I, Claudia

by Mary McCoy

  It wasn’t until the third night that Maisie asked about Imperial Day, and by then, I’d almost forgotten about it. We were dressing up to go see Chicago, Maisie in a swingy green dress, me in the tuxedo shirt and cigarette pants I’d worn to Homecoming.

  “How is school, anyway? Is Cal still terrible?”

  She asked like he was a distant memory. A distant, distinctly bad, but ultimately harmless memory, and not the boogeyman of the waking nightmare that was my current life at Imperial Day.

  “Even worse than you remember him,” I said. “Let’s talk about absolutely anything else.”

  The weekend melted away, and then the week filled with sleeping in, lavish meals, museums, and history, and I hardly thought about Imperial Day at all. Hector texted me once to ask about the holiday food drive, but Maisie and I were at the theater and I didn’t even see it until three hours later.

  Maisie had lobbied hard for our parents to meet us in New York for Thanksgiving, and eventually they gave in. We ordered a complete Thanksgiving dinner from Whole Foods, and Maisie and I made pumpkin pies and brewed one pot of coffee after another. While the pies baked, we went up to the rooftop with our hands clamped around mugs to keep them warm. Downstairs, our parents did something I’d never seen before: they put on sweatpants and watched television while doing nothing else.

  “Can I ask you something?” Maisie’s voice was serious, and even as I nodded, I felt my chest tighten up because I had a feeling that whatever was coming next, I didn’t want to talk about it. This whole week was about not talking about it. That was the whole point.

  “What are you staying there for?” she asked.

  I didn’t reply. I hadn’t realized it up until then, but the answer to that question had gotten so tangled and messy. If you could get it, a diploma from Imperial Day would allow you to spend the next four years pretty much wherever you wanted to go. But that wasn’t why I stayed. It was more than that. I’d built something during my time there, or at least I’d started to. Under Hector and me, Imperial Day could be a place where people tried to make the world better, where they helped each other instead of ratfucking each other’s campaigns and lives.

  I didn’t want to walk away from that without a fight.

  “Is it Hector?”

  I didn’t answer that either, but Maisie wouldn’t let me off the hook.

  “I listen to you when you talk, Claudia, and for a person who never likes anyone, you really seem to like him.”

  “He’s my best friend,” I said, holding the coffee cup close to my chest to ward off the cold. If there was one thing I wanted to talk about less than the situation at Imperial Day, it was the situation with Hector.

  “And?”

  “And he has a girlfriend. I invited him to come on this trip with me, but he said no.”

  “Because of her?”

  “Partly. Mostly it was because he didn’t want to abandon his post. Like I’m doing.”

  Maisie’s brow furrowed as a gust of wind blew her bangs back.

  “You can quit, you know. It won’t ruin your life,” Maisie said, her eyes serious in a big-sister-wisdom-imparting kind of way.

  Whatever damage Imperial Day had done to Maisie, she had healed now. Hemingway said that the world broke you and that afterwards, some people were stronger at the broken places. Maisie looked like that now, wise and beautifully scarred, and for a split second, I wanted it for myself—until I thought about what Maisie had done to get that way, what she was suggesting I do now.

  Maisie was telling me to abandon Hector the way she’d abandoned me. She was telling me to save myself. I never would have called Maisie a selfish person, but in that moment, I realized how much different my life would have been, what a different place Imperial Day would have been, if Maisie had stayed. If she’d beaten Ty in the Honor Council presidential race like I knew she could have if she’d really wanted to. If she’d actually tried.

  The hatchet job on Oberlin St. James would never have happened. Cal would never have lasted out the year on the Honor Council, much less been elected president. Hector and I would be regular, ordinary senators, not officers with targets on our backs. Zelda Parsons would have been spared humiliation. Esme Kovacs would have been spared harassment. All the people who’d been wrongfully accused would have clean records. Ms. Yee would still have her job. The turtles would still be alive.

  That was what running away got you. A list of wrongs you could have righted. I was tired of waiting for the worst to happen, then reacting when it did. I didn’t want to run away. I wanted to take a stand against Cal, against the whole poisonous, paranoid police state that my high school had become.

  I could do it, but only if I didn’t care what happened to me, and in a reckless moment, standing on top of an apartment building staring out across Manhattan, I didn’t.

  There was nothing I wanted, nothing I was afraid to lose anymore.

  “Claudia?”

  I shook myself back to the present moment. Maisie watched me, a nervous expression on her face.

  “We should go inside,” she said, tugging my arm with false cheer. “The pies will be done soon.”

  Our parents were still watching football when we went back downstairs. It was strange to see them this way, but we all passed a pleasant two days together in this other family’s apartment. We went to Times Square and the top of the Empire State Building and did all of our Christmas shopping at the same stores we had in LA, and when my leg started to hurt, we went back to the apartment for a Tim Burton movie marathon.

  During that time, I became more resolved than ever. I would return to Imperial Day with a mission: to eliminate the threat of Cal and save the school, even if something terrible happened to me in the process.

  It was only after my parents and I got through airport security at JFK that I began to have doubts and to worry about what had happened at Imperial Day in my absence.

