I, Claudia

by Mary McCoy

  “Yes, you have our full support,” Livia said.

  As long as we make you look good, I thought. Even though she’d spoken up in favor of Hector’s plan, I had no doubt it was more political maneuvering on her part. Livia liked being on winning sides, and suddenly, nobody-sophomore that he was, Hector Estrella looked like a winner.

  Hector seemed dazed, but he mumbled his thanks and said that he’d be in touch, and eventually they left and we were alone. That was when I looked down at the desktop where Hector’s hands rested, and I saw that they were shaking.

  “You did a great job,” I said. I put my hand on top of his on the desk and gave it a squeeze. This was a thing we were doing now, I thought. We were hand-squeezing buddies. “How did you think up Honor Week?”

  “I couldn’t fall asleep last night,” Hector started. “I was lying in bed, wishing that everything with the Senate and the money and the Queen Mary had never happened, and I was trying to think of a way to make up for it.”

  Suddenly, I was flooded with relief that I’d turned down the presidency when Livia had offered it to me. Why did they even ask me first? I never would have thought of something like Honor Week.

  “I’m going to assume you don’t actually have a call in to The Ellen DeGeneres Show?”

  “No, but I will. I had to think on my feet,” I said. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought of Honor Week, but I certainly knew how to sell it.

  I’d also lied in front of two Honor Council officers and thirty other people, so my vice presidency was off to an excellent start.

  “So, now you know what it feels like,” Hector said with a smirk. “When I do something important without telling you about it first.”

  Ah, there was Crabby Hector. I’d been missing him.

  “You’re still mad at me for going to the Honor Council?”

  I knew what he was going to say before he said it because I was thinking the same thing.

  “No,” he said. “But you can’t do something like that again. Neither one of us can. You saw what people were like today. They’ll turn on us in a second.”

  “I’m sorry the meeting was so awful,” I said. “You were brilliant, though. It was very Obama circa 2008. Or maybe JFK.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I was expecting it, so it wasn’t so bad.”

  “If we were juniors, nobody would have said anything about it.”

  Hector shook his head. “If I was less brown, nobody would have said anything about it.”

  “Really?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. If you’d asked anyone at Imperial Day their attitudes on race, they probably would have told you that it was the 21st century, we were all equal, and they didn’t even see color.

  Hector looked surprised that I’d question it, but then also not really surprised at all.

  “Like, how can you tell it’s that?” I asked.

  “Could we not do this?” Hector asked. He looked uncomfortable. He looked like he wanted to flee the room.

  “Do what?”

  “The thing where we have this conversation and I end up thinking less of you.”

  “I don’t see why it’s a big deal. You could just explain,” I said.

  Hector sighed, then headed for the door. As he opened it, he turned and looked back over his shoulder at me.

  “Or you could just believe me, Claudia,” he said.

  By the time I made it to the door, he had already whipped around the corner and out of sight.

  “Hector!” I called out after him. I heard the squeaking of his shoes on the tile floor slow, then stop, but he didn’t reply.

  Of course I believed him.

  Hector was exactly what his campaign posters had promised: vision and integrity. I was a meddling, foul-mouthed, duplicitous white girl, and which one of us had the Honor Council tapped for the job first?

  Hector’s footsteps started up again, growing fainter until the sound faded away altogether, and I stood there wondering why I couldn’t bring myself to lift my voice and call “I believe you” down the hallway.

  Was it that hard to admit I was wrong?

  Was I that much of an asshole?

  Apparently, yes.

  XXVI

  Honor Week

  Honor is a maddeningly subjective word, and most of the other words that can be used to define it are similarly vague: uprightness; virtue; nobility; righteousness. Things I suspected that I was not, at least not in the way Hector was.

  I think he did the smart thing by keeping things loose and letting people decide for themselves what constituted an act worthy of Honor Week. A few people grumbled about the dance, but word got around about what Hector had said during the Senate meeting and people also grumbled that he was right. Some people fell in line because Ty and Livia and all of their friends seemed to be so excited about it. And others got into it because there was just something about Hector.

  He inspired them. He gave them a way to feel like they were the ones who’d stopped corruption, enacted justice, and ushered in a bright and promising future. And the political genius of Hector was that he let them feel that way. He wasn’t interested in looking good or taking the credit for himself.

  Behind every idealist, though, is a realist. Behind every lofty intention is the person who’s tethering them to the ground. Behind the person cheering, “This is right!” is the person asking, “But will it sell?”

  Hector could handle the ideas all by himself, but he needed me to manage the public relations component of his plan to resurrect Imperial Day from its shameful scandal. Honor Week was something Hector wanted to do for its own sake. If the ways in which it could be marketed to our advantage had occurred to him, he would have felt too guilty to properly exploit them.

  Which is not to say he wouldn’t let me do it for him.

