I, Claudia Read online

  The Honor Council consists of eight members, two from each class, elected by their peers, and all infractions are reported to them. They conduct the investigations, provide counsel to the accused, call the witnesses, render the verdicts, and dish out the sentences, which can range from probation or community service for a minor infraction to expulsion for a serious one. The principal may overrule a decision, though in my perusal of the Honor Council archives (disappointingly scanty—nothing but member rosters and a page or two of statistics about how many cases were heard each year), I learned that this executive privilege has not been exercised in over a decade—certainly not during the tenure of Dr. Graves, who is seldom known to leave his office, much less meddle in the affairs of the Honor Council.

  Lots of schools have honor codes, but what Paul Chudnuff created at Imperial Day was a whole culture. Overseeing all of it is the Honor Council, which has the power to do whatever it wants to uphold that code; whose members hold in their hands all of our fates and decide whether we will be cast out in disgrace or permitted to remain.

  The Honor Council knows everything that happens at Imperial Day, every dark secret, every misdeed.

  Paul Chudnuff took the ideas of honor and righteousness and linked them to power.

  And to a certain kind of person, power like that is irresistible.

  IV

  Someone I Knew Firsthand to Be a Terrible Person

  “This isn’t the Griffith School,” Maisie said as she walked me to homeroom on the first day of my freshman year at Imperial Day Academy. I felt a little bit babyish about this, but also grateful to have my sister by my side.

  And when she said that this wasn’t the Griffith School, I knew what she really meant. Three years of middle school had taught me to brace myself for certain kinds of meanness, to anticipate, deflect, and when all else failed, to flee. The existence I’d made for myself in middle school had allowed me to survive, but it was no way to live. After three years of keeping my head down, of being invisible, of sheltering at a lunch table with people whose common status as rejects failed to bond us together in any meaningful way, what I needed was a friend. A real friend. A friend who wasn’t also my sister. Some of my former classmates at Griffith had found their way to Imperial Day, but most had not. As I looked around the hallways, the faces I saw were almost all new. This was encouraging.

  “You’re going to find your people here, Claudia. I know it.”

  We stopped in front of my homeroom door.

  “Are you ready?” Maisie asked.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Unless you can think of a reasonable, legal alternative.”

  “I’ll be homeschooled,” I said.

  “Our parents have better things to do than homeschool your ass.”

  “I’ll have a private tutor then,” I said. “Like a 17th-century dauphin. Or a child actor.”

  Maisie gave me a sad smile because she knew that I was kidding, but she also knew that the reason I was kidding was because I was scared.

  “Do you want a hug?” she asked, holding out her arms to me. “Or would that be embarrassing?”

  I wanted a hug more than anything.

  “Go,” I said, shooing her out of the doorway. “You’ll be late. I promise not to run away and become a child actor.”

  “Or a 17th-century dauphin,” she said, giving my arm a squeeze. “Find me at lunch, okay? I’ll save you a seat.”

  Having lunch with Maisie was both good and not good. On the one hand, it was the only time during the day when I was guaranteed to see her. The second she saw me, Maisie always stopped what she was doing to drop some little bit of sunshine into my day: she’d show me a batch of Gerald Ford campaign buttons that had gone up for sale on eBay, or a close-up picture of the dude who is, absent any context, depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry with his 11th-century cock and balls dangling freely. What I’m saying is, Maisie knew how to make me smile.

  On the other hand was the rest of our lunch table. The upperclassmen Honor Council representatives all ate together: Augustus and Marcus; Julia, who wasn’t on the Honor Council, but had a certain status nonetheless because she was Marcus’s girlfriend; Maisie and Ty; and, much to my dismay, Livia, who was only a sophomore, but as Augustus’s girlfriend, held court over the entire table. Everyone was in her thrall, including my sister. Especially my sister.

  The nice thing about having been in middle school during my sister’s first two years at Imperial Day was that I could tell myself that certain things weren’t happening, that my sister wasn’t becoming closer and closer to someone I knew firsthand to be a terrible person.

  But that first day of school in the Imperial Day cafeteria, Livia walked through the door, spotted my sister, and shouted from across the room, “There she is!” And Maisie pointed at her and shouted back, “There’s my girl!”

  And then, when they came running up to each other, Livia stopped in front of my sister, threw up her hands and said, “Who run it?” And at the same time they both said, “You run it,” pointed at each other, crossed their arms, bumped them together, then hugged, like the whole routine was some long-standing inside joke/secret handshake the two of them had, its origin story entirely mysterious to me.

  Being at Imperial Day and sitting with Maisie at lunch meant that I could no longer ignore my sister’s friendship with Livia.

  I didn’t know then, on the first day of my freshman year, that the Honor Council would come to be synonymous with corruption and tyranny. The fact that my sister was the junior class Honor Council representative didn’t jar me in the least. She was lovely and honorable and decent and good and universally liked. Of course she was on the Honor Council.

  But her friendship with Livia? That worried me from the start.

  V

  Every Bit as Awful as the Lie

  There are lots of reasons to dislike Livia.

