I, Claudia Read online

  “What kind of problem?” I asked. I sat down on top of another desk so we were at the same eye level.

  “Better take the chair,” she said curtly. “That desk has a wobbly leg.”

  I took the chair.

  “The stats class did some polling, and you’re only drawing 25 percent of your class’s vote. You’re not going to beat Chris Gibbons with 25 percent of the vote, Claudia.”

  Eugene Debs never polled 25 percent, I thought. If Eugene Debs had polled at 25 percent, he probably would have died from happiness.

  “And whatever you were going for with that thing in the Weekly Praetor . . .” She rolled her eyes in disgust. “I am here to tell you that is not an effective campaign strategy.”

  “Okay,” I said, because it seemed like this would be over sooner if I agreed with her.

  “The assembly on Thursday, do you have something ready for it?”

  Writing the speech was even more agonizing than writing the profile for the newspaper, but I nodded.

  “Well, stop working on it,” Livia said. She picked up two notecards, tapped them twice on the edge of the desk to even out the edges, and handed them to me.

  Even before she explained what they were, I knew what she was going to say. This kind of backstage, smoke-filled-room political maneuvering was as old as politics. It was how things got done. It was how the most powerful people got the things they wanted. I was just surprised to find myself a part of it. Why did Livia care if I won? Was it really that she hated Chris Gibbons so much, or did she just think I’d be easier to control than he was?

  “Your speech,” Livia said as I took the cards. “It’s exactly sixty-five seconds long, so you have some wiggle room.”

  Each candidate got two minutes to speak at the assembly, and most of them used every second of it. To do less would be to deprive us all of their brilliant oration. It was a smart move on Livia’s part. To have a candidate get through their remarks uninterrupted by the moderator’s 10-second warning would be downright refreshing.

  As I scanned the cards, I saw that Livia had included all the usual platitudes about my commitment to service, my love for Imperial Day, but there was some edgier material as well. She’d included a line about how I was tired of watching the same people get elected over and over again, and how I’d represent everyone, not just my friends.

  I had to hand it to Livia. She was anything but oblivious to the criticisms of her detractors. Augustus would have been horrified. I could almost hear him asking in his naïve way, “Is that really what people think of us?”

  If he’d known what people thought, who knew? Maybe he would have tried to change things, but Livia was happy to insulate him from criticism. And as for Livia, she knew exactly who didn’t like her and why. She just wasn’t interested in changing.

  Then I flipped the second notecard and read the closing paragraph Livia had written:

  It’s not easy for me to sit here in front of you, to speak into this microphone and ask for your vote. I don’t mean that I’m nervous. I mean that this is physically difficult for me. But I know you can see past all that. You can see a person who will represent you, who will work for YOU in Student Senate.

  “You won’t have to stand at the podium when you say it,” Livia said once I’d looked up. “They’ll have a chair for you. I checked.”

  As I read over the cards again, my cheeks burned. Was this how my classmates saw me? Or how they needed to see me if I was going to win their votes? The noble cripple, oh-so-grateful for a seat at the normal-people table? I felt like screaming as I imagined the prospect of standing up on that stage like Livia’s puppet. Forgive me. Sitting. I meant, sitting. Because apparently my mismatched legs wouldn’t allow me to stand perfectly still at a podium for sixty-five seconds while I read the words that somebody else had written for me.

  And did she have to put so many S’s in it?

  “So what do you think?” Livia asked, her lips pursed impatiently. She slid down from the desk and crossed to the chair where I sat, resting her fingertips on the desktop and glaring down at me. “Can you do it?”

  I skimmed over the notecards again, and my lip curled in distaste as I let what Livia was proposing sink in.

  She sensed it, and pounced. “Before you get all self-righteous on me, Claudia, let me ask you this: Do you want to win? Because nine times out of ten, this assembly cannot help you. It can only hurt you. Everybody’s already made up their minds before they sit down, and the only way you can change them is against you. You’re polling 25 percent. If you want to win, you will need to do something drastic at this assembly. Believe me, I thought about every angle, and this is the one that’s going to work. So I’m going to ask you again: Can you do this? Do you want to win?”