  As we waited at the gate, I checked my email and made the internet rounds, and as far as I could tell, things had been quiet. Too quiet, really. I’d only had the one text from Hector, and that was days ago. What if something had happened to him while I’d been gone? What if something had happened to me? What if I returned to Imperial Day to find that I’d been charged, convicted, and sentenced without my knowledge? Before we boarded the plane, I texted Hector: On my way home—what’s going on?

  Then the flight attendant made me turn off my phone before Hector texted back. The whole flight back to LA, I ran through every possible scenario I could think of. In some of them, Hector had to step down as president or got expelled. In others, I did. And in between terrible, worried thoughts, I imagined how I was going to stop Cal. Sort of. I could visualize myself setting out to do it, then my brain would flash forward to the students of Imperial Day lifting me up onto their shoulders to celebrate their liberation. It was the part in between that I couldn’t picture.

  When the plane touched down, though, my silly little plans and fantasies hardened into something real and necessary.

  I had five texts from Hector when I turned my phone on. There was also one from Esme, one from Lucy Lin, and two from numbers I didn’t recognize.

  Something terrible had happened.

  I’d been right to be afraid, right to run away, but I’d been afraid of the wrong things. I’d been afraid for the wrong person. If I’d known what was going to happen, I would have done it all differently.

  I would have invited Soren Bieckmann to come to New York with me, and if I had, he’d still be alive today.

  XL

  Not an Accident,

  Not on Purpose

  I wasn’t there when it happened, but here’s what I know.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Soren left his home at around 10 a.m. and went to the LA Food Bank, where he passed out turkeys and canned cranberry sauce until 3 p.m. He returned to his house at 6 p.m., where he ate his last meal—a frozen bean and cheese burrito and a spinach salad—and played video games. At 8 p.m., he left hi
s home again and went to a party at the home of an actor who’d once been on a Nick Jr. show, but had since gone into DJ’ing.

  Nobody saw him drinking anything except coffee at the party, but there were a handful of accounts saying that he’d appeared to be slightly intoxicated. Whatever happened, he knew better than to drive himself home. His car was found parked in the Hollywood Hills near the actor/DJ’s house two days later.

  Soren punched in his front door security code at 1 a.m. Someone wearing a gray hoodie can be seen in the security footage walking him to the door, but you can’t see his face, and in the footage, he doesn’t follow Soren inside. Whoever that person was, he was the last person to see Soren alive.

  Soren’s parents were in Park City when it happened. They found him on Saturday morning when they got home. There was no drug paraphernalia around, but the toxicology report showed that Soren had ingested hydrocodone and diazepam. He had a prescription for the latter, for anxiety, but not the former. He died sometime around three or four Friday morning.

  People speculated that he’d relapsed, that he’d used that three-hour window between volunteering at the food bank and returning to his house to obtain the painkillers illegally. Some people said it was an accidental overdose, while others said it was on purpose. Soren’s grades weren’t good. He’d lost a lot of his old friends since he’d gotten clean. He spent a lot of time alone. He hated being sober. His parents had left him alone at Thanksgiving.

  People theorized that the person in the gray hoodie, his or her face hidden from the camera, was an unlicensed cab driver or some minor celebrity who’d decided to be a Good Samaritan and make sure Soren got home, but was afraid to stick around. Police questioned everyone at the party, but nobody admitted to going home with Soren and nobody remembered seeing anyone in a gray hoodie.

  I didn’t buy any of it. Not Soren. Not accidentally. Not on purpose. It wasn’t possible.

  I know that sounds naïve. My mother was raised by a family of drunks, and has spent my entire life drilling into my head the two things that addicts do: they relapse and they lie. But none of that sounds like Soren to me.

  Why would he spend five hours helping other people on Thanksgiving, then leave depressed? And if he was lonely and it took him three hours to get home from the food bank, wasn’t it equally possible that he went surfing or to a coffee shop or to an AA meeting? He wasn’t upset that his old friends had fallen away. He was happy about it. He hated those people, and he’d told me as much at Homecoming when he realized that Cal didn’t have to be nice to him anymore. He was relieved.

  Not an accident. Not on purpose. Not Soren.

  We drove home from the airport, my parents peppering me with questions I didn’t have the answers to yet while I sat in the backseat, too shocked and numb and angry to cry. They’d met Soren, but they didn’t know him. Their concern was based on curiosity, that a thing like this had happened to a student at their daughter’s school. I didn’t have it in me to answer questions like that, so eventually, I handed the phone to my mother and told her to call Hector herself.

  She and my father had him on speaker when we pulled into the driveway. I jumped out of the car and ran toward the house without waiting for them, without helping with the bags. The last thing I heard before I slammed the car door shut was Hector asking, “Is Claudia there? Is she okay?”

  I was not okay. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Hector. I wanted to run up to my room, pull the covers over my head, and stay there until someone came to tell me that none of it was true.

  I unlocked the front door and dashed into the foyer, where our house sitter had stacked the mail. Behind me, I could hear my mother asking questions that no teenage boy except Hector Estrella would have known the answers to: Where were the services going to be held? Was his family asking that money be donated to a charity in lieu of flowers?

