I, Claudia Read online

  Some people seek out obscurity; others have it thrust upon them. Octavia was one of the latter.

  She did what she needed to do to survive. And so did Livia. It was a long time before Livia was successfully betrayed again, and it was the last time she was caught at any of her tricks.

  By the time the older girls finished eighth grade, this was the historical record: Cassidy would always be a slut. Jill would always be a victim. Octavia would always be an outcast. But by the time Livia was in ninth grade and running for Honor Council, nobody ever remembered to call her a liar.

  VI

  Balls the Size of Church Bells

  For the first month at Imperial Day, I was in survival mode. I went to class. I raised my hand just enough to keep my participation scores out of the toilet. I clung to Maisie at lunch and during the rare moments when we saw each other in the hallway like she was a barrel bobbing in shark-infested waters.

  But by the end of September, I’d begun to realize that I wasn’t going to fail out and I wasn’t going to die. I wasn’t going to be brutalized by upperclassmen any more than I could handle. The whispers behind hands, giggles, and pitying looks when I talked or was forced to serve a volleyball in gym class—that kind of thing was going to happen, and I’d made my peace with it a long time ago. The important thing was, I realized it wasn’t going to get any worse.

  I thought about what Maisie had told me on the first day of school, that I’d find my people at Imperial Day, and I decided that it was high time I started looking for them.

  I volunteered my services in the fall theatrical production of Little Shop of Horrors and was made assistant stage manager, mostly because no one else wanted the job. Imperial Day Academy is not the sort of place where you get a lot of people wanting to be assistant anything. I covered the news beat for the school paper, reporting on school board meetings, the show choir, and the trials and travails of the academic decathlon team.

  Maisie was right. It wasn’t like the Griffith School. People did seem to like me once they got to know me a little, like I was an unexpectedly good record from the dollar bin. It was nice to be seen with fresh eyes by people who didn’t know yet that they weren’t supposed to like me.

  So when Soren Bieckmann announced to the cast and crew of Little Shop of Horrors that his parents were out of town and we were all invited over to his house for a party, it dawned on me that I was included in that invitation and that, if I wanted to, I could go.

  I was so excited by the prospect of having plans on a Friday night that I failed to consider that my sister might have a problem with it.

  You see, Soren Bieckmann was himself a problem. Had he been less rich or less white, he would have done a dozen stints in juvie by his sophomore year, but since he was these things, people considered him reckless, fun, and generally a good person to know if you liked prescription medications. Despite his reputation, he always managed to skate on the right side of the Honor Council, and nothing ever stuck to him but rumors.

  Soren’s parents were never around, and he must have gotten lonely rattling around in that big Brentwood house all by himself because he filled it up with people every chance he got. There was almost always something going on at his house on the weekends, and they were the kind of parties everybody was still talking about on Monday morning. People got together and broke up and had screaming fights and cried in the bathroom. There was spectacle and drama, blood and vomit. The ancient Romans went to the Colosseum to watch gladiator battles and see elephants fight rhinos to the death. Imperial Day students went to Soren’s parties.

  “Absolutely not,” Maisie said when I told her where I was heading that Friday night.

  She was on her way out, too, for frozen yogurt and a movie with Livia, and when she said it, something inside me rankled. Was this the trade-off for her taking me under her wing at Imperial Day, that I could only hang out with people she approved of?

  “I’m not going to do anything,” I said, referring to the drinking, screwing, and recreational drug use that I’d been told came standard at any Soren Bieckmann affair.

  “Then why go at all?”

  “Because I was invited. Because the alternative is sitting in my room reading a book about the Tower of London. Because I feel like being around some people for a change.”

  “You’re welcome to join Livia and me.”

  Maisie was trying to be nice, but the look I gave her at the suggestion made her throw up her arms in exasperation.

  “Fine, do what you want,” she said. “But be careful. And check in. Let me know that you’re okay.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, annoyed by Maisie’s fussing. If she could spend Friday nights with Livia, I didn’t think she had any moral high ground to tell me how to spend mine.

  But then I felt myself soften. It was hard for me to be upset with Maisie, and after all, she was only worried about me. If I had faith in my own ability to avoid being lured into a life of vice, didn’t it make sense that Maisie could do the same thing and remain unscathed by her friendship with Livia?

  “I’ll text you,” I added, then gave Maisie a quick hug before brushing past her to wait outside for my Uber, ready to embark on my first night of adventure, of spectacle, of freedom.

  And as I discovered upon walking up the long winding driveway to Soren’s house, Julia had had the same idea. If I had to run into someone from the Honor Council lunch table at a party like this, I was glad it was her. Like me, Julia wasn’t on the Honor Council. Like me, she was sitting at the table because of somebody else. If she hadn’t been Marcus’s girlfriend, Augustus probably wouldn’t even have known her name, much less broken bread with her on a daily basis. But unlike me, Julia was undeniably cool, with her bright red lipstick and black liquid eyeliner. Nobody at Imperial Day dressed like her. She wore knee-high lace-up boots with vintage dresses and strings of pearls with her Misfits t-shirt. She looked like she’d as soon kick you in the kneecap as look at you, and if I’d possessed any swagger or style whatsoever, I would have aspired to be just like her.

