As I’ve said before, Maisie tried to make me feel like I belonged at Imperial Day. She invited me to sit with her at lunch, introduced me to her friends, included me in things like that strange trip to the Venice boardwalk. But sometimes I wonder if all of this could have been avoided if she’d cared less. It’s possible I never would have appeared on Livia’s radar; maybe I never would have found my way into politics at all.
I’m not saying I blame Maisie. I’m just saying it’s interesting.
The whole school year, I’d avoided Livia as studiously as I could, considering we ate lunch together most days. I didn’t speak directly to her, didn’t look her in the eye, didn’t try to engage in her conversations, and for the most part, she seemed to appreciate this. So, I was surprised when she turned to me at lunch one day at the end of March and said, “Claudia, you should run for Student Senate.”
Ty nearly choked on his Snapple at this suggestion, and Livia gave him a dirty look. I looked down at the table and mumbled that I hadn’t thought about it since there was no way I could win.
“Don’t run yourself down, Claudia,” Maisie said, leaping to my defense. “Why couldn’t you win? You know everyone, and everyone knows you.”
“She’s right,” Livia said. I took a sip of my milk and tried to calm the nervous feelings swarming in my head. I was not accustomed to having this much attention directed toward me at the lunch table.
“What about Esme Kovacs and Chris Gibbons?” I asked. As far as I knew, my class already had two senators, and it was them. Not that I thought they were doing a bang-up job or anything, but I know enough about history to know that it’s difficult to unseat an incumbent, even if that incumbent is a thoughtless clod like Chris Gibbons.
“Esme’s giving up her seat on the Senate to run for Honor Council,” Livia explained, and everyone at the table nodded in tacit approval because there was a freshman Honor Council representative they very much wanted gone.
You see, there is built into the Imperial Day Academy electoral system, and perhaps all electoral systems, the potential for error. Sometimes, the voters are misled or misinformed. Sometimes they do not have all the facts, and that is how you end up with mistakes.
One of these mistakes was Jesse Nichols, the Honor Council representative Esme Kovacs no doubt hoped to replace. As I mentioned earlier, Jesse Nichols is without doubt the stupidest person I have ever encountered. Teachers avoid calling on him. Entire classes cringe when he opens his mouth. When he approached Augustus—Augustus!—one day and asked if he could join us at lunch, Augustus shook his head sadly and said, “Sorry, dude. No room.”
However, since the freshman Honor Council representatives and senators are elected during the first two weeks of the school year, and it took a solid month for Jesse Nichols to fully reveal the range and depths of his stupidity to us all, he was elected to the Honor Council, and then there was nothing anyone could do about it.
“Is Gibbons actually running for reelection?” Augustus asked, and the entire table groaned in unison.
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.