by Mary McCoy
“What’s on the agenda?”
“Donations. New hires.” He mimed a yawn. “But you know how it is. Gotta keep an eye on the bastards.”
“Sure, I’ll do it,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too eager. Maybe Jasmine Park could have found an elegant way to maneuver the conversation toward my next point, but Mr. Prettinger was a journalism teacher. I figured a man who worked on deadlines would appreciate bluntness. “Mr. Prettinger, are you familiar with the Senate car wash fundraiser for Homecoming?”
“I am,” he said cagily.
“Is there any chance I might prevail upon you to volunteer two hours of your time washing the cars of ungrateful children for a good cause?”
“Since when is Homecoming a good cause?” he asked, though before I could answer, he scrunched up his face in disbelief and said, “Wait, you’re a senator now?”
“I thought you knew,” I said, then sensing his disapproving tone, I added, “It’s not like I’m selling heroin or something.”
“It’s just that once a person crosses the line from journalism to politics, they rarely cross back,” he said, regarding his Cobb salad as though it had disappointed him, instead of me.
“You haven’t totally lost me, Mr. Prettinger. I could be persuaded to cover the next three school board meetings for the Weekly Praetor.”
“If I wash cars,” Mr. Prettinger said.
“If you wash cars.”
Mr. Prettinger weighed the unpleasantness of this prospect with trying to wrangle unwilling student journalists into dull meetings for the next three months, then nodded when he’d made up his mind.
“You might actually make a very good politician, Claudia,” he said, then looked over my shoulder at Hector, who was pretending to read Mr. Prettinger’s bulletin board on AP Style, a faraway look in his eyes. “Who’s your friend? I don’t suppose you’re a writer, are you?”
The moment he found himself on Mr. Prettinger’s radar, I saw Hector snap to attention and turn into himself. Or rather, turn into the version of himself that did so well at Imperial Day. The warm eyes and easy smile, the confidence tempered by respectful deference, whether he was talking to a teacher or a student.
“Hector Estrella,” he said, stepping forward to shake Mr. Prettinger’s hand. “Nice to meet you, though I’m afraid I’m not much of a writer.”
Mr. Prettinger persisted. “Photography?”
“A little.”
“Cover three board meetings, your friend shoots the field hockey match on Friday, and you’ve got yourself a deal, Claudia.”
I turned to Hector before accepting his offer, wanting to make sure that I hadn’t roped him into anything too onerous—but then I thought about all those smooth, strong field hockey player legs, and judging by the smile on Hector’s face, he was thinking about the same thing.
“Done,” he said.
Mr. Prettinger saluted me before turning back to his dinner and baseball scores and said, “Pleasure doing business with you, McCarthy.”
“Likewise, sir.”
As Hector and I walked down the hall, I said, “Now we just have to do that nine more times.”
“Next time we split up,” Hector said. “No more of this two favors for the price of one nonsense.”
I had four and a half months of Imperial Day experience on Hector, and an older sister, but he was catching on fast.
XVIII
A Pile of Bricks on Your Chest
Dear Maisie,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to say that being on the Honor Council was an easy job or anything, but when people came to you, all you had to do was decide their fates.
I have to listen to their problems.
Oh, Maisie, their problems . . . There are the people who complain that the vegetarian hotdog is not also gluten free (Hint: because the main ingredient is gluten!), and the people who are upset that our parking lot is not covered, and what are we going to do if their precious Range Rover is exposed to the elements? (Oh my god, it is southern California, there are no elements.)
And if I want to keep my job and avoid being a one-term wonder like Chris Gibbons, I have to act like I care what these people have to say, and like I might be inclined to do something about it.
You might ask, Why is this a job you actually want to keep? To which I would reply, Because then there are the other kinds of problems.
There are the people on scholarship who can’t pay for their stupid required gym uniforms, which cost $200 including shoes, because whoever picked them out sure as shit wasn’t thinking about the scholarship kids when they did it. And there is the person who asked why we have two dedicated college and career counselors, yet no one who can really help you if, say, you have a panic attack in the middle of Calculus that makes you feel like there’s a pile of bricks on your chest. There is the person who wants to know why we don’t have an anti-bullying policy like every other school.
The Honor Council can’t protect people from things like that. And as long as the Senate is happy to be a glorified party-planning committee, neither can we.
Once upon a time, some smart person created the fiction that the Honor Council was where the wisest and the most promising and the best went, and that the work of the Senate was carried out by those of us who fell just a little bit short. I’m sure you never thought of it that way, but that’s what everyone else thinks.
But I think that a different kind of smart person would figure out a way to make people see that real power should live in the open, not in secret, that their lives should be ruled by hope that things could be better, not fear that they could lose everything if they made the wrong move.
Maisie, I have so much work to do.
But I know what I’m doing.
I really really miss you, Maisie.
XX,
Claudia
Of the last three things I told Maisie, two of them happened to be true.