  She walks around like she has a stick up her ass.

  She thinks she’s the only person who knows how to do anything properly, like the rest of us are giant idiots and she has to save us from ourselves.

  She knows where everybody’s weak spot is, and she always seems to know how to push and prod it until it gives.

  There are lots of reasons to dislike her, and depending on who you are, there are also some reasons to hate her, but there was only one reason that my sister’s friendship with Livia scared me. Maisie was already a freshman at Imperial Day preparing for her first Honor Council campaign, but Livia and I were still together at the Griffith School. Livia was in eighth grade and I was in seventh when the incident in question happened, and it was very difficult for me to come by reliable information because I was in the wrong grade to have access to firsthand sources. Information was on lockdown because everyone was trying to keep the younger students from finding out anything about it.

  My sources eventually included a conversation between staff in the front office, on whom I eavesdropped while pretending to photocopy a John Updike short story for a teacher; Livia’s former best friend, Octavia Resnick; her victim, Cassidy Jones; and, of course, the newspaper accounts that surfaced. I went so far as to track down a few of their sources and re-interview them, just to verify their stories.

  I’m telling you this so you understand: This isn’t gossip. This is history.

  And it matters.

  What happened was this: An eighth-grade girl named Cassidy Jones accepted an invitation to a school dance from a boy named Victor Merriweather, who is unimportant to this history save for his distinction of having been Livia’s seventh-grade boyfriend. According to Octavia, it was not that Cassidy agreed to go that enraged Livia so much as the fact that Cassidy failed to ask Livia’s blessing beforehand.

  Right on the heels of Cassidy’s offense, the eighth-grade language arts teacher, Mr. Arnold, caught Livia with a To Kill a Mockingbird cheat sheet concealed under the sole of her shoe during a quiz. Mr. Arnold handled the matter discreetly. He asked Livia to stay after class, where he
informed her that she’d receive a zero. Then he lectured her about what waited around the corner at Imperial Day Academy, the Honor Code. Was she willing to jeopardize her future over the outcome of a 10-point quiz?

  Livia nodded her head, feigned regret, and meekly accepted her punishment, but inside she seethed. She was especially irate after receiving a B+ for the course, rather than the A her carefully compiled point spreadsheet showed that she had earned, even factoring in the zero on the To Kill a Mockingbird quiz.

  However, Livia kept her rage to herself and was not suspected when an anonymous letter arrived in the inboxes of several middle-school administrators stating that Mr. Arnold and Cassidy Jones were having a sexual relationship. The letter alleged that Mr. Arnold had written Cassidy poetry and given her a prepaid cell phone. They’d had sex in his car at the end of a little-traveled cul-de-sac overlooking the 101 freeway. They’d also had sex at Mr. Arnold’s house on a day when both he and Cassidy had called in sick.

  It was all shockingly well documented. Office records showed that Mr. Arnold and Cassidy had indeed been absent from school on the same day. The clerk at a convenience store near the school said that he remembered Mr. Arnold purchasing a pair of cheap, prepaid cell phones on at least one occasion. A sheaf of love poems written in a decidedly adult hand was found in Cassidy’s locker, though she denied ever having seen it before.

  Not a bit of suspicion fell on Livia, and poor Cassidy was judged and found guilty from the second the story got out. She was a girl who’d always had boyfriends, who’d developed early, who wore skintight shirts and jeans and loomed large in the fantasy lives of most heterosexual males in the eighth grade, and possibly more than one creepy staff member. For this, she was immediately assumed to be complicit in the whole thing.

  In addition, she was on partial scholarship. Her parents were no one you had to suck up to. She wasn’t like Astrid Murray, who, despite being a known asshole, was treated with inexhaustible goodwill by her classmates because her parents were moderately famous actors.

  The school was thrown into chaos. People could talk of little else, although at the same time, you weren’t supposed to talk about it. Nobody enjoyed talking about it. It wasn’t the kind of story that made you feel scandalously in-the-know. It was the kind that made you feel dirty for having brushed up against it.

  What was lost in all of this was that, from the beginning, Cassidy had said that the story was a lie, and she had never wavered from this. She’d told the principal, she’d told the police, she’d told her parents, and yet, the investigation carried on because no one believed her. Her grades suffered and she came perilously close to losing her scholarship, but still, she came to school every day, staring straight ahead, speaking to no one. She took notes in class and handed in all her assignments on time, avoiding the pitying, curious, disgusted looks from her teachers.

  It was when the police had hit a roadblock in their investigation—not quite enough evidence to move forward, too much to back away—that Octavia came forward and outed Livia as the letter-writer.

  At first, no one believed Octavia any more than they had believed Cassidy. But then, Octavia began to recite lines of verse, verbatim, from the sheaf of poetry that had been found in Cassidy’s locker. Octavia confessed that she and Livia had written the poems together. It was a joke, a shitty one, but Octavia had only done it as a way to commiserate with her friend. Everybody knew that if a girl with boobs as big as Cassidy Jones’s had a cheat sheet under her shoe, Mr. Arnold would have acted like he didn’t see a thing. Octavia had never intended to show the poems to anyone, and she’d sworn she had no idea what Livia had planned to do.