  There was a friendly lilt in her voice as she spoke, a smile on her lips, but the tendons in her neck strained tight and stood out like a lizard’s.

  Did I want to win? Not really. Not anymore. I didn’t care what happened to me. What I cared about was Maisie, and Maisie had to beat Ty. If she didn’t, it would be as good as handing the presidency over to Livia. And then it occurred to me: if I made a fool of myself during my speech, it would hurt Maisie’s chances. I was her sister. I was afraid that any tarnish on me would rub off on her.

  I thought about my Eugene Debs Socialist prison campaign and my weird newspaper profile. That was real, unvarnished me, and the real, unvarnished me was polling at about 25 percent.

  There was one unexpected perk of the insulting speech Livia had written for me: If it made people want to vote for me, maybe it would make them want to vote for Maisie, too. If they pitied me, they’d pity her. Sixty-five soul-crushing seconds. In and out. Probably nobody would be listening anyway.

  “Of course I want to win,” I said.

  “You said you didn’t care what happened to you. Why not, Claudia?”

  “Because in the scheme of things at Imperial Day, I didn’t matter. What mattered was Maisie.”

  “Let’s say you’d run a poor campaign or given a bad speech. Do you think that would have mattered to Maisie? Would she have been ashamed of you or felt that you’d ruined her chances?”

  “No, that’s not like her.”

  “Did Maisie ask you to read the speech that Livia wrote for you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Would she have even wanted you to, Claudia?”

  XIV

  Put It Back the Way It Was

  On the morning of the assembly the candidates met at school early for a catered breakfast, served to us by the graduating seniors from student government. Marcus and Augustus loaded up our plates with bacon and croissants and cantaloupe slices while the two senior senators poured orange juice and coffee. I picked at my plate, too nervous to eat. I was dressed up, by my standards anyway, in wide-legged black pants and a white button-down shirt that I wore untucked. As a nod to the occasion, I wore a blue and gold striped necktie—Imperial Day colors—tied with a full Windsor knot. Imperious in a gray sleeveless sheath dress, Livia eyed my outfit from across the room, and I did my best to ignore her disapproving stare. Just because I was going along with her plan didn’t mean she got to pick my wardrobe. It would be a cold day in hell before anyone got me in a sheath dress.

  I was sitting next to Hector at a table with all the other freshman candidates. He looked crisp and senatorial in his charcoal pinstripe pants, cashmere sweater, and shiny black shoes. However, his hands shook so badly he could barely lift the coffee cup to his lips.

  “I don’t know why I’m trying to drink this,” he said. “It’ll only make things worse.”

  It was Hector, Chris Gibbons, and me for sophomore Student Senate, then Zelda Parsons, Esme Kovacs, and two boys I didn’t really know for Honor Council. By the end of the day, I realized, three of us would have lost.

  “You’re going to do fine,” I told Hector. “If it makes you feel any better, it’s probably going to be me who loses. According to the stats class, I’m pol
ling at 25 percent.”

  Hector snorted and shook his head. “Who told you that?”

  “That’s just what I heard,” I said, sneaking a look at the table where Livia was chatting politely with her opponents.

  “I’m in that stats class,” Hector said, “and the people who ran those numbers did not get a good grade. I think they surveyed, like, five guys who sit with Chris Gibbons at lunch. Not exactly a representative sample.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t know what you’re polling, Claudia, but it’s not 25 percent.”

  After Hector’s revelation, I was too rattled to answer. This changed everything. Maybe I didn’t need to resort to desperate measures to save my campaign and help my sister look good. Maybe I already looked good. The problem was, I didn’t have a backup plan: all I had was Livia’s speech. I read over the notecards and thought about what she’d said: Everybody’s already made up their minds before they sit down in the auditorium. Maybe I could just read the boring parts and cut out the pathetic part about how difficult it all was for me. And I’d read it standing up, that was for sure.

  “Are you okay, Claudia?” Hector asked. “You sound disappointed.”

