I, Claudia Read online

  “Too bad,” the fortune-teller said. “I have some especially extraordinary things to tell you.”

  Livia turned toward the others. “We’ll throw in five dollars each for her.” It was a command, not a question.

  “That’s really not necessary,” I said, inching back from the fortune-teller’s stand.

  “It’s no trouble,” Livia said, reaching in her baby-blue Bottega Veneta clutch.

  “I d-d-don’t want to have my fortune told,” I said, a little more forcefully than I’d intended, which of course made me stutter all over the place.

  Livia looked like a sadistic dentist who’d just prodded a sore tooth. She held out her hand and, just like that, Ty and Cal each pitched in a five-dollar bill. Only Augustus held back, eyeing my obvious discomfort. He’d shell out five bucks for a laugh, but not for a cruel one.

  “She doesn’t want to do it, Livia,” he said.

  Livia shrugged as though that fact was entirely beside the point.

  “Come on, Maisie’s sister,” Cal said. “It’s not like he’s going to give you herpes. Probably.”

  I could feel my throat start to tighten as I inhaled the mixture of incense and cheap liquor wafting from the fortune-teller’s booth. My head spun, and I held a hand to my nose even though I knew it was rude.

  It wasn’t this particular fortune-teller. It wasn’t his odor or grotesque looks. The truth is that I don’t like fortune-tellers.

  No. That’s not the truth. The truth is that I’m afraid of fortune-tellers.

  I’m a historian. Fortune-tellers are my natural enemies. I deal in a past that happened. They deal in a future that won’t.

  The idea of having a stranger look into my eyes and down at my palm, then tell me all about myself, made me want to go into hiding. I didn’t want to be seen or known, and I certainly didn’t want any of it to happen with Livia, Cal, and the rest of them watching.

  But more than any of that, I didn’t want to hear my fortune because even if it was a scam, even if I had nothing to be afraid of, it was me we were talking about.

  I knew it would be terrible, and I knew it would be the truth.

  After kicking in the last five dollars herself, Livia put four bills down on the fortune-teller’s table and pulled her hand away like she was afraid of accidentally touching something. Then she pushed me forward and sat me down on the three-legged stool.

  There I was, face-to-face with the fortune-teller. I was frozen in my seat, arrested by his gaze and deranged grin. I shook Livia’s hands from my shoulders and scooted up close to the fortune-teller’s card table. If I was going to be forced to have my fortune read, at least I could have some privacy. The man seemed to understand, leaning in and lowering his voice.

  “How old are you?” he muttered.

  “Fourteen,” I muttered back.

  He nodded knowingly. “Ninth grade, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ninth grade is where it all started to go wrong for me,” he said, sucking on a tooth.

  That was one of the many things about fortune-tellers that drove me nuts, the way they tricked you into doing their work for them, acting like they were making small talk when really, they were trying to pin you down. I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to make it that easy for him.

  “Do you like school?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then he surprised me.

  He cocked his head to the side and said, “So it’s people you don’t like.”

  “I like people fine.” I tried to sound casual about it, but it probably came off sounding defensive anyway.

  “Then people don’t like you,” he said, sucking his tooth again as he sized me up. “You start a lot of fights?”

  I sniffed, enjoying a moment of vindication—and a little bit of relief. There was nothing magical about this person. He was doing a cold reading, and not doing a very good job of it either.

  “I’m a pacifist,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. Augustus and Ty were keeping a respectful distance, and Cal’s attention had drifted toward a busty woman in a slingshot bikini and roller skates, twirling down the bike path. But Livia hung on every word I said, no doubt filing it away for some moment in the future when she could use it against me.

  “You know who else was a pacifist?” The fortune-teller reached across the table and gripped my forearm. I could feel my skin begin to itch at his touch, could almost see the fleas hopping from his arm to mine. I tried to pull away, but he only tightened his grip.

  “You ever heard of Good King Wenceslas?” he asked.

