I, Claudia Page 5

“We should have been doing it all along,” Augustus said. “If the Honor Code is supposed to mean anything, it has to be in effect at all times.”

  His eyes shone like an idealist, like a true believer, but I immediately saw the more frightening implications, especially for someone like Julia. According to the Honor Code, the minimum sentence for drinking was a week’s suspension.

  “Are you handing out Honor Code violations tonight?”

  “You know I can’t talk about that.”

  Augustus nodded to Ty, who looked relieved to be dismissed from making conversation with Soren. He went back into the living room, cruising from one cluster of people to another and putting everyone on edge again. Augustus started in the other direction, toward the pool, but before he went out the door, he turned back to me and said, “You can have fun, Claudia. Just be careful.”

  I limped toward the front door as fast as my bad leg would carry me. I had to get Julia out of there in a hurry. She wasn’t an idiot. If she’d known the Honor Council was planning to crash the party, she would have stayed home with her flask. If the minimum sentence for an alcohol-related violation was a week’s suspension, the Honor Council vice president’s girlfriend was sure to get at least double that. They’d make an example of her, just to show they weren’t playing favorites.

  Outside, I found Julia nodding off in the rosemary bushes.

  “We need to go,” I said, tugging on her arm. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

  Julia grumbled as I pulled her to her feet, and the flask slipped from her fingers. These were not the drinking habits of a person who wanted to blow off a little steam, I realized. Julia had been drinking like a person who needed to obliterate something.

  She reached down to pick up the flask, but I shook my head and gave her arm another tug.

  “I’ll buy you another one.”

  “Full of scotch?”

  “Full of whatever you want,” I said, and she followed me through the yard and down to the sidewalk. She wasn’t very steady on her feet, and I ended up pulling one of her arms over my shoulder to keep her from veering into the street or somebody else’s yard. It was just over a mile from Soren’s house to Julia’s, and I hoped my leg would be able to bear her weight as well as my own for that distance.

  We’d slogged two blocks in silence when suddenly, Julia lifted her chin from her chest and said in a clear voice, “Marcus isn’t a bad person. He just makes me feel like one.”

  “You’re not a bad person,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t stay with somebody because I’m afraid of finding a new place to sit at lunch. That’s bullshit.”

  The words sounded like she’d run through them in her head, practiced saying them under her breath over and over again, while I was in the kitchen with Augustus. I nodded in agreement. Maybe it was the alcohol giving her courage to say these things aloud, but it seemed like maybe they had been a long time coming.

  “You’ll still be my friend, though, right, Claudia?”

  At this, she tripped over a piece of sidewalk that had been pushed up by a tree root, and I tightened my grip to keep her from cracking her head open. At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly, and then once I was, I was too shocked to answer. My knees and ankles groaned as she leaned into my shoulder, and it dawned on me that someone wanted to be my friend. Someone cool and intimidating. Someone who looked down her nose at half the people at Imperial Day. Someone who was exactly the kind of person I wanted to be friends with. Someone who was currently wasted, but someone who maybe liked me anyway.

  That was when I heard the police siren.

  “Fuck,” Julia said, as we turned around to see a black and white cruiser coming down the street behind us, red and blue lights on. Her eyes cleared, the liquid courage replaced by stark fear. I held tight to her waist to keep her from running.

  “Let me handle this,” I whispered. “Don’t move.”

  There had only been one short whoop of the siren to get our attention. This was a nice neighborhood, after all, and the LAPD didn’t want to disturb the residents on a Friday night. Not like the neighborhoods where helicopters circled overhead pretty much nonstop. The officer rolled down his window as the cruiser pulled up alongside us. He looked us up and down, his eyes lingering on Julia’s chest a moment too long.

  “Have you girls been drinking?” he asked.