XIX
What We’d Secretly Wanted
All Along
I’d never been so lonely in my life. As it turned out, you could fill up your days with all the theater practice and newspaper meetings and Senate hearings you wanted to and it didn’t make you any less lonely. I thought all the time about the conversation I’d had with Maisie before she left for Rome.
Am I one of them now?
That depends on you.
Of course, sitting at the old Honor Council lunch table without Maisie was out of the question now, so I spent lunch in the library, catching up on the homework I was increasingly neglecting, writing the newspaper stories I owed Mr. Prettinger, and going through the minutes of old Senate meetings. If I learned from the mistakes of the past, I reasoned, I might avoid them. Maybe I could actually make things better around here.
It was a pair of freshman girls named Lucy Lin and Veronica Ollenbeck who emerged victorious from the Senate elections. They did everything together, had known each other since the first grade, and Oberlin St. James could scarcely hide his contempt for them. They came from a world where being in student government meant that you got your picture in the yearbook and nothing more was expected of you. They had no idea they’d signed themselves up to be yelled at by their classmates each Tuesday during public hearing, then bossed around by the unappreciative Oberlin St. James and Jasmine Park each Thursday during our closed sessions. Hector and I took pity on them and even tried to include them in our surreptitious note-passing, but they were too terrified to respond.
Halfway through September, Hector and I had collected four teachers for the car wash, though I had not yet worked up the guts to approach Ms. Yee. Oberlin St. James gave us a stern look during our Thursday meeting while exacting a promise that it would be done by the next meeting, but I was too frustrated to care. What I wanted to be doing was drawing up some impactful policy and petitioning the Board of Commissioners to make changes and create a fund for people who couldn’t afford to buy a stupid required gym uniform, but instead, Oberlin St. James and
Jasmine Park had me bothering overworked educators and pricing balloon arches for a pep rally.
When we came to her part of the agenda, Jasmine Park made a pouting face and said, “I’m just going to come right out and say it: The Queen Mary is already booked for the night we want and they can’t squeeze us in. Same with the Skirball and the Getty.”
A collective gasp and groan went up in the room, and Oberlin St. James actually said, “How can this be?” like he was a 19th-century farmer who’d just lost his crop to a swarm of locusts.
Jasmine continued, “How would you guys feel if we had the dance here instead? The Queen Mary is so far away anyhow. What if we did it here in the gym, but really made it nice? More underclassmen would be able to attend. Would everyone be okay with that?”
I am sure it never once crossed Jasmine’s mind that we would not be okay with it. She had no backup plan, unless her backup plan was to subtly convince us that having Homecoming in the gym was what we’d secretly wanted all along. However, not even the freshmen, Lucy Lin and Veronica Ollenbeck, seemed to appreciate the decision that Jasmine had allegedly made on their behalf. The fact was, Imperial Day students expected to be spoiled and fussed over to a certain extent, and no amount of foil fringe and paper lanterns could make the idea of spending Saturday night dancing in our gym seem glamorous.
Oberlin St. James sighed and said, “This isn’t what we’d hoped to hear, obviously, but let’s not decide anything about the venue today. I propose we hold a special meeting next Monday and come to a final decision then.”
We all agreed to this and moved on to the next order of business. This was the point at which I should have left well enough alone, but I couldn’t help thinking that just because Jasmine Park couldn’t get a reservation at the Queen Mary, that didn’t mean that no one could. I wanted to prove that I deserved to be part of the Senate, that even though I was a mistake and a fluke and a person who should not have been elected, I was not without my uses.
I was only trying to be helpful.
XX
Woodward & Bernstein
Other people leveraged their famous families all the time. Livia’s dad had gotten her that internship at Google when she was a freshman, and Astrid Murray was always surrounded by people angling for a visit to a set, or a studio internship, or an invitation to one of the star-studded parties her parents threw at their house during awards season. My parents may not have been the richest or the most famous at Imperial Day, but still, InVigor was a name that got people’s attention.
The problem was that in order to exploit it, I had to call the Queen Mary, and my stuttering on the phone is a miserable experience for everyone. Even if the person on the other end of the line had the patience to understand me, nobody would believe I was legitimately affiliated with a major corporation. That was why I brought Hector in on the plan. He’d make the call for me, on behalf of Tessa McCarthy, CEO of InVigor, to inquire about availability for a little something she’d like to arrange for the students at her daughter’s school.
At first, Hector hated the idea.
“It’s shady, Claudia. It might even be an Honor Code violation.”
“What if I told my mom what we were doing? Would that make you feel better?”
“You’re going to say, ‘Mom, is it okay if we impersonate your assistant in order to book the Queen Mary for Homecoming?’”
“That is exactly what I’m going to say.”
What my relationship with my parents lacks in warmth, it does at least make up for in honesty.
Hector considered this. I could tell what he wanted to say because I have known third graders who possessed better poker faces. He wanted me to let it go. He wanted us to keep our mouths shut and have Homecoming in the gym, but instead he said, “Okay, I’ll do it, but only if you talk to your mom and she says it’s okay.”
He sounded crabby about it, and that was how I realized that Hector Estrella was my friend. The rest of them could have polite, respectful, warm, smiling Hector, but crabby Hector was all mine.
