I, Claudia

Advance praise for

★ A gripping political thriller . . . about power, corruption, and the choices we make both for ourselves and the ones we love.

—starred, Kirkus Reviews

"I, Claudia will fortify your heart while stabbing you in the back. Mary McCoy has penned a thriller about betrayal and treachery in one high school’s student government, but it’s also the inspiring tale of a quiet, awkward girl trying to find the strength to do what’s right. It’s Pretty Little Liars by way of ancient Rome—a wild, exciting ride, but full of caution about leadership run amok."

—Anthony Breznican, author of Brutal Youth

"With its addictive voice, inventive storytelling, and one of the most fascinating and original heroines I’ve ever met, I, Claudia captivated me from the very first page. I couldn’t put it down!"

—Gretchen McNeil, author of Ten and #MurderTrending

"Prickly, smart, and laugh-out-loud funny I, Claudia’s political emphasis couldn’t be more timely, nor her narrator more delightfully suspect. McCoy’s skillful weaving of history’s great manipulators into a decidedly contemporary setting is fun, memorable, and utterly original."

—Alison Umminger, author of American Girls: A Novel

"What do imperial Rome and a contemporary L.A. prep school have in common? More than you might think. Laced with tumult and palace intrigue, I, Claudia pulls back the purple curtain for an inside look at the school’s patrician class. With psychological thrills, all-too-apt historical asides, and a witty, unforgettable narrator, I, Claudia is a smart and topical novel, an engrossing reminder that power corrupts."

—Kate Hattemer, author of The Land of 10,000 Madonnas and The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

Text copyright © 2018 by Mary McCoy

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCoy, Mary, 1976– author.

Title: I, Claudia / Mary McCoy.

Description: Minneapolis : Carolrhoda Lab, [2018] | Summary: Over the course of her high school years, awkward Claudia McCarthy finds herself unwittingly drawn into the dark side of her school’s student government, with dire consequences —Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038714 (print) | LCCN 2018007836 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541523753 (eb pdf) | ISBN 9781512448467 (th : alk. paper)

Subjects: | CYAC: Conduct of life—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Student government—Fiction. | People with disabilities—Fiction. | Family life—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M43 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.M43 Iah 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038714

Manufactured in the United States of America

1-42567-26213-3/12/2018

9781541530676 ePub

9781541530683 mobi

9781541530690 ePub

For Brady

This is a story of what I was, not what I am.

—Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

During our first session, you told me, Claudia, you are what we call an excellent historian.

You meant it in the therapist’s sense of the word, my ability to reflect upon my own troubles, their causes, and contributing factors, and craft a narrative around them: the story of my rise, my disgrace, the long string of humiliations and failures that had brought me to your couch, a box of tissues at my side.

I had just mentioned Charles I of England, who was hounded by Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads, arrested, made the subject of a farcical trial, and sentenced to death. The day of his trial was cold, and Charles wore two shirts so that no one would see him shivering when he placed his head on the block and think that it was because he was afraid.

The idea of putting a king on trial was novel to the English people—so novel, in fact, that no one noticed until it was too late that Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army were batshit insane and that they’d just replaced an innocuous king with a full-blown tyrant.

I was not trying to say that Charles I was the best king England ever had. However, out of them all, he certainly wasn’t the one most deserving of public execution.

Are you saying you feel like Charles I? you asked.

Of course not, I said.

He was a 17th-century English king. He had a son to avenge him, who would return from exile, overthrow Cromwell, and regain the throne. He was guaranteed a place in history. We have nothing in common.

I was just saying that, in some small way, I might have understood how he felt standing before the executioner’s block.

Part I

The Reign of

Augustus

The Honor Council

Senior Class representatives:

Augustus Dean, President

Marcus Rippa

Junior Class representatives:

Maisie McCarthy, Vice President

Ty Berman

Sophomore Class representatives:

Livia Drusus

Rebecca Ibañez

Freshman Class representatives:

Zelda Parsons

Jesse Nichols

I

The Future Is Coming for You

I asked where we should start, and you said the beginning, which did not clarify things at all. The historian imposes beginnings upon her narrative; they are not naturally occurring things.

I could begin with the founding of the Imperial Day Academy in 1898 and its subsequent rise to prominence among the elite families of Los Angeles County. Or I could begin in the late 1990s when my parents bucked the glittery tech company trend of settling in the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest, and instead based their start-up, DeliverMe, in Los Angeles. I could start with my birth, or with the day that Augustus and Livia became a couple, or with the day that Livia became a menace.

