I, Claudia Read online

  Chris Gibbons was another electoral mistake, though a different sort of mistake.

  I knew him from the Griffith School, where he’d existed on the fringes of popularity, always sitting at the second- or third-most desirable lunch table. He had no discernible faults or quirks, and was mild, pleasant, and generally well thought of, if he was thought of at all. His run for Student Senate at the beginning of freshman year had been a rare show of ambition, and we’d all applauded it, giving him a hefty share of the vote.

  But then something had happened to Chris Gibbons. He shed his pleasant demeanor, started dressing all in black, reading Ayn Rand, and scrawling the words LOVE and HATE across his knuckles in Old English lettering.

  I fear I have given you the idea that everyone at Imperial Day was some kind of tightly wound, Type-A overachiever, but that wasn’t the case. Like any other elite private school, Admissions tried hard to weed out the obvious flight risks, but it did admit its fair share of burnouts, misfits, malcontents, and losers. Some only looked good on paper, some were the grandchildren of people who had given the school so much money they could not be rejected, some had grown weary of playing the game we played at Imperial Day, and some were accidents.

  Shortly after his election, Chris Gibbons decided that these people were his constituents, and that what they most wanted from their Senate was for all of its members to be taken down a few pegs.

  So, rather than carry out the work of the Imperial Day Senate, Chris became its most vocal critic. He gave blistering interviews to the school paper, and complained to anyone who would listen that the Senate focused all of its energy on the popular people, didn’t care about anyone else, and that its entire leadership was dominated by fakes and cowards. When he ran out of things to say about the Senate, he turned his wrath on the Honor Council, loudly criticizing their off-campus surveillance and calling Augustus a dictator.

  The students of Imperial Day thought they had elected a mild-mannered public servant, and found themselves instead with a loudmouthed shit-flinger. After a year of ignoring, deflecting, or denouncing his rants, his colleagues on the Senate and Honor Council now simply hoped that Chris Gibbons would not be reelected.

  “Please tell me someone else from the sophomore class is running,” Maisie said, which was as close as Maisie would ever come to saying something mean about anyone.

  “Someone named Hector Estrella,” Livia said.

  “Who?” asked Augustus and Ty at the same time.

  “He’s nobody,” Livia replied.

  “But nobody else?” Maisie asked, a worried look in her eye. If there were only two candidates running for sophomore class senator, Chris and Hector, they were both guaranteed a seat.

  “Well . . .” Livia said, cocking her head to the side and looking at me. “That depends.”

  “You want me to beat Chris Gibbons,” I said.

  “Which you can,” Maisie said.

  “We’ll help you,” Livia added, a coy smile pinching the corners of her mouth. “You’re an interesting person, Claudia. Not the usual cookie-cutter type who usually wins these things. That alone will get you votes. And you’re not an idiot or a troublemaker. That will help with the people who are tired of watching Chris stir up trouble. Just don’t open your mouth too much, C-C-C-Claudia.”

  She smiled when she used my old middle-school nickname to show that she was kidding, but I knew better. Still, I felt myself bend toward her words and begin to wonder if maybe she was right, if maybe I could win.

  Chris Gibbons wasn’t interested in making the school a better place, and Esme Kovacs had only used the Senate as a stepping-stone to the Honor Council. Meanwhile, I’d written a successful petition to the Athletic Director to get a new discus cage for the track team, had assistant-stage-managed the best-attended musical theater production Imperial Day had seen in a decade, had opened up what my journalism teacher, Mr. Prettinger, called an “unprecedented” dialogue between the Weekly Praetor and the Imperial Day Board of Commissioners, and had gotten the Model United Nations team matching windbreakers that said THIS IS NOT A RESOLUTION. THIS IS A REVOLUTION. on the back because the sad bastards needed to show a little spirit.

  And I wasn’t even trying that hard.

  “She should talk more. Go for the pity vote.” I guess that was Ty’s cloddish way of showing he was on board with the idea, which of course he was—it was Livia’s.