  A smile played at the corner of my lips, and I discovered my appetite had returned.

  “I’m fine,” I said, stuffing half a croissant into my mouth. “Great, actually. Hector, you have revived my political career.”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” he said.

  The first-period bell rang, and Augustus set down his bacon-serving tongs and said, “Everyone to the auditorium. It’s showtime.”

  We lined up backstage, the upperclassmen claiming the folding chairs along the wall, leaving the underclassmen to stand. The freshmen went first because we were less important, but the way Hector spoke, you never would have guessed this was the case. The moment he stepped in front of the microphone his nerves vanished and he looked genuinely happy to be up there. He even got a laugh for a self-deprecating joke about the correct spelling of the word integrity. When he left the stage, the applause sounded sincere.

  Next was Chris Gibbons, who took the stage looking like he’d just rolled out of bed. As he spoke about his past year of service, about how he wasn’t afraid to speak up when he saw hypocrisy and laziness and poor governance, I thought about what Hector had said. It was hard to know what would happen. Hector had charisma, but he was new, so it was possible that not enough people knew him to elect him. Chris had his troubled past with the Senate, but had run a clean, clever campaign with no missteps. And then there was me.

  “Claudia, you’re up.”

  The voice shook me from my thoughts, and I realized that Chris Gibbons had finished his speech and a freshman stagehand in a black turtleneck was nudging me out onto the stage. I’d worked with him on Little Shop of Horrors. His name was Daniel, and he had that impeccable stagehand quality of being completely invisible until you needed him. He walked alongside me onto the stage where I saw someone had moved a wooden chair. Daniel lowered the microphone down toward it, then offered me his arm—so I could sit down, I guess.

  I didn’t know what the real numbers were. I didn’t know how many votes I really had, but when I imagined myself reading the speech that Livia had written for me, sitting in a chair because I was supposedly too crippled to stand, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. It would have been one thing if the chair and the microphone and Daniel’s arm were there because people were being nice, but the whole thing was a manipulation, and I wanted no part of it. I tapped Daniel on the arm.

  “Could you put it back the way it was?” I whispered.

  My mind was made up.

  Daniel moved the microphone as I took Livia’s notecards out of my pocket and placed them on the podium. I cleared my throat, adjusted my Windsor knot, and began to read:

  “I might not be the typical or ideal Imperial Day student, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t felt welcomed here. At the beginning of the year, you were mostly strangers, and now, I call many of you my friends. That’s one of the most special things about Imperial Day and one of the reasons I’m so eager to serve as your sophomore senator. However, I won’t just represent the interests of my friends. It is my pledge to listen to the concerns of every—”

  Then a voice called out from the back of the darkened auditorium.

  “P-P-P-PLEDGE.”

  I froze in the spotlight, unable to believe what I’d just heard.

  “S-S-SENATOR.”

  It was a different voice that time, a different corner of the auditorium. A gasp and a few nervous titters rolled through the crowd as they waited to see what was going to happen next. I waited, too. Somebody knew who had done this. Somebody had been sitting next to them or behind them or in front of them when it had happened. I waited for a third voice to chime in, to denounce what had just happened, but after a few seconds, it began to dawn on me that this was not going to happen. The whispering and giggling died down, the room fell silent, and I realized that the voice they were waiting for was mine. Nobody was going to defend me. Everybody was too interested in seeing how I was going to respond, what I was going to do next.

  I looked down at the words on Livia’s notecards and wondered if I should have listened to her. If I’d been sitting down in the chair, would that have made a difference? Is that what they wanted me to be? But I didn’t have the stomach to finish reading that speech now. I couldn’t stand to say one more nice thing about Imperial Day or its students. No one was going to stop this and no one was going to be punished, so the only thing I could do was to get off the stage with some dignity.

  I would not run away. I would not let them see me get angry. I would not let them see me cry.

  I would not give them the satisfaction.