When you said none of that would be necessary, annoyance tugging at the corners of your mouth, I told you that I’d start with the ninth grade. It seemed as good a place as any to start.

I entered ninth grade with a piece of prophecy and a piece of advice from a fortune-teller, and they served me well up until the recent chain of events that led to me being here and talking to you.

The night I came into this information, I had gone to Venice Beach with my older sister, Maisie, and her friends: Augustus, Livia, Marcus, Julia, Ty, and Cal. They were all older than I was, already students at Imperial Day, already distinguishing themselves despite the fact that most of them were still underclassmen, and were it not for Maisie, I would never have been invited to join them at all.

Maisie is two years older than I am and was about to start her junior year at Imperial Day. She has long, dark hair that she wears parted down the middle with bangs. She is always drawing, and when my family goes out to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, Maisie orders for all of us with an accent, which impresses the waiters.

Everybody loves Maisie, but more importantly, Maisie loves me.

Maisie loves me in a way most people do not. She never acts like I am an embarrassment or an obligation. She didn’t have to invite me to the beach with her friends that evening, but she did anyway. My parents would have been content to leave me moldering in my room with a history of Weimar Germany or a playlist of Ken Burns documentaries. I would have been content with that, too, but when Maisie stuck her head into my bedroom and said, A bunch of us are going to Venice tonight, Claudia. You should come, I found myself getting up off the floor and putting on a clean t-shirt.

Marcus was driving when they came to pick us up, though the Lexus belonged to Augustus, who only had his learner’s permit. Augustus rode shotgun, and Marcus’s long-time girlfriend, Julia, sat in the backseat looking like a 1940s film star in her cat-eye sunglasses. I was pleased to see that Augustus’s girlfriend, Livia, was not in the car. Livia had a summer internship at Google, Augustus explained, and since their offices were in Venice anyway, she was going to meet us there.

"How did she manage that?" Julia asked, and I was pleased to hear in her tone evidence that Livia’s charms were not universally admired, even if my sister was best friends with her.

Her dad knows someone, Augustus said. He said it without judgment because at Imperial Day, everybody’s dad or mom knows someone. Not necessarily someone who could get a Google internship for a high school freshman who couldn’t even code—Livia’s dad was especially well connected—but at least someone who could get you good seats at the Hollywood Bowl or write you a rec letter for Stanford.

In any case, I was grateful for whatever nepotism had made it possible for me to enjoy the drive to the beach without her. Something about Livia always made my stutter come out.

With the others, it was easier. Marcus, who was a rising senior, was so much older that I barely registered as a person to him, and Augustus was so popular that he could afford to be magnanimous. Besides, he liked my sister, and I found a little bit of shelter under the umbrella of his admiration for her.

We parked, then walked over to the Venice Skate Park, where we found Ty and Cal leaning on the railing and watching the skateboarders whizzing around the banks of the flow bowl. Cal carried a board with him and swaggered toward us as if he had already skated, even though I could tell he hadn’t. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on him and the board looked like it had never been used.

Julia noticed it, too.

Are we going to get to watch you skate, Cal? she asked with a smirk.

He turned his piggy eyes on her and cackled in the straitjacket-ready way I would come to know far too well over the next three years.

No, Julia! he said, holding his skateboard out to her like a burnt offering. "I’m going to watch you skate!"

Julia took a stutter-step back from his outstretched arms, but had no retort. Cal had a flair for verbal repartee that came in from the side, slightly cockeyed with an absurdist bent. You never knew how to respond to it, and if anything, Julia looked like she wished she’d kept her mouth shut in the first place. I understood. Cal made me almost as nervous as Livia did, and I dreaded the idea of doing anything that might draw his attention.

We said our hellos, and then we turned to watch the skateboarders, whose feats were so dazzling and hypnotic that we barely spoke to each other.

Maybe this won’t be so bad, I thought. Maybe next, somebody would suggest going to the movies so we could all sit in the dark for two hours not talking and then go home. I was just thinking how perfect that would be, when I turned around and saw Livia coming our way.

She peeled off her pink cardigan as she walked, and her white sundress suddenly transformed from office- to beach-wear in a way it only ever does on the pages of Marie Claire. She propped her sunglasses on top of her head as she sauntered up to Augustus and stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.

How was work? he asked, and she said, Fine, and they both sounded at least forty.

The thing that might surprise you after hearing the way I’ve just talked about Livia is that she isn’t pretty. Not that I have any right to talk. I’m just saying that if you didn’t know her and saw a picture of her, you might be surprised that someone with the conventional, symmetrical, Captain America prettiness of Augustus was dating her.

