I, Claudia

by Mary McCoy

  As if things were not already bad enough, Cal was about to drag out the agony that was my public humiliation by outing the guilty parties right here during the assembly. I wanted to hide under the stage.

  At first, all I could think was, When did this happen? Cal must have collected the twenty-five signatures needed to get himself on the ballot, but he hadn’t campaigned, hadn’t done a newspaper profile. He hadn’t even made an appearance at the candidates’ breakfast. Until now, as far as anybody knew, there were only two people running for the junior class seats on the Honor Council, Livia and Cecily Stanwick, who’d been dogged throughout the campaign by rumors of an SAT cheating scandal. Livia had barely campaigned, and why should she have? She was guaranteed a seat, and the vice presidency was all but a formality. The other incumbent, Rebecca Ibañez, had dropped out for no reason, but seeing Cal at the podium in his suit, I began to suspect there had been a reason after all.

  It was not difficult for me to picture Cal approaching Rebecca with intimidation or threats. That would be entirely in keeping with what I knew of his character. But neither was it difficult for me to imagine that Rebecca simply might have reached her limit. For a year, the rest of the Honor Council had treated her like she scarcely counted, like she was a mistake. The sight of a ballot that included all those names again—Livia, Ty, Maisie, Zelda—might have made Rebecca Ibañez decide she’d be better off enacting change somewhere her talents were appreciated.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder, and when I turned around, Maisie was there, a stricken look on her face.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, then gestured toward Cal, who was still scanning the audience for the guilty parties. “But this? This is not okay.”

  “I can’t believe he’s running for Honor Council,” Maisie said, a distinctly un-Maisie-like sneer on her lips that vanished as she turned to face me. “Is there anything I can do, Claudia? Anything you want me to say in my speech?”

  “Please don’t,” I said, my eyes widening in horror. It didn’t matter that Maisie’s intentions were good. If she did it, every other candidate who followed her would do it, and the thought of my humiliation becoming the prevailing theme of the entire election made my face burn with shame.

  “Don’t even mention it, Maisie,” I said. “Act like it never happened. This is bad enough.”

  “I wouldn’t do what Cal’s doing. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” I said. “But still.”

  There was something else Maisie didn’t understand. When I told her that I was okay, I meant it. I mean, I won’t lie. The scene unfolding in the Esther Pico Memorial Theatre had hurt me, and hurt badly. However, what Maisie didn’t get was that I was used to it. I’d been excluded from birthdays, picked last for teams, and laughed at for a very long time. People had been mocking my limp, my looks, my stutter since first grade, and no matter what any teacher promised to do about it, I had realized early on that it would never stop, and that I could either absorb every last hurt my classmates inflicted, or I could choose to do something else.

  People could still hurt me, but I would never be surprised by it, and that made all the difference.

  Running for office had certainly brought out a kind of overt, blunt cruelty, but the only difference was in its scale. At its core, it was the same thing I’d been dealing with for the past ten years. I’d learned that the best way to keep it from sinking into the vulnerable nooks and crannies of my brain was to move on and not to dwell.

  “Just give the speech you were going to give,” I said. “Please just don’t call any more attention to it.”

  Out on the stage, Cal had spotted a raised hand in the audience.

  “Petra,” he called out. “Did you have something to say?”

  From the darkened auditorium, I heard a voice call out, “I know who said it.”

  A triumphant, malevolent grin oozed onto Cal’s face. Quickly, he tempered it into something a bit more befitting the occasion.

  “Thank you, Petra. Thank you for speaking up. I know you’ll report that to an Honor Council representative after the assembly.”

  Cal turned back to the mic, addressing the whole room once again. He seemed as much at home on the stage as he had a few months before doing musical theater.

  “That is the kind of accountability and transparency I am offering you. No more party-crashing. No more lurking around your extracurricular activities, waiting for you to step out of line. The Honor Council should be where you need it: here at Imperial Day, not in your private lives. The Honor Council should make your time at school easier, not harder. It should protect you, not expose you. It should make your life better, not worse. Thank you for your vote.”

  Maisie’s face went slack as Cal finished his speech and the auditorium erupted in enthusiastic applause. Cal nodded his head, taking it all in as though we owed him this, that we were finally dishing out the acclaim and respect he’d deserved all along.

  Under her breath, I heard Maisie whisper, “He set the whole thing up.”

  “Maisie . . .” I started to speak, but Maisie would not be interrupted.

  “He probably paid them to heckle during your speech so he could come to your rescue during his own. Or maybe he didn’t pay them. Maybe he just threatened them instead.”

  My sister is a very sane and well-adjusted and reasonable person, so I was not quite sure what to make of the unhinged look in her eyes, the grim smile that played across her lips.