  The confidence I’d felt when I told Julia that I’d handle it drained away. What had I been thinking? I had no experience defying authority figures and no idea whether I could actually pull it off, but I knew that I had to. I had to save Julia. I thought about Joan of Arc, and reasoned that if an illiterate peasant girl could talk her way into an audience with the Crown Prince of France and convince him that God wanted her to lead an army into the Siege of Orleans, I could surely match wits with the LAPD.

  I made my eyes wide, as though I was scandalized by the officer’s very suggestion, then looked over at Julia. She was holding it together fairly well, all things considered. Her feet were planted. She’d stopped swaying from side to side.

  “No, officer,” I said. “W-w-we haven’t been drinking.”

  “What are you doing out so late? Do your folks know where you are?”

  “Of c-c-course they do. She t-t-tutors me in math and history and English. All the s-s-subjects really,” I said, laying on thick my assortment of verbal ticks and oddities. “N-n-now she’s walking me home. I know it’s late, but we really got going on some quadratic equations, and I completely lost track of the time.”

  The police officer looked skeptical. “Then why does it look like you’re holding each other up? Did all those quadratic equations render you unable to walk straight?”

  I heard the tiniest whimper escape Julia’s lips. She was starting to crack.

  “I-I-I-I-I,” I said, but that was as far as I got before my asthmatic wheeze overcame me and I fell to the curb, gasping for breath. If you’re not used to my asthma attacks, I am told they are extremely upsetting. I am told that I appear to be dying. Actually, it was my own mother who told me that. She said it like she was accusing me of having them that way on purpose.

  Julia sat down next to me and rubbed my back while I rummaged in my pocket for my inhaler and jammed it into my mouth. The police officer stared, trying to figure out whether I was going to expire within the next thirty seconds and whether he was going to have to do something about it.

  “Is she okay?” he asked Julia.

  “I think so,” Julia said, her voice careful and measured.

  “I’m sorry,” I said looking up at the officer from the curb, wearing my most pitiful look. “It’s my leg. It doesn’t work so well. This one is shorter than the other. John F. Kennedy suffered from a similar condition. Also Little Richard and St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Anyway, you can breathalyze me if you want to, but that’s why she was holding me up.”

  I held both legs out straight in front of me to demonstrate the veracity of this claim. The officer stared at me for a moment, a baffled look on his face, then shook his head and turned to Julia.

  “Can you get her home all right?”

  Julia nodded, and I chimed in, wanting to rescue her from having to do any more talking than was necessary. “It’s not far. Only a c-c-couple more blocks.”

  “Well, you girls be careful. Lot of creeps out there.” Then he turned to Julia again. “It’s nice of you to help her out on your Friday night.”

  Julia lowered her eyes and muttered, “Thank you, sir,” and then he rolled up his window and drove off.

  The moment he’d turned the corner, Julia let out a huge sigh, tipped backwards into someone’s flower garden, and began to giggle like a loon.

  “That. Was. Amazing,” she said, throwing her arms up over her head and kicking her legs up in the air, taking out a clump of calla lilies along the way. The porch light went on, illuminating the slate walkway. I grabbed the flailing Julia by an ankle.

  “We need to
get out of here now,” I said.

  “Claudia, you’ve got balls the size of church bells.”

  “Shut up and move, Julia.”

  She scrambled to her feet, still laughing, and I dragged her down the sidewalk until we’d put a little distance between ourselves and the respectable citizens we’d roused from their evening’s slumber. My leg really was starting to hurt by then.

  “You should spend the night at my house,” Julia said, eyeing my limp. “I’ll drive you home in the morning.”

  I was grateful she’d offered. I wasn’t sure I had more than a few blocks left in me at that point and didn’t want to call Maisie to come get me so late at night, even if I was stone-cold sober. The thought of facing my sister, now that I’d had my first taste of what the Honor Council actually did, now that I knew Maisie was a part of it, made me feel queasy.

  Still, I’d promised her that I’d check in, so I did. I told her the truth, where I was, what I was doing, who I was with. The only thing I omitted was that I was aiding and abetting a fugitive from the law.