  “Like in the song?” I asked, finally wrenching my arm out of his grip, not caring how rude it might seem. But the fortune-teller seemed too worked up to care.

  “Murdered by his own brother, Boleslav the Cruel,” he said. “To get a dukedom. With a name like that, you’d think Wenceslas would have seen it coming.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” I asked.

  He lowered his voice further and craned his neck down so that the ocean breeze carried his words away and Livia, who wasn’t even trying to conceal her eavesdropping, was frustrated in her efforts and finally rejoined Augustus, Ty, and Cal.

  “Because, Claudia, I want you to know that I am also a student of history.”

  His words shot down my spine like ice water.

  He overheard one of them, I thought. Livia must have said my name within earshot of his table.

  However, I knew this was not the case. And how could he have known I was a historian?

  The fortune-teller’s lips curled back to reveal two silver canine teeth, probably the ones he’d been sucking.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, pleased with himself. “Cat got your tongue? Now, tell me. What is it that you’d like to know?”

  I could have asked anything. Often I think about that and wish I’d asked about something meaningless, like what the weather would be like on October 16 or whether I’d be pretty in ten years. Other times, I wish I’d asked about love and whether I was always going to be alone. That would have been useful information.

  But I didn’t, and what I asked was so broad, so stupid, I don’t know what kind of answer I even expected to get.

  “What’s high school going to be like?” I asked.

  The fortune-teller didn’t hesitate.

  “The answer is all right there,” he said, nodding toward Augustus and Ty and Livia and Cal. “Your little friends over there.”

  I looked over my shoulder in disbelief.

  “Those people aren’t my friends.”

  The fortune-teller clasped my hands. This time, I didn’t recoil from his touch.

  “Of course they’re not. And you’re going to destroy them all. You’re going to leave them reeling, their ambitions unrealized, their dearest hopes and wishes thwarted. And when all of them have fallen away, you alone will be left standing with the kind of power that people would lie and cheat and steal for, the kind of power that everyone wants. Everyone except you.”

  The skeptic in me pulled my hands away, started to get up from the table, but the historian in me won out. I stayed put and let the fortune-teller’s words sink in.

  His eyes darted toward Augustus, then down the line: Ty, then Cal, before meeting mine again.

  “Gold. Silver. Then clay. Then bronze.”

  “Augustus is gold?” I asked, frantic to remember every word even if I didn’t understand what they meant. He’d looked at me when he said bronze. Did that mean I was bronze? Was that supposed to be a good thing?

  Without answering my question, the fortune-teller cut his eyes toward Livia and he whispered to me, “And her? She’s the fire that forges you all. You want to keep from getting burned, Claudia? Play up that stutter of yours. Play up the limp. But whatever you do, Claudia, play dumb and keep your head down. You do that, and you just might make it out of Imperial Day Academy in one piece.”

  I’d never told him where I went to school. That I knew for sure
.

  II

  A Student of History

  Nothing I do matters.

  You might think that I’m upset about this, that after years of absorbing contempt from my peers and disappointment from my parents, it was inevitable that I would end up here in your office.

  But you’d be wrong if you think I’m that fragile.

  You see, I almost died when I was born. I was hospitalized for months, an incubator baby with translucent skin and a dozen tubes sticking out of me, and for most of that time, I was alone. My mother and father were busy cleaning up the mess that was our family business and attending to my siblings, so mostly I lay mewling in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by myself. Very few pictures of me exist from that time. Two-pound babies are not very lovely to look at, and I suppose no one wanted to get all that attached to me in case I failed to pull through.

  Lest you think my parents neglectful monsters, I don’t hold this against them. The time surrounding my birth was a difficult one for them. You see, my parents were, in the parlance of the early 2000s, internet pioneers. They had started a string of successful online businesses that catered to busy people who were too important to have time to do their own errands, but not important enough to have personal assistants to do those things for them. So my parents created DeliverMe, an online service to deliver their diapers and groceries, run background checks on their nannies, and order their takeout.