  After everything I’ve said about ratfucks and Nixon and winning at any cost, you’d think it would have been easy for me to accept Maisie’s theory. But all I could think about was the audacity of the thing. Who would do something like that? It was too risky, there were too many uncontrollable variables. If any piece of the plan had failed, the results would have been catastrophic for Cal. Besides, was it more likely that Cal enlisted ringers to heckle me during my campaign speech in front of dozens of witnesses so that he could then swoop in and pretend to save the day? Or that a couple of people at Imperial Day were insensitive jerks?

  “Do you have any evidence?” I asked.

  “I have the evidence of knowing him.”

  “I don’t know, Maisie,” I said, shaking my head.

  And then it occurred to me that if it had been Livia up there, I would have believed the worst in a heartbeat. In fact, even as Maisie’s shoulders slumped and she leaned back against the wall with a defeated sigh, I found myself wondering if Livia had had something to do with it, if this was retaliation because I hadn’t delivered my speech the way she’d told me to.

  I chased theories down rabbit holes through the rest of the candidate speeches, including Livia’s. All the while, Maisie stood against the wall, silent and brooding, until Mrs. Lester took the stage once more. There were only a handful of speeches left to go, but these were the big ones.

  “It’s my pleasure to introduce our first candidate for Honor Council president, Ty Berman.”

  Ty walked to the podium like he was getting in the lunch line. Actually, no. On omelet bar day, I’d actually seen him do that with something like enthusiasm. His speech was like elevator music or wallpaper, and even though it was right there in front of me, I couldn’t bring myself to notice it. The words crumbled and blew away like dust the second they landed on my ears. Even when I really tried to pay attention, other thoughts kept jumping to the forefront: What was Maisie going to do? She seemed more upset about all of this than I was.

  I turned to Maisie and whispered, “You can beat this guy. A giraffe puppet on the end of a rake could beat this guy.”

  Maisie smiled, but didn’t say anything. I watched as she closed her eyes and rubbed her temples, mentally preparing to take the stage.

  “Are you ready?” I asked, but Maisie didn’t answer me, and then Ty was done and Maisie’s name was being called. I caught a whiff of rosemary mint shampoo as she brushed past me, squeezing my ar
m, and then she was standing at the podium, her voice clear and her eyes fierce. I’d never been nervous for Maisie before. Whenever she did something, it was confident and considered and reliably solid, but the look on her face before she’d taken the stage made me worry that Maisie was—for the first time in her life—about to do something ill-considered.

  “Ever since I was a freshman, I’ve wanted to be Honor Council president,” she said. “I had a pretty great one for a role model. When I looked at Augustus, I saw an honorable person, a natural leader, and a person with vision. Augustus had a vision of what the Honor Council could be and do, and it’s one I admire. I spent the last three years admiring Augustus, but what I realize now is that I’m not him and neither is my opponent, and no matter which of us you elect, things are going to be different next year.

  “You can have a leader who will try to pretend that things are the same, and we are good people, and this school is a nice place, or you can have me.

  “I’m going to do things my way if you elect me, and I’m not entirely sure what that is. But I promise you three things:

  “I will be fair. I will do what is right. I will tell the truth. Thank you.”

  Maisie stalked off the stage without waiting for applause. When it came, it sounded confused and was quickly drowned out by chatter from the audience. Even from where I stood, I could make out the gist of it because I was thinking it, too.

  “What was that?” I asked, stepping in front of Maisie before she continued on, possibly through a wall.

  Maisie’s eyes softened as they focused on me. She blew out a deep breath and covered her face with her hands for a moment. When they dropped back down to her sides, she was herself again.

  “I’m glad that’s done,” she said, smiling at me.

  “But what did you do?” I asked.

  “I did what you asked me to. I didn’t say anything about you. I gave the speech I wrote last night. I said what I wanted to say.”

  Maisie’s smile crumpled then, and she went silent and looked down at the floor, and I knew that there was something she wasn’t telling me.

  “Maisie, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to win,” she said with a shrug. “I looked out into the auditorium during my speech and I saw it in their eyes. They don’t want me.”

  “That’s insane,” I said. “You’ve been going to school with these people for three years. They know you, and they know Ty, and if they don’t vote for you because they didn’t like a 30-second speech you gave, then they’re idiots.”

  Maisie shushed me, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw Oberlin St. James, one of the candidates for Senate president, shooting us a poisonous look. Maisie took me by the arm and led me through the backstage area and into the green room, where most of the candidates had retired after giving their speeches.

  When we opened the door, people turned to stare at us and conversations stopped mid-sentence, and even if I hadn’t heard the last thing Zelda Parsons said before clamping her mouth shut like a lantern fish, I would have known they’d all been talking about us.

  “Her own sister, and she didn’t even say anything.”

  I glared at Zelda, then looked around the room until I found a quiet corner and pointed it out to Maisie.

  “Over there,” I said, and we went over and took a seat on some risers, and then I asked, “What’s going on, Maisie?”

  She looked down at the riser. Long ago, someone had written I FARTED HERE in Sharpie. Even though the residue of the act had doubtless evaporated, we caught ourselves moving away from it at the same time and laughed a little harder than the moment warranted.

