I, Claudia
Advance praise for
★ “A gripping political thriller . . . about power, corruption, and the choices we make both for ourselves and the ones we love.”
—starred, Kirkus Reviews
“I, Claudia will fortify your heart while stabbing you in the back. Mary McCoy has penned a thriller about betrayal and treachery in one high school’s student government, but it’s also the inspiring tale of a quiet, awkward girl trying to find the strength to do what’s right. It’s Pretty Little Liars by way of ancient Rome—a wild, exciting ride, but full of caution about leadership run amok.”
—Anthony Breznican, author of Brutal Youth
“With its addictive voice, inventive storytelling, and one of the most fascinating and original heroines I’ve ever met, I, Claudia captivated me from the very first page. I couldn’t put it down!”
—Gretchen McNeil, author of Ten and #MurderTrending
“Prickly, smart, and laugh-out-loud funny I, Claudia’s political emphasis couldn’t be more timely, nor her narrator more delightfully suspect. McCoy’s skillful weaving of history’s great manipulators into a decidedly contemporary setting is fun, memorable, and utterly original.”
—Alison Umminger, author of American Girls: A Novel
“What do imperial Rome and a contemporary L.A. prep school have in common? More than you might think. Laced with tumult and palace intrigue, I, Claudia pulls back the purple curtain for an inside look at the school’s patrician class. With psychological thrills, all-too-apt historical asides, and a witty, unforgettable narrator, I, Claudia is a smart and topical novel, an engrossing reminder that power corrupts.”
—Kate Hattemer, author of The Land of 10,000 Madonnas and The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy
Text copyright © 2018 by Mary McCoy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCoy, Mary, 1976– author.
Title: I, Claudia / Mary McCoy.
Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Lab, [2018] | Summary: “Over the course of her high school years, awkward Claudia McCarthy finds herself unwittingly drawn into the dark side of her school’s student government, with dire consequences” —Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038714 (print) | LCCN 2018007836 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541523753 (eb pdf) | ISBN 9781512448467 (th : alk. paper)
Subjects: | CYAC: Conduct of life—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Student government—Fiction. | People with disabilities—Fiction. | Family life—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M43 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.M43 Iah 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038714
Manufactured in the United States of America
1-42567-26213-3/12/2018
9781541530676 ePub
9781541530683 mobi
9781541530690 ePub
For Brady
This is a story of what I was, not what I am.
—Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
During our first session, you told me, “Claudia, you are what we call an excellent historian.”
You meant it in the therapist’s sense of the word, my ability to reflect upon my own troubles, their causes, and contributing factors, and craft a narrative around them: the story of my rise, my disgrace, the long string of humiliations and failures that had brought me to your couch, a box of tissues at my side.
I had just mentioned Charles I of England, who was hounded by Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads, arrested, made the subject of a farcical trial, and sentenced to death. The day of his trial was cold, and Charles wore two shirts so that no one would see him shivering when he placed his head on the block and think that it was because he was afraid.
The idea of putting a king on trial was novel to the English people—so novel, in fact, that no one noticed until it was too late that Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army were batshit insane and that they’d just replaced an innocuous king with a full-blown tyrant.
I was not trying to say that Charles I was the best king England ever had. However, out of them all, he certainly wasn’t the one most deserving of public execution.
“Are you saying you feel like Charles I?” you asked.
“Of course not,” I said.
He was a 17th-century English king. He had a son to avenge him, who would return from exile, overthrow Cromwell, and regain the throne. He was guaranteed a place in history. We have nothing in common.
I was just saying that, in some small way, I might have understood how he felt standing before the executioner’s block.
Part I
The Reign of
Augustus
The Honor Council
Senior Class representatives:
Augustus Dean, President
Marcus Rippa
Junior Class representatives:
Maisie McCarthy, Vice President
Ty Berman
Sophomore Class representatives:
Livia Drusus
Rebecca Ibañez
Freshman Class representatives:
Zelda Parsons
Jesse Nichols
I
The Future Is Coming for You
I asked where we should start, and you said the beginning, which did not clarify things at all. The historian imposes beginnings upon her narrative; they are not naturally occurring things.
I could begin with the founding of the Imperial Day Academy in 1898 and its subsequent rise to prominence among the elite families of Los Angeles County. Or I could begin in the late 1990s when my parents bucked the glittery tech company trend of settling in the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest, and instead based their start-up, DeliverMe, in Los Angeles. I could start with my birth, or with the day that Augustus and Livia became a couple, or with the day that Livia became a menace.
