by Mary McCoy
MR. MATHERS: And did Livia ever ask anything of you in exchange for this alliance?
ZELDA PARSONS: She didn’t have to. Livia and I wanted the same things. That’s why she was grooming me to be the president, not Claudia or Esme or any of the other underclassmen.
MR. MATHERS: Did she tell you that?
ZELDA PARSONS: She told me that she admired my work. During election season.
MR. MATHERS: What about your work did Ms. Drusus admire?
ZELDA PARSONS: Elections are not just about convincing voters that you’re the best candidate. They are about convincing them that their worst fears about your opponents are all true.
And that can be accomplished by . . .
MR. MATHERS: Ratfucking.
Apologies for the language. It’s a term that came up in Ms. McCarthy’s transcript.
ZELDA PARSONS: That’s a strange word for it. I always thought of what I did more as . . . massaging an election.
Rat massage.
How many ratfucks exactly had Zelda Parsons been responsible for?
There were Hector’s INTEGRETY posters, the mysterious hits taken out on Rebecca Ibañez and Cecily Stanwick, the Photoshop job against me . . . Which ratfuck had gotten Livia’s attention in the first place?
MR. MATHERS: I’m not sure that’s an improvement, Ms. Parsons.
So you formed an alliance with Ms. Drusus that eventually resulted in the two of you running on a ticket together. And as we know, that didn’t work out the way the two of you had hoped.
ZELDA PARSONS: No, it didn’t.
MR. MATHERS: And then there was the incident with the turtles . . .
ZELDA PARSONS: Can you not call it that? Can you just say I killed them?
MR. MATHERS: My god, it was you?
My therapist asked me if I considered myself to be a good judge of character, if I’d ever been wrong about someone. I suppose now I have the answer to that question.
ZELDA PARSONS: Yes.
MR. MATHERS: You killed the turtles during the Homecoming dance.
ZELDA PARSONS: Yes.
MR. MATHERS: Why in god’s name would you do something like that?
ZELDA PARSONS: I had three reasons, and once you hear them, I think you’ll understand. Maybe you won’t agree, but you’ll understand.
First, I wanted to discredit Claudia McCarthy, who, I might add, was such an incompetent Senate vice president that she forgot to hire any security guards for the dance. I wanted to get back at her for sabotaging Livia’s campaign with that disgusting story from the Griffith School.
Apparently, no matter what I do, some people are going to keep insisting that I had something to do with that smear campaign against Livia.
Second, I wanted to ruin Cal’s god-awful celebration of himself, which I’d known he was planning—the slideshow, crowning himself king, the whole thing.
But the third reason I did it, the main reason I did it, is that I thought it might get some adults to step in and make it stop.
You’ve heard what kind of Honor Council president Cal was. You know the things he did. And you know that no one ever stopped him.
He threatened other students, he threatened teachers, and every day I thought, Someone will notice. Someone will step in and do something. Someone will stop him.
Then he threatened me into being his girlfriend for a month. The whole time I thought, People know you. They know you would never do this. Someone will pull you aside and ask you what’s wrong.
When they didn’t, I thought, Well, if they don’t care what happens to us, maybe they’ll care about the turtles. Turtles can’t even feel pain, by the way. I looked it up. They never knew what hit them, and it was over in a second.
I didn’t want to do it, but I thought, If I do something bad enough, the people in charge of this place won’t be able to ignore it anymore. They’ll have to do something, and that will be worth a few dead turtles.
MR. MATHERS: But the only person who was stopped was you.
ZELDA PARSONS: That was when I realized that no one was willing to stop Cal. No one knew how to stop him. Except the person who took the shower fixture to his head.
MR. MATHERS: I understand you have an alibi for that afternoon?
ZELDA PARSONS: I was in San Pedro visiting my grandmother. She was sick.
MR. MATHERS: I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she’s doing better.
ZELDA PARSONS: She died. I was in the room when it happened.
