by Mary McCoy
Now, with my head down on the desk in Mr. Woolf’s class, I imagined that the medal was real, that they held another assembly just so they could loop it over my head while Mrs. Lester told me how brave I’d been and how sorry they all were and the entire student body stood up one by one and begged for my forgiveness.
We were wrong, Claudia.
We are sorry, Claudia.
Nobody has ever suffered the way you have suffered, Claudia.
It was self-indulgent and pathetic, and it felt excellent.
I was deep into enjoying the public groveling segment of my fantasy when the bell rang, which caused me to jolt upright in my chair and knock my tablet and books onto the floor. There were a few giggles as I flailed and blinked myself back to consciousness. It seemed too early for the bell, I thought. Or maybe I’d been asleep much longer than I’d thought. I picked up my notebook and was inspecting it for drool when the seldom-heard voice of Dr. Graves crackled through the loudspeaker. It sounded as though it had traveled a great distance to be there, possibly from the 1900s and through a Victrola.
“Good afternoon to you all.” There came a little cough, a rustling of papers, and the creaking of a leather chair before he continued. “I offer my most heartfelt congratulations to the winners of this year’s elections and my sincere respect to all who ran. To participate in the Senate and the Honor Council elections is to embody the very spirit and soul of the Imperial Day Academy, and it is one of the noblest things you can do during your time here.”
I thought about what Maisie had said about how much people at Imperial Day liked to pat themselves on the back. There was nothing noble about what I’d done. I’d gotten some signatures on a petition, made some posters, given a speech, and I wasn’t even sure why I was running anymore.
Dr. Graves continued. “Without further ado, then, I am pleased to announce that your new Honor Council president is Ty Berman. Honor Council vice president is Livia Drusus . . .”
He went on announcing each seat, class by class, but I didn’t hear a word of it. All I knew was that Ty was president and Maisie wasn’t. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see Livia beaming, nodding graciously as she accepted congratulations from the people in her class. I could almost see the glint in her eye as everything unfolded exactly as she’d planned. I wondered how long it would take for Ty to all but turn over the Honor Council to her. Maisie would be in art class right now, I thought. I wondered what she was feeling. Was she relieved? Was she already dancing on the tables that now she was absolved of trying to make Imperial Day a better place? She could go to Rome and study Italian and art with a clear conscience. There was nothing holding her back now except me.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around, eyes narrowed, and said, “What?” with unmasked hostility.
Tabitha Lyons pulled back her hand as though I’d bitten it, and I immediately felt bad. Tabitha was sweet and timid and not at all a bad sort of person. I had a hard time believing that she would have giggled behind her hand while some clod shouted “P-P-P-PLEDGE” in the middle of the auditorium. If she wasn’t so cripplingly shy, maybe she would even have done something to stop it.
“I’m sorry, Tabitha,” I said, my face softening. “It’s been a shitty day.”
“But you won,” she said.
“I did?”
I searched her face for something to suggest she was joking. Even if she was making fun of me, that would have been all right, but her eyes were as wide and brown and sincere as a dairy cow’s.
“You did,” she said. “You and Hector Estrella. Congratulations.”
Instead of thanking her, I turned around and put my head back down on the desk.
IMPERIAL DAY ACADEMY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS v. CLAUDIA McCARTHY
OFFICIAL HEARING TRANSCRIPT
MR. CARSON QUENTIN MATHERS, PRESIDENT OF THE IMPERIAL DAY ACADEMY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS: 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 three 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.
Part II
The Reign of Ty
The Honor Council
Senior Class representatives:
Ty Berman, President
Maisie McCarthy (resigned)
Lola Stephenson (runner-up)
Junior Class representatives:
Livia Drusus, Vice President
Cal Hurt
Sophomore Class representatives:
Esme Kovacs
Zelda Parsons
The Senate
Senior Class representatives:
Oberlin St. James, President
Jasmine Park, Vice President
Junior Class representatives:
Ernest Collingswood
Morgan Peterson
Sophomore Class representatives:
Hector Estrella
Claudia McCarthy
Two freshman representatives for both the Honor Council and the Senate will be elected during the first two weeks of fall semester.
XVI
Corporate Yoga
In case you cared, the summer before sophomore year was the best one of my life. It was the last gasp of my old life before politics reeled me in. It was my last real summer with Maisie before Rome took her away from me.
Maisie didn’t spend much time with her old friends once she’d resigned her seat on the Honor Council. At the lunch table, Augustus was disappointed and constantly trying to talk her out of it. Ty was as taciturn and graceless in victory as he was in everything else. Marcus was checked out, his thoughts already three thousand miles away at NYU, and Livia could hardly contain her glee that things had turned out just like she’d hoped they would. It was, overall, not an environment that was conducive to friendship, and when school was over, I noticed that Maisie never seemed to return any of their texts, seeming instead to prefer my company.