  ***

  To KTLA Channel 5 News, I sent word of the following:

  Maddie Urrea’s book drive for the local juvenile detention facility

  Kian Sarkosian’s trash clean-up effort at the Venice boardwalk

  Zelda Parsons’s care packages of toiletries and snacks for homeless people on Skid Row

  I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about how:

  Ravi Sejani prepared and delivered meals to all of his elderly neighbors

  Lola Stephenson played improv theater games with the patients at Children’s Hospital

  Ty and Livia held a canned goods drive for the local food bank

  Trixie Pappadou came out. She said it was the most honest thing she could think of to do during Honor Week.

  Other stories I shared more selectively or decided not to share at all.

  I was effusive in my praise of freshman senators Lucy Lin and Veronica Ollenbeck, who managed to capture fifteen feral cats, transport them to the local veterinary clinic, and have them spayed or neutered. I just left out the part where they both contracted some sort of bacterial infection and spent the rest of Honor Week out of school recovering from it.

  I left out of my reports that Chris Gibbons made cupcakes for every teacher with a little flag stuck in them that said, “You make Imperial Day great,” which was a nice gesture, only everyone was afraid to eat them.

  Known asshole Astrid Murray bought a round for everyone at a local coffee shop, which at first Ty tried to argue wasn’t strictly “honorable,” even if it was generous, but Astrid stood her ground and argued that she’d supported a local business and made a lot of uncaffeinated people very happy, which was certainly a public service.

  Octavia Resnick and Cal teamed up to give free guitar lessons to kids in an after-school program. Had it been anyone else, I would have included it in my press releases, but I didn’t want Cal getting anywhere near a reporter. Not when Hector’s reputation was on the line. And mine, too, I suppose.

  To the surprise of all, it was Soren Bieckmann who got us on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. One of his parents was on the board at LA County Hospital, and he somehow got a list of every cancer patient without insurance. T
hen he set up a campaign on InVigor to pay for all of their chemotherapy and radiation, and charmed celebrities on as many social media platforms as he could think of until he got it to go viral in less than forty-eight hours. I think he wound up raising something like half a million dollars for these people.

  ***

  What did I do for Honor Week?

  Why do you want to know that? Like I told you, I wrote copy and press releases. I applied many hashtags to many pictures. I asked my parents to make Soren’s fundraiser a featured campaign on InVigor, which may or may not have been ethical, but considering the cause was people with cancer, I decided the scales of justice were tipped in my favor. I put in a call to The Ellen DeGeneres Show. But you want to know what honorable thing I did?

  It was almost two years ago.

  I don’t even remember now.

  I don’t care if you think I’m lying.

  XXVII

  After You Explain That It

  Is in My Best Interest to Cooperate Fully

  During Honor Week, I didn’t take any pictures of myself doing any good deeds. I did not collect any sponsors or raise a single dollar for the Imperial Day Academy.

  Every morning that week, I came to school early. I made sure no one was watching.

  I ripped a sheet of paper out of my notebook, wrote I BELIEVE YOU on it, folded it up, and stuck it in Hector’s locker.

  We never talked about it.

  XXVIII

  Valentine’s Day

  During the first one hundred days of his presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stabilized the banks, provided emergency relief to starving families, regulated the stock market, put more than eight million people to work through the WPA work-relief program, and set the bar for presidential dynamism so high that no president since has matched it.

  “This is what I want to do,” Hector said. He never hit you over the head with it, but in some ways, he was every bit the student of history that I was.

  “Then let’s make FDR proud,” I replied.

  There were no banks to stabilize, but Honor Week raised so much money that even after the Union Rescue Mission donation, there was enough left over to create a fund to buy school supplies for scholarship students. The financial reform we enacted made all student organization spending public and transparent so that nothing like the Queen Mary debacle would ever happen again. We set to work creating a model for mental health services and drafted an anti-bullying policy. When Soren Bieckmann came to us about forming a drug and alcohol addiction support group, we helped him do it. Hector and Esme Kovacs and Lucy Lin started a mentoring program to encourage students of color to take leadership roles in the disproportionately lily-white student government at Imperial Day.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt was our role model, our inspiration, and we wielded him like a talisman. Hector got me an FDR action figure for Christmas, and I got him a key chain that said, THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF.

  After Hector Estrella’s first one hundred days, nobody at Imperial Day was asking whether he deserved to be president.

  We made a lot of changes to the way the Senate did things at Imperial Day, but we didn’t dare touch the Valentine’s Day flower sale. If we’d messed with that, they would have killed us.

  Hector, Veronica, Lucy, and I were excused from all of our morning classes to collect money and sort order forms into piles. It was so busy, I didn’t have time to glance at the sappy notes people wrote to each other or to think about the fact that none of them was for me.

  Cal had a way of making you pay attention to him, though, whether you wanted to or not.

  Each bouquet was $15. He handed me a $100 bill and a stack of order forms. I wondered what kinds of lurid notes Cal had written to his would-be conquests, but knew better than to peek.

  “Don’t worry, Claudia,” he said, running his tongue across his upper lip. “One of these is for you.”

  When I shuddered and gave him his change, he handed the $10 bill to Hector.

  “So you can get something nice for your lady,” he said, pressing the bill into Hector’s palm, then patting him on the back of the hand like he was somebody’s grandmother. “I insist.”

