I, Claudia
Page 31
I don’t feel that way anymore.
CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS
Chris Gibbons
Kian Sarkosian
Hector Estrella
Livia Drusus
Zelda Parsons
DR. GRAVES: The next witness is Honor Council representative Kian Sarkosian.
MR. MATHERS: Mr. Sarkosian, as the person who brought these charges against Claudia McCarthy, I’m sure you understand how serious they are.
Remember what I said about people having motives you couldn’t possibly understand at the time? I give you Exhibit A: Kian Fucking Sarkosian, Informant, Semi-Ex-Boyfriend, and Turncoat.
KIAN SARKOSIAN, HONOR COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE: I do.
MR. MATHERS: And so, before we go on, it’s important that we rule out certain questions. You and Ms. McCarthy were close, weren’t you?
KIAN SARKOSIAN: We were . . . something like that.
MR. MATHERS: What would you say if I suggested that you brought these charges against Ms. McCarthy because of hurt or unreciprocated feelings between the two of you?
KIAN SARKOSIAN: Mr. Mathers, I brought the charges against Claudia because I believe she did it.
MR. MATHERS: You think she’s capable of something like that?
KIAN SARKOSIAN: She told me she was working on a plan to take him down.
MR. MATHERS: I mean physically capable.
KIAN SARKOSIAN: Maybe she didn’t do it alone.
MR. MATHERS: What if I suggested that you were the one who helped her? Mr. Hurt hit you in the face with a cafeteria tray just a few hours before he was attacked in the shower? Surely you were still angry about that.
KIAN SARKOSIAN: Mr. Mathers, when I’m upset I go to the LA County Museum of Art and look at ancient Assyrian art. I don’t settle scores. And I don’t do things because Claudia McCarthy asks me to.
MR. MATHERS: You accuse Ms. McCarthy of unjustly firing all the Honor Council representatives, then appointing her own picks without fair elections. Yet you got to keep your seat.
KIAN SARKOSIAN: I was good at my job. I hadn’t done anything wrong.
MR. MATHERS: Yet you violated the confidentiality of the Honor Council to serve as Ms. McCarthy’s informant. Do you think that was ethical?
KIAN SARKOSIAN: In the darkest times, resistance is always ethical.
MR. MATHERS: Mr. Sarkosian, what is in your hand?
KIAN SARKOSIAN: Just a slip of paper, sir. Nervous habit. Something to do with my hands.
MR. MATHERS: Well, you’re clearly reading it. Give it to me, please.
Thank you, Mr. Sarkosian.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FIND OUT I’M A TERRIBLE PERSON?
YOU ARE A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE UNIVERSE.
YOU DESERVE BETTER.
Would you care to explain what this means?
KIAN SARKOSIAN: It doesn’t mean anything.
Here are the facts:
1. I don’t blame Kian for what he did. I’m not even angry. Kian Sarkosian will always be my good thing in a year of shit.
2. In bringing me up on all these charges, he did me a favor.
3. Before the trial, people doubted my innocence and suspected the worst of me, but then Kian Sarkosian brought it all out into the open.
4. And after that, no one would ever again be able to question my absolute right to be exactly where I was. Sometimes I wonder if Kian thought of that, too—if he wasn’t trying to take me down, but clear the way for me. I wouldn’t put it past him.
5. As I said before, he’s the best liar I ever met.
CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS
Chris Gibbons
Kian Sarkosian
Hector Estrella
Livia Drusus
Zelda Parsons
MR. MATHERS: Where were you between 1:30 and 3:00 on April 6?
JESSE NICHOLS, FORMER HONOR COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE: What day was that?
MR. MATHERS: The day of Mr. Hurt’s attack, son.
JESSE NICHOLS: Oh, right.
I had eighth-period English with Mr. Woolf, so that went until 2:30. Then Kian Sarkosian and I walked to my locker. I think I wasn’t sure whether I needed my trigonometry book over the weekend, and Kian kept telling me to hurry up.
Oh my god, Jesse Nichols.