She taught me to drive that summer. We practiced in the parking garage at our parents’ office. They’d long ago sold their interest in DeliverMe, which had weathered the storm of the security breach and the Melinda Incident and was eventually absorbed into Amazon. Following that crisis (and, of course, the crisis of my birth), our parents had really gotten into What Really Matters and Giving Back to the Community and An Ethical Corporate Model and things like that. They wound up starting InVigor, a network of charitable ventures that allowed people to make low-interest loans to poor people or fund installation art projects and basically feel very good about themselves by doing very little. Maybe they were trying to be better people, but it was hard to take any of that seriously when they operated out of a beachfront office building in Santa Monica and brought in an instructor for staff yoga classes on the beach at 8 a.m. and noon.
All summer, Maisie and I drove to InVigor to do corporate yoga. We went out for coffee. I sat on the beach and read history books while she ran on the bike path. We cooked. We talked. We were inseparable, but it wasn’t until the Fourth of July that Maisie finally brought up the thing that nobody had been saying all summer. We were parked on the roof at InVigor so we could watch the fireworks at the Santa Monica Pier without actually having to deal with the crowds.
“Are you mad at me for leaving?” she asked.
I could tell she’d been wanting to ask me for a long time. I could tell it was hard for her to ask it, and I didn’t know what to say back. I was upset. Maisie was abando
ning me, abandoning Imperial Day, abandoning all the things the two of us could have done together to make it a better place. And of course, I missed her already.
“I’m not mad,” I said at last, turning over the words I wanted to say next, making sure they were the right ones. “I just don’t know how I’m going to get through the next year without you.”
“You’ll get through the same way you got through your freshman year,” Maisie said. “You didn’t need me then.”
There was the tiniest shred of hurt in her voice, and I felt guilty all over again as I remembered the ways I’d tried to distance myself from Maisie when I’d been keeping secrets from her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was an idiot.”
I didn’t want to let on that I’d ever doubted her. The dirty tricks, the shady expulsions, the power plays—those things were the opposite of everything Maisie was about.
“That’s not why I’m leaving. You know that, don’t you, Claudia?”
I nodded, but it was still nice to be reassured.
“Do you think less of me now, Maisie?” I asked. She gave me a puzzled look, so I clarified. “I mean, do you think I’m one of them now?”
Maisie took a pull on her bottle of sparkling water, then twisted the lid back on the glass bottle and set it in the Prius’s cup holder.
“You don’t have control over any of this,” she said, gesturing toward the parking garage, the night sky, the beach, all of it. “The only thing you can control is the way you act. Whatever kind of person you are or aren’t is up to you, Claudia.”
And that brought me right back to the place our conversation had started.
“I don’t know if I can do it without you, Maisie.”
“You know I’ll be here if you need me.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I know that, but it’s not nothing either.”
XVII
Elegant Solutions
As President Oberlin St. James called to order the first session of the 116th Imperial Day Senate, ingloriously gathered in Mr. Samson’s chemistry classroom, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my fellow senators were surprised to see me there. Like they didn’t think I’d go through with it, like my victory was such an obvious sham that I should have done the decent thing and resigned like Maisie had.
“Our first order of business is to welcome our new senators, Hector Estrella and Claudia McCarthy.” Oberlin St. James nodded in our direction as we lifted our hands to wave to our new colleagues.
“Okay, then. Moving on to the next thing: special elections to fill the freshman seats.”
Between Ty and Oberlin St. James, Imperial Day had not elected especially personable leadership. Ty wouldn’t talk to you at all, whereas Oberlin St. James wouldn’t talk to you until he’d decided that you weren’t an idiot, and Oberlin St. James thought almost everyone was an idiot.
“Claudia and Hector, we expect you to attend the orientation for all freshmen wishing to run for Senate, but you are not to speak to any of the candidates or answer their questions or breathe a word of advice to them. Please leave that to those of us who know what we’re doing.”
Oberlin St. James gave a cloying smile to his vice president, Jasmine Park, and to the other upperclassman senators, but there were no smiles for Hector and me. We were still on probation.
I noticed that Hector was writing down everything Oberlin St. James said as he laid out the itinerary for the freshman election orientation.
Shit, I thought, I should be taking this more seriously, and I reached into my bag for a notebook. When I leaned over, though, my eyes fell on Hector’s paper and I saw that he’d written in blocky, draftsman letters along the margin:
THANK YOU TO OBERLIN ST. JAMES FOR THAT WARM WELCOME
and beneath that:
WHAT SHOULD WE TELL THE FRESHMEN IF THEY ASK US WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A SENATOR?
He hadn’t nudged me or made a thing of it. He’d just been sitting there waiting for me to notice.
I opened my notebook and pretended to write down the date and time of the assembly, but what I really wrote was:
LET’S TELL THEM IT’S A CULT.
“Moving on to Homecoming,” Oberlin St. James said, and without meaning to, I let out a small sigh. It was a reflex, a momentary forgetfulness on my part. After all, it was only a year ago that I’d been the kind of person who studiously avoided all Homecoming-related activities, and now I had been put in charge of them. But momentary lapse or not, Oberlin St. James was not amused.