Maisie hugged Livia, which started a cascade of unwanted hugs. Julia had to hug Livia because otherwise it would have looked like a snub. As Augustus’s best friend and Julia’s boyfriend, Marcus had to hug her next. Ty was the sort of stiff, taciturn person for whom hugs were acutely painful but who would never do anything that seemed rude, so he hugged her, and then Cal hugged her probably a little longer and closer and more creepily than Livia would have liked. Once this had all been dispensed with, Livia’s eyes fell at last on me.

I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Claudia, she said, and if she’d said, What the hell are you doing here, Claudia? it would have sounded equally gracious and warm. Needless to say, we did not hug.

M-M-Maisie invited me, I said, folding my arms across my chest.

There it was: my stutter, reliable as a German train schedule.

Oh, that was nice of her, Livia said, giving a pitying look to Augustus. Then she suggested we all get some food because she was dying of hunger, which of course, was a ludicrous overstatement.

We drifted away from the skate park and walked down the boardwalk, past beach cafes and taco stands. Nobody could agree on where to go, not even my ordinarily easygoing sister, who insisted on sushi even though everybody else refused to eat it because the Health Department had given the stand a B.

Undeterred, Maisie split off from the group to get her Dragon Roll, though not before inviting me to join her. Maisie was always thoughtful like that. I considered going with her. It would have been nice to have had a few minutes alone with her, away from her friends who made me so nervous. It would have been worth the food poisoning I almost certainly would have gotten. If I had it to do over again, I would have gone with her, but at that moment, all I could think was that Maisie might have wanted a break from her loser kid sister, and so I stayed behind with the others, looking longingly over my shoulder. She shouted that she’d catch up with us and disappeared into the crowd.

On one side of the boardwalk were semi-legitimate businesses—the places where you could buy bikini tops and pizza by the slice. On the other side of the boardwalk people had set up card tables and canopies from which they sold homemade jewelry, painted rocks, and pamphlets filled with conspiracy theories about aliens and the Illuminati and the lizard people. You walked faster past these people, avoided eye contact. If you got into a conversation with the henna tattoo lady, you might be lost, and found again years later selling toe rings at a rickety card table of your own.

I struggled to keep up with the others, my bad leg starting to ache as it did whenever I tried to walk too far or too fast, and I was mentally willing myself not to keel over in the sand when we passed the fortune-teller’s booth.

The hand-lettered sign in front of it read, BE PREPARED! THE FUTURE IS COMING FOR YOU!

I noticed it in the way you notice when you walk past a dog tied up in someone’s yard, barking like it wants to eat your face.

Bead curtains hung from three sides of the canopy so that it was almost dim inside. Behind a card table sat a man with sand-colored dreadlocks. He wore several layers of clothing despite the heat. Nobody stopped and nobody paid any attention to him, and he didn’t seem to mind until I walked past. Then he became agitated, rocking back and forth on his stool and calling out to us.

Hey, Blondie! That was to Livia. C’mere. All of you come here. I’ve got something to tell you. No one may ever have this knowledge again. Power. Betrayal. Corruption. Destruction. If I was you, I’d want to know about it.

There was something about his voice when he said Destruction—something low and rumbly that made me shudder. I recovered quickly, but Livia picked up on it right away, perpetually on the lookout as she was for any display of human frailty. I knew immediately that she would veer back toward the fortune-teller, leading the rest of our group behind her.

How much for this knowledge that no one may ever have again? Livia asked.

Twenty bucks, the fortune-teller said. The whites of his eyes were the color of Dijon mustard, and as we drew closer, smells of patchouli and grain alcohol wafted toward us.

Yeah, I’m not doing that, Marcus said, before turning to Julia. Come on, let’s get something to eat.

Marcus was on scholarship, and even if he wasn’t, he was much too sensible to throw away twenty dollars on a boardwalk fortune-teller. Besides, why did he need a fortune-teller? His future was as good as written. Sweet, beloved, genius poor kid bounces around foster homes until he lands at Imperial Day, and soon thereafter moves in with Augustus’s family, practically like a second son. His college application essay would probably be optioned for film.

Who’s first? I don’t have all day, the fortune-teller said as Marcus and Julia turned away and set off down the boardwalk toward the chicken flautas stand. He sounded impatient, even though it wasn’t like we were falling over each other to sit down at his seedy-looking table.

Livia turned to me and smiled sweetly.

Why don’t you go first? she said.

I don’t have twenty dollars, I said, even though I did.

Too bad, the fortune-teller said. "I have some especially extraordinary things to tell you."

Livia turned toward the others. We’ll throw in five dollars each for her. It was a command, not a question.