Shut up.
Shut up.
Shut up.
Shut up.
Shut up.
MR. MATHERS: Why was Kian Sarkosian in such a rush?
JESSE NICHOLS: I don’t know. I went as fast as I could, but he was still annoyed. Then we went downstairs.
MR. MATHERS: Near the West Gym?
JESSE NICHOLS: No, the back hallway by the science classrooms. We stood in front of some random person’s locker for ten minutes, I don’t know why, and then finally Kian said, “Never mind, let’s go.”
MR. MATHERS: Why were you and Mr. Sarkosian leaving school together that day?
JESSE NICHOLS: We always do. My house is on the way, so he usually gives me a ride. I haven’t gotten around to getting my permit yet. I want to, but it just seems like so much work and I haven’t had time and—
MR. MATHERS: What you are saying is that you and Mr. Sarkosian were together every step of the way between 1:30 and 3:00, with witnesses?
JESSE NICHOLS: Yeah.
MR. MATHERS: Well, then why in god’s name didn’t somebody mention that? Why didn’t Kian Sarkosian mention it?
JESSE NICHOLS: Maybe he was thinking about other stuff. He’s under a lot of stress. Some people really think he did it.
Except that part, Jesse Nichols. That was all you needed to say.
CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS
Chris Gibbons
Kian Sarkosian
Hector Estrella
Livia Drusus
Zelda Parsons
MR. MATHERS: Claudia McCarthy has been a patient in your care for how long?
DR. CHRISTINA XIU, PEDIATRICS, CEDARS SINAI MEDICAL GROUP: Since she was five, shortly after her second heart surgery.
MR. MATHERS: In your professional opinion, is Claudia McCarthy capable of carrying out a physical assault against a five-foot-ten-inch male who weighed 170 pounds?
DR. CHRISTINA XIU: Excuse me?
MR. MATHERS: Do you believe she could have done it?
DR. CHRISTINA XIU: You mean I was called away from my practice to answer a question that—it seems to me—the school nurse, or any of Ms. McCarthy’s peers, or anyone who has met Ms. McCarthy could have answered?
MR. MATHERS: Which is to say . . .
DR. CHRISTINA XIU: Which is to say I would find a scenario where the young man happened to be standing in the shower, the fixture fell on his head, and he fell to the floor and knocked his skull on the tile to be far more plausible than one where my pediatric, asthmatic heart patient with leg-length discrepancy carried out an attack.
Is that all?
CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS
Chris Gibbons
Kian Sarkosian
Hector Estrella
Livia Drusus
Zelda Parsons
Claudia McCarthy
Just so you don’t think I’m trying to put one over on you by leaving myself off the suspects list altogether.
MR. MATHERS: Dr. Graves, based on what I’ve heard so far, of what exactly am I supposed to convict Claudia McCarthy? Being disliked? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Ambition?
DR. GRAVES: I apologize, Mr. Mathers. You’ve been more than patient.
MR. MATHERS: What I’d like to know, Dr. Graves, is, Is there anyone here who can tell me anything useful? Anything that doesn’t contradict every other piece of testimony? Anything that isn’t wrongheaded, misinformed, misinterpreted, or an outright lie?
DR. GRAVES: There’s only one person left to go.
Mr. Estrella? You can come up. We’re ready for you now.
MR. MATHERS: Mr. Estrella, it’s been a long afternoon and I think it’s fair to say that we’d all like to go home, so I’ll keep this brief. Your na
me has already come up a few times today, so I feel like I have some sense of who you are and of your relationship with Ms. McCarthy. Would you say that depiction was more or less accurate?
HECTOR ESTRELLA, SENATE PRESIDENT: I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.
MR. MATHERS: Would it be accurate to say that without Ms. McCarthy’s . . . interventions, you would not be Senate president right now?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate, sir.
MR. MATHERS: So you might have aspired to that position even without her encouragement?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: It’s hard to say what I might have aspired to when I was a freshman. I wanted to make the school a better place, and being on the Senate seemed like a way to do that. My peers elected me to represent them three times, and Claudia didn’t have anything to do with that.