“Then I’ll do it right now,” I said, pulling out my phone and sending a text. A few seconds later, my phone buzzed. “She says it’s fine.”
Hector sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”
I entered the number for the Queen Mary corporate reservations line and put the phone on speaker.
“What should I say?” Hector asked while I was ringing, and I realized that maybe we’d underprepared.
I only had time to jot down my mother’s name and the name of her company before a woman’s voice came on the line and asked how she could assist us.
“This is Hector Estrella,” he said, cringing as his real name slipped out. I poked him in the arm and motioned for him to keep talking.
Hector recovered and gave the representative his false credentials.
“What date were you looking for?” the woman asked, adding, “And you said you were calling from InVigor?”
I could almost hear her straighten up in her chair when Hector said yes.
“On behalf of Tessa McCarthy,” he repeated. “We were hoping for October 15. She’s trying to organize something for her daughter’s school.”
“Very good. Let me just check the calendar,” the woman said. I could hear her fingers clicking on the keyboard. “And what school is this for?”
“The Imperial Day Academy.”
There was some more clicking, then a long pause, and then the woman said, “Huh. There’s already a reservation for the Imperial Day Academy here. For the 16th of October, actually, not the 15th.”
“That’s odd. What name is it under?” Hector asked, his voice blandly cheerful so that it didn’t even sound like he was asking for information that was none of his business and that the woman on the reservations line should not have been giving out to him.
“Oberlin St. James is what it says here,” the woman said.
Hector didn’t miss a beat.
“That makes sense. Oberlin is one of Tessa’s daughter’s friends. He must have taken care of it already.”
He was proving himself to be a far more accomplished liar than I’d expected. While he carried on his pleasant back-and-forth with the reservation lady, he and I locked eyes, the implications of this phone call dawning on us.
“And it’s for three hundred?” Hector asked.
That was how many students were expected at Homecoming. There was more keyboard clicking.
“No, it’s only for forty.” I let out a gasp, and the woman asked, “Is something wrong?”
Hector maintained his composure. “Everything’s fine. Maybe there’s been a change of plans. I will have Tessa’s daughter check with Oberlin and we’ll get back to you if there are any changes.”
“Very good,” the woman said. “And what was your name again?”
Hector hung up without answering her. We sat there, both of us staring at the phone on the table between us, absolutely still and silent.
“Come on,” I said.
I got up from the table and headed down the hall to the classroom where the Senate met. Hector followed behind me. We didn’t speak the whole way there even though the halls were deserted. This was too big to say out loud anywhere public. Once we were inside, I locked the classroom door behind us, turned out the lights, and sat down at the classroom computer.
Hector and I didn’t talk about what we were doing. We didn’t have to. I logged in with the Senate password and opened up the folder labeled BUDGET. One by one, we read every document that had been opened in the past week, then looked through the other files, even the ones with names that made them sound unrelated. People at Imperial Day didn’t succeed at deception, fraud, and embezzlement by going around naming files things like “Secret Homecoming Dance” or “My Plan to Defraud the Imperial Day Academy and Throw a Giant Party for My Friends.”
Because that was what this was, right?
I couldn’t think of any other possible explanation. The officers of the Senate had lied a
nd told us that we couldn’t have Homecoming at the Queen Mary because it was already booked when, in fact, they’d already booked it for themselves. Only a fraction of the student body would be able to attend because, presumably, only a fraction of the student body would even know about it. The rest would go to Homecoming in the gym like suckers.
“Maybe it’s not what it looks like,” Hector said. So sweet of him to go looking for the best in people.
“Maybe,” I said, but I had a tight feeling in my throat. My hands shook as I moved the mouse and opened file after file. As the light from the screen bathed our faces in an icy blue glow, I wondered if Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had felt this way back in 1972. One minute, they’re investigating a little break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, the next they’re finding out that President Nixon’s reelection committee cut the burglars a check for $25,000 the week before.
“Check the downloads,” Hector said. I clicked on the folder, sorted the files by date, and opened the most recent one, a file named REFNO6379. It had been downloaded right before the last Senate meeting.
When I saw what it was, I covered my mouth with my hand.
“Oh my god,” I said.
“Print it,” Hector said. “Print five of them.”
Hector and I shut down the computer, shut the classroom door behind us, and headed for the nearest exit. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to break into a limping run. We couldn’t stay here. We needed to be somewhere we could talk freely, and I wanted to be there as soon as possible.
We left campus and crossed the street to the corner bus stop, which no one from Imperial Day ever used. As meeting places went, we could hardly have found anything safer this close. This being west LA, the likelihood that a bus would materialize was next to nothing.
The secret vibrated between us as we sat on the bus stop bench. In our bags, we each carried copies of a receipt for a deposit for a party at the Queen Mary paid out of the Imperial Day Academy Senate bank account. I doubted it was a coincidence that it was for $5000, the exact amount of the discrepancy between what OSJ thought the Senate had to spend on the Homecoming dance and how much Jasmine Park claimed was actually in the bank.