  As I mentioned before, Marcus lived with Augustus’s family. They bought his clothes. They fed him and let him drive their car, but he didn’t have wads of spending money like the rest of us did. He and Julia spent a lot of weekend nights eating Chipotle and watching Netflix. He never liked to take money from them, not even when they insisted. He was their perfect, deferential, appropriately grateful ward, and he never did anything that would suggest even a hint of trouble.

  Except, I guess, having a girlfriend like Julia, a girl you could tell from a glance didn’t fit in with Maisie and Livia. If she had, maybe she would have been out getting frozen yogurt with them instead of sitting on Soren Bieckmann’s front steps drinking from a flask.

  The first thing she did was point to the flask and say, “Before you think about telling your sister, I’m only having one drink.”

  She sounded like she’d had three, at least.

  “I’m not telling anyone,” I said, even though both the drinking and not reporting the drinking were Honor Code violations. I felt a pang of guilt about keeping it from Maisie, and yet, at the same time, I thought about all the lunch periods Julia spent sitting quietly while everybody else blathered on about Honor Council business. What Julia did with her own time outside of Imperial Day didn’t seem like anyone else’s business.

  “Where’s Marcus?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to spend every Friday night with Marcus.” She said it in a snappish way.

  “No one said you did.”

  “It was implied,” Julia said, taking a long pull on her drink. “It was strongly implied.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  “What are you doing here anyway, Claudia?”

  I’d been dreading a moment exactly like this one—when someone pointed out that I didn’t belong there.

  “I was in-in-vited,” I said, cursing my nervous stutter as I said it.

&n
bsp; “You don’t say. How do you know Soren?”

  Her diction was perfect, right up until she got to Soren’s name and slurred the hell out of it.

  “He’s playing Mr. Mushnik in Little Shop of Horrors,” I said. “I should know. He’s been late to the last three rehearsals.”

  “Mr. Mushnik?” Julia asked. It took her three tries saying it before she laughed and gave up. “Oh. Then you probably know him better than I do. Cal’s in that play, isn’t he?”

  “He’s Orin,” I said. Cal had moved on from his poser skater days and was now playing an ether-huffing sadomasochistic dentist who beats the shit out of his girlfriend, Audrey. It was the role he was born for, and it let him bully his way around the sets and granted him ample opportunity to grab the backup singers’ tits backstage.

  “So you’re in a play, you’re at a party. It seems like Imperial Day agrees with you,” Julia said, adding, “No offense, but I’m kind of surprised.”

  “None taken,” I said. “I’m as surprised as you are.”

  Julia opened her purse, putting the flask inside and taking out a compact and a tube of lipstick.

  “He’s working on scholarship applications,” she said as she dabbed the deep red on her lips.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You asked where Marcus was. I’m telling you.”

  “That sounds very responsible, I guess,” I said.

  “Marcus is very responsible. Some college will be quite lucky to get him.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  She laughed again and snapped her compact shut.

  “Between you and me, Claudia, it’s kind of a shit deal.”

  “Being Marcus’s girlfriend?”

  “Especially since everybody seems to think I should spend Friday nights chained to his wrist.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The thing is, it’s not like we’re going to get married or anything. But it kind of takes the romance out of things when your boyfriend acts like he’s just killing time with you until he can start his real life.”

  “You could always break up with him now,” I felt like a different person when I said it, the kind of person who dispensed reckless and world-weary romantic advice like she knew what she was talking about. And I liked the way it felt.

  The front door swung open and Julia sat up and whipped her head around, frantic that whoever it was might have overheard me, but it was just two seniors who could barely stop making out long enough not to fall down the stairs. They disappeared around the side of the house without even noticing that Julia and I were there.

  “I guess I could,” Julia said softly. “Seems like a lot of work though. It’s not like I’d get to keep sitting at the lunch table with Augustus and your sister if I did that.”

  “So sit somewhere else. Find new friends.”

  This was the kind of person I wanted Julia to think I was, someone who could shrug her shoulders and say “Fuck it” about anything. I’d already defied whatever expectations she’d formed about me at the lunch table, and I wanted to keep doing it.

  “You make it sound so easy,” she said, laughing bitterly.

  We looked through the big picture window into Soren’s house. I could see the living room, some kind of den past that, and, further back, people wandering in and out of the kitchen, opening the refrigerator door. All kinds of people filled the rooms, a perfect cross-section of Imperial Day. If I was being cynical, I’d say that the demand for pharmaceuticals and an unsupervised environment transcended social boundaries. Of course, it might also have been that everyone just really liked Soren.

  In the living room, couples sprawled on the long leather couch, their limbs tangled together as they slobbered on and groped each other. In the corner, a cluster of voyeurs pretended to play Cards Against Humanity while a drinking game of some kind raged on around the credenza. In the den, a group of guys crowded around a video game, staring vacantly and blowing shit up. Most of the people I saw were upperclassmen, but I recognized a girl from my biology class and a couple of crew underlings from Little Shop of Horrors.

