Diplomatic Immunity

by Brodi Ashton

  So then I crawled into bed and pulled my quilt up over my head. My mother got me out from under the covers that afternoon and said she had two cups of coffee waiting for us downstairs.

  “I’m sick,” I said.”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied.

  I sighed and rolled out of bed. Trudged down the stairs and to the kitchen.

  “I thought you were going out,” I said.

  She took a deep breath in. “I was, but then I read that article. Sit down, Pipe.”

  My chest contracted a bit. She pushed a mug of coffee toward me.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Piper, you wrote it, didn’t you?”

  I hung my head.

  My mom held out her hand to me, and I grabbed it. “Oh, Mom. I’m so screwed up. The Amadors are a good family. And yes, Raf sort of goes looking for trouble. And he finds it. But I think he has good reasons. And don’t even get me started on his mom. . . .” The word vomit stopped for a moment.

  My mom squeezed my hand. “You screwed up. You’re not screwed up.”

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I’m assuming you didn’t mean for the story to be published?”

  I shook my head. “Never.” That wasn’t true. The lies needed to stop. “Well, at one time I did.”

  “Pipe, I’ve never totally understood your obsession with journalism, but how could you have ever thought this story was a good idea? Sure, maybe when you’re working for a paper and the people you are covering are strangers. But these are your classmates. Your friends.”

  I lowered my head. “I thought . . . I thought the only thing I cared about was finding a way to pay for college.”

  My mom reached for the coffeepot and topped off my mug. “That’s important. It is. I feel bad that we can’t afford to take away that worry for you. But that can’t be the only thing you ever think about.”

  “I know. I think I realized that.”

  “Then can I ask why you kept writing the story? And why you let Charlotte believe you still intended to publish it?”

  “I didn’t want Charlotte to know I was . . .” Falling for the subject. Just say it. Falling for Raf. “I didn’t want her to know I was falling for . . . the guy. The story. It was unprofessional.”

  My mom sighed. “So you continued investigating the kids with diplomatic immunity and writing an article and interviewing sources and taking pictures and adding to the exposé, all because you didn’t want to admit to your best friend that you had a crush?”

  “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds a little ridiculous. But I was trying to be professional.”

  My mom put her hand up. “You’re a teenager. You’re not a professional, and you’re not supposed to be. Let’s stop the excuses. The fact of the matter is, you wrote this article. And because of that, you’ve given up your right to excuses. Now what are you going to do about it?”

  I put my forehead on top of our joined hands. “I’m going to change my name to Phyllis Muffler and run away to Tahiti.”

  “What will you live on?”

  “Lost potential and broken dreams and whatever I can get for the Toyota.”

  My mom tugged on the top of my head, urging me to look up. “I think your friends deserve more than that.”

  “There’s nothing I can do. Besides, they’re not my friends.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  I nodded. “Not anymore.” I stifled a sob, feeling a full-on waterfall of tears coming my way.

  “Oh, Pipe.” She rubbed her thumb softly across my knuckles.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just want to go to hide out at Gramma Weeza’s. And I want to go back to Clarendon.”

  My mom let out a long breath. “Should I call you Phyllis from now on?”

  “This isn’t me running away. This is me going home. I tried Chiswick, and it didn’t work out. I can go to Clarendon and take back my co–editor in chief job and hope for a scholarship to the community college.”

  “Going back to Clarendon sounds a bit rash. It also sounds like running away.”

  “It’s not! Don’t you think I’ll still have to go through all this pain and humiliation at Clarendon? Changing locations doesn’t mean I’m avoiding the problem. It just means I’m going to face this problem from home. That’s all this is. It’s time to go home.”

  My mom ran her fingers over my hair the way she used to when I was little and I would lay my head in her lap while we watched a movie. I put my head on the table.

  “You’ll get through this, sweetie.”

  “When? Tomorrow?”

  “No.”

  “Next week?”