  You can probably see what I couldn’t then, that once again, I was being used. If I’d read into Livia’s words, I would have seen that she wanted me to draw at least some of the freak vote away from Chris. And because I wasn’t a troublemaker, she’d ensure that everyone in the freshman class who was the right sort of person—her sort of person—would vote for me to make sure a loose cannon like Chris Gibbons didn’t get a second year in the Senate.

  But I was momentarily seduced by the idea of power, at being singled out and identified as someone who could be trusted, someone who could be a leader. Even though it was Livia offering, all I could think was, I’ll get in, I’ll fix things around here, then I’ll get out. None of this will touch me.

  The moment I nodded my head and said I’d do it was the moment that set me on the path to this chair in your office.

  But enough about me. The Honor Council races were where the action was that spring.

  With Augustus and Marcus graduating, the Honor Council presidency and vice presidency would be up for grabs, which hadn’t happened in some time. Augustus had wielded uncommon power, presiding at the head of the Honor Council for three years, the longest-serving president Imperial Day had ever had. He had changed the shape of it, and now there was a distinctly Augustinian way of doing things.

  Sometimes I wonder if Maisie had spent enough time thinking about the political implications of that before she announced to our lunch table that she was running for Honor Council president.

  Augustus’s smile looked genuine. Ty’s didn’t, which made sense because as the other junior Council member, it had been a given that he’d run for president. Apparently, it hadn’t entered his mind until that moment that Maisie might actually want the job, too. Maybe he thought she was too nice to campaign against him.

  “I hope I’m not stepping on your toes,” she said. “I think we’d both do a great job.”

  “Sure, sure,” Ty said, his lips pulled tight and thin. “I haven’t even decided if I’m going to run yet.”

  “I wondered if you’d be too busy with football,” Augustus said, nodding, and Livia made a face, as if someone had poisoned her egg salad sandwich.

  “But you have to run, Ty. Nobody knows the Honor Council as well as you do. Except Augustus,” Livia said.

  “Hey, I know the Honor Council pretty well, too,” Maisie said. She gave Livia a playful shove, but I saw confusion in her eyes that her supposed best friend seemed to have taken Ty’s side already. In fact, Livia hadn’t even congratulated Maisie or wished her good luck.

  I understood it perfectly, though.

  Ty was too busy with football to be Honor Council president, not to mention he lacked the personality for it. If Livia was his vice president, she’d be running the show in everything but title.

  “I think both of you should run,” Augustus said. “We don’t want it to look like I’m hand-picking somebody—which I’m not.”

  Augustus might have given his blessing for both Ty and Maisie to run for president, but I knew how he really felt about it. When he’d suggested that Ty might be too busy with football to run, I heard something in his voice that told me Augustus hoped Ty would be too busy to run.

  And Livia might have been best friends with my sister, but for her to have a chance at any real power on the Honor Council the following year, Ty had to win the election.

  So Augustus wanted Maisie to win, but couldn’t act like it, and Livia wanted Ty to win, but also couldn’t act like it.

  Maisie complicated things for Livia. She was smart and nice to everyone. She wasn’t just liked;
she was loved. And Augustus seemed inclined to support her. If she ran, there was a very good chance she’d win, and I doubted she’d hand over the reins to Livia the way that Ty would.

  And so, without meaning to, Maisie had crossed Livia, and when I realized that, I thought about Cassidy and Octavia. I thought about what Maisie had said to me when I confronted her about her friendship with Livia, that I didn’t know Livia as well as she did, that people changed.

  You’re wrong, Maisie, I thought. And you should watch your back.

  But of course, Maisie wouldn’t do that. That was the problem with her. She never saw the worst in people, and I realized that if anyone was going to watch Maisie’s back, it was going to have to be me.