Her nurses knew it was close, so they called all her family and told us to come down so we could watch it happen. It was awful. When I die, I want to die alone.
MR. MATHERS: Ms. Parsons, please. That’s enough.
We all make mistakes. My first was trusting Zelda Parsons, ratfucker and turtle murderer. My second was giving her back her seat on the Honor Council. I can assure you that as of this writing, both of those mistakes have been remedied.
CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS
Chris Gibbons
Kian Sarkosian
Hector Estrella
Livia Drusus
Zelda Parsons
MR. MATHERS: Ms. Kovacs, I’m surprised to see you mixed up in this.
ESME KOVACS, HONOR COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE, FORMER SENATOR: I’m not happy about it, Mr. Mathers.
MR. MATHERS: Well, why don’t you help us to understand exactly what happened here. Why don’t you start at the beginning. You started out on the Senate, and you’ve been on the Honor Council since your sophomore year—is that right?
ESME KOVACS: Yes, sir. I was really proud to have been elected and to serve my school, and of course, I knew how important the Honor Council was to the legacy of Imperial Day. It was like being a part of history. It was important to me to live up to that.
MR. MATHERS: And back when you started, did the Honor Council live up to that standard?
ESME KOVACS: Mostly, I think we did.
MR. MATHERS: Can you tell me about your working relationship with Claudia McCarthy on the Honor Council?
ESME KOVACS: A person like that should not be representing the Imperial Day Academy.
MR. MATHERS: That’s a stronger response than I expected. Could you explain?
ESME KOVACS: The president of the Honor Council is the face of the school. It’s the highest, most visible, most important job, and to have someone like . . . like that—it reflects poorly on the whole school.
If there was any truth to the accusation that I’d stacked the Honor Council with my own people, wouldn’t I have at least picked some who liked me?
MR. MATHERS: Did Ms. McCarthy do something in particular to offend you? Not to put you on the spot, but is it possible you were a little jealous of her friendship with Hector Estrella?
ESME KOVACS: No! Also, I don’t even know why I’m here. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m being dragged down by these other people. I look guilty by association. I wish I’d never even seen Hector Estrella. I feel dirtied by the whole thing.
MR. MATHERS: No one thinks you’ve done anything wrong, Esme. You’re helping us to understand what happened, that’s all.
ESME KOVACS: But I don’t even know what happened!
I walked past the Senate meeting room one day. Hector and I had broken up a few days before, but I wanted to talk to him. To see if maybe I’d made a mistake. And I heard Claudia in the room. They were alone together and having this big heart-to-heart.
And then they started talking about Cal, and how he’d ruined the school. I heard Claudia blame Cal for everything from Hector and me breaking up to Soren’s death.
MR. MATHERS: You saw Soren Bieckmann the night he died, didn’t you?
There is no group of people so thoughtless, so careless, so immune to self-examination as the people who have always been told they are “nice.”
I would never say that the person who kicks the addict while they’re down is a murderer, but let’s dispense with the illusion that Esme Kovacs is a “nice” person.
ESME KOVACS: A couple o
f times.
Around eleven, I saw him talking to Chris Gibbons in the corner, and then, not too much later, he ran into me in the hall, giggling and practically falling down, and I said, “Wow, it’s like the last year never happened.” He staggered off, and that was the last time I saw him.
MR. MATHERS: What else did Ms. McCarthy say to Mr. Estrella in the Senate meeting room?
ESME KOVACS: She said that they needed to make it their top priority to stop Cal. To “take him down”—those were the exact words she used.
MR. MATHERS: What did Mr. Estrella say to that?
ESME KOVACS: He told her to calm down. He said she should step back and let him “take care of things.”
MR. MATHERS: What did he mean by that?
ESME KOVACS: I don’t know! All I know is that the next day, Hector wasn’t in Mrs. DiVincenzo’s eighth-period class, and that same afternoon, Cal gets beaten up in the locker room and he would have died if Claudia hadn’t just happened to find him. And why would she do that? Why would she go into the West Gym locker room unless she knew exactly what Hector was going to do?
