by Mary McCoy
Soren’s mother was bird-thin, but wore layers and layers of flowing, gauzy clothes that enveloped her. His father had a shock of white hair and a tan that suggested he surfed almost as often as his son did. As his son used to.
On our way up to the front, one person stood out in the scattering of mourners, one person I hadn’t expected to see. Not there. Not ever again.
Livia was wrapped in a gray woolen coat and a dusty rose scarf with a matching beret. She sat alone in one of the back rows, speaking to no one, looking at no one. I’d never seen her look so invisible before. I didn’t know she was capable of it. The only flash of the old Livia came when Hector and I walked past and she met my eyes for a second before looking down at her lap. In that glance, I knew that nothing had been forgotten and nothing had been forgiven. I knew that if Livia had it to do over again, she would have spent a few more minutes scrambling my insides with the heel of her boot last spring.
But why was she back? And what was she doing here?
Before I could stop to wonder, a non-denominational preacher got up and said some oatmeal words about tragedy and those left behind to carry on in the wake of it and how we should always keep our good memories of Soren close to our hearts. Then Soren’s father got up and talked about how all he’d ever wanted was for his son to have all the things he never did, but maybe he’d been wrong. He wished he’d done things differently; said that if he had, maybe Soren would still be here. Then his face crumpled and he broke down in tears, and everyone just sat there watching him until Cal went up and took him by the shoulder and led him back to his seat. After that, no one felt much like talking.
Soren’s parents each threw a handful of dirt into the grave, and then we all lined up behind them and followed suit, and after that, people started to drift away. If there was a wake, nobody wanted to go to it. I suspected that a lot of people would be seeking obliteration that night, but they were going to do it in private. Soren’s mother looked around as it was ending, disappointed and panicked all at once. If we left, it was really over and he was really gone.
“I’m afraid I don’t know you,” she said, extending a hand to Hector to keep him from leaving. He introduced himself and said he was sorry for her loss, and then she turned to me.
“I’m Claudia McCarthy,” I said. “Soren and I went to H-Homecoming together.”
“Did you,” she said, her voice suddenly crisp and suspicious like she thought I might have been one of Soren’s friends from the bad days, part of the reason he was here in a hole in the ground.
I pulled my jacket tight to my chest to keep out the chill and looked out over the cemetery, the line of cars parked by the side of the road. Livia was gone.
“We thought very highly of your son,” Hector said, bowing his head solemnly.
Mrs. Bieckmann’s lip curled and I watched as she bit back a bitter remark, smiled graciously, and said, “That’s so good of you to say.”
That was the moment something in me broke. Soren had looked inside himself, and when he hadn’t liked what he saw there, he’d been brave enough to change it. He’d worked hard. He’d sacrificed things to stay sober, and to watch his mother stand there in the cemetery burying her son and thinking he was a fuck-up was more than I could bear.
“Soren was a good p-p-person,” I burst out. It was louder than I’d meant it to be, and Mrs. Bieckmann studied me with a mixture of horror and pity.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, and then she started to excuse herself to go somewhere, anywhere else, but I wouldn’t let her.
“He was a good person,” I said again. “And honest. He was the most honest person I ever met, and this is not what it looks like. Soren was sober. He didn’t want to relapse. Whatever happened to him, it wasn’t that. Maybe he took something by mistake. Maybe he didn’t know what he was taking.”
My voice pitched up, fast and manic and punctuated by staccato stutter-steps. Mrs. Bieckmann’s eyes grew wider and I felt Hector’s hand on my arm—a warning that I was going too far, but in my mind, this wasn’t far enough. I wanted to tell her my suspicions that Cal must have been involved, that he must have said something that had driven Soren to it. I wanted to throw anything I could at Mrs. Bieckmann to at least make her consider the possibility that this wasn’t a stupid junkie overdose.
“That’s enough,” Mrs. Bieckmann said, clutching the sides of her face with her hands. “Please.”
“We’re sorry,” Hector said, even though he hadn’t had anything to do with it. “We’re so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Bieckmann.”
He led me away, past the rows of white folding chairs, past the stragglers who’d stayed to look for Humphrey Bogart’s grave or vape in their cars before heading back to west LA. Hector unlocked the car and said, “Get in,” a little more forcefully than I would have expected from him.
He got in on his side, slammed the door shut, and grasped the steering wheel, his arms ramrod straight, his teeth gritted. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“What is wrong with you, Claudia? You can’t talk to people like that.”
“Like what?”
“This was her son’s funeral.” He slammed his palm down on the steering wheel, and something inside of me reared up.
“I know what the fuck it was, Hector. I was there.”
I saw a middle-aged couple walk past the car and stare at us, as if trying to decide whether this was a situation where they should intervene. I glared at them, and they kept walking.
“What was I supposed to do? Let her think Soren was a selfish, stupid addict?”
“Look, I know he was your friend . . .”
“Then why won’t you tell me what happened?” I interrupted. “Yours is the only story I’d believe anyway.”
My voice caught in my throat as I realized how angry I’d been with Hector all week, almost without realizing it. He knew me. He knew how my brain worked, that having facts and dates and names and quotations to piece together was the only thing that would comfort me. It was only words—it seemed like such a small thing, and he wouldn’t even give me that.