That’s really not necessary, I said, inching back from the fortune-teller’s stand.

It’s no trouble, Livia said, reaching in her baby-blue Bottega Veneta clutch.

I d-d-don’t want to have my fortune told, I said, a little more forcefully than I’d intended, which of course made me stutter all over the place.

Livia looked like a sadistic dentist who’d just prodded a sore tooth. She held out her hand and, just like that, Ty and Cal each pitched in a five-dollar bill. Only Augustus held back, eyeing my obvious discomfort. He’d shell out five bucks for a laugh, but not for a cruel one.

She doesn’t want to do it, Livia, he said.

Livia shrugged as though that fact was entirely beside the point.

Come on, Maisie’s sister, Cal said. It’s not like he’s going to give you herpes. Probably.

I could feel my throat start to tighten as I inhaled the mixture of incense and cheap liquor wafting from the fortune-teller’s booth. My head spun, and I held a hand to my nose even though I knew it was rude.

It wasn’t this particular fortune-teller. It wasn’t his odor or grotesque looks. The truth is that I don’t like fortune-tellers.

No. That’s not the truth. The truth is that I’m afraid of fortune-tellers.

I’m a historian. Fortune-tellers are my natural enemies. I deal in a past that happened. They deal in a future that won’t.

The idea of having a stranger look into my eyes and down at my palm, then tell me all about myself, made me want to go into hiding. I didn’t want to be seen or known, and I certainly didn’t want any of it to happen with Livia, Cal, and the rest of them watching.

But more than any of that, I didn’t want to hear my fortune because even if it was a scam, even if I had nothing to be afraid of, it was me we were talking about.

I knew it would be terrible, and I knew it would be the truth.

After kicking in the last five dollars herself, Livia put four bills down on the fortune-teller’s table and pulled her hand away like she was afraid of accidentally touching something. Then she pushed me forward and sat me down on the three-legged stool.

There I was, face-to-face with the fortune-teller. I was frozen in my seat, arrested by his gaze and deranged grin. I shook Livia’s hands from my shoulders and scooted up close to the fortune-teller’s card table. If I was going to be forced to have my fortune read, at least I could have some privacy. The man seemed to understand, leaning in and lowering his voice.

How old are you? he muttered.

Fourteen, I muttered back.

He nodded knowingly. Ninth grade, right?

Yes.

Ninth grade is where it all started to go wrong for me, he said, sucking on a tooth.

That was one of the many things about fortune-tellers that drove me nuts, the way they tricked you into doing their work for them, acting like they were making small talk when really, they were trying to pin you down. I didn’t respond. I wasn’t going to make it that easy for him.

Do you like school? he asked.

Yes, I said.

Then he surprised me.

He cocked his head to the side and said, So it’s people you don’t like.

I like people fine. I tried to sound casual about it, but it probably came off sounding defensive anyway.

"Then people don’t like you, he said, sucking his tooth again as he sized me up. You start a lot of fights?"

I sniffed, enjoying a moment of vindication—and a little bit of relief. There was nothing magical about this person. He was doing a cold reading, and not doing a very good job of it either.

I’m a pacifist, I said, looking back over my shoulder. Augustus and Ty were keeping a respectful distance, and Cal’s attention had drifted toward a busty woman in a slingshot bikini and roller skates, twirling down the bike path. But Livia hung on every word I said, no doubt filing it away for some moment in the future when she could use it against me.

You know who else was a pacifist? The fortune-teller reached across the table and gripped my forearm. I could feel my skin begin to itch at his touch, could almost see the fleas hopping from his arm to mine. I tried to pull away, but he only tightened his grip.

You ever heard of Good King Wenceslas? he asked.

Like in the song? I asked, finally wrenching my arm out of his grip, not caring how rude it might seem. But the fortune-teller seemed too worked up to care.

Murdered by his own brother, Boleslav the Cruel, he said. To get a dukedom. With a name like that, you’d think Wenceslas would have seen it coming.

What does that have to do with me? I asked.

He lowered his voice further and craned his neck down so that the ocean breeze carried his words away and Livia, who wasn’t even trying to conceal her eavesdropping, was frustrated in her efforts and finally rejoined Augustus, Ty, and Cal.

Because, Claudia, I want you to know that I am also a student of history.

His words shot down my spine like ice water.

He overheard one of them, I thought. Livia must have said my name within earshot of his table.

However, I knew this was not the case. And how could he have known I was a historian?

The fortune-teller’s lips curled back to reveal two silver canine teeth, probably the ones he’d been sucking.