  Instead I stood at the podium and looked out into the crowd, keeping my expression as neutral as possible. I met people’s eyes and forced them to look at me. I refused to look away first. One face after another. I did this until the moderator said, “Ten seconds, Miss McCarthy.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly until I was sure I could get the words out without stuttering or bursting into tears. As I leaned toward the mic, my necktie fell against the podium, and I clamped my fingers down on it, stroking the silk. The audience looked restless as they waited to see what I’d do next. Some looked downright hostile, like it was my fault they’d spent sixty seconds feeling uncomfortable, but I didn’t care. I’d spent a year trying to fit in, becoming involved, meeting people, and after a year of that, the student body of Imperial Day had responded with a resounding Fuck you.

  “Thank you for your time and, I hope, for your vote,” I said at last before walking off the stage. I left Livia’s notecards on the podium.

  The audience was quiet, but the moment I was behind the curtain, I heard the chattering begin as everyone began to talk about what they’d just seen. Backstage, all the other candidates stared at me in horror. Maybe a few were stunned that it had happened in the first place, but they seemed more scandalized that I’d chosen to stand there, absorbing it in silence.

  What would you have done if it was you? I wanted to ask. Because if it was you, I like to think I would have done something.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Lester, the AP Government teacher who was ostensibly coordinating this thing, was standing by my side and clutching my arms in her hands.

  “I’m so sorry, Claudia,” she said, exhaling her coffee breath in my face. With each word, she gave me a little shake that I suppose I was meant to find emphatic and reassuring. “I will find out who did this.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I did not think Mrs. Lester would find the culprits. I mean, what was she going to do? Drop everything and question the whole student body? She had an assembly to run. There were thirty-six candidates, each with two minutes to speak, and I’m sure Mrs. Lester knew that a freshman with hurt feelings was a less volatile situation than an auditorium packed like a powder keg with bored, restless people.

 
; She did stand there with me long enough to make sure that I was not about to fall to pieces outside the green room. Once she saw that I was more or less all right, she let go of my arms and swept past me. A moment later, she was standing at the podium trying to hush the crowd so she could introduce the people running for the junior class seats on the Senate and Honor Council. The show had to go on.

  Rather than face the stares of my fellow candidates in the green room, I returned to the wings where I had a good view of the stage, and watched Mrs. Lester tap impotently on the microphone.

  “Attention, please. May I have your attention, please?”

  I almost felt bad for her. It wasn’t fair expecting a teacher like that to stand up for me when she was outmatched herself. The buzz of conversation grew even louder and Mrs. Lester began to look desperate. The lull in the program had lasted a minute too long, and now disorder had spread over the auditorium like kudzu. I saw her crane her neck, looking out into the audience for some other teacher or administrator to come to her aid.

  It wasn’t a teacher who rescued her, though. It certainly wasn’t Principal Graves. It wasn’t even Augustus.

  It was Cal, psycho-eyed creep and sexual harasser of theater girls, who appeared from the far side of the stage. I was used to seeing him in his white dentist’s coat, terrorizing the cast and crew of Little Shop of Horrors. Now, he wore a navy blue suit and a red striped tie. His hair was slicked back and there was a pocket square folded in his breast pocket. He glided up to the microphone, nudged Mrs. Lester aside, and said, “Please show this woman some respect,” which was ironic, considering the source.

  A hush fell over the room as Cal, who had never come to a teacher’s defense in his life, stood there before them looking like JFK.

  “Are you ready, Calvin?” Mrs. Lester asked.

  Cal nodded, and Mrs. Lester smiled. Order restored, she leaned over and said, “I am pleased to introduce the candidates for junior class Honor Council representative.”

  “Thank you,” Cal said as Mrs. Lester made her exit. He rested his forearms on the podium and leaned forward like this was just a casual conversation between friends. “Before I begin, I wanted to say how surprised and how disappointed I am about what just happened up here a moment ago. According to the Honor Code, we’re not supposed to lie, cheat, or steal, but if that’s all there is to it, so what? It has to mean more than that. The Honor Code has to function in our lives in such a way that when one of our classmates is bullied, we refuse to tolerate it. That’s why right now, I want to ask if anyone knows who made fun of Claudia McCarthy during her speech. Or maybe those people want to confess themselves?”