  Along the way, they transformed themselves from Caltech-educated nerds into the class of moneyed Angelenos. They lost their schlubiness, moved from Pasadena to Los Feliz, and then to Pacific Palisades when they had kids. They acquired the trappings of Angeleno success: a pool they never used, a personal trainer, Botox, teeth whitening sessions, an electric car, a storage unit for their wine, and a stylist for special occasions.

  My mother was not quite seven months pregnant with me when she discovered that my father’s assistant, Melinda, had stolen credit card numbers from 75 percent of DeliverMe’s customer base.

  My mother’s suspicions had been aroused when she found Melinda, whom she’d never liked, flirting with the head of DeliverMe’s security operations, a doughy, acne-scarred, unreconstructed geek named David. My mother valued David for his home-brewed encryption software and the firewalls he guarded like a sworn member of some ancient warrior guild, but she was not sure what Melinda saw in him and doubted the purity of her motives.

  As a result, the next time Melinda went to lunch, my mother went to her desk and saw that the little idiot had left her Hotmail account logged in. A cursory search revealed hundreds of emails, each containing long strings of credit card numbers and expiration dates. Calmly, my mother summoned her own assistant to guard the door while she printed off one email after another, placing them carefully into a folder.

  That was when the contractions began, but instead of telling someone or lying down or going to the doctor, my mother called her lawyer. She called the police. She called my father and spelled out the extent of Melinda’s betrayal. She met with a PR consultant about damage control, and—most of all—she waited for Melinda’s arrest. But as quickly and quietly as my mother had acted, Melinda must have sensed the axe was about to fall because when the police descended upon her one-bedroom carriage house in WeHo, she was already on a plane to Argentina with enough stolen credit card numbers to comfortably fund a long exile.

  I think it was being thwarted like that, being denied her vengeance, that sent my mother into full-on, movie cliché, water-breaks-in-the-elevator labor, causing me to come into the world far more prematurely than anyone would have liked.

  My parents’ business ultimately recovered from the Melinda Incident. And mostly, I recovered from the trauma of my early birth. I still have the usual preemie problems: allergies and asthma. I’ve had three heart surgeries and steroids shot into my lungs. I’ve worn glasses since I was three (though now I sometimes switch them out for contact lenses). And then I have a few other ailments, impediments, maladies, and shortcomings.

  There’s the stutter that, despite my speech therapist’s assurances, never quite resolved itself and a sibilant “S” that still gives me trouble if I try to pronounce the letter while thinking about it too much or not enough. And my right leg is three inches shorter than the left one, causing me to walk with a limp (though it’s really only noticeable when I get tired or if you’re looking for it).

  On top of everything else, no one would ever call me my parents’ loveliest child.

  They have two other children, both intelligent, attractive, talented in all the ways parents hope for. Charlie is at Harvard Business School now and has little to do with any of us, least of all me. He does not come into this story. Serves him right, the snob.

  And I’ve already told you a little about Maisie, though not about what happened to her—what Livia did to her, I should say.

  So my parents have all the legacy they need. My siblings will achieve great things, marry into good families, produce lovely children themselves, and do and be all the things my parents ever hoped for.

  It used to be that first sons inherited property, second sons went into the military, and third sons were given over to the church as thanks to God for the other two. But since my parents are not religious, I became a student of history.

  People always say that history is important because those who don’t learn from its mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

  I’m not sure that’s true. I believe that history is important because if you’re still standing on the other side of it, it means you won. You survived. It’s in the past, and what’s behind you can’t hurt you.

  Not as long as you can outrun it.

  As far as most people were concerned, what I did was putter around with dates and dusty old books and microfilm, and who was going to bother to ask me about that? I was glad to be thought bookish and eccentric, but ultimately harmless. I was grateful for my unremarkableness, for my parents’ indifference to me, that my classmates found me boring or strange.

  Nothing I did mattered.

  And because of that, I was free.

  “You said you wanted to begin this story in the ninth grade, Claudia.”

