When Maisie picked me up at JFK Airport, she had a very conspiratorial look about her.
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does your enjoyment of this week hinge upon spending a lot of time on a college campus?” she asked.
“Zero,” I said, because my enjoyment of the week hinged entirely on being with my sister and not at the Imperial Day Academy.
“Brilliant,” she said, grabbing my luggage off the carousel. She didn’t even have to ask if it was mine, it being the only suitcase plastered with 1992 Jerry Brown presidential campaign stickers.
Even though Maisie carried my suitcase, I could tell that New York City was not going to be easy for me. Everyone walked so fast here. As Maisie and I made our way through the airport terminal toward the shuttle that would take us into Manhattan, Maisie explained that one of her friends from school lived in the city and that she and her family were out of town for the holiday. They’d offered Maisie the run of their Gramercy Park apartment in exchange for the care and feeding of two geriatric cats and some light plant watering.
“If you absolutely need to tour some colleges, we can do that, but otherwise, the city is ours. We can totally rage.”
For a minute, I had fearful visions of Maisie dragging me, stuffed into a midriff top, to a club where we’d brandish fake IDs and do shots.
“Want to go look at some Caravaggios?” she asked, and I was relieved to discover that college life had not changed my sister, at least not in any dull or predictable ways.
After dropping my suitcase off at the apartment, our first order of business was to go uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then afterwards, to a wood-paneled Viennese café, where we drank something called a Kaiser Mélange that was basically coffee with whipped cream and ate chocolate-hazelnut torte. There was even a chamber music quartet.
The next day we went to the Tenement Museum, Grand Central Station, and a diner that used to be a hotel ballroom. We refused to eat in any restaurant that was not at least fifty years old. My sister had always been good to indulge me in the occasional history bender, but this time, she’d outdone herself.
It wasn’t until the third night that Maisie asked about Imperial Day, and by then, I’d almost forgotten about it. We were dressing up to go see Chicago, Maisie in a swingy green dress, me in the tuxedo shirt and cigarette pants I’d worn to Homecoming.
“How is school, anyway? Is Cal still terrible?”
She asked like he was a distant memory. A distant, distinctly bad, but ultimately harmless memory, and not the boogeyman of the waking nightmare that was my current life at Imperial Day.
“Even worse than you remember him,” I said. “Let’s talk about absolutely anything else.”
The weekend melted away, and then the week filled with sleeping in, lavish meals, museums, and history, and I hardly thought about Imperial Day at all. Hector texted me once to ask about the holiday food drive, but Maisie and I were at the theater and I didn’t even see it until three hours later.
Maisie had lobbied hard for our parents to meet us in New York for Thanksgiving, and eventually they gave in. We ordered a complete Thanksgiving dinner from Whole Foods, and Maisie and I made pumpkin pies and brewed one pot of coffee after another. While the pies baked, we went up to the rooftop with our hands clamped around mugs to keep them warm. Downstairs, our parents did something I’d never seen before: they put on sweatpants and watched television while doing nothing else.
“Can I ask you something?” Maisie’s voice was serious, and even as I nodded, I felt my chest tighten up because I had a feeling that whatever was coming next, I didn’t want to talk about it. This whole week was about not talking about it. That was the whole point.
“What are you staying there for?” she asked.
I didn’t reply. I hadn’t realized it up until then, but the answer to that question had gotten so tangled and messy. If you could get it, a diploma from Imperial Day would allow you to spend the next four years pretty much wherever you wanted to go. But that wasn’t why I stayed. It was more than that. I’d built something during my time there, or at least I’d started to. Under Hector and me, Imperial Day could be a place where people tried to make the world better, where they helped each other instead of ratfucking each other’s campaigns and lives.
I didn’t want to walk away from that without a fight.
“Is it Hector?”
I didn’t answer that either, but Maisie wouldn’t let me off the hook.
“I listen to you when you talk, Claudia, and for a person who never likes anyone, you really seem to like him.”
“He’s my best friend,” I said, holding the coffee cup close to my chest to ward off the cold. If there was one thing I wanted to talk about less than the situation at Imperial Day, it was the situation with Hector.
