“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.