  XII

  The Feather of Truth

  It’s not that you think that I’m lying exactly, but I can tell from the look on your face that you think I must be mistaken. The stakes were so low—I mean, a high school election, for Christ’s sake. What was Livia getting out of this? Weren’t she and Maisie friends anyway?

  You have trouble believing that this is what happened because your head doesn’t work that way. You work with teenagers in crisis, which means you’re probably a decent sort of person, and you aren’t interested in being powerful, which, believe me, is a good thing.

  When Richard Nixon was running for reelection in 1972, he had a whole shadow campaign, a whole team of people who did nothing but sabotage his opponents with dirty tricks that they charmingly called ratfucks. They stole letterhead and used it to send out crazy memos. They broke the air conditioning at a fancy fundraiser so all the potential donors were too hot and crabby to open their wallets. They slipped a fake schedule to one opponent’s pilot and had him fly to the wrong city.

  You don’t just wake up one morning with the audacity to pull something like that in a presidential election. You practice. You practice somewhere it doesn’t matter. Nixon’s people practiced at the University of Southern California, sabotaging student government elections. Livia practiced at Imperial Day.

  Here’s the thing: Even if it’s not important, winning is winning. And for some people, that’s enough.

  I wasn’t immune to it either. It wasn’t just the power, though. It wasn’t just the chance to make things better at Imperial Day. It was the way that Livia had pointed her finger at me and said, “You should run, Claudia.” It didn’t matter that I didn’t like her and she didn’t like me. In a way, that made it mean even more. There was something about being chosen like that, being seen in a way that you’d never seen yourself, that makes it very hard to say no.

  It was only after I’d gathered my twenty-five signatures and gotten myself officially on the sophomore class ballot for Senate that I realized what I had done, and immediately thought about trying to get out of it. The fortune-teller at the Venice boardwalk had told me to keep my head down if I wanted to make it out of Imperial Day in one piece, and running for Senate was the exact opposite of that. I was lifting up my head and practically begging somebody to play Whac-a-Mole with it.

  But then I thought about Maisie, the look on Livia’s face when she announced her run for Honor Council president, and the look on Maisie’s face when Livia had all but thrown her support behind Ty. She’d been so happy and excited when she’d told us, and almost immediately, the whole thing had become complicated and thorny and political. My sister needed a friend. My sister needed someone to look out for her. My sister needed solidarity. And so halfway back to the main office to have my name stricken from the ballot, I changed my mind. I would risk it. I would run for Maisie.

  We could work on our campaigns together, side by side. This was both a nice idea and, for me, a significant advantage, for no one better understood the Imperial Day campaign trail than my sister.

  It wasn’t just that I needed Maisie’s help. I missed her and the way things used to be between us, but how do you have that conversation? I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted to tell her I was sorry I’d kept things from her. I wanted to tell her the truth about everything, from sneaking Julia past Augustus and Ty at Soren’s party to the Honor Council hearing I’d accidentally spied on. I wanted to explain why I’d acted the way I had, why I’d pulled away.

  Instead, I knocked on her bedroom door one night and said, “Maisie, will you help me with my Senate campaign?”

  Her face lit up as she jumped up from her bed and ran to the door and put her hands on my shoulders and said, “Of course I will.”

  We went to the kitchen, where Maisie made a pot of peppermint tea and put out a saucer of shortbread cookies and proceeded to walk me through each stage of election season. We talked about campaign materials, color schemes, slogans, how to hit up people in the art and graphic design classes.

  “Don’t do jokes on your campaign posters,” she warned. “They’re funny the first two times you see them, then you’re sick of them.”

  “What happens after that?” I asked, pouring both of us more tea from the little china pot. “Once you have the posters up and everything.”

  “You campaign. It’s two weeks. Of course, you have to be nice to everybody and talk to everybody, but don’t talk about the fact that you’re running. Don’t come right out and ask people to vote for you. It’s gross.”

  “Then where do you actually talk about getting votes?”