And I just don’t . . . I just don’t . . .
MR. MATHERS: It’s all right, Ms. Kovacs.
ESME KOVACS: I just don’t know! Did my ex-boyfriend try to kill someone? Did she put him up to it?
I won’t dignify Esme’s ravings with a response, but there is one more thing I’ll say about her.
If I hadn’t meddled her and Hector into a relationship, they wouldn’t have been at that party together. They wouldn’t have run into Soren at the moment they did. Maybe Esme never would have gotten the chance to say whatever shitty thing she said to Soren Bieckmann the last night he was alive.
Whether she said the words that broke Soren, the words that made him decide to overdose, or whether she didn’t, it almost doesn’t matter.
I put her in the room with him that night. So that’s on me.
DR. GRAVES: The next witness is Livia Drusus.
MR. MATHERS: Ms. Drusus, your tenure at this school has been a rocky one, and your name has come up more than a few times today. Not in connection with the charges themselves, of course, but in league with the general culture of deceit that I have come to understand exists at the Imperial Day Academy. What do you have to say to that?
LIVIA DRUSUS, IMPERIAL DAY SENIOR, FORMER HONOR COUNCIL VICE PRESIDENT: Mr. Mathers, there are so many things that I want to say right now, but the first is that I’m sorry.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that everything people have been saying about me is a lie. A lot of it is true. We did abuse the power of the Honor Council. We acted like the rules didn’t apply to us. Worst of all, we opened the door for people like Cal and Claudia to step into those roles, and for that, I’m sorriest of all.
MR. MATHERS: You left school for a time. A leave of absence, isn’t that right? Could you explain what led you to take that rather drastic measure?
LIVIA DRUSUS: Elections at Imperial Day are rough. They always have been. I’ve seen what people do to each other in the name of winning, but I have a thick skin. Might makes right, and if you can’t handle the elections, you probably can’t handle the job.
I thought I could handle it.
MR. MATHERS: Why did you want to be Honor Council president?
LIVIA DRUSUS: It wasn’t even that I wanted it. I needed to run and I needed to win because the alternative was Cal.
He’d been groping and harassing and intimidating and—let’s call it what it is—sexually assaulting his way through Imperial Day since his freshman year. Every girl in this school has some story about him, and nobody ever did anything about it.
It was up to me to stop him.
MR. MATHERS: And did you resort to any unconventional—any unsanctioned—tactics in your campaign against him?
LIVIA DRUSUS: What Zelda and I did to Cal wasn’t a ratfuck—pardon my language, sir.
I thought Cal had gotten away with so much because people were afraid to speak up for themselves. I thought that if I could find everyone Cal had ever hurt and get their stories together, maybe someone would listen. Maybe something would change. Maybe people would at least think twice before voting for him.
MR. MATHERS: You planned to collect these stories about Mr. Hurt’s indiscretions and do what, exactly, with them?
LIVIA DRUSUS: I planned to give them to you, sir. To Dr. Graves. To anyone who would look at them, really.
That was what I planned to do, but before I had a chance . . .
MR. MATHERS: What happened before you had a chance, Ms. Drusus?
LIVIA DRUSUS: Mr. Mathers, one of the great things about the Imperial Day Academy is that people come here from all over the city. It can be a place to reinvent yourself. If you’re someone like me, it can be a place to start over.
When I was in eighth grade at the Griffith School, something awful happened.
There was a teacher I didn’t get along with. To blow off steam, my friend and I joked about how he was creepy and gross and how in his spare time he probably wrote bad poetry to all the pretty girls in our grade. Then, because we were fourteen and bored, we wrote some.
