made me wonder what it would feel like to know that someday you were going to grow out of all the things that were wrong with you.

  “Stick around and maybe you will,” I said. Kian didn’t reply. He just closed the holding cell door behind me as I sank down into the wooden chair, leaned my elbows on the desktop, and bowed my head. I had no idea whether my testimony had made things better or worse for me, much less anyone else. Mouthing off to a freshman at this point profited me nothing.

  I sat in the dank little room considering my next move. Livia had spun that beautiful line of bullshit about stopping things before it was too late when her intention all along was to use the scandal to get rid of as many people as possible. After a show of power like that, no one would take the Senate seriously and no one would dare cross the Honor Council again.

  Livia had said what she needed to say to keep me calm, to keep me from telling Hector.

  It was a good maneuver.

  A few minutes later, Kian came to the door, knocking first like it was a doctor’s office and he wanted to make sure I had my paper gown on.

  “Still here,” I said, and he opened the door and took me back.

  They were all there, even Cal, and there was an uneasiness in the room. Half of them looked like they’d gotten their way, and the other half were still stewing about it.

  “There’s something else we’d like to go over with you, Claudia,” Livia said, but then turned to Ty and nodded her head in a show of deference. “Why don’t you lead the discussion, Ty.”

  Ty cleared his throat. “This is all strictly confidential, Claudia. None of it leaves this room. But we need to know, in the event that Senate officers have to step down, would you be willing to lead in an acting capacity?”

  Whistleblowing seems like it would feel noble and righteous, but mostly it makes you feel awful. This is especially true when one of the governing bodies at your school decides to hand you the presidency like it’s a reward for your snitching.

  I remembered the moment when Livia had singled me out at the lunch table and said, “You should run for Senate.”

  I didn’t want anything else she had to give me. I didn’t want to owe Livia Drusus anything, ever.

  “No,” I said to Ty, probably much too quickly. “I’m not the right person for it.”

  Relief washed over Ty’s face.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, but the look Livia gave me told another story. I hadn’t done the thing she expected me to do, the thing she wanted me to do, the thing she’d probably made Ty ask me to do, the thing she would have done if she’d been in my shoes.

  And I could tell she’d never forgive me for it.

  XXIV

  The Way He Looked

  Hector wasn’t getting books out of his locker in the science hallway, or in the library, or any of the other places I usually ran into him during the day. It wasn’t until the last bell rang that I finally got a text from him.

  Meet me at the pond. I’ll get there as soon as I can.

  Imperial Day had three stories, four long hallways that formed a square and a boxed-in garden courtyard with a fountain and a wishing bridge and a little pond with turtles in it.

  That was where I waited for Hector, realizing I hadn’t seen him since Saturday night when he drove me home after our run-in with Cal.

  I took a seat on one of the benches and went through the motions of reading a Civil War history, but mostly I watched the turtles. Some of them swam, one made its way from one side of the wishing bridge to the other. Two babies had climbed out of the water and were adorably sunning themselves on a rock. They looked like they had a very nice life.

  People at Imperial Day would do the worst things to each other, but we all agreed: nobody fucked with the turtles.

  When Hector sat down next to me on the bench, I jumped, partly because he’d approached so quietly, partly because of the way he looked. His skin was wan, there were dark circles under his eyes, and a whiff of stale sweat mingled with his usual sandalwood smell.“You look awful,” I said.

  He gave me a sad smile, then asked, “But do I look presidential?”

  ***

  Dear Maisie,

  I know you told me you wanted an Imperial Day gossip blackout, but this is not gossip. This made the news.

  * * *

  Twenty Suspended, Four Expelled Following Embezzlement Investigation at Local School

  * * *

  Four students at the Imperial Day Academy, all of them members of the school’s student government, were expelled Tuesday in the wake of an investigation that reveale
d they spent thousands of dollars in school funds to throw a private party for themselves and their friends aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

  A spokesperson confirmed that school officials had become aware of the party after a receipt for a deposit was leaked anonymously to Imperial Day administrators as well as to officers in the school’s Honor Council.