When you said none of that would be necessary, annoyance tugging at the corners of your mouth, I told you that I’d start with the ninth grade. It seemed as good a place as any to start.
I entered ninth grade with a piece of prophecy and a piece of advice from a fortune-teller, and they served me well up until the recent chain of events that led to me being here and talking to you.
The night I came into this information, I had gone to Venice Beach with my older sister, Maisie, and her friends: Augustus, Livia, Marcus, Julia, Ty, and Cal. They were all older than I was, already students at Imperial Day, already distinguishing themselves despite the fact that most of them were still underclassmen, and were it not for Maisie,
I would never have been invited to join them at all.
Maisie is two years older than I am and was about to start her junior year at Imperial Day. She has long, dark hair that she wears parted down the middle with bangs. She is always drawing, and when my family goes out to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, Maisie orders for all of us with an accent, which impresses the waiters.
Everybody loves Maisie, but more importantly, Maisie loves me.
Maisie loves me in a way most people do not. She never acts like I am an embarrassment or an obligation. She didn’t have to invite me to the beach with her friends that evening, but she did anyway. My parents would have been content to leave me moldering in my room with a history of Weimar Germany or a playlist of Ken Burns documentaries. I would have been content with that, too, but when Maisie stuck her head into my bedroom and said, “A bunch of us are going to Venice tonight, Claudia. You should come,” I found myself getting up off the floor and putting on a clean t-shirt.
Marcus was driving when they came to pick us up, though the Lexus belonged to Augustus, who only had his learner’s permit. Augustus rode shotgun, and Marcus’s long-time girlfriend, Julia, sat in the backseat looking like a 1940s film star in her cat-eye sunglasses. I was pleased to see that Augustus’s girlfriend, Livia, was not in the car. Livia had a summer internship at Google, Augustus explained, and since their offices were in Venice anyway, she was going to meet us there.
“How did she manage that?” Julia asked, and I was pleased to hear in her tone evidence that Livia’s charms were not universally admired, even if my sister was best friends with her.
“Her dad knows someone,” Augustus said. He said it without judgment because at Imperial Day, everybody’s dad or mom knows someone. Not necessarily someone who could get a Google internship for a high school freshman who couldn’t even code—Livia’s dad was especially well connected—but at least someone who could get you good seats at the Hollywood Bowl or write you a rec letter for Stanford.
In any case, I was grateful for whatever nepotism had made it possible for me to enjoy the drive to the beach without her. Something about Livia always made my stutter come out.
With the others, it was easier. Marcus, who was a rising senior, was so much older that I barely registered as a person to him, and Augustus was so popular that he could afford to be magnanimous. Besides, he liked my sister, and I found a little bit of shelter under the umbrella of his admiration for her.
We parked, then walked over to the Venice Skate Park, where we found Ty and Cal leaning on the railing and watching the skateboarders whizzing around the banks of the flow bowl. Cal carried a board with him and swaggered toward us as if he had already skated, even though I could tell he hadn’t. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on him and the board looked like it had never been used.
Julia noticed it, too.
“Are we going to get to watch you skate, Cal?” she asked with a smirk.
He turned his piggy eyes on her and cackled in the straitjacket-ready way I would come to know far too well over the next three years.
“No, Julia!” he said, holding his skateboard out to her like a burnt offering. “I’m going to watch you skate!”
Julia took a stutter-step back from his outstretched arms, but had no retort. Cal had a flair for verbal repartee that came in from the side, slightly cockeyed with an absurdist bent. You never knew how to respond to it, and if anything, Julia looked like she wished she’d kept her mouth shut in the first place. I understood. Cal made me almost as nervous as Livia did, and I dreaded the idea of doing anything that might draw his attention.
We said our hellos, and then we turned to watch the skateboarders, whose feats were so dazzling and hypnotic that we barely spoke to each other.
Maybe this won’t be so bad, I thought. Maybe next, somebody would suggest going to the movies so we could all sit in the dark for two hours not talking and then go home. I was just thinking how perfect that would be, when I turned around and saw Livia coming our way.
She peeled off her pink cardigan as she walked, and her white sundress suddenly transformed from office- to beach-wear in a way it only ever does on the pages of Marie Claire. She propped her sunglasses on top of her head as she sauntered up to Augustus and stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.
“How was work?” he asked, and she said, “Fine,” and they both sounded at least forty.
The thing that might surprise you after hearing the way I’ve just talked about Livia is that she isn’t pretty. Not that I have any right to talk. I’m just saying that if you didn’t know her and saw a picture of her, you might be surprised that someone with the conventional, symmetrical, Captain America prettiness of Augustus was dating her.
