I, Claudia

by Mary McCoy

  I heard the catch in her breath as she hit the floor, then a low moan that gave way to ragged sobbing. I lifted my head and leaned back against the radiator with my legs stretched out in front of me, and I watched Livia cry.

  There were only a few places that really hurt. I’d have a bruise on my thigh and another on my shoulder, but I wasn’t bleeding and none of it would show.

  The first-period bell rang, but neither of us moved.

  “Are you going to hide in here all day?” I asked, gasping for breath.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  She was still on her knees, clinging to the desktop and sobbing, but not because she was sorry.

  I could have screamed. I could have gone running down the hall saying that she’d thrown a mug at my head and beaten me up. Someone might even have believed me.

  But what was the point?

  “I didn’t do it,” I said, as if saying it one more time was going to make a difference. “If I did, why would I come running up here the second you called me?”

  Livia stopped crying and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Why did you come?” she asked. Her eyes were swollen to slits.

  “I thought you needed help,” I said, but that wasn’t the whole truth.

  I came because I wanted to see her like this, ruined and disgraced.

  I went because I hoped she needed my help. I wanted to hear her ask for it, and I wanted to tell her no.

  Livia pulled herself to her feet and glared down at me.

  “You act like you’re still the same sad little worm you were at the Griffith School with your limp and your stutter and your wheezing, but you’re not. You have everything, and you don’t deserve any of it. I gave it to you.”

  “I never asked you to give me anything,” I said, craning my neck to look up at her.

  Livia kicked me in the side. Then she kicked me in the stomach so hard that it took my breath away.

  “Get out of here,” she said, kicking me once again, this time in the ribs.

  I could already feel my airways closing up as I crawled for the door, staggering to my feet before I stepped out into the empty hallway. Once I was out in the open again and safe, I reached for my inhaler, but my shoulder bag was still sitting next to the radiator in the Honor Council room and I didn’t want to go back in there. I hugged the wall and closed my eyes and struggled to catch my breath as my chest tightened up. My guts and ribs ached where Livia had kicked me, and it made it hurt even more to breathe. Suddenly, I realized that I was too far gone and I couldn’t make it back to the Honor Council room for my bag before I collapsed. I couldn’t call out, so I banged my fist against the row of lockers as I slumped over to the floor and wheezed.

  Then I heard a soft thump near my knees and looked up to see my bag sitting next to me. I clawed at the zipper, then dipped my hand inside the bag, pulled out my inhaler, and breathed.

  As I fell back against the lockers, I watched Livia walk down the hallway, her heels clicking on the linoleum. When she reached the end, she shoved open the double doors, one with each hand, and let them slam shut behind her.

  ***

  Livia didn’t come back to school on Monday, and she was out the rest of the week. She missed the assembly and the speeches. The day of the election, rumors began to circulate that she was taking a leave of absence from Imperial Day, but by then it was too late to change the ballots.

  So she got some votes, even if it wasn’t nearly enough.

  Some people still preferred her to Cal.

  “What did you tell Maisie about all of this?”

  “The night Maisie got back from Rome, we went to the roof of the parking garage at InVigor again. There, I told her the whole story, from the Queen Mary to the Valentine’s Day flowers to the Senate presidential election results to Livia’s foot in my ribcage and her subsequent leave of absence from Imperial Day. When it was all over, I felt wrung out, just like I do now, only about a hundred times worse because it was the first time I’d ever said it all out loud at once.”

  “What did your sister have to say?”

  “She said, ‘You made a great friend, exposed corruption, enacted change, got a secret admirer, won your Senate reelection, and on top of everything, someone you’ve always disliked is gone and probably never coming back to Imperial Day. It sounds to me like you got everything you wanted.’

  “I was less surprised when Livia hit me in the face. I couldn’t answer. All I could do was stare at my sister and think, Were you even listening? How could you think that any of this was what I wanted?”

  IMPERIAL DAY ACADEMY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS v. CLAUDIA McCARTHY

  OFFICIAL HEARING TRANSCRIPT

  ZELDA PARSONS, HONOR COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE: Livia and I wanted the same things. That’s why she was grooming me to be the president, not Claudia or Esme or any of the other underclassmen.

  MR. MATHERS: Did she tell you that?

  ZELDA PARSONS: She told me that she admired my work. During election season.

  MR. MATHERS: What about your work did Ms. Drusus admire?

  ZELDA PARSONS: Elections are not just about convincing voters that you’re the best candidate. They are about convincing them that their worst fears about your opponents are all true.

  And that can be accomplished by . . .

  MR. MATHERS: Ratfucking.

  Apologies for the language. It’s a term that came up in Ms. McCarthy’s testimony.

  ZELDA PARSONS: That’s a strange word for it. I always thought of what I did more as . . . massaging an election.

  Rat massage.

  ***

  MR. MATHERS: According to Ms. McCarthy, you and she were involved in a physical altercation after this story got out.

  LIVIA DRUSUS, FORMER HONOR COUNCIL VICE PRESIDENT: That is a lie. I never even spoke to her. She came into the Honor Council room after the lies about me went up all over the school. I don’t know why Claudia came to me. Maybe she wanted to gloat. I was upset. I threw a coffee mug on the floor and some of the shards might have bounced over near where she was standing, but I didn’t lay a hand on her.

