I, Claudia

by Mary McCoy

  There was a note on her door telling me that she’d given my phone to Hector Estrella, and that he said he’d find me after school to return it.

  Sighing heavily, I made my way back to the first floor and around to the other side of the school. I stuck my head out the door and scanned the lot for Hector’s car. Not seeing it, I returned the way I had come, resigning myself to at least the next two hours without a phone.

  That’s why I went down the hallway past the West Gym in the first place.

  Why I went in is another story.

  I hadn’t seen much of Livia since the day we crashed Ruby Greenberg’s Honor Council hearing and its aftermath together. We’d avoided each other. Maybe it was out of the shared horror at what we’d seen that day and what we’d failed to stop. Or maybe it was because after that, it was so much harder to see one another as the enemy.

  That was what I was thinking about when I opened the door to the West Gym and stepped inside. This time, I wasn’t careful not to make any sound. I wasn’t hiding.

  Those were the things that led me to that hallway, those were the thoughts that led me to the gym, but what led me to the boys’ locker room was the sound of running water.

  Nobody used the West Gym showers. I hadn’t even known that they worked. My first thought was to turn around and walk away. Whatever was going on in the locker room had nothing to do with me. It was none of my business. But then I remembered what Livia and I had seen, how we’d done nothing, and I thought, This time I’ll stop it.

  The air in the locker room was thick and swampy and I could still hear shower heads spraying full blast onto the algae-slick tile. There was a tangy, metallic scent in the air that I’d encountered exactly once before—also at Imperial Day, but I would have recognized it anywhere.

  And so, even if I didn’t know exactly what I was going to find when I turned the corner, it didn’t come as a total surprise.

  Cal’s body was crumpled on the floor of the showers, being pelted on all sides. There was blood in his hair, rivulets of it coursing toward the drains in the center of the room. A single tooth lay in the middle of the puddle. One of the shower heads lay next to him on the floor. I guessed that was the weapon.

  At first, I thought he was dead. I stood there, my feet rooted, but it wasn’t shock I felt or fear. It was a strange detachment, and though it had never occurred to me to beat the shit out of Cal, I found I was not entirely sorry someone else had. It wasn’t until he turned his head to the side and I saw his puffy, blood-smeared face, one eye swollen to a slit, and he croaked, “Help,” that I screamed.

  He was alive, and that was so much worse.

  No one came, but I kept screaming until Cal spit a mouthful of blood in my direction and said over the streaming showers, “Get help, you stupid cunt. I can’t get up.”

  My mouth clapped shut. I threw open the locker room door and ran out of the gymnasium and into the hall. Even if no one was there, I could at least call for help.

  I burst through the main office door and found Dr. Graves standing at the photocopier. He jumped when he saw me, even before I said, “There’s b-b-been an accident. Call the ambulance.”

  He picked up the phone and dialed. While he gave instructions to the dispatch, I wrote down the particulars, and after he hung up the phone, Dr. Graves said, “Show me.”

  So I’m the one who found Cal. I’m the one who got help. Even though it was Cal, I got help. Would I have run faster if it were Hector on that locker room floor? Probably. But I still went. Cal can call me a stupid cunt all he wants to, but I’m not a monster.

  LI

  The Kind of Power That

  Everyone Wants

  Because of my quick thinking, Cal’s life was saved. Therefore, people decided that I was a hero.

  Nobody asks whether I would have been doing the world a favor if I’d turned around and walked out of the locker room like I hadn’t seen a thing.

  Because that is not the kind of people we are. Most of us want to be good people. Most of us are trying, and when you say something like Things would be better if so-and-so was dead, it fucks everything up. It makes it hard to go on feeling like you’re a good person. So instead of making me regret that I’d saved Cal’s life, my classmates rewarded me for it.

  A special election was held. There were three names on the ballot—mine, Chris Gibbons’s, and Livia’s—but at the end of the day, I found a note in my locker:

  IT WASN’T EVEN CLOSE

  When I saw Kian’s handwriting, I knew he’d accepted that what had happened between us over spring break had only been a brief respite from the way our lives were going to look. We were never going to walk around the halls of Imperial Day holding hands. He was never going to be my boyfriend. Love, friendship, a harmless hobby like the study of history—those things weren’t for me. Every time I’d tried to seek them out in an effort to be happy or normal or well-adjusted, or to help save someone from themselves, something had steered me back toward politics and power, like it was my fate.

  Which I suppose it was.

  You’re going to destroy them all. You’re going to leave them reeling, their ambitions unrealized, their dearest hopes and wishes thwarted. And when all of them have fallen away, you alone will be left standing with the kind of power that people would lie and cheat and steal for, the kind of power that everyone wants. Everyone except you.

  This wasn’t the life I would have chosen for myself. It chose me, which I suppose is what the fortune-teller was trying to warn me about that day at Venice Beach.

  By an overwhelming majority, the students of Imperial Day elected me president of the Honor Council, and because I’d fucked up so badly, because I’d failed to prevent Cal from coming to power, because I’d failed to stop him once he did, because I hadn’t left him to die when I had the chance, and most of all, because there was no one else capable of fixing all the things that had gone wrong, I accepted.