  When we couldn’t pretend it was funny anymore, Maisie looked up at me and said, “Claudia, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  So I was right. There had been something Maisie wasn’t telling me.

  She started off looking me in the eye, but within a few words, she’d turned her head and was staring out the window, weighing each word with the precision of a coke dealer.

  “This thing came up, Claudia, this art and language immersion program. It’s in Rome, and you spend your senior year studying there. Livia gave me the application—I guess her dad knows someone on the board—and I got in. I just found out last Monday.”

  There was a buzzing in my ears and Maisie’s voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. She’d known for over a week, I thought. She’d known before she even started campaigning. And Livia had given her the application.

  I’d thought the ratfuck on Maisie would come in the form of sabotage or humiliation, but Livia was too smart for that. She’d delivered it in the form of a one-way ticket to Rome, exactly the thing to keep Maisie too distracted to run a proper campaign.

  “I would have told you sooner, but I promised myself that I’d stay if I won the election. And until today, I thought, well, maybe there’d be nothing to tell.”

  “So you blew your campaign on purpose?” I snapped at her.

  “No, Claudia.”

  “Then what was all that stuff with the feather and the Egyptian Book of the Dead and not even starting your campaign until a week in and practically calling Ty out in front of the whole student body?”

  “You inspired me, Claudia. I’m tired of the way things are. If I win, things are going to change around here.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Then I don’t want to stay here and pretend I’m doing anybody any good. You’re right. All those people voting for us have known me for three years. They know what I stand for. I’m tired of watching people pat themselves on the back for how virtuous and honorable they are when it’s a lie,” she said, then added, “If I lose, I’m leaving.”

  “Do Mom and Dad know about Rome?”

  “Of course they know,” Maisie said. “They had to sign a waiver. I made them promise to let me tell you myself though.”

  “But you’re going to win,” I said, hating the desperate whine that crept into my voice.

  “I hope so.”

  The idea of Imperial Day without Maisie, of our parents’ house without Maisie, days and weeks without her like she’d been ripped out of my life—it hurt, and it hadn’t even happened yet. I wanted to bury my head in Maisie’s shoulder and beg her to stay. I wanted to tell her how much I needed her.

  So instead, of course, I yelled at her.

  “No, you don’t!” I said. “If you really wanted to win, you would have tried. You would have made normal posters and said the things you were supposed to say. You wouldn’t have sabotaged yourself.”

  The bell sounded, and Mrs. Lester’s voice came over the loudspeaker in the green room.

  “Thank you for your attention and your participation in the democratic process. It’s all just so exciting. Please return to homeroom at this time to cast your ballots.”

  Maisie got up from the risers and held out her hand to help me up.

  “I have faith in people, Claudia. If they look at me and decide they trust me to be in charge of the Honor Council, then I want to stay here and do that. But if what they want is something else, if they want to elect someone who’s just trying to add a line to his extracurriculars like Ty, or someone who’s just running to mess with us like Cal, then I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to serve alongside them like I think everything is fine, because nothing good is going to come of it.”

  The one-minute bell sounded and Maisie eyed the clock, ever the perfect student.

  “We’ll talk more at home,” she said. “I promise.”

  “Aren’t you going to be at lunch today?”

  “Library. I didn’t do my calculus homework last night because I was working on my speech.” She looked at the clock again, then back at me with an apologetic look on her face. “I have to go now, Claudia. But if I don’t see you again today, good luck.”

  “Maisie—”

  I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say. All I knew was that I didn’t want this conversation to end.
I wanted it to be always the moment before I had to go cast my ballot, my sister by my side. I wanted us to stay where we were, to never vote, to never find out the end result of the Imperial Day Student Elections because either way, everything from here on out was going to be different. This was the end of something, the beginning of something else, and I knew in my heart that—

  “What is it, Claudia?”

  “Good luck to you, too, Maisie.”

  XV

  My Sincere Respect To All

  Who Ran

  It was later that day, during seventh period, when the election results came in.

  By then, I’d sweated through my dress shirt, and my necktie felt too tight, and I was wishing that I’d brought a t-shirt to change into. I put my head down on the desk, daring Mr. Woolf to say anything about it. I wanted to get through the next forty-five minutes, go home, crawl into bed, and stay there for the next two days. I hadn’t spoken to a soul since the assembly. During lunch, I had gone to the Humanities faculty lounge and hidden in the book storage room where I’d eavesdropped on the Honor Council hearing the previous fall. I sat in the corner with my knees drawn up to my chest, and with each breath I took I thought, I will not cry, I will not cry, I will not cry.

  I put on my armor, I hardened my heart, and after half an hour, I was ready to come out of the storage room, ready to endure three more hours of stares and whispers without lashing out. That I did not ask a single person what the fuck they were looking at should have qualified me for some kind of medal.