  Hector said nothing as Cal walked away chuckling to himself, but he crumpled the $10 bill up in his fist, then set it on the table between us. As he sat there quaking with rage, I picked up the bill, smoothed it flat, then folded it into the shape of an elephant. My mom had taught me this trick. When Maisie and I were little, she had a habit of taking us to fussy lunch places where children were about as welcome as hepatitis C, and the dollar bill elephant trick usually shut us up for fifteen minutes or so.

  I put the $10-bill elephant down on a sheet of notebook paper, scribbled on the page and passed it over to Hector:

  That at least got a smile out of him.

  After lunch, we retreated to Senate headquarters, where it was every man on deck. For the next two hours, we tucked heartfelt messages into the bouquets, then delivered them just before eighth period, consulting the seating charts that the teachers had grudgingly left for us.

  It was hard enough for eight senators to do it, and now there were only four of us. No one had the stomach for special elections after the Homecoming scandal, and Hector and I swung into action so quickly that no one seemed to miss the extra bodies except for us. Lucy and Veronica recruited four freshman girls to help, which probably didn’t take much arm-twisting. Once they found out they’d get to spend the afternoon sorting Valentine’s Day flowers with Hector Estrella, they were probably falling over themselves to volunteer.

  Eighth period I had Art History, which was both ideal and horrible. Looking at pretty pictures in a dim room at the end of a long day was extremely Zen, but it was also a recipe for narcolepsy, no matter how interesting Mrs. Castaneda’s lecture was. Fortunately, it was also a small class, and not terribly full of the kind of people who were likely to get a lot of flowers, so that was a relief. Mine wouldn’t be the only empty desk.

  In fact, there was only one bouquet in the whole classroom, and it was on Trixie Pappadou’s desk. As the bell rang, the rest of my classmates trickled in and took their seats, and Mrs. Castaneda dimmed the lights. After saying a few words about the 1940s and late period realists, she pulled up a slide of a girl crawling through a field of dried brown grass toward a house that seemed much too far away.

  “Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth,” said Mrs. Castaneda. “The model for this painting was stricken with polio, and as Wyeth described it, his challenge was ‘to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.’ Some people consider it to be sentimental. An art columnist for the New York Times called it a dorm room poster. If you are a jaded sort of person, I suppose that this painting does not have much to offer you.”

  As Mrs. Castaneda went on to the next slide, there was a knock on the door, which then inched open to reveal Kian Sarkosian and his prison haircut.

  “May I help you?” Mrs. Castaneda asked.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have a flower delivery that ended up in the wrong classroom,” he said. Then, much to my surprise, he turned to me and said, “I think these are yours, Claudia.”

  I started to get up from my desk, but I think he realized the distraction and embarrassment watching me hobble up to the door would create for everyone, so instead, he dashed into the classroom, his long legs carrying him to my desk in three paces. He set the bouquet down on my desk, gave me a stern nod, and was gone just as suddenly as he’d appeared.

  I took the flowers, not caring about the cellophane crinkle that made Mrs. Castaneda break off her lecture mid-sentence and glare at me. There was a note taped to the bouquet wrapping that read:

  TO CLAUDIA—YOU ARE A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE UNIVERSE.

  It wasn’t signed, but that was almost beside the point. For a moment, it was enough to know that somebody—at least somebody on this continent anyway—felt that way about me. You know how, whe
n somebody likes you for exactly the reason you most want to be liked, it makes you like them even more? If they’d written that I was nice or funny or smart, it wouldn’t have hit me so hard, and all of the feelings that I usually kept shoved down wouldn’t have threatened to come leaking out right there in Art History class.

  At least it was dark. At least it was because I was happy.

  I’m sure Andrew Wyeth is a terrific artist and very important, and I promise to read a book about him someday to make up for the amount of attention I paid to Mrs. Castaneda for the next forty minutes. As the slides faded in and out, all dark landscapes and lonely people, a different series of images played in my brain like something out of a movie. There was a soaring soundtrack as I ran in slow motion down the hallway, then a dramatic cut and a zoom in for a close-up of our faces as I said, “It was you,” and then a long kiss and fade to black.

  The bell rang, and I jumped up from my seat, gathering up my books and flowers, and I limped down the hallway as fast as I could, past the gym, turning down the long hallway where the auditorium was, and finally rounding the corner to the science hallway. I caught the wall and stood there a moment to gather up my courage and breath. The noise in the hallway faded as I zeroed in on Hector standing at his locker, loading up his backpack with books for the weekend. The hallway was filled with people kissing, people crying, people holding hands, making plans, saying that they loved each other. I felt like all of it was a beautiful backdrop to the scene that was playing out as I fought through the crowd of people to get to Hector, not wanting to wait one second longer than necessary to reach him.

  And then I was there, and he was there. His face lit up when he saw me, and he gave me a hug, crushing me to his shoulder. My cheek rested on the gray cashmere sweater he wore.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, Claudia,” he said. “Who are the flowers from?”

  Everything stopped.