  That was as far as I made it. That was when it hit me.

  That Soren Bieckmann was dead.

  My floppy-haired, reformed drug dealer Homecoming date. My friend. I thought about the way he’d put his arm around my shoulder at the dance, the way his eyes had gone intense when he said, “I’d rather be honest.”

  Someone else is responsible for this, I thought. The person who gave him the hydrocodone. The person who drove him home without bothering to make sure he was okay. His parents, for not being home when it happened. Everyone at Imperial Day who’d turned their backs on him the second he got sober. Me, for not taking him to New York with me.

  I’d rather be honest.

  When the universe looked down and said, Which one of these lives should I blot out today? that’s who it picked. The guy who said things like that.

  The rest of us got to live.

  XLI

  A Good Person

  The funeral wasn’t until the next weekend. There were about two seconds of a police investigation, and then the coroner had to do some toxicology reports before they’d release the body to Soren’s family.

  The body.

  It was so strange, that was all he was now. All anyone at school could talk about was how sad and stupid and tragic and awful it was. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about any of it, but I heard things. It had been one of those big, sprawling parties that started early, ended late, and ranged indoors, outdoors, upstairs, downstairs. Certain names began to bubble up to the surface consistently enough that I believed the accounts to be accurate, but it was impossible to know when they’d left, what they’d seen or hadn’t seen.

  Chris Gibbons had been there. And Kian Sarkosian. So had Cal. So had Esme Kovacs. And so had Hector.

  Those were the names I heard whispered again and again.

  I just never heard it from Hector.

  He was out sick with a cold half the week, and when he returned, he wouldn’t talk about it.

  “Did you see him?” I asked after an especially muted and brief Senate meeting. “Did you talk to him?”

  “Claudia, I’m not ready to talk about it,” he said.

  “Was Cal fucking with him? Did you see them together?”

  “Claudia, stop it,” he said in a way that made me feel like a vulture for asking in the first place.

  I wasn’t a vulture, though. I wasn’t one of the people who spoke of nothing else that week, who cataloged every known fact or rumor of the night Soren died like they were his fucking biographers. Those people were the vultures, and of course, I talked to them so I could learn what they knew. I hated it, I hated them, I hated myself, and yet, I needed to know.

  Because I was never going to be able to know what Soren was thinking the night he died. I would never know if he felt lonely when he got home from volunteering at the food bank or if he was happy to be going to a party or if he went out that night intending to get fucked up or if the thought never entered his mind.

  I was never going to get to know any of that, so this was all I had.

  The funeral was at Forest Lawn in Glendale, where all the old movie stars are buried. It was a chilly gray day, little flecks of rain spitting down on everyone’s faces. The service was outside, which was fine because it felt right. Nobody wanted sunshine.

  Hector and I went together. He offered to drive as an olive branch, and since Esme had stayed home, I accepted (she said she had to meet her SAT tutor, but I suspected that she just didn’t want to be there). I didn’t want Hector to be angry with me for asking too many questions, and I didn’t want to be angry with him because he wasn’t ready to talk. If he wanted to pretend there was no unspoken business between us, I would let him.

  Attendance was spottier than I would have guessed it would be. I’d expected hordes of people who’d never even talked to Soren huddled together and making a spectacle of their grief, making his death all about themselves. That was how it had been at school all week.

  Maybe it was the weather or how long it took to drive from the Westside to Glendale. Maybe it was the seediness of Soren’s previous affiliations or the fact that so
many Imperial Day students had purchased from Soren on at least one occasion the very narcotic on which he’d OD’ed. Chris Gibbons did not have the nerve to show his face, but Cal did.

  I wouldn’t say I was surprised.

  That was the other reason I asked so many questions. When I found out Cal had been there the night Soren died, I wanted to know how he’d been involved with it. Not if. How.

  I realize that’s a very serious accusation to make, but just listen.

  I’m not saying that Cal ground up a fistful of pills and snuck them into Soren’s cup of coffee. I am not even saying that he gave Soren the painkillers.

  What I’m saying is that I know Cal, and as I’ve told you, I know that he did the things that he did because it amused him, and the idea of taunting a recovering addict who was alone on Thanksgiving, drinking coffee at a party where everyone else was doing shots, walking around by himself because he remembered too late that none of these people were really his friends anymore?

  I think that is an idea that would have amused Cal very much.

  I’m not calling Cal a murderer. What I am saying is that if he hadn’t been at the party that night, Soren would still be alive.

  So maybe I am calling him a murderer.

  Cal stood in the second row of mourners, right behind Soren’s parents, wearing a suit and looking somber and reflective. Soren’s mother turned and whispered something to him, and he turned around, scanned the crowd. When his eyes fell on us, he said something to Soren’s mother, then waved us up to the front.

  What do you do in a situation like that? You go. You do not make a scene at your friend’s funeral and upset his parents. You go up to the front and you sit next to the person you hate most in the world, the person you suspect is responsible for your friend’s death, even if you’re not sure how.

  Soren’s parents turned and clasped our hands and thanked us for coming with a practiced formality, like they’d stayed up all night saying the words over and over so they wouldn’t fall apart when they had to say them for real.