  “Do you have anything else to add, Claudia?”

  “You’re still listening?”

  “It’s my job to listen, Claudia. Besides, it was an interesting story. In places.”

  “Then you believe me?”

  “It’s not my job to believe or disbelieve, Claudia. I am here to listen.”

  “What happens next?”

  “I prepare a transcript and summary of our conversation and turn it over to the Board. It is the hope of your counsel that this will offer the Board some better sense of the context in which you made the decisions you did.”

  “Do you think it will help?”

  “I don’t know, Claudia. I can only say that I wish you the very best of luck.”

  “With the trial?”

  “No, Claudia. With your life.”

  Part IV

  The Trial of Claudia

  If you are reading this, you are a student of history.

  The Honor Council does not keep records. It never has in the 110-year history of Imperial Day, and a person can’t help wondering, have there been other Cals before? Was there an Augustus in the 1940s, a Livia in the 1980s?

  I hate it when the historical record is lost. That’s when you get the Etruscans or Stonehenge, a lot of maddeningly unanswerable questions that could have been sorted out if someone had just bothered to leave a note.

  I know what it’s like to feel like you’re owed an explanation and to know you’re never going to get it, and I never wanted anyone to feel that way about me.

  I didn’t care that my trial would be public or that there would be a transcript. I wanted it that way. I wanted a record in the archives of Imperial Day so that you could find it. I want to share with you that most comforting lesson that history has to teach us: If you are around to tell your story, that means you survived it, you outran it, you came out the other side. Maybe not whole. Maybe not better than you were, but you lived to tell the tale.

  You may notice places within this transcript where I’ve taken it upon myself to correct and amend the record
. Because sometimes the wrong people ask the wrong questions, and the right people arrive at the wrong conclusions. Because people are mistaken. And because people lie.

  If you are a history purist, you may view my commentary as a contamination of the historical record, or you may view it as delightful ephemera. Either way, let’s keep it between us.

  If a tank full of dead turtles wasn’t enough to make them fix the lock on the main office door, I doubt my additions to this particular file will either, but let’s not tempt fate.

  You don’t know what I mean about the turtles yet. It’s about two hours into the recording, between the part where I go to Homecoming with Soren Bieckmann and the part where he dies. Do you still have flash drives? Can you even open the audio file?

  In any case, know that the things I did, I did out of hope, out of frustration, out of despair. I could say that I did them for you, whoever you are, but if you’ve read this much, I guess I know better than to bullshit you with a line like that.

  XX,

  Claudia

  DR. ROBERT GRAVES, PRINCIPAL OF THE IMPERIAL DAY ACADEMY: The Board of the Imperial Day Academy is assembled here today to hear the case against Honor Council President Claudia McCarthy. Board President Carson Quentin Mathers, Esquire, presiding.

  Claudia McCarthy is accused of election tampering and defamation of character. Ms. McCarthy is also a person of interest in the assault on Calvin Hurt, an incident that occurred on school grounds. Ms. McCarthy stands accused of conduct unbecoming any Imperial Day student, much less its leader, and of damaging the school’s legacy through her words and deeds.

  We are gathered here today to determine not only whether Ms. McCarthy is fit to remain Honor Council President, but whether she is fit to keep her position as a student at this institution.

  MR. CARSON QUENTIN MATHERS, PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS OF THE IMPERIAL DAY ACADEMY: Ms. McCarthy, do you understand the charges against you?

  CLAUDIA McCARTHY, HONOR COUNCIL PRESIDENT: I understand them. I just don’t understand how they apply to me.

  MR. MATHERS: And how do you plead?

  Except for the last part, I maintain that all of this is true. Sometimes people have motives you couldn’t possibly understand at the time, as you’ll eventually see.

  CLAUDIA McCARTHY: Innocent. On all counts. I did not tamper with any election. I defamed no one’s character. I told the truth, as I knew it, as I understood it at the time. I had nothing to do with what happened to Cal.

  I deserve to keep my place at this school and my position as president of the Imperial Day Honor Council, and I question the motives of anyone who says otherwise.

  MR. MATHERS: Please take your seat, Ms. McCarthy. And for heaven’s sake, stop glaring.

  Dr. Graves, would you please call the first witness?

  DR. GRAVES: The first witness is Senior Class Honor Council representative Christopher Gibbons.

  MR. MATHERS: You served on the Honor Council under Ms. McCarthy. Can you relate the circumstances under which Ms. McCarthy came to be president of the Honor Council?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS, SENIOR CLASS HONOR COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE: Well, someone tried to kill her predecessor in the boys’ locker room.

  Or to be more specific, Claudia McCarthy wanted to be Honor Council president, so she put out a hit on Cal Hurt. She convinced her flunkie, Hector Estrella, that Cal deserved to die and this was the only way to stop him.

  She saw her chance, she used her friend, and she took it.

  That is how Claudia McCarthy came to be president of the Honor Council.