  “They do a profile of everyone in the school newspaper, and then on the day of the election, there’s an assembly in the auditorium. Everybody gets two minutes to do their stump speech. You can go sincere. You can talk about how much you love Imperial Day and public service. Or you can . . . I don’t know . . . perform feats.”

  “Feats?”

  “Play the guitar. Juggle. Saw a woman in half.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Some people treat it like a talent show,” Maisie said, sipping her tea. “It’s strange, but sometimes it works.”

  “Is there anything I should know? Anything I should worry about?” I asked.

  “Just be yourself, Claudia, and you’ll do fine.”

  Over and over she said that, and every time, all I could think was, Why would anybody vote for that?

  I looked to Maisie for help, but of course, I also looked to history. There are many ways to run a doomed political campaign, and feeling certain that this was one, I decided that I would at least do it with style. In US presidential races alone, you can find examples of the loser who doesn’t know he’s a loser; the loser who vastly overestimates his own abilities; the loser who goes negative in so nuclear a way as to make himself sound like an old man who wears black knee socks with shorts and yells at the radio.

  But then there are classy losers, ballsy losers, losers who make losing look like winning. For my campaign, I decided to take a page from the playbook of Eugene Debs, five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, who once managed to land almost 4 percent of the popular vote while running his campaign out of a federal prison.

  I needed a little bit of that attitude if I was going to very publicly run for Student Senate and very publicly, very probably, lose.

  I took a picture of myself in profile sitting on my bed. In black and white, the antique brass headboard looked convincingly like prison bars. After consulting my Imperial Day student ID, I cropped the photo into a circle and ran a ring of text around it that read:

  FOR SENATE: STUDENT 1439

  People might look at me as Maisie’s ugly, limping, stuttering sister, the girl who sat at the lunch table with half the Honor Council because they pitied her. With these buttons and posters, though, I was providing an alternative narrative. I was the girl who went to parties wearing Nixon t-shirts. The girl who knew almost everyone even if she wasn’t really friends with anyone. The girl who didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought of her. Not an insider. Not someone with an unfair advantage. Not someone to be pitied. It was a good angle, and the best part was, I didn’t have to pretend to be anything I wasn’t.

  I’d just found
a way to market the unlovable person I was into something that somebody might want to vote for.

  That was the moment I got sucked in. Once I started thinking about How I Appeared as a Candidate, I was a goner, but I didn’t see it then. I didn’t realize how seriously I was taking it.

  Ballots were finalized and campaigning was officially permitted beginning at 3 p.m. on May 1. At 3:05, my posters were up. At 3:07, I was roaming the hallways, studying the work of my competitors.

  Based on what I knew of Chris Gibbons, the incumbent freshman senator, I’d expected something punk rock and angry and populist, maybe incorporating some tasteful little anarchy symbols. Instead, he went cute. His posters were a play on his last name and included a picture of an adorable baby monkey nuzzling a blanket.

  It was genius.

  It didn’t matter that Chris Gibbons was abrasive and a loudmouth and a loose cannon, because from now until election day, he’d be Baby Monkey Guy.

  I had no chance against Baby Monkey Guy.

  When I turned the corner into the main hallway on the first floor, I saw my other competitor. I knew who Hector Estrella was, just barely. He was a freshman, obviously, but had transferred in at the beginning of spring semester, which meant he was either ridiculously rich or important or brilliant, or possibly all three. Imperial Day usually played hard-to-get with transfer students. After all, if they were transfers, it meant they’d chosen some other school first. It wouldn’t do to look too eager.

  When I found him, Hector was on his phone, pacing the hallway with one hand clapped at the back of his neck, his fingers kneading at it as though he was trying to work out a knot in the muscle.

  “You’re right. Everything looked fine when I picked up the prints. You did a great job. But I’m standing here now looking right at it, and there are two Es and one I,” he said. I looked down at the floor and saw what he was talking about.

  HECTOR ESTRELLA FOR STUDENT SENATE