MR. MATHERS: Why do you think they elected you? What special skills do you bring to the leadership of the Imperial Day Senate?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Sir, I believe I was elected because people thought I’d do a good job.
MR. MATHERS: And have you?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Sir, I’m afraid I don’t understand. Have I done something to offend you?
MR. MATHERS: In my role as president of the Imperial Day Academy Board of Commissioners and as an alumnus of the school, I take a personal interest in the health and growth and development of the students here, so when someone comes in from outside and through his influence harms our children—
HECTOR ESTRELLA: What do you mean “comes in from outside”? I transferred here my freshman year.
MR. MATHERS: I am aware of the circumstances surrounding your transfer.
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I was accepted to Imperial Day just like everyone else, sir. I pay my tuition just like everyone else.
MR. MATHERS: You mean your parents pay your tuition.
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Just like everyone else’s.
MR. MATHERS: Mr. Estrella, you are here today because your friend, Ms. McCarthy, is facing some very serious charges. Assault, attempted murder, corruption, election tampering. In fact, the most serious charges I’ve seen during the time I’ve been affiliated with this school, which is three times longer than you’ve been alive.
I find it difficult to believe that you, as Ms. McCarthy’s closest friend and ally, weren’t at least somewhat complicit in all of this. So if it seems like I’m being hard on you, it’s because I am.
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I see, sir.
MR. MATHERS: And how would you describe your relationship with Ms. McCarthy?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Claudia was my best friend.
MR. MATHERS: Was?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Is. I don’t know.
MR. MATHERS: According to both Ms. McCarthy’s and Ms. Kovacs’s testimony, shortly before Mr. Hurt was beaten in the boys’ locker room, you told Ms. McCarthy to take a step back. You told her that you’d “take care of things.” What did you mean by that?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I meant that I’d take care of the Senate. Claudia doesn’t always take care of herself, and I was worried about her.
I was trying to protect her. The situation with Cal couldn’t have gone on much longer. He was graduating in a month and a half. It was all about to be over if she could just outlast him.
MR. MATHERS: In the version of the story Ms. McCarthy tells, it almost sounds like you offered to take care of Cal for her. And that is a version of the story that’s supported by the testimony of your girlfriend. What do you have to say about that, Mr. Estrella?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I had nothing to do with what happened to Cal.
MR. MATHERS: You weren’t in your eighth-period class that afternoon. Not according to Ms. Kovacs.
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Mrs. DiVincenzo wrote me a pass to the guidance office. I was doing college research.
MR. MATHERS: Would you be able to prove that? Would anyone in the guidance office be able to confirm your whereabouts during that window of time?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I don’t know.
MR. MATHERS: You don’t know.
HECTOR ESTRELLA: But the Admissions counselor at Northwestern can.
I’ve thought about this part a lot, and at first, I wondered why Mr. Mathers was being such a dick to Hector. Was he frustrated that his last credible suspect had just produced an airtight alibi? Was he a racist?
Possibly. But then I remembered that Mr. Mathers is also a lawyer, and since he went to Imperial Day, I’m going to guess he’s a pretty good one. And Hector had told the truth. He’d told almost all of the truth. But he was holding one more thing back, and even though I didn’t know it at the time, Mr. Mathers did.
That’s why he pushed him, I think.
MR. MATHERS: Excuse me?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: We spoke on the phone from 1:30 until 2:15. After that, I went back to class. Mrs. DiVincenzo gave me Claudia’s phone that she’d confiscated during the assembly. I waited around at Claudia’s locker for a few minutes, but Kian Sarkosian and Jesse Nichols were standing around glaring at me, so I went out to my car and went home. I ran into Mr. Prettinger in the parking lot. We talked about the Dodgers for a few minutes, then I went home.
So, that’s where I was.
MR. MATHERS: All of these things just happened around you and you went blithely on, unaware of it all? Is that right, Mr. Estrella? None of this touches you. None of this is your fault. Is that how you see things?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: No, sir.