  Part III

  The Reign of Cal

  The Honor Council

  Senior Class representatives:

  Cal Hurt, President

  Rebecca Ibañez

  Junior Class representatives:

  Esme Kovacs

  Zelda Parsons, Vice President

  Sophomore Class representatives:

  Kian Sarkosian

  Maddie Urrea

  The Senate

  Senior Class representatives:

  Trixie Pappadou

  Sarah Reisman

  Junior Class representatives:

  Hector Estrella, President

  Claudia McCarthy, Vice President

  Sophomore Class representatives:

  Lucy Lin

  Veronica Ollenbeck

  Two freshman representatives for both the Honor Council and the Senate will be elected during the first two weeks of fall semester.

  XXXII

  Nature Abhors a Vacuum

  Those first days back after summer vacation, all anyone could talk about was Livia. Not only had she not finished out the school year; as far as anyone knew, she wasn’t coming back for her senior year at all. It was college application suicide, not the kind of thing any Imperial Day student would have done. The fact that it was Livia who had gone and done it was the most shocking thing of all.

  People claimed to know all kinds of things about what had happened to her: They said that she’d enrolled in a boarding school back east or fled the country for the same language immersion program Maisie had done. There were alleged sightings at the Grove, the Arclight, the Trader Joe’s, but as no one actually claimed to have spoken to her, I disbelieved them all.

  Besides, Livia was gone, and I had two very real, very immediate problems that I needed to solve if I was to survive another year at Imperial Day.

  The first proble
m was that I needed not to be in love with Hector Estrella.

  “Where the hell have you been for the past two weeks?” Hector asked, bouncing up to my locker on our first day back. “I missed you.”

  “Family stuff,” I said. “Maisie got back from Rome.”

  I tried to look casual as I closed my locker door, but my heart was sproinging around my ribcage and my cheeks were flushed and my hands were trembling because Hector had said that he missed me. He missed me, he missed me, he missed me.

  This situation was untenable. I could not go around love-stricken and sweaty-palmed, threatening to make a fool out of myself every time Hector talked to me. I had work to do. We had a school to run. Something had to be done immediately.

  I would be Hector Estrella’s vice president, his right-hand woman, and his political manager. I would be his friend, but I’d shove the rest of those feelings down until I’d crushed them to dust.

  So a few days later, when I saw Esme Kovacs gazing longingly across the cafeteria in Hector’s direction, the way that every other girl with half a brain in her head at Imperial Day did, I said, “She likes you.”

  Hector reddened, like this was the first time he’d ever realized such a thing was possible. In the year and a half I’d known him, I’d never heard him talk about a girl he liked. I’d never heard rumors about him hooking up with anyone. I’d walked down the halls with Hector enough times, heard the underclassmen shriek and giggle as he went past if he happened to wave or look in their direction.

  Sometimes I wondered if Hector’s indifference was an act, if he was awkward around girls or pretended not to notice when they swooned over him because he thought it would keep him from turning into his dad. I never asked him, though. Except for that night with Cal at The Last Bookstore, he never talked about his dad at all, and I got the sense that it was a conversational no-fly zone.

  Out of all of the girls who batted their eyes in Hector’s direction, Esme Kovacs seemed possibly worthy of him. She was smart, pretty, together. She was a former senator, a current Honor Council member. She was nice to everyone. On top of that, I found her to be so boring that I knew I wouldn’t be jealous if Hector started dating her.

  I mean, look, I knew that I couldn’t make Hector date anyone, but I thought I could at least give him a nudge in the right direction. Anyway, it was time.

  “How do you know she likes me?”

  “Because she’s looking at you.”

  “You’re looking at me.”

  “I’m sitting next to you. Where the hell else am I supposed to look?” I said brusquely. “Esme Kovacs has options, though. There are lots of things Esme Kovacs could be looking at, but every time, she picks you. God knows why.”

  Hector turned pink again and looked down at the cafeteria table, obviously pleased with this information.

  So that was one problem taken care of. My second problem was very different.

  My second problem was that I needed to figure out how to run the school in close proximity to a raging psychopath without attracting his attention or displeasure.

  With Cal, I thought, the trick was to stay out of his way and let him do whatever he wanted. He might make things difficult for us at first, but sooner or later, he’d get bored or distracted and move on to something else. If I could keep Hector and me off of his radar until Christmas, we’d be fine.

  What I observed quickly was that Cal didn’t do things like Augustus and Ty did. He didn’t associate with Honor Council people outside their meeting room on the third floor. At lunch, he sat with rabble-rousers like Chris Gibbons and Astrid Murray, but one or two days a week, he’d pick some random, unsuspecting table and join them. During these forced and terrifying affairs, everyone’s sphincters would clench so tightly I’m surprised the effect did not create a black hole in the center of the Imperial Day Academy cafeteria.

  The weird thing was, people still liked him. He was always surrounded by people who were drawn to his confidence and swagger and the way he did whatever he wanted. And if he put his hand on your thigh in chemistry lab and wouldn’t move it, or pulled your deodorant out of your gym bag, swiped it on his armpits in front of everyone, then handed it back to you, that was just Cal being himself.