Maisie hugged Livia, which started a cascade of unwanted hugs. Julia had to hug Livia because otherwise it would have looked like a snub. As Augustus’s best friend and Julia’s boyfriend, Marcus had to hug her next. Ty was the sort of stiff, taciturn person for whom hugs were acutely painful but who would never do anything that seemed rude, so he hugged her, and then Cal hugged her probably a little longer and closer and more creepily than Livia would have liked. Once this had all been dispensed with, Livia’s eyes fell at last on me.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Claudia,” she said, and if she’d said, What the hell are you doing here, Claudia? it would have sounded equally gracious and warm. Needless to say, we did not hug.
“M-M-Maisie invited me,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.
There it was: my stutter, reliable as a German train schedule.
“Oh, that was nice of her,” Livia said, giving a pitying look to Augustus. Then she suggested we all get some food because she was dying of hunger, which of course, was a ludicrous overstatement.
We drifted away from the skate park and walked down the boardwalk, past beach cafes and taco stands. Nobody could agree on where to go, not even my ordinarily easygoing sister, who insisted on sushi even though everybody else refused to eat it because the Health Department had given the stand a B.
Undeterred, Maisie split off from the group to get her Dragon Roll, though not before inviting me to join her. Maisie was always thoughtful like that. I considered going with her. It would have been nice to have had a few minutes alone with her, away from her friends who made me so nervous. It would have been worth the food poisoning I almost certainly would have gotten. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone with her, but at that moment, all I could think was that Maisie might have wanted a break from her loser kid sister, and so I stayed behind with the others, looking longingly over my shoulder. She shouted that she’d catch up with us and disappeared into the crowd.
On one side of the boardwalk were semi-legitimate businesses—the places where you could buy bikini tops and pizza by the slice. On the other side of the boardwalk people had set up card tables and canopies from which they sold homemade jewelry, painted rocks, and pamphlets filled with conspiracy theories about aliens and the Illuminati and the lizard people. You walked faster past these people, avoided eye contact. If you got into a conversation with the henna tattoo lady, you might be lost, and found again years later selling toe rings at a rickety card table of your own.
I struggled to keep up with the others, my bad leg starting to ache as it did whenever I tried to walk too far or too fast, and I was mentally willing myself not to keel over in the sand when we passed the fortune-teller’s booth.
The hand-lettered sign in front of it read, BE PREPARED! THE FUTURE IS COMING FOR YOU!
I noticed it in the way you notice when you walk past a dog tied up in someone’s yard, barking like it wants to eat your face.
Bead curtains hung from three sides of the canopy so that it was almost dim inside. Behind a card table sat a man with sand-colored dreadlocks. He wore several layers of clothing despite the heat. Nobody stopped and nobody paid any attention to him, and he didn’t seem to mind until I walked past. Then he became agitated, rocking back and forth on
his stool and calling out to us.
“Hey, Blondie!” That was to Livia. “C’mere. All of you come here. I’ve got something to tell you. No one may ever have this knowledge again. Power. Betrayal. Corruption. Destruction. If I was you, I’d want to know about it.”
There was something about his voice when he said “Destruction”—something low and rumbly that made me shudder. I recovered quickly, but Livia picked up on it right away, perpetually on the lookout as she was for any display of human frailty. I knew immediately that she would veer back toward the fortune-teller, leading the rest of our group behind her.
“How much for this knowledge that no one may ever have again?” Livia asked.
“Twenty bucks,” the fortune-teller said. The whites of his eyes were the color of Dijon mustard, and as we drew closer, smells of patchouli and grain alcohol wafted toward us.
“Yeah, I’m not doing that,” Marcus said, before turning to Julia. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”
Marcus was on scholarship, and even if he wasn’t, he was much too sensible to throw away twenty dollars on a boardwalk fortune-teller. Besides, why did he need a fortune-teller? His future was as good as written. Sweet, beloved, genius poor kid bounces around foster homes until he lands at Imperial Day, and soon thereafter moves in with Augustus’s family, practically like a second son. His college application essay would probably be optioned for film.
“Who’s first? I don’t have all day,” the fortune-teller said as Marcus and Julia turned away and set off down the boardwalk toward the chicken flautas stand. He sounded impatient, even though it wasn’t like we were falling over each other to sit down at his seedy-looking table.
Livia turned to me and smiled sweetly.
“Why don’t you go first?” she said.
“I don’t have twenty dollars,” I said, even though I did.