  She paused stroking my hair. “No.”

  “I can’t go to school tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to school tomorrow.”

  Some reporter I’d turned out to be. Yes, I’d made it to People magazine, but I was pretty sure successful reporters weren’t supposed to lose every single friend afterward. And run to their grandma’s house so no one could find them.

  Well, maybe they did. Not the running-to-Gramma’s part but the losing their contacts when the story was an exposé. It was called an exposé for a reason. It exposed weaknesses and secrets and underbellies.

  But probably professional reporters didn’t fall in love with the subjects of their stories. I decided to make a list of things professional reporters didn’t do.

  PROFESSIONAL REPORTERS DON’T:

  1. Interview someone and come away with only the fact that the interviewee’s eyes twinkled in the porch light.

  2. Notice twinkling eyes.

  3. Christiane Amanpour never obsessed over the fact that a knee touched a head.

  4. Ann Curry never got the dictator of Zimbabwe to talk by putting her head on his belly.

  5. Raf will probably never speak to me again.

  6. I’ll never see him again.

  7. Because maybe he’s being sent back to Spain.

  8. Because I ruined his life.

  9. And exposed his deepest, darkest secrets.

  10. What happened to my list? It didn’t feel like a list anymore so much as an inventory of my broken heart.

  11 . . .

  11 . . .

  I put my pencil down and kept packing. No point in dwelling on things I couldn’t change. What was it that twelve-step programs taught?

  God grant me the ability to accept the things I cannot change, change the things I want, and then disappear.

  Okay, maybe I was remembering it wrong.

  Another step was making amends. I knew this. At Clarendon I’d done a story on children of parents who were in the twelve-step program.

  Making amends.

  How does one make amends for ruining a life?

  I pulled myself together, showered, and drove to Gramma Weeza’s house.

  When I stepped through the door, she was waiting for me. She wore black skinny jeans, had a T-shirt with a black leather jacket over it, and then, oddly enough, had finished the outfit with a 1950s apron around her waist.

  Her arms were wide open, and when I reached her, I fell into them. And my seventy-eight-year-old grandma held me up.

  She was a soft spot on which to land. Thank God for more than one soft spot in this world.

  She didn’t mention the “incident” until after we’d had coffee with a lot of sugar, and even then it was only in a very general manner.

  “So, your mom filled me in on a bit of the kerfuffle.”

  I snorted. “‘Kerfuffle.’ That makes it sound almost fluffy and nice.” I swigged a gulp of coffee and let it burn my tongue. “See, Gramma? This is what happens when you get detention. This is what happens when I live outside my”—air quotes—“‘well-placed lines.’”

  She didn’t try to correct me or convince me otherwise. She didn’t ask me why I would do such a thing. She just loved me unconditionally. And that’s when the snot works started.

  “Oh, dear.
It’s getting ugly,” Gramma Weeza said. She handed me a box of tissues. “Start from the bottom of your face and work your way up.”

  I did as instructed, mopping up the tear/snot concoction at my chin and mouth and then focusing on my nose for a bit.

  “I can’t . . . I can’t . . .” I can’t do it.

  “I know, dear. But you can.”

  “I’m not . . . . I’m not . . .” I’m not going to survive.

  “I know, sweetie. But you will.” Gramma kissed her fingertip and then pressed it against my forehead like someone affixing a gold-star sticker. “The human body is amazing in what it can withstand. Tomorrow you’ll feel a little bit better. And then the next day you’ll feel a little bit better. The third day, you’ll feel worse, because people always feel worse on the third day, but then the fourth day, you’ll feel a little bit better.”

  I shook my head, and the tear factory overwhelmed that ill-equipped box of tissues.

  “Maybe we should call Dr. What’s-His-Face,” I said, referring to the one time I’d seen a therapist when my parents were worried about my obsessive attention to detail back in grade school. “This can’t be normal. This can’t be healthy. What if my body runs out of water because it cries it all out?”