  When we got to Julia’s house, she let us in through the side door into a mud room where we took off our shoes, then quietly made our way through the house, up the stairs to Julia’s room. At the end of a long hallway, I could hear what sounded like the engine of an airplane.

  “It’s a fan,” Julia said. “My mom can’t sleep without a lot of white noise. Then she sleeps through everything.”

  As soon as we got into her room, Julia fell into the king-size bed without getting undressed or pulling back the covers. Eyes already closed, she pointed to the other side of the bed.

  “I hope you don’t mind sharing,” she said.

  “Do you want some water?” I asked. “Some ibuprofen?”

  But by then, her mouth had dropped open and she was snoring lightly.

  I texted my parents to let them know where I was. Then I turned out the light and got into bed, lying on top of the covers just like Julia was. It had been a strange evening. In my fourteen years, I’d had very few nights away from my own bed. I’m sure it doesn’t come as the hugest surprise to learn that I hadn’t been invited to many sleepovers.

  But Julia chose me. Julia decided that she wanted to be my friend, and that had never happened before.

  It was nice to be over at somebody’s house on a Friday night.

  On the other side of the bed, I heard Julia mumble softly, “Thanks, Claudia.”

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I stared up at the ceiling, looking for patterns in the swirls of plaster, a smile on my face. My eyelids started to grow heavy, and I was struck by how good and normal I felt.

  Julia had confided in me about her love life and I’d saved her from the cops and she’d called me her friend. Maybe I was starting to find my people, just like Maisie had said I would. Maybe my days at Imperial Day were going to be good ones. Maybe I was going to be happy.

  But I’m barely into the story and I think you already know that isn’t what happened because I’ve never been any good at choosing allies, and nobody should ever take my advice.

  “Did Julia break up with Marcus like you suggested?”

  “She did. The very next day.”

  “And what happened then, Claudia?”

  “Why does it matter? It doesn’t have anything to do with why I’m here talking to you.”

  “I guess I care because it seems like the next part of the story.”

  “What happened was exactly what Julia said was going to happen. She moved to a different lunch table. She sat alone. Livia and Augustus and all the Honor Council people stopped talking to her.”

  “She sat alone? You didn’t sit with her?”

  “It would have looked odd if I’d left the Honor Council table. I thought it would hurt Maisie’s feelings, that I’d seem ungrateful.”

  “But every once in a while . . . especially right after the break-up. Don’t you think Maisie would have understood that, Claudia?”

  “Of course, I know what you’re getting at. I could have been a better friend. I should have been a better friend. It makes perfect sense now. At the time, I suppose that logic did not present itself to me.”

  VII

  If You’re Horribly Murdered,

  I’ll Avenge You

  After Soren’s party, I began to notice the disappearances.

  The first was Ravi Sejani, a sophomore I’d seen puking in the bushes the night of Soren’s party. Unlike Julia, he’d been caught. Unlike Julia, he hadn’t had anyone to steer him out of Augustus and Ty’s sight. That said, if I’d just stayed home with my history of the Tower of London and never mentioned the party to Maisie, Ravi Sejani probably never would have been suspended in the first place.

  I knew that it wasn’t my fault that the Honor Council had decided to start policing off-campus parties, and yet, for some reason, I blamed myself.

  Honor Council hearings were confidential, but once I started paying attention, I knew exactly what was happening. The people who’d spent Monday high-fiving in the hallway about their weekend exploits were gone by Friday. It didn’t take long before a hush fell over Imperial Day. Nobody bragged about their Saturday night plans anymore, people looked over their shoulders before they’d so much as whisper about having a sip of a wine cooler. They were paranoid and mistrustful, wondering whether their friends and partners in mischief would turn around and report them to Augustus the first chance they got. Soon, the only parties that were still happening were ones that made Soren Bieckmann’s look like a prayer meeting. They were planned in secret by people who feared nothing and didn’t care what happened to them, people like Cal Hurt and Astrid Murray and Chris Gibbons. Obviously, I wasn’t invited, but Julia found out about all of them and partied like she was making up for lost time.