  And then Ty passed by the window.

  Julia flung herself back.

  “Shit,” she said.

  She pulled me down behind the rosemary bushes, and careful not to be seen, we watched the temperature of the rooms change as Ty walked through them. People set down their red plastic cups, stopped their conversations, angled their backs slightly away from him. Only the couples making out on the couch seemed not to notice.

  “What’s he doing here?” Julia asked.

  “Having fun?” I suggested, though the thought of Ty enjoying himself at a social gathering seemed far-fetched.

  Then Augustus stepped into view, a bottle of Snapple in his hand. Julia gasped, and sat down in the dirt beneath the window, knees tucked to her chest like she was willing herself to be as small and invisible as possible.

  “I need to get out of here,” she said, stunned into a momentary sobriety.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. It was strange seeing Augustus here, I was willing to admit, but Julia’s reaction seemed extreme.

  “Do you honestly think Soren invited two Honor Council representatives to his party?”

  I shook my head, and Julia gave me a nudge toward the front door.

  “Find out what they’re doing here,” she said.

  “I c-c-can’t,” I said, suddenly nervous at the thought of it.

  “I need to know if they saw me.”

  “I’m sure nobody saw you.”

  “Claudia, please.”

  I saw real worry on Julia’s face. She was afraid of what would happen to her if Augustus and Ty saw her here, and I realized that she was right—being an Honor Council girlfriend really was a shit deal.I hadn’t been drinking, I hadn’t taken anything. I had every right to be there, and I had every right to walk up to Ty and Augustus, say hello, and ask a few friendly questions, didn’t I? We did sit together at lunch every day. I could do this. I could do this for Julia.

  “Okay, I’ll go.”

  Taking a deep breath, I walked through the front door. A few heads turned to see who was there, but when they saw it was me, people went back to what they were doing. It wasn’t as loud as it should have been, considering half the school seemed to be there. The music was turned down low and people’s voices sounded like they were at a museum rather than a party. Everyone kept stealing looks into the kitchen, where Augustus and Ty had corralled Soren. Augustus was doing most of the talking while Ty stood looking vaguely disapproving, though also like he sort of wanted a beer.

  I inched up on the conversation from the side so I could listen to what they were saying. I was not eavesdropping, I told myself. I was collecting data for the historical record—and, of course, for Julia.

  “We’re not here to make anyone uncomfortable,” I heard Augustus say to Soren. “But we all agreed that there should be an Honor Council presence at off-campus parties this year.”

  Soren pushed his floppy bangs out of his eyes and said, “Not trying to be a dick here, but what if people don’t want an Honor Council presence at parties this year? Like, you guys are welcome at my house whenever you want, but I guess I’d prefer it if you were here as civilians.”

  The thing was, he didn’t sound like a dick, which was probably the reason he had lasted as long as he had at Imperial Day. There was something aw-shucksy stoner about everything that came out of his mouth. He acted like he couldn’t imagine ever getting in trouble for anything, and so mostly, he didn’t.

  “This is a good thing for you, too,” Augustus said. “People will be safe. You and your parents aren’t going to be on the news because somebody wrapped their car around a tree after a party at your house.”

  “I appreciate that,” Soren said, “but some people won’t. They’ll just have parties somewhere else and make sure you don’t find out about them.”

  Ty let out a snort and folded his arms across his chest.


  “We’ll find out about them,” he said.

  Augustus frowned at him, not because what Ty said wasn’t true, but because Augustus never would have said it so gracelessly. I always got the feeling that the more elegant points of politics were lost on Ty entirely, that if you couldn’t explain it with a football metaphor or a motivational poster, you might as well save your breath.

  “What Ty is saying is that Imperial Day isn’t that big a school,” Augustus said, and that was when he noticed me in the kitchen doorway. “Claudia, there you are.”

  He said it like he’d been expecting to see me.

  And that was when I knew.

  What were two Honor Council representatives doing at a party to which they certainly hadn’t been invited?

  They were here because Maisie knew I would be here and told them about it. Or more likely, they were here because Maisie told Livia, and Livia told Augustus. Maybe the idea of an “Honor Council presence” at parties like Soren’s had been Livia’s idea in the first place. It would be like her to do something like that. Whatever way I looked at it, though, two things were true:

  This happened because I’d confided in my sister and she’d gone to the Honor Council with it, and

  The Honor Council was sticking its nose where it wasn’t wanted, and it was my fault.

  “G-g-gentlemen,” I said, nodding to each of them before turning to Soren. “I was just looking for s-something to drink.”

  “There’s Coke in the fridge, Claudia,” Soren said, giving Augustus a pointed look. “Nothing but Coke in my very Honor Code–compliant fridge.”

  Augustus took me by the shoulder and steered me toward the fridge, probably to make sure I didn’t go looking for anything stronger than a soda.

  “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Claudia, but going to parties like this is a good way to get yourself an Honor Code violation.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked. I hadn’t gotten the sense that the Honor Code was binding outside the walls of Imperial Day.