MR. MATHERS: Would you care to elaborate in more than a monosyllable?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: There’s something I need to say.
It doesn’t have anything to do with Claudia or Cal, but I need to say it here and now while everyone is listening.
The night Soren Bieckmann died, I was the one who drove him home from the party. The guy in the gray hoodie who walked him to his door, then left—that was me. I had no idea he was going to overdose. I don’t even know what that looks like.
Esme and I ran into him at the party, and he looked like he’d had a couple of drinks. That’s what I thought, anyway, but Esme turned to me and said, “I’m surprised it took this long,” and I know Soren wasn’t completely wasted then, because he heard her. He looked right at us, and he had this expression on his face like he was going to cry.
That’s even more brutal than what Esme says she said. Between you and me, I’m going to believe Hector’s account on this one.
We kept walking, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, so about half an hour later, I told Esme I was going to find him and take him home. She was worried about what would happen if we got pulled over with him in the car. I get pulled over, uh, slightly more than the average Imperial Day student, so I told her she didn’t have to come, that I’d go back to the party for her after I dropped Soren off, and have her home before curfew.
When I found Soren, he said he was fine. He said he could get himself home, and I told him, “No. I’m not going to let you do that.” When I said that, his face crumpled and he started to cry, and he said, yeah, that I should probably give him a ride.
He was fine in the car, though. Slurry, but mostly making sense. We talked about some idea he’d had for a documentary about the hip-hop artists who sell their CDs on the Venice boardwalk. He told me he was thinking about adopting a dog from the shelter. He acted like he hadn’t just been crying in front of me.
We got to his house, and I asked if he was all right, and he said yes. I walked him to the door. I didn’t even think to ask him if there was anyone else home. I didn’t invite him to spend the night at my house because we weren’t really friends like that.
I wish I had. I wish I’d taken him home with me or offered to stay there with him. I wish I’d left him at that party and hadn’t offered him a ride home. The worst part is, if I’d just left him there, there would have been a ton of people around. He wouldn’t have been alone. Maybe he wouldn’t have died.
I know Claudia wants to believe that Cal was responsible for Soren’s death. If he was the
one who gave Soren all that hydrocodone, maybe I would have beaten the shit out of him in the boys’ locker room. But I never saw Cal go anywhere near him that night.
What I know is that the person most responsible for Soren Bieckmann’s death is me.
MR. MATHERS: I see. Well, thank you for that, Mr. Estrella.
Before I let you go, there’s something I’d like you to think about. You are the last person to testify in this trial today. You are the last person who can help me make sense of this. You seem like a thoughtful young man, so I’d like you to think about this: Do you think the testimony we’ve heard has painted an accurate picture of Ms. McCarthy and her culpability in any and all of the matters we’ve discussed today?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: I see what you’re doing, Mr. Mathers.
You’re running out of time to find someone who’s responsible for all of this. You hoped it could be me, but since it can’t be, you’d like me to help you decide that it’s Claudia.
The problem with your story is, I don’t think it’s the right one.
If you ask me, the reason Claudia is here today is because, despite everything that happened, she refused to be a victim. She didn’t always do the right thing, but she did the best she could.
MR. MATHERS: Did you know how she felt about you?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Excuse me?
MR. MATHERS: She never told you?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Told me what?
MR. MATHERS: Nothing. It’s just that Ms. McCarthy lied to you as well.
HECTOR ESTRELLA: The person Claudia lies to more than anyone else is herself. She doesn’t deserve to be found guilty. She doesn’t deserve to be punished.
MR. MATHERS: What does she deserve?
HECTOR ESTRELLA: Claudia deserves to be happy.
CAL’S BEATING: SUSPECTS
Chris Gibbons
Kian Sarkosian
Hector Estrella
Livia Drusus
Zelda Parsons
Claudia McCarthy
VERDICT
MR. MATHERS: At the beginning of this trial, it was the severity of the charges brought against Ms. McCarthy that made me fear for the future of this school.