  “Don’t even tell me where you’re going,” I begged her. “That way, if I’m interrogated by the Honor Council, I won’t have to lie to them.”

  “I should tell someone where I’ll be. What if it turns out like an episode of Criminal Minds?”

  “Julia, if you’re getting a Criminal Minds vibe from this particular social gathering, maybe you shouldn’t go.”

  I tried to talk her out of it, but the more debauchery was promised, the more impossible it was for Julia to stay away.

  “Fine,” I’d end up saying. “Write the address on a slip of paper and hide it somewhere in your room. If you’re horribly murdered, I’ll avenge you.”

  Meanwhile, things with Maisie had reached an all-time low. It was hard not to look at my sister differently now that I was beginning to see the Honor Council in action.

  The power, the secrecy of the meetings, the discipline, the control—none of it fit with the Maisie I knew. That Maisie would have been more at home on the Senate. They did all the real work at Imperial Day. They planned the fundraising, field trips, dances, and assemblies. They listened to complaints and settled student grievances. And yet, none of it came with any real power. The Senate merely did the things that everyone expected, the things that made our school a nice place, but that none of us wanted to do ourselves.

  They were servants who did our bidding, while the Honor Council representatives ruled us, kept us docile, and made us afraid. And those they couldn’t scare, they punished.

  I didn’t understand why my sister was friends with Livia, and I didn’t understand what my sister was doing on the Honor Council, but I felt like those two things were connected, and that what they meant was that what I really didn’t understand was Maisie.

  VIII

  An After-Hours Nude

  Soiree at the Esther Pico Memorial Theatre

  I should begin the next part of my story, or testimony, or whatever this is, by explaining to you that the first time I spied on an Honor Council hearing, it was purely accidental.

  What happened was, the Honor Council’s usual meeting room was going to be painted over the Thanksgiving holiday, so they’d had to convene elsewhere. I was in the storage closet
off the Humanities faculty lounge doing extra credit for Ms. Yee to bring up my unspectacular grade in World History. According to Ms. Yee, I would improve as a historian if I learned to focus.

  “You start off talking about the Assyrians, then you take a detour into the Shang dynasty and end up writing about Socrates. Try to tell one story at a time, Claudia.”

  However, because of my enthusiasm for the subject (or because she was trying to get me out of her classroom so she could go home), she’d taken pity on me and offered me a handful of extra-credit points if I agreed to go through the classroom sets of textbooks in the faculty lounge closet after school and weed out the more dilapidated ones.

  If Ms. Yee was not precisely a historian, she was at least a very good history teacher. Ms. Yee taught history like she was telling a story. She could reel off dates and the names of ancient capitals and kings without even glancing at her notes, and she always ended her lectures on a cliff-hanger so you spent the rest of the day wondering what was going to happen to old Ashurnasirpal II next. (Spoiler alert: he would kill everybody, then have someone carve into the wall of his palace, “Of the young men’s ears I made a heap; of the old men’s heads I made a minaret. I exposed their heads as a trophy in front of their city.” That’s the kind of stuff Ms. Yee told us about in class.)

  Okay, and that digression is probably exactly the lack of focus Ms. Yee was complaining about. But suffice it to say, I was perfectly happy to be staying after school on the day before Thanksgiving break, flipping through copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh to see if anyone had written “FUCK” in the margin if it meant getting on her good side. I was so engrossed in the task at hand that I didn’t hear Augustus and Livia come into the faculty lounge, and it took me a moment longer than that to realize that Soren Bieckmann was with them, and a few seconds more before I figured out that they must have been there on Honor Council business, and by that time I’d been sitting there listening far too long to announce myself.

  “Is this it?” I heard Soren say in his affable way. “I thought there’d be more of you. I thought you’d be wearing robes and old-timey wigs or something.”