  “They stole from the very people they’d been elected to represent,” said Imperial Day sophomore and former senator Chris Gibbons. “It’s despicable.”

  The twenty students who confessed they had been invited to the party were suspended for one week. All of them maintained that they did not know the party at the Queen Mary was funded with stolen money.

  Imperial Day is known for its Honor Code, a pledge signed by students upon admittance to the school promising that they will not lie, cheat, or steal while they are enrolled. Asked whether this incident undermines the Honor Code, Imperial Day Academy head Dr. Bob Graves said, “If anything, this affirms that the Honor Code works. Our student body is composed of young men and women of integrity who speak up when they hear about wrongdoing.”

  Ty Berman, President of the Honor Council, could not speak about the investigation, but said that new Senate leadership had been appointed. “We are confident that those responsible are no longer representing the student body,” he said.

  “Everything is crazy right now,” said junior Soren Bieckmann. “These were the people who were supposed to be going to Harvard, and now they might be going to jail.”

  School sources would not comment on whether the accused would face criminal charges.

  So that’s what’s going on here. Also, I am vice president of the Senate now.

  How’s Rome?

  Ciao, bella,

  XX,

  Claudia

  “You turned down the Senate presidency but accepted the vice presidency?”

  “Just so we’re clear, I turned down the job Livia offered me. The one Hector Estrella offered me, I took.”

  XXV

  The Thing Where We Have This Conversation and I End Up Thinking Less of You

  Of course I agreed to be Hector’s vice president. I couldn’t just leave him out there all by himself. It was not a great time to be a senator. At our first public hearing after the purge, people were spilling out of the room. Ty and Livia came to lend some air of legitimacy to the proceedings, but the students were out for our blood.

  “How do we know you weren’t involved in this?”

  That was from one of the asshole freshmen who’d run and lost his Senate race just a few weeks before, one of those rare cases that restore my faith in the democratic process.

  “I think that the entire Senate should be disbanded,” said Chris Gibbons, smug in his faux retro Hot Topic t-shirt. “The whole thing is illegitimate.”

  “You’re illegitimate,” someone jeered from the back of the room, and the tips of Chris Gibbons’s ears turned red.

  While the underclassmen seemed to want our heads on pikes alongside Oberlin St. James’s and Jasmine Park’s, the upperclassmen wanted our jobs.

  “No offense, but do you know what you’re doing? Are either of you even qualified to lead the Senate?” asked a girl with corkscrew curls and a narrow nose, whom I recognized as the worst backup singer from Little Shop of Horrors.

  Another girl standing next to her nodded in agreement. “Can’t we have a new election or something?”

  There was a buzz of approval in the room, and that was when I realized that half the students in the room weren’t there to complain. They were hoping we’d cave in and hand over our titles, or that we’d prove ourselves to be so incompetent that we’d be immediately forced to resign.

  I looked nervously at Hector, who absorbed it all stoically.

  Ty stood up and said, “The investigation is closed. If Hector and Claudia had anything to do with what happened, they wouldn’t be here now.”

  “And you haven’t even given them a chance,” Livia said.

  The room went silent for a moment, during which someone coughed the word “SNITCH” into the back of their hand.

  Livia’s eyes widened, and I saw her open her mouth to lay into the guilty party when Hector raised his hand and said, “You can have a school governed by an Honor Code or you can have a school where you call each other snitches, but you can’t have both. Nobody’s happy about why we’re here or why I’m your president, but that’s all in the past now. I plan to work hard and listen to what you have to say and do a good job. So, that said, does anyone else have something to ask, other than whether or not we deserve to be here?”

  After a long pause, a sophomore raised her hand and asked, “What about the money?”

  “Homecoming’s supposed to be next week!” another voice called out plaintively, as though he thought that perhaps we’d all forgotten.

  “I know,” said Hector. His voice was level, but his eyes were shining with excitement. “And I have a plan.”

  Oberlin St. James always got pompous when he was speechifying, but Hector sounded natural, like he was looking right at each person in the room and speaking only to them. He belonged up there.

