In case you cared, the summer before sophomore year was the best one of my life. It was the last gasp of my old life before politics reeled me in. It was my last real summer with Maisie before Rome took her away from me.
Maisie didn’t spend much time with her old friends once she’d resigned her seat on the Honor Council. At the lunch table, Augustus was disappointed and constantly trying to talk her out of it. Ty was as taciturn and graceless in victory as he was in everything else. Marcus was checked out, his thoughts already three thousand miles away at NYU, and Livia could hardly contain her glee that things had turned out just like she’d hoped they would. It was, overall, not an environment that was conducive to friendship, and when school was over, I noticed that Maisie never seemed to return any of their texts, seeming instead to prefer my company.
She taught me to drive that summer. We practiced in the parking garage at our parents’ office. They’d long ago sold their interest in DeliverMe, which had weathered the storm of the security breach and the Melinda Incident and was eventually absorbed into Amazon. Following that crisis (and, of course, the crisis of my birth), our parents had really gotten into What Really Matters and Giving Back to the Community and An Ethical Corporate Model and things like that. They wound up starting InVigor, a network of charitable ventures that allowed people to make low-interest loans to poor people or fund installation art projects and basically feel very good about themselves by doing very little. Maybe they were trying to be better people, but it was hard to take any of that seriously when they operated out of a beachfront office building in Santa Monica and brought in an instructor for staff yoga classes on the beach at 8 a.m. and noon.
All summer, Maisie and I drove to InVigor to do corporate yoga. We went out for coffee. I sat on the beach and read history books while she ran on the bike path. We cooked. We talked. We were inseparable, but it wasn’t until the Fourth of July that Maisie finally brought up the thing that nobody had been saying all summer. We were parked on the roof at InVigor so we could watch the fireworks at the Santa Monica Pier without actually having to deal with the crowds.
“Are you mad at me for leaving?” she asked.
I could tell she’d been wanting to ask me for a long time. I could tell it was hard for her to ask it, and I didn’t know what to say back. I was upset. Maisie was abandoning me, abandoning Imperial Day, abandoning all the things the two of us could have done together to make it a better place. And of course, I missed her already.
“I’m not mad,” I said at last, turning over the words I wanted to say next, making sure they were the right ones. “I just don’t know how I’m going to get through the next year without you.”
“You’ll get through the same way you got through your freshman year,” Maisie said. “You didn’t need me then.”
There was the tiniest shred of hurt in her voice, and I felt guilty all over again as I remembered the ways I’d tried to distance myself from Maisie when I’d been keeping secrets from her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was an idiot.”
I didn’t want to let on that I’d ever doubted her. The dirty tricks, the shady expulsions, the power plays—those things were the opposite of everything Maisie was about.
“That’s not why I’m leaving. You know that, don’t you, Claudia?”
I nodded, but it was still nice to be reassured.
“Do you think less of me now, Maisie?” I asked. She gave me a puzzled look, so I clarified. “I mean, do you think I’m one of them now?”
Maisie took a pull on her bottle of sparkling water, then twisted the lid back on the glass bottle and set it in the Prius’s cup holder.
“You don’t have control over any of this,” she said, gesturing toward the parking garage, the night sky, the beach, all of it. “The only thing you can control is the way you act. Whatever kind of person you are or aren’t is up to you, Claudia.”
And that brought me right back to the place our conversation had started.
“I don’t know if I can do it without you, Maisie.”
“You know I’ll be here if you need me.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I know that, but it’s not nothing either.”