It was just a joke. We never meant for anyone to see them, but someone fished them out of the trash and gave them to the guidance counselor, and the next thing I knew, there was an investigation. I didn’t speak up because it looked like everything was going to blow over. But then, my friend, Octavia, confessed everything and the charges were dropped, and everyone hated me, but I didn’t care because at least it was over.
And then it turned out that Mr. Arnold really was a pervert. Everything Octavia and I had been joking about was true. The only thing we were wrong about was the girl.
No one talked about that part, though. They talked about me like I was the one who’d committed a crime. I hadn’t set out to ruin anyone. It was all a big, awful coincidence, and no one at the Griffith School ever let me live it down.
Of course, leave it to Livia to turn HERSELF into the victim of that whole story.
I think that’s why I cared so much about what happened with the election and Cal. If I hadn’t stumbled onto what was happening with my English teacher and that girl, it would have continued. Who knows how much longer and how many more girls? If somebody doesn’t put a stop to it, it just goes on and on.
And the HERO of this one.
I knew what would happen if Cal was president of the Honor Council.
MR. MATHERS: And you believe Ms. McCarthy was the one who leaked this story to the student body just prior to the Honor Council elections?
LIVIA DRUSUS: There is no doubt in my mind that she did. Only a handful of people came here from the Griffith School, and of all of them, Claudia is the only one who would do something like that to hurt me.
MR. MATHERS: What about your friend? Octavia, you said her name was? I seem to remember her name popping up once or twice in Ms. McCarthy’s testimony.
I still think Octavia did it. I think she told Cal the story about Mr. Arnold during that Valentine’s Day weekend when he bought her five bouquets of flowers and stuck his tongue down her throat in the hall. I’ll never convince Livia of that, though. I can only hope that I’ve convinced you.
LIVIA DRUSUS: She’s my friend. She’s still my friend. She was the only one who stood by me through everything that happened at the Griffith School. She’s been loyal to me ever since. I think she even flirted with Cal for a week around election time just to keep him distracted. She did that for me.
Besides, when everything happened at the Griffith School, people were almost as angry with Octavia as they were with me. That was one of the worst times in our lives. In either of our lives. It’s not a story we go around sharing.
MR. MATHERS: According to Ms. McCarthy, you and she were involved in a physical altercation after this story got out.
LIVIA DRUSUS: That is a lie. I never even spoke to her. She came into the Honor Council room after the lies about me went up all over the school.
I don’t know why Claudia came to me.
Because she told me to!
Maybe she wanted to gloat. I was upset. I threw a coffee mug on the floor and some of the shards might have bounced over near where she was standing, but I didn’t lay a hand on her.
Livia is, always has been, and always will be a liar who is capable of anything. If you remember nothing else, remember that.
MR. MATHERS: How did you find the school when you returned from your leave of absence, Ms. Drusus?
LIVIA DRUSUS: As bad as I’d feared, sir. Worse.
I went to Dr. Graves and one or two of the teachers, but no one seemed to take it very seriously, maybe because it was coming from me. So I started going to Honor Council meetings like a UN elections observer or the Red Cross in a war zone. Knowledge is power. I felt that if I understood what Cal was doing, I might understand how to stop him.
Unfortunately, he was brutally attacked before I could arrive at a peaceful solution.
MR. MATHERS: What did you think about that?
LIVIA DRUSUS: I was sorry it happened, of course, but not surprised.
MR. MATHERS: And do you have any ideas about who might have been responsible?
LIVIA DRUSUS: I’ve thought about this a lot, and what I keep coming back to is Claudia McCarthy. Maybe she didn’t do it herself, but I don’t doubt she was involved.
She cleared a path for herself into the Senate vice presidency, and I can’t help thinking, What if what happened to Cal was Claudia McCarthy clearing herself another path?
I think it because that used to be me. I used to want power like that. I used to chase it, spend time planning how I was going to get it. So I understand how that works. It consumes you. It makes you forget that people are people. Instead, they’re obstacles.
In closing, I’d like to say that I used to feel that way, so I know where Claudia is coming from.