  Mr. Arnold had never had sex with Cassidy, Octavia said. Nobody had done anything. Livia had made the whole thing up. This news detonated in the hallways of the Griffith School as the case began to disintegrate. Mr. Arnold came back to work, and a handful of people (though fewer than you’d expect) told Cassidy they were sorry for what she’d gone through.

  Now it was Livia who was in exile. People avoided her in the halls or stared openly, whispering behind their hands. The more people learned about what Livia had done—and how mild the original provocation was—the more disgusted they became. The school administrators cancelled the hearing to decide Mr. Arnold’s fate, and instead set a date to determine whether Livia would be permitted to remain at the Griffith School. The LAPD considered bringing charges against her, though Mr. Arnold gallantly came forward and begged them not to punish a confused, immature girl who couldn’t have known how out of control her accusations would become.

  Cassidy could have spat in Livia’s face, slapped her, punched her, torn out her hair, and hardly a teacher at the Griffith School would have lifted a finger to discipline her. However, she did none of these things. The day the news broke, she walked up to Livia, looked her in the eye, and asked, “Why me?”

  Legend has it that Livia sneered and replied, “Why not?” However, a more credible source at the scene confirms that Livia said nothing at all, that she pretended she hadn’t heard and walked away. I consider this to be the likelier account because Livia knew how much trouble she was in. She knew how close she was to losing everything she valued, everything she was. If ever her indomitable spirit was cowed in the slightest, I believe it must have been then.

  Just when things looked darkest for Livia, the story took an ugly turn.

  A girl came forward, a girl no one had ever thought of much before, a girl who tended to walk invisibly through the halls, a girl who was the last girl in the world you’d expect to be involved in any of this. Jill Hathaway.

  Jill Hathaway was painfully shy, with a shock of overgrown black hair. She always carried around a black Moleskine notebook filled with poetry she’d written, some of it very good. She had an intensity about her, a seriousness that said all of this pain and isolation and alienation was for something, like she was making a study of it to tease out later, strand by strand, for her art.

  So, yeah, I think you see where this is going. The truth was every bit as awful as the lie. The fact was this: Mr. Arnold would never have pursued a girl like Cassidy Jones. A girl with friends. A girl who talked, a girl who spoke up for herself. And had he known that Jill Hathaway was the kind of girl to keep a journal, perhaps he would have set his sights elsewhere.

  I’ve always found it curious that Jill’s Moleskine notebook turned up when it did, in the inbox of Ms. Garza, our middle-school guidance counselor. Maybe Jill wanted it to be over, too. Or maybe it wasn’t Jill who turned the journal in at all.

  All I know for sure is that Ms. Garza called Jill into her office and gradually drew from her a tearful confession that she and Mr. Arnold had been sleeping together since October. There was proof. Jill had emails from an account he’d set up just for contacting her. She had a mix CD he’d made for her and an obscene text. She said that she’d wanted to end it, but didn’t know how and was too scared. He wouldn’t stop sending her messages, wouldn’t stop watching her. Even when she tried to avoid him, he was always there, following her around, lurking around in the hallway by her locker, parking his car outside her house.

  And here’s what happened next. People began to say that it was Livia who had given Jill the courage to come forward by accusing Mr. Arnold of having an affair with an eighth grader. No one seemed to remember the fact that Mr. Arnold was entirely innocent of the particular crime Livia had accused him of. Everyone just decided it was because of Livia that he had been brought to justice.

  I don’t enjoy telling you this story. It isn’t gossip that I relish knowing, but then again, it’s not gossip. It’s the truth. It is history, and if you want to understand Livia, this is where you have to start.

  So, if she was such a monster, why was my beatific older sister such good friends with her?

  I guess that’s partly my fault.

  Like I said, Maisie wasn’t there when it happened, and by the time the story trickled out, Livia had dropped out of it entirely. Mr. Ar
nold’s crimes were so abominable that Livia’s all but disappeared in their shadow.

  Livia also got to Imperial Day a year before I did. She had a whole year to worm her way into my sister’s life. Maisie talked about her, went places with her, had her over to our house, and the whole time, I wondered, Does she know? She had to know.

  But if Maisie knew, then why were she and Livia always up in her room with the door closed? Why were they always laughing their heads off, then stopping abruptly when I knocked on the door?

  Part of me wanted to tell my sister my version of the story, but something always stopped me.

  I was afraid of sounding jealous.

  I was afraid Maisie wouldn’t believe me.Worst of all, I was afraid that Maisie already knew what Livia had done, and she didn’t care.

  If any two people had mixed feelings over the revelations about Mr. Arnold, they were Cassidy Jones and Octavia. Cassidy never quite managed to shake off the stories. There was always something about the way people treated her, like she was still unclean even if the stories weren’t true.

  As for Octavia, that was the end of her friendship with Livia, which meant the end of her time as a person who mattered. She slunk through the Griffith School, then Imperial Day, silently willing everyone to forget she was once a person they noticed.