By Christmas, Bradley McCord and Trina Gaines, the two freshmen, had resigned from the Honor Council. Both made official statements about needing more time to commit to their studies, but I knew it was either that they no longer had any stomach for Cal’s brand of justice or that he’d driven them out. Within days, he’d appointed Astrid Murray and some sycophant freshman to fill their seats, and the only person left who’d actually been elected was Kian Sarkosian, whom I was beginning to suspect had Stockholm syndrome.
People dealt with Soren’s death in different ways. Hector threw himself into Esme and, to an even greater degree, the Senate. Sometimes I wondered if he was doing good works just to keep himself from going insane. He got the senior class to agree on a gift—a row of cypress trees to be planted on the school grounds in Soren’s name. He organized a memorial scholarship in Soren’s name. Even the goddamn Valentine’s Day flower sale was to be held in Soren’s name.
The Senate had been my refuge and my inspiration the previous year, but now, all my work as Senate vice president just felt like going through the motions. Ms. Yee was gone, the Honor Council was a sham, Soren was dead, and Cal larked around the school doing whatever he felt like. Even Hector’s most ambitious ideas seemed hollow when it was so obvious that the best thing we could do for our school, the thing that we most needed to do, was find a way to get rid of Cal.
Deep Throat must have felt the same way because the day we came back from winter break, there was a note in my locker that read:
CHECK THE ATTENDANCE RECORDS
You’d think they might have fixed the lock on the front office door after the Homecoming Turtle Massacre, but to do that would be to acknowledge that there was a problem. It was easier for the school to do nothing, to tell themselves the turtles were an isolated incident and everything was fine.
Anyway, it was easy enough to lag behind after a Senate meeting one Thursday afternoon, to pace the hallways until they were empty. The hard part was convincing myself that I was any better than the Watergate burglars Nixon had hired.
I wondered if my Deep Throat was one of the front office’s student volunteers, or one of the staff, or possibly even Dr. Graves himself. What if our school principal was so terrified of Cal that he was actually turning to me for help? Far-fetched though it was, the last thought chilled my blood enough to send me through the office door.
I was breaking and entering to save my school.
It didn’t take long to find the attendance records for the fall semester. Eventually, it all got entered into a computer, but whatever scholarship kid whose job it was to shred all the paper records had apparently been hoarding them instead. I wracked my brain trying to remember who the student workers were, but they were all quiet, helpful, agreeable types. You signed in late, you signed out early for the dentist, and by the time you were in the parking lot, you’d already forgotten their faces.
Or maybe not you. Maybe that was a me thing.
Cursing myself for being the kind of person who overlooked the kind of people I apparently thought were less important than me, I found the file folder in the first drawer I opened. Not only was it neatly labeled, but somebody had already done the math for me. So helpful! So agreeable!
20 SUSPENSIONS
5 EXPULSIONS
The school year was only halfway over. If these records were to be believed, that meant the Honor Council was suspending or expelling more than a student a week. There were only four hundred people at Imperial Day—did any other elite private school in Los Angeles have disciplinary numbers like that? I wondered what the Board would think about that if they got wind of it.
That was what Deep Throat wanted me to know. What was implied was that Deep Throat expected me to do something about it.
When I pitched the idea to Mr. Prettinger, though, he looked skeptical.
“You haven’t been on the newspaper staff in two years,” he said, looking for a way to hedge out of the conversation. I reminded him of all the times my byline had appeared on stories as a personal favor to him.
“Is that what this is?” he asked. “Another favor? How’s that going to look, Claudia—a story like that coming from you?”
“Get someone else to write it then, I don’t care. I’ll give you the numbers.”
“Numbers you’re not supposed to have.”
“Check the office records,” I explained. “They’ll hold up.”
“And so what if they do?”
“What do you mean, what if they do? What about exposing the truth? What about Nixon and Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein?”
Mr. Prettinger sighed the sigh of a man who had watched his profession, tenuous though his connection to it may have been, turn to dust.
“Claudia, no one except you and I even know who Woodward and Bernstein are,” he said. “And let’s say we do run it. What if the only thing that happens as a result is that they shut down the newspaper?”
A little voice in my head whispered, If Ms. Yee was still here, she’d know who Woodward and Bernstein are. Then again, look what had happened to her. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected Mr. Prettinger to willingly throw himself in front of the 18-wheeler that was Cal and the Honor Council.
“Then what should I do?”
“The Board knows your face well enough by now. Go tell them yourself.”
I thought about going to the Board, but Prettinger was right about one thing: this was information I wasn’t supposed to have. When they asked where I’d gotten it, what was I going to tell them? The truth? That an unknown person sometimes wrote things down on pieces of paper and stuffed them into my locker? When they heard that, they’d ask, “How do you know what they’re telling you is true? And how’d you get those attendance records anyway?”
And I wouldn’t have an answer for that.
Mr. Prettinger saw the look on my face and sighed.
“I’m sorry, Claudia,” he said. “I just can’t get involved in this.”
There was no one who could help me, and I didn’t know where to turn. I felt like an animal in a zoo, a shitty one, the kind with a shitty habitat that drove the creatures into a pacing, ferocious madness.