  Gramma Weeza left the room and returned with a towel, which she used to replace the wadded-up tissue in my hand.

  “On the contrary, Piper. I think this is the healthiest thing you’ve ever done.”

  For the next few hours, I swam in a sea of tears, snot, tea, coffee, and sugar.

  “Give yourself time to grieve,” Gramma Weeza said as she brought me a fresh cup of coffee.

  “I’m not grieving,” I insisted. “I didn’t care about them.”

  She nodded. “You just keep crying until your mouth figures out what your heart already knows,” she said.

  Fresh sobs rose in my chest. “I don’t have a heart.”

  Gramma Weeza looked pointedly at the sea of used tissues surrounding the kitchen table. “All evidence to the contrary.”

  I went to her bedroom and rolled myself up in the blankets like a giant burrito and imagined myself disappearing, but I didn’t. The tears momentarily dried up and the sugar kept flowing and for the first time in a long time I smiled and I said, from under the blanket, “There’s this boy named Rafael Amador.”

  “Go on,” Gramma said. She’d been hovering.

  “And this one night he whisked me away on a motorcycle and we broke through closed national park gates and ditched his security detail and broke some laws and then . . . he showed me the back side of water. I showed him the bottoms of planes.”

  “It sounds beautiful.”

  “It was.”

  “Tell me more.”

  Before I could, the doorbell rang. It was Charlotte. Gramma Weeza let her in and warned her to have a life jacket handy, and then she left us alone.

  Charlotte sat down in a chair next to me. “I’m so sorry, Pipe. I never meant . . . I thought you were asking for my help. I didn’t know it would hurt you so much. I thought you were too scared and you needed me.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand. I did everything in my power to make you think that publishing it was what I wanted. And it was. Until it wasn’t. But I didn’t tell you that. And I can be very convincing. I am a very, very good liar.”

  Charlotte squinted at me. “You seem different.”

  I felt my face and my cheeks and the puffy bags as big as mattresses under my eyes. “Yeah, I’m a mess.”

  “That’s not what I mean by ‘different,’” Charlotte said. “I just mean, yes, you’re a mess. But I’ve never seen you in this much of a mess without some sort of plan.”

  “Welcome to the new me. I’m a mess and I don’t have a plan. I don’t even have a list. Or a subject heading for a list. Or a starting point.”

  Charlotte had this soft sort of reminiscent smile going on. “Remember when we were eight? And there was that one gully with all the fall leaves, like twelve feet deep? You suggested we try to see if we could actually swim in the leaves. We had leaves stuck in our hair for days.”

  I smiled. I remembered it not in the way where you replay a movie in your head, but in the way where the memory throws bits and pieces against your brain. The smell of the leaves. The sound of them crunching all around our flailing bodies. The feel of my mom scrubbing my head, cursing the nest of dirt and leaves that had made a permanent home there. The sight of Michael standing at the top of the ravine, looking at me like I was crazy.

  “My mom finally gave up and had to cut my hair to within an inch of my scalp,” I said.

  “And you thought you looked like a boy, so you asked us all to call you ‘Peter’ until your hair was long enough to tuck behind your ears.”

  I did this sigh-mixed-with-laugh thing. “Where did those girls go?”

  “We didn’t go anywhere. We’re the same people. When you convinced me to swim in leaves, you didn’t have a plan. But it was the best day I’d had in years. I loved you. Plan or no plan.”

  The tears started again.

  “Life jacket, Charlotte!” my grandma called from the other room. What, did she have a cup against the wall?

  She hustled into the room with another towel. I buried my face in it and heaved giant sobs.

  “This is what happens when you cork it up for years,” Gramma Weeza said. “At first I told her to let it all out. The problem is, this corked well runs deep.”

  Charlotte put her hand on my back and rubbed softly.

  “What am I going to do, Charlotte?”