  Off to the side, I saw Livia’s jaw tighten as she turned and whispered something to Ty. That probably meant she knew as much about Hector’s plan as I did, which is to say, nothing.

  Hector forged ahead. “No car wash, none of the other fundraisers. We don’t have enough time or people, and to be honest, I hate the idea of asking our teachers to wash our cars.”

  A murmur went up in the room. I couldn’t make out what anyone said specifically, but the general gist seemed to be, Look at the sophomore, having opinions.

  “Instead of Homecoming Week, we’ll have Honor Week. People will pledge to do one honorable thing a day and get their friends and family to sponsor them. You help an old lady cross the street, you collect a dollar from each of your sponsors. You read stories to the little kids at the library, collect another round from your sponsors. Take pictures of all of it. And at the end of the week—” Hector paused for a moment and took a deep breath. “We take the money we would have spent on the dance, and we donate it to the Union Rescue Mission.”

  At this, the murmur turned into a roar, and I saw Livia smirk behind her hand. A sophomore didn’t just waltz into the Senate presidency in the wake of a scandal and tell his constituents, Oh, and by the way, Homecoming is canceled. From the hostile faces in the room, I wondered if Hector’s presidency was going to be even shorter than Oberlin St. James’s.

  Hector’s cheeks reddened, but he stood his ground. His gaze traveled across the room, and one by one, he stared down every angry person until, at last, they fell silent, waiting to hear what he was going to say next. Livia looked surprised by this, then annoyed.

  “I know you’re angry, and I know it isn’t fair. You didn’t steal any money, so why shouldn’t you get to have a normal Homecoming? The answer is, we can’t just go on like nothing happened. We have to do something radical and public and loud to let them know that’s not what Imperial Day is.

  “I transferred here because I want to go to Harvard or Berkeley or Yale someday. Probably a lot of you do, too. And if we do nothing, the admissions people are going to look at our applications and say, ‘Wasn’t that the school where the students stole thousands of dollars?’ And it won’t matter that you didn’t have anything to do with it.

  “But if we do something different, people will think of something positive when they hear about Imperial Day. I am really sorry that there won’t be a Homecoming dance this year, I’m sorry you’re being asked to fix something that wasn’t your fault, but I think this is worth it.”

  Looking out at the students, I could see that Hector had won more than a few people in the room over to his plan. Still, I could also see people grumbling to one another. I heard one girl complain that she’d already bought her dress. Hector had tried appealing to the better angels of their nature, but for some students at Imperial Day, that was ne
ver going to be the best point of entry.

  Five minutes ago, I hadn’t known anything about Hector’s plan, but even with minimal preparation, I could see that it had its more venal charms as well. That was the angle I’d take.

  “This week, we’ll be contacting all the news channels,” I said. “We’ll have pieces on Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post and the LA Times. We have a call in to The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

  I didn’t know whether I was making things better or worse—I was talking too fast—but still, I had a feeling that I was onto something. I could see it dawn on all of their faces that this could be huge, and they could be a part of it.

  Before I could go on, Hector jumped in. “Obviously, I still need to talk it over with the other senators and get some feedback from the Honor Council, but more details are coming this week.”

  That was smart, I thought, mentioning the Honor Council like that. If there was one thing Livia loved, it was being asked for her opinion. It might even have been enough to make her forgive Hector for publicly sharing his plan without running it by her first.

  “I think it’s brilliant.”

  Livia’s voice cut through the chatter, and everyone turned to see her beaming at Hector. Once he knew what he was supposed to think, Ty beamed at Hector, too, and then I knew that it was only a matter of time before everyone else fell in line.

  He’d done the impossible. Hector Estrella had reestablished the legitimacy of the Imperial Day Senate with one speech. People gave him approving nods as they filed out of the room. A few smiled on their way past, and one came up to the front of the room to shake his hand: Chris Gibbons.

  Hector still had to pull it off, of course, but people wanted to believe in him. They wanted his plan to succeed.

  Ty and Livia waited until everyone else had left to approach Hector.

  “Let us know what you need to make this happen,” Ty said, shaking Hector’s hand, while looking to Livia for approval.