  MR. MATHERS: Mr. Hurt has maintained that he has no idea who his assailant might have been. You and the victim were friends, weren’t you? Did he ever confide in you about the details of his attack?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: No, he never told me who tried to kill him.

  MR. MATHERS: He never told the school or the police either. Do you think that’s strange?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: He was a strange person. Is a strange person. When he was the Honor Council president, he’d walk out in the middle of hearings. One time, he stuck his face in front of a defendant and barked like a dog at them. I don’t pretend to understand why he does anything he does.

  MR. MATHERS: Erratic as his behavior was, weren’t you almost relieved when Ms. McCarthy took his place?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: I was surprised, not relieved.

  I mean, I was the Honor Council VP, but whatever. I’m used to it. Claudia beat me out for a Senate seat freshman year. This wasn’t any different.

  MR. MATHERS: You’ve also maintained Claudia used the assault on Cal Hurt as an excuse to bypass the electoral process and stack the Honor Council with her friends.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: When she took over, Claudia cleaned house. She kicked Jesse Nichols and Macro Stinson and Astrid Murray off because they were Cal’s people. She kicked me off. She brought Zelda and Esme back.

  There were no elections, even though all of this happened right around election time, but because of everything that had happened—the tragedy, the investigation—nobody said anything about it. Every single person who got on the Honor Council had been hand-picked and vetted by Claudia.

  And then, once she was in charge, she stopped having hearings.

  MR. MATHERS: How would you know that, Mr. Gibbons?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: I was . . . around. I’d stand in the hallway outside the Honor Council room before school. After school. All the times they usually met. It was three weeks before I even caught them having a meeting.

  MR. MATHERS: Isn’t that the best possible outcome, Mr. Gibbons?

  Isn’t it possible that the Honor Council had been overzealous under its previous leadership, and these changes under Ms. McCarthy’s leadership merely signified a regression to the norm?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: I don’t think it’s possible. I’ve gone to school here for four years. There’s no way people aren’t lying and cheating as much as they ever did. People don’t change that much.

  MR. MATHERS: Then what are you suggesting, Mr. Gibbons?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: I’m suggesting that Claudia got everything she wanted, just like she always does. She can act like it’s an accident or like she’s some dork with a limp and a stutter, her whole little “poor me” routine, but I promise you, everything that girl does is on purpose. None of it is an accident.

  MR. MATHERS: Mr. Gibbons, are you a drug dealer?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: Sir, I . . . what? Excuse me?

  He never answers the question about the hydrocodone, and that tells you everything you need to know.

  MR. MATHERS: So, Mr. Gibbons, let me ask more precisely: Did you provide Soren Bieckmann with hydrocodone?

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: We shouldn’t be having a disciplinary hearing for Claudia McCarthy right now. We should be talking to the police.

  MR. MATHERS: That is not what I asked you, Mr. Gibbons.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBONS: I’m done talking, sir. I’m not the one on trial.

  But if you want proof that I’m telling the truth, ask anyone. They’ll tell you the same thing. Claudia McCarthy doesn’t care about anything except power. And herself.

  Chris Gibbons gave my friend the overdose that killed him and basically accused me of attempted murder.

  But Cal? By the end of Chris’s testimony, I knew he hadn’t had anything to do with what happened to Cal.

  Chris Gibbons is a piece of shit, but thank god, he’s also a lousy liar. Look at the way he flailed when Mathers asked him about Soren and the hydrocodone. If Chris Gibbons had dished out the beating that made it necessary for Cal to complete his senior year from a hospital bed, he would have fallen to pieces during the questioning.

  That’s the first reason I’m crossing Chris Gibbons off the suspect list.

  The second, sadder reason is I think Cal actually was the closest thing to a friend Chris Gibbons ever had at Imperial Day.

  CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS

  Chris Gibbo
ns

  Kian Sarkosian

  Hector Estrella

  Livia Drusus

  Zelda Parsons

  DR. GRAVES: The next witness is Zelda Parsons.

  MR. MATHERS: Help me to understand all of this, Ms. Parsons. How did we arrive at this point?

  ZELDA PARSONS: In the 110 year history of the Imperial Day Academy, there have been ninety Honor Council presidents, and do you know how many of them have been female?

  MR. MATHERS: I can’t say that I do.

  ZELDA PARSONS: Seven. And that’s if you count Claudia McCarthy.

  MR. MATHERS: I’m sure those numbers will begin to balance themselves out now that we’re well into the 21st century, don’t you think? But what does that have to do with anything?

  ZELDA PARSONS: You asked me to help you understand all of this, and that’s something I want you to understand.

  When I was running for Honor Council my freshman year, Livia took me aside, and she told me something that changed my life. She told me that no one was ever going to give me permission to have power. She said that I was going to have to demand it, and that if that didn’t work, I was going to have to reach out and take it.

  Even before I was elected, I saw what she meant. Ty Berman was president of the Honor Council, and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Livia had to pretend she was following his lead, when really it was the other way around.

  Livia always told me that if we stuck together, it wouldn’t always be that way. She said that we just had to get through that year, and after that, she’d be the president and I’d be her vice president, and we could do things the way we wanted to.