  “I don’t know. Have you talked to Rafael?”

  “Not since he told me I ruined his life.”

  She sighed. “You’ll get through this.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s either that or you die trying. And I don’t think this is going to kill you.”

  I grimaced. “I think you’re speaking too soon.”

  That night, I couldn’t help but stalk the internet looking for news of Raf in the aftermath of the article. But there was nothing.

  I went to Post-Anon. Maybe other people’s misery would make me feel better. There was another entry of the poem about lost love.

  Even though I’m out of chances

  You might notice in all my glances

  That I still love you, and my broken heart dances

  Just knowing that I had it good that one time

  Now all I’ve got is one last rhyme

  I shut my computer and hid under the covers and wondered how in the world I would make it to school in the morning.

  36

  As much as I tried to shut it out, Tuesday morning came. It sneaked through the crack at the bottom of my bedroom door and infiltrated the space between my window and the sill, and once it was inside, it bonked me on the head as if to say, Wake up, world’s biggest asshat.

  I checked my phone for any messages from Raf, but there was only one from Charlotte.

  Charlotte: Thinking of you.

  A knock came from my door, followed by Gramma Weeza’s voice.

  “Breakfast, Pipe.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I mumbled.

  “You need your energy,” she said.

  “I don’t deserve energy,” I said.

  I heard her footsteps as she walked back down the hall. Usually she insisted on breakfast. It was always the biggest meal she prepared, and it sometimes resembled a dinner more than a breakfast. For my sixteenth birthday, she’d made me pork chops and rice. For breakfast.

  But today she didn’t pressure me. My situation must have been really pathetic if she was letting me off the hook so easily.

  When I got to school, it was bad. Really bad. Like teen-movie bad, complete with fake coughs that sounded like “narc” and “bitch.” My locker had a website scrawled across it in black permanent marker: “www.hopb.com.”

  Knowing it couldn’t be anything good, I resisted checking it out for a full thirty seconds.
When I gave in and looked it up on my phone, I gasped. A literal bottom-of-the-lungs gasp.

  At the top of the page was a banner with a picture of me licking my hand. I recognized it as one night when I’d learned how to do a tequila shot one night at the embassy, but the angle and the way my eyes were closed made it look like I was passionately making out with my own hand.

  The banner read: “Hate on Piper Baird.”

  Below it was some sort of mission statement.

  Do you hate Piper Baird? So do we! Feel free to share your pictures or stories with us here. And since Piper values anonymity, don’t bother leaving your name.

  So many entries. So many unflattering pictures. Stupid cell phones with their cameras.

  One anonymous poster even wrote a short story to go along with the hand-licking picture. The story was told from the perspective of my tongue, which I guess was creative.

  Shutting off my phone, I straightened my spine and walked down the hallway, ignoring the glares and trying to ignore the tears streaming down my face, and hoping and not hoping for a glance of Raf.

  When I got to chemistry, Raf’s usual seat was empty.

  At lunch, Mack and Faroush were sitting at their usual table; and when I got my tray of food, I started toward a different direction—because who would want Benedict Arnold at their table?—but Mack motioned me over.

  “You sure know how to cause quite the fracas,” she said once I’d sat down. “I knew what you were doing, but I didn’t realize how ruthless it was going to be.”

  I put my head down and knocked it against the table. “I know. I’m a horrible person.”

  “You’re not horrible,” she said. She didn’t elaborate.

  A loud crack of plastic hit the table and made me jump. Giselle had thrown her tray next to us and sat down.

  She stared at me with seething in her eyes. “What. The. Hell.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for it to be published.”

  “Don’t hide behind that bullshit. You meant it all along. You are a narcissistic psychopath.”

  I put my head back down on the table. “I think you mean ‘sociopath.’”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A sociopath feels remorse.”

  She sighed. “I don’t care.” Her French accent was coming out more than I’d ever heard it before. “You broke my best friend.”