  At the beginning of the school year, when Cal assumed the Honor Council presidency, we all held our breath, waiting to see what he was going to do with that kind of power.

  As it happened, there was a controlled-substance vacuum at Imperial Day at this time. Soren Bieckmann, who had raised tens of thousands of dollars for cancer patients during the previous year’s Honor Week, had surprised everyone by reforming. The cynics assumed that it was temporary, that it was a last-ditch effort to get into a good college, but whatever the case, you could not get so much as a crushed-up Adderall off of him. And as nature abhors a vacuum, Chris Gibbons stepped up so that the students of Imperial Day would not have to do without.

  Interestingly, this development only seemed to invigorate Chris and Cal’s friendship so by the time Cal’s tenure as Honor Council president began, it was already a far cry from the puritanical days of Augustus and all of his nosing around off-campus parties for underage drinking. Where Augustus and Livia set out to have the school drug dealer expelled, Cal became his best friend.

  The first two weeks of school passed quietly enough, though, and I lulled myself into the belief that maybe Cal had only been interested in the Honor Council because it would allow him to do whatever he wanted without consequences.

  While that part was certainly true, Cal’s vision was more far-reaching.

  He wanted what Hector and I had built. He wanted empire.

  How it started was, I went to my locker at the end of the day and opened it and a note fluttered out onto the floor. I picked it up, unfolded it, and read:

  CAL IS TAKING OVER HONOR WEEK. ANNOUNCEMENT TOMORROW. THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW.

  Before the words of the anonymous note could fully sink in, my phone was out and I was calling Hector. Because he knew me, because he knew that my stutter made me dread being on the phone and that I would only have called under the most dire of circumstances, he answered right away.

  “Hector, w-w-where a-a-are you?”

  “I’m . . . in the parking lot. Just leaving actually.”

  There was a weird hitch in his voice. At first I thought it was because he was surprised to hear my voice over the phone, but then I realized.

  “You’re with someone,” I said.

  “I, uh—”

  I could actually hear his ears turning red.

  “Are you free later tonight?” I asked. “We need to talk.”

  In most relationships, the phrase We need to talk means Something is wrong with us. With Hector and me, it meant Something is wrong with the Senate.

  Whatever cute-girl spell had rendered Hector moony and red-eared was broken the moment he knew this was Senate business.

  “What happened?” Hector asked.

  “I can’t talk about it,” I said. “Not if you’re with the person I think you’re with.”

  There was a pause, then Hector said, “I am.”

  “Call me back this evening when you’re alone.”

  Apparently, that wasn’t soon enough for Hector. By the time I got home, he was already there, sitting on my front porch, his car parked in the driveway, no sign of Esme.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, leaping to his feet as I came up the driveway. I hadn’t thought I sounded serious enough on the phone to warrant a house call, but then again, this was the Senate we were talking about.

  I showed Hector the note, and immediately he burst out a rapid-fire line of questions I didn’t have the answers to: Who sent this? What do they mean, take over Honor Week? How? What should we do?

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. And finally, and in sum, I don’t know,” I said when he was done. “I don’t know what any of it means.”

  “How can he take it away from us?” Hector asked.

&nbs
p; I nodded in agreement. “It’s ours. It was your idea. We started it. We did all the work. Do you think Cal wants to do all that work? He does not.”

  I explained my theory to Hector about how Cal would probably lose interest in trying to be in charge of anything, but by the time I got to the part about how everything would be back to normal by Christmas, I could tell Hector’s brain was working in a different direction.

  “Maybe we need to remind people that we started it. Maybe that’s the way to stop him.”

  “What are you talking about, Hector?”

  “I need to go home,” Hector said, getting up from the porch.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This was a lie, and I knew it. Even if the plan wasn’t fully formed in his head, even if I knew he’d be staring at his ceiling at two in the morning hashing it out, I knew he had some idea.

  “Hector, we don’t even know who gave me the note. We don’t even know if it’s true.”

  If he’d told me then what he had planned, I would have stayed up all night helping him. Or I would have stayed up all night trying to talk him out of it.

  Instead, I did my AP Psychology homework and read half of Beowulf, then went to bed.

  The next morning, I was eating toast and looking at my phone when I saw something that made me aspirate crumbs.

  Between 1:46 and 2:37 a.m., Hector had posted the following message on every social network he could think of:

  Big announcement tomorrow about Imperial Day Honor Week!!! It’s a surprise, but it’s going to be even bigger and better than last year!!!

  If there was one thing that made Hector Estrella more awkward than girls, it was social media. Give him a microphone and an audience, give him five minutes and a face-to-face conversation, and he could convince you of anything. Give him a Facebook account, and you’d swear he was an octogenarian who’d just learned the internet existed.

  The number of exclamation points varied, but by and large, it was the same message posted everywhere. When I checked my Imperial Day email, it was even worse. Hector had sent a mass email about his big announcement to the entire student body at 3:19 a.m. It was punchy and unhinged and about five paragraphs too long.