“Is this beneath you, Claudia?”
I’d assumed it was a rhetorical question, but after an excruciating silence, it became clear that Oberlin St. James was waiting for a response.
“No,” I said at last.
“Because this is what we do. We hear student grievances. We intercede on their behalf. And we plan and we organize and we raise money for the events that make life here at Imperial Day something other than a desolate wasteland of interminable sameness, punctuated by nothing but tests and lunch. Do you understand, Claudia?”
“Yes,” I said, more quickly this time.
But what I was thinking as Oberlin St. James glared at me, probably wondering if I was another Chris Gibbons, and as Jasmine Park rolled her eyes at the junior class senators, Morgan Peterson and Ernest Collingswood, was, Can’t we do better than that? Can’t we do more?
Having put me in my place, Oberlin St. James carried on with the Homecoming plans.
“The feedback we got last year indicated that people preferred to have the dance off-site rather than in the gym. Jasmine and I have been going over possible venues, and so far the frontrunners are the Queen Mary, the Getty, and the Skirball. I’m going to turn things over to Jasmine to discuss what we need to do for any of this to come close to happening. It won’t be easy, but I think Jasmine has figured out a few elegant solutions to our fundraising situation.”
My eyes darted over to Hector’s paper, and I saw that he’d written:
OH MY GOD HE LOVES HER.
Happily, I hadn’t alienated all of my Senate colleagues. I snuffled out a laugh in the back of my hand and jotted back:
ELEGANT FUNDRAISING SKILLS = VERY HOT
Jasmine flipped her highlighted hair over one shoulder and ran us through the price for each venue, what people were willing to pay for tickets, and how we’d make up the difference. She explained the kinds of fundraising that Imperial Day students were resistant to and those they could often be tricked into doing. She showed us her spreadsheets. I’d joked about it, but I had to admit that the whole thing was, in fact, sort of hot.
For Homecoming, the most lucrative fundraiser was the teacher car wash. Senate members sweet-talked ten teachers into volunteering, and then people would pay obscene amounts of money to have Mr. Woolf or Mrs. DiVincenzo or whoever scrub their cars.
It struck me as a little tone-deaf and possibly cruel in the extreme when you considered the financial situation of most Imperial Day teachers compared with that of the typical student. Asking them to take a rag to the wheel well of Lexus after student-owned Lexus seemed a little too close to saying outright the thing that was silently implied in our dealings: You serve at our pleasure.
Jasmine Park licked her lips and reported that the Senate had $5000 in the account set aside for Homecoming expenses, and I saw Oberlin St. James’s prodigious eyebrows knit together.
“Are you sure that’s all we have?” he asked. “I could have sworn there was $10,000 in that account.”
Jasmine looked down at her papers, then shook her head. “According to the bank statement, it’s $5000.”
“Huh, remind me to look into that,” said Oberlin St. James in a distracted way that made me fairly sure he was never going to look into it. “Anyhow, Claudia and Hector, for your first assignment as senators, I put it to you to find ten teachers for the car wash. And don’t come back without Yee.”
I felt immediately defensive of my brilliant history teacher. “Why
do you want Ms. Yee?”
“She gives more Cs than anyone at Imperial Day. Our constituents will find it most gratifying to see her washing our cars.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. A C at Imperial Day was like an F anywhere else.
“At our next meeting, we’ll open up for public comment from the student body. Brace yourselves. The first one is always long. Until then, Claudia and Hector will organize the car wash. Jasmine will book the Homecoming venue. Get the Queen Mary if you can, Jasmine, and I want everyone to come up with at least three ideas for Homecoming week activities. See you Thursday.”
I looked at the clock. With the nine-hour time difference, I’d missed my chance to Skype with Maisie. I sent her a quick text apologizing and asking if she was free the next night instead.
Everyone else left the second Oberlin St. James dismissed us, but Hector waited for me to finish my text before getting up to go.
“Are there ten teachers we can persuade to do the car wash?”
He kept his tone light, but I could tell the ethical implications had occurred to him as well, and he was troubled, torn between offending our teachers by asking or invoking the wrath of Oberlin St. James by failing.
“Oh, there are ten teachers. That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
Hector had transferred in last year. He only had four and a half months of Imperial Day under his belt. I had a full year, plus an older sister, which translated to fairly reliable intel on who would be flattered to be asked, who would agree under duress, and who should not be approached under any circumstances. But it wasn’t that easy.
“They’re all going to want something,” I said.
We were walking toward the journalism classroom where my old newspaper advisor, Mr. Prettinger, sat at his desk eating a Cobb salad and reading the sports section of the Los Angeles Times.
“Hi, Mr. Prettinger,” I said, sticking my head through the door.
“Claudia,” he said, raising his hand in greeting and folding up the paper, “you are just the person I wanted to see. There’s a Board of Commissioners meeting tonight and nobody can cover it. Can you go?”