  “And I do. It’s just that to fully understand the Claudia McCarthy ninth-grade experience, you need context.”

  “What sort of context?”

  “I’ve told you what kind of person I am, or at least what kind of person I was when I entered the Imperial Day Academy. Now you need to know exactly what kind of a rat factory it was, so you can understand that a person like me had no business being sent there in the first place.”

  “Then I suppose you’d better tell me about it.”

  III

  A Rich Person Who Felt Guilty about Something

  The Imperial Day Academy is sometimes called “the Empire” because its graduates are spread throughout every Ivy League school and Fortune 500 company in the world. Once I realized I would be going there, and that there was no getting out of it, I decided that I owed it to myself to learn a little something about the place. As a historian, I knew that the version of events presented on the school website would be sanitized and scrubbed clean of all truth and human interest, so I dug deeper into the historical record until I found the real dirt.

  The Imperial Day Academy was founded in 1898, and like many things in Los Angeles, it was founded by a rich person who felt guilty about something. Paul Chudnuff was an oil tycoon whose only daughter, Faith, had an intense friendship with a distressingly middle-class girl named Violet Hayes. Chudnuff was unnerved by it and suspected that something unseemly—by 1898 standards, anyway—was going on, so he put a stop to it. He forbade the girls from seeing one another anymore, which went over even more poorly than you might have expected.

  Faith and Violet ran off in the night with nothing but the clothes on their backs and attempted to hop a train to San Francisco. They weren’t stupid girls, but they were sheltered, with heads full of romantic ideas. Miraculously, they weren’
t crushed beneath the wheels or stabbed by hoboes. They got on the northbound train without incident, but then the weather turned as night fell. The next morning, railroad bulls found the girls in a boxcar huddled together and frozen nearly to death.

  It was with a mixture of guilt, shame, worry, and anger that Paul Chudnuff made his way to San Francisco to collect them. The girls’ injuries were very severe—both had lost appendages to frostbite—and it was already in the papers. Some foolish person had even told reporters how Chudnuff had interfered in the girls’ friendship.

  The whole train ride up, Chudnuff reasoned that if Faith had been in a more rigorous environment, surrounded by a better sort of person than the neighbor girl, her head would have been filled with more serious things. She would have cultivated her mind, filled it with philosophy, rhetoric, oration, and history instead of dime novels about train-hopping tramps.

  According to his biographers, by the time Chudnuff reached San Francisco, he’d hatched the idea for the Imperial Day Academy. It would be a school governed by honor, by decency, by obedience to one’s parents and teachers. It would be coeducational so that male and female students might “mix freely and learn early to enjoy one another’s society,” by which he really meant “not turn queer,” but you know, potato, po-TAH-to.

  The more he thought about the school, the more he liked the idea. It appealed to his sense of himself as a classicist and a scholar. What’s more, he knew that it would change the newspaper headlines from “OILMAN’S DAUGHTER LOSES FOOT” to something far more noble.

  The school would be elite. It would be rigorous, but in his feverish scheming, Paul Chudnuff would not be satisfied with starting a good private school, or even an excellent one. It had to be really revolutionary. For starters, it would be a meritocracy. Chudnuff’s school would admit only the brightest and most talented, regardless of their ability to pay (but with the unspoken understanding that most of the students would be able to pay because that was just how these things worked). But more important than that, the students would learn to govern themselves, and take on the responsibility and duty to rout out whatever was not fine or fitting. To uphold these ideals, each student would sign an honor code when he or she entered Imperial Day, vowing not to cheat, steal, lie, or otherwise demonstrate character unbecoming, and to report any instances of misconduct witnessed. And that was the kernel of thought that would become the Imperial Day Academy Honor Council, created to uphold the school’s honor code. We have a student council like most schools do, only ours is called the Senate—another of Paul Chudnuff’s classicist touches. The Senate has the appearance of running things, but the real power lies with the Imperial Day Academy Honor Council, and everyone knows it.