“And?”
“And he has a girlfriend. I invited him to come on this trip with me, but he said no.”
“Because of her?”
“Partly. Mostly it was because he didn’t want to abandon his post. Like I’m doing.”
Maisie’s brow furrowed as a gust of wind blew her bangs back.
“You can quit, you know. It won’t ruin your life,” Maisie said, her eyes serious in a big-sister-wisdom-imparting kind of way.
Whatever damage Imperial Day had done to Maisie, she had healed now. Hemingway said that the world broke you and that afterwards, some people were stronger at the broken places. Maisie looked like that now, wise and beautifully scarred, and for a split second, I wanted it for myself—until I thought about what Maisie had done to get that way, what she was suggesting I do now.
Maisie was telling me to abandon Hector the way she’d abandoned me. She was telling me to save myself. I never would have called Maisie a selfish person, but in that moment, I realized how much different my life would have been, what a different place Imperial Day would have been, if Maisie had stayed. If she’d beaten Ty in the Honor Council presidential race like I knew she could have if she’d really wanted to. If she’d actually tried.
The hatchet job on Oberlin St. James would never have happened. Cal would never have lasted out the year on the Honor Council, much less been elected president. Hector and I would be regular, ordinary senators, not officers with targets on our backs. Zelda Parsons would have been spared humiliation. Esme Kovacs would have been spared harassment. All the people who’d been wrongfully accused would have clean records. Ms. Yee would still have her job. The turtles would still be alive.
That was what running away got you. A list of wrongs you could have righted. I was tired of waiting for the worst to happen, then reacting when it did. I didn’t want to run away. I wanted to take a stand against Cal, against the whole poisonous, paranoid police state that my high school had become.
I could do it, but only if I didn’t care what happened to me, and in a reckless moment, standing on top of an apartment building staring out across Manhattan, I didn’t.
There was nothing I wanted, nothing I was afraid to lose anymore.
“Claudia?”
I shook myself back to the present moment. Maisie watched me, a nervous expression on her face.
“We should go inside,” she said, tugging my arm with false cheer. “The pies will be done soon.”
Our parents were still watching football when we went back downstairs. It was strange to see them this way, but we all passed a pleasant two days together in this other family’s apartment. We went to Times Square and the top of the Empire State Building and did all of our Christmas shopping at the same stores we had in LA, and when my leg started to hurt, we went back to the apartment for a Tim Burton movie marathon.
During that time, I became more resolved than ever. I would return to Imperial Day with a mission: to eliminate the threat of Cal and save the school, even if something terrible happened to me in the process.
It was only after my parents and I got through airport security at JFK that I began to have doubts and to worry about what had happened at Imperial Day in my absence.
As we waited at the gate, I checked my email and made the internet rounds, and as far as I could tell, things had been quiet. Too quiet, really. I’d only had the one text from Hector, and that was days ago. What if something had happened to him while I’d been gone? What if something had happened to me? What if I returned to Imperial Day to find that I’d been charged, convicted, and sentenced without my knowledge? Before we boarded the plane, I texted Hector: On my way home—what’s going on?
Then the flight attendant made me turn off my phone before Hector texted back. The whole flight back to LA, I ran through every possible scenario I could think of. In some of them, Hector had to step down as president or got expelled. In others, I did. And in between terrible, worried thoughts, I imagined how I was going to stop Cal. Sort of. I could visualize myself setting out to do it, then my brain would flash forward to the students of Imperial Day lifting me up onto their shoulders to celebrate their liberation. It was the part in between that I couldn’t picture.
When the plane touched down, though, my silly little plans and fantasies hardened into something real and necessary.
I had five texts from Hector when I turned my phone on. There was also one from Esme, one from Lucy Lin, and two from numbers I didn’t recognize.
Something terrible had happened.
I’d been right to be afraid, right to run away, but I’d been afraid of the wrong things. I’d been afraid for the wrong person. If I’d known what was going to happen, I would have done it all differently.
I would have invited Soren Bieckmann to come to New York with me, and if I had, he’d still be alive today.