Disgust clouded Hector’s face as he turned even further away from me, looking out the window across the dismal cemetery.
“I don’t want to talk about it so you can feel better, Claudia.” His voice started out a quiet, quaky calm, but it didn’t take long before he was yelling again. “I already talked to the police. I talked to my parents. Separately, so I got to do that twice, and it was equally fucking fun both times. I saw him that night, Claudia, and I didn’t know, and so he died. That is why I don’t want to talk to you about it. That is why I never want to talk about it again. Do you fucking understand?”
I wanted to explain myself. I wanted to tell Hector that I understood how he felt, that I blamed myself, too, but instead I lowered my head.
“Stop yelling at me,” I whispered.
As soon as the words were out, the part of me that had started to break at Soren’s grave broke all the way. I wrapped my hands around my knees, put my head down, and sobbed until nothing else would come out.
The same thing must have broken in Hector because I heard him crying in the seat next to me a moment later. We didn’t look at each other. We didn’t offer each other our shoulders for comfort. We sat there with our separate grief and guilt, and when it hurt too much to sit there bearing them any longer, Hector started the car and drove me home.
“I stand by what I told Mrs. Bieckmann. The notes you’re taking, whatever you end up doing with them, keep that part in, please. Keep in the part where I said that Soren Bieckmann was a good person because it’s the truest thing I’ve told you so far.”
XLII
A Story Like That Coming
from You
By Christmas, Bradley McCord and Trina Gaines, the two freshmen, had resigned from the Honor Council. Both made official statements about needing more time to commit to their studies, but I knew it was either that they no longer had any stomach for Cal’s brand of justice or th
at he’d driven them out. Within days, he’d appointed Astrid Murray and some sycophant freshman to fill their seats, and the only person left who’d actually been elected was Kian Sarkosian, whom I was beginning to suspect had Stockholm syndrome.
People dealt with Soren’s death in different ways. Hector threw himself into Esme and, to an even greater degree, the Senate. Sometimes I wondered if he was doing good works just to keep himself from going insane. He got the senior class to agree on a gift—a row of cypress trees to be planted on the school grounds in Soren’s name. He organized a memorial scholarship in Soren’s name. Even the goddamn Valentine’s Day flower sale was to be held in Soren’s name.
The Senate had been my refuge and my inspiration the previous year, but now, all my work as Senate vice president just felt like going through the motions. Ms. Yee was gone, the Honor Council was a sham, Soren was dead, and Cal larked around the school doing whatever he felt like. Even Hector’s most ambitious ideas seemed hollow when it was so obvious that the best thing we could do for our school, the thing that we most needed to do, was find a way to get rid of Cal.
Deep Throat must have felt the same way because the day we came back from winter break, there was a note in my locker that read:
CHECK THE ATTENDANCE RECORDS
You’d think they might have fixed the lock on the front office door after the Homecoming Turtle Massacre, but to do that would be to acknowledge that there was a problem. It was easier for the school to do nothing, to tell themselves the turtles were an isolated incident and everything was fine.
Anyway, it was easy enough to lag behind after a Senate meeting one Thursday afternoon, to pace the hallways until they were empty. The hard part was convincing myself that I was any better than the Watergate burglars Nixon had hired.
I wondered if my Deep Throat was one of the front office’s student volunteers, or one of the staff, or possibly even Dr. Graves himself. What if our school principal was so terrified of Cal that he was actually turning to me for help? Far-fetched though it was, the last thought chilled my blood enough to send me through the office door.
I was breaking and entering to save my school.
It didn’t take long to find the attendance records for the fall semester. Eventually, it all got entered into a computer, but whatever scholarship kid whose job it was to shred all the paper records had apparently been hoarding them instead. I wracked my brain trying to remember who the student workers were, but they were all quiet, helpful, agreeable types. You signed in late, you signed out early for the dentist, and by the time you were in the parking lot, you’d already forgotten their faces.
Or maybe not you. Maybe that was a me thing.
Cursing myself for being the kind of person who overlooked the kind of people I apparently thought were less important than me, I found the file folder in the first drawer I opened. Not only was it neatly labeled, but somebody had already done the math for me. So helpful! So agreeable!
20 SUSPENSIONS
5 EXPULSIONS
The school year was only halfway over. If these records were to be believed, that meant the Honor Council was suspending or expelling more than a student a week. There were only four hundred people at Imperial Day—did any other elite private school in Los Angeles have disciplinary numbers like that? I wondered what the Board would think about that if they got wind of it.
That was what Deep Throat wanted me to know. What was implied was that Deep Throat expected me to do something about it.
When I pitched the idea to Mr. Prettinger, though, he looked skeptical.
“You haven’t been on the newspaper staff in two years,” he said, looking for a way to hedge out of the conversation. I reminded him of all the times my byline had appeared on stories as a personal favor to him.
“Is that what this is?” he asked. “Another favor? How’s that going to look, Claudia—a story like that coming from you?”
“Get someone else to write it then, I don’t care. I’ll give you the numbers.”
“Numbers you’re not supposed to have.”
“Check the office records,” I explained. “They’ll hold up.”
“And so what if they do?”
“What do you mean, what if they do? What about exposing the truth? What about Nixon and Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein?”
Mr. Prettinger sighed the sigh of a man who had watched his profession, tenuous though his connection to it may have been, turn to dust.
“Claudia, no one except you and I even know who Woodward and Bernstein are,” he said. “And let’s say we do run it. What if the only thing that happens as a result is that they shut down the newspaper?”
A little voice in my head whispered, If Ms. Yee was still here, she’d know who Woodward and Bernstein are. Then again, look what had happened to her. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected Mr. Prettinger to willingly throw himself in front of the 18-wheeler that was Cal and the Honor Council.
“Then what should I do?”
“The Board knows your face well enough by now. Go tell them yourself.”
I thought about going to the Board, but Prettinger was right about one thing: this was information I wasn’t supposed to have. When they asked where I’d gotten it, what was I going to tell them? The truth? That an unknown person sometimes wrote things down on pieces of paper and stuffed them into my locker? When they heard that, they’d ask, “How do you know what they’re telling you is true? And how’d you get those attendance records anyway?”
And I wouldn’t have an answer for that.
Mr. Prettinger saw the look on my face and sighed.
“I’m sorry, Claudia,” he said. “I just can’t get involved in this.”
There was no one who could help me, and I didn’t know where to turn. I felt like an animal in a zoo, a shitty one, the kind with a shitty habitat that drove the creatures into a pacing, ferocious madness.
XLIII
It’s Never Enough
I didn’t expect Livia to be the one to help spring me from my cage.
The day Livia came back to Imperial Day, I found her standing in front of my locker at the end of eighth period, arms folded at her chest, jaw set. She looked like she’d been waiting there since lunchtime.
“So you’re back,” I said, because otherwise I think she would have stood in front of my locker glaring at me for another ten minutes without saying a word.
“Are you happy with the way things turned out?” she spat, like it was my fault.
I held up my hands in surrender. Whatever Livia thought had happened between us, I had too many other things on my mind, and the last thing I wanted was another enemy.
“Livia, whatever you think I did to you, you’re wrong.”
“Sure,” she said, bumping my shoulder with unnecessary roughness as she shoved past me and stalked off down the hall.
In the three weeks following her return, Livia moved through the halls with an unblinking calm, daring anyone to ask where she’d been or to bring up the circumstances surrounding her exile. People whispered about it, but no one was bold enough to ask her to her face.
Livia sat alone at lunch. I never saw her speak to anyone except teachers. The only person she seemed to make any kind of exception for was me. Since her return, she’d slammed the bathroom door in my face, spilled a cafeteria tray full of chicken teriyaki and rice down my front, and stepped on the back of my heel in a way I couldn’t prove was on purpose, but knew wasn’t an accident.
When I ran into her in an empty stairwell one day after school, I clutched the railing and braced myself for the inevitable shove, but instead, Livia took me by the elbow, gave it a tug, and said, “Come with me.”
“Why?” I asked, digging in my heels.
“Because we’re going to do something.”
“What?”
“You know what’s the best thing in the world about having the worst thing happen to you?” she asked with a smirk. “After that, it doesn’t matter what you do. So come o
n.”
I felt a shock go through me as she said this. It was the same feeling I’d had when I broke into the front office, the same feeling I’d had that night on the New York City rooftop with Maisie. I didn’t care what happened to me if it meant I could put a stop to this. Even if it meant working with Livia. She led me up the stairs to the third floor, into the Honor Council meeting room. We were not expected. We were not invited. We walked past the witness-holding cell, rounded the corner, and took seats on two of the wooden chairs while Astrid Murray gaped like a fish.
“You’re not allowed to be here,” said Macro, Cal’s pet freshman. Livia shrugged, daring him to do something about it.
Jesse Nichols and Chris Gibbons came in next, the latter scowling at the sight of us.
“Leave,” Jesse Nichols said. God, what an insipid person. Has anyone ever listened to anything Jesse Nichols has ever said?
Again, Livia and I said nothing, not even when Chris Gibbons made an obscene gesture at Livia or when Astrid Murray started doing her best impersonation of my stutter and limp, which I had to admit were fairly spot-on. I guess since her parents were actors, maybe she’d accidentally learned something.
“What are you even trying to prove?” Astrid asked as I turned away, repulsed by her bug eyes and mottled jowls.
Livia and I remained silent because we knew that ultimately, there was one person whose thoughts on this subject actually mattered, and until he arrived, it was pointless to engage his minions.
A few minutes later, Cal arrived with Kian Sarkosian. When they entered the room, everyone let out a raucous cry.
“CAL!!! CAL AND KITCHEN BOY!!!”
It was a far cry from the days of Augustus. I remembered how Soren had arrived at his ambush hearing, half-expecting to find the Honor Council representatives in robes and wigs.
I wondered why they’d started calling Kian “Kitchen Boy.” I also wondered what about him was so broken inside that he felt compelled to stay even after everyone else had resigned in disgust.