What’s the matter? he asked, pleased with himself. Cat got your tongue? Now, tell me. What is it that you’d like to know?

I could have asked anything. Often I think about that and wish I’d asked about something meaningless, like what the weather would be like on October 16 or whether I’d be pretty in ten years. Other times, I wish I’d asked about love and whether I was always going to be alone. That would have been useful information.

But I didn’t, and what I asked was so broad, so stupid, I don’t know what kind of answer I even expected to get.

What’s high school going to be like? I asked.

The fortune-teller didn’t hesitate.

The answer is all right there, he said, nodding toward Augustus and Ty and Livia and Cal. Your little friends over there.

I looked over my shoulder in disbelief.

Those people aren’t my friends.

The fortune-teller clasped my hands. This time, I didn’t recoil from his touch.

Of course they’re not. And you’re going to destroy them all. You’re going to leave them reeling, their ambitions unrealized, their dearest hopes and wishes thwarted. And when all of them have fallen away, you alone will be left standing with the kind of power that people would lie and cheat and steal for, the kind of power that everyone wants. Everyone except you.

The skeptic in me pulled my hands away, started to get up from the table, but the historian in me won out. I stayed put and let the fortune-teller’s words sink in.

His eyes darted toward Augustus, then down the line: Ty, then Cal, before meeting mine again.

Gold. Silver. Then clay. Then bronze.

Augustus is gold? I asked, frantic to remember every word even if I didn’t understand what they meant. He’d looked at me when he said bronze. Did that mean I was bronze? Was that supposed to be a good thing?

Without answering my question, the fortune-teller cut his eyes toward Livia and he whispered to me, And her? She’s the fire that forges you all. You want to keep from getting burned, Claudia? Play up that stutter of yours. Play up the limp. But whatever you do, Claudia, play dumb and keep your head down. You do that, and you just might make it out of Imperial Day Academy in one piece.

I’d never told him where I went to school. That I knew for sure.

II

A Student of History

Nothing I do matters.

You might think that I’m upset about this, that after years of absorbing contempt from my peers and disappointment from my parents, it was inevitable that I would end up here in your office.

But you’d be wrong if you think I’m that fragile.

You see, I almost died when I was born. I was hospitalized for months, an incubator baby with translucent skin and a dozen tubes sticking out of me, and for most of that time, I was alone. My mother and father were busy cleaning up the mess that was our family business and attending to my siblings, so mostly I lay mewling in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by myself. Very few pictures of me exist from that time. Two-pound babies are not very lovely to look at, and I suppose no one wanted to get all that attached to me in case I failed to pull through.

Lest you think my parents neglectful monsters, I don’t hold this against them. The time surrounding my birth was a difficult one for them. You see, my parents were, in the parlance of the early 2000s, internet pioneers. They had started a string of successful online businesses that catered to busy people who were too important to have time to do their own errands, but not important enough to have personal assistants to do those things for them. So my parents created DeliverMe, an online service to deliver their diapers and groceries, run background checks on their nannies, and order their takeout.

Along the way, they transformed themselves from Caltech-educated nerds into the class of moneyed Angelenos. They lost their schlubiness, moved from Pasadena to Los Feliz, and then to Pacific Palisades when they had kids. They acquired the trappings of Angeleno success: a pool they never used, a personal trainer, Botox, teeth whitening sessions, an electric car, a storage unit for their wine, and a stylist for special occasions.

My mother was not quite seven months pregnant with me when she discovered that my father’s assistant, Melinda, had stolen credit card numbers from 75 percent of DeliverMe’s customer base.

My mother’s suspicions had been aroused when she found Melinda, whom she’d never liked, flirting with the head of DeliverMe’s security operations, a doughy, acne-scarred, unreconstructed geek named David. My mother valued David for his home-brewed encryption software and the firewalls he guarded like a sworn member of some ancient warrior guild, but she was not sure what Melinda saw in him and doubted the purity of her motives.

As a result, the next time Melinda went to lunch, my mother went to her desk and saw that the little idiot had left her Hotmail account logged in. A cursory search revealed hundreds of emails, each containing long strings of credit card numbers and expiration dates. Calmly, my mother summoned her own assistant to guard the door while she printed off one email after another, placing them carefully into a folder.

That was when the contractions began, but instead of telling someone or lying down or going to the doctor, my mother called her lawyer. She called the police. She called my father and spelled out the extent of Melinda’s betrayal. She met with a PR consultant about damage control, and—most of all—she waited for Melinda’s arrest. But as quickly and quietly as my mother had acted, Melinda must have sensed the axe was about to fall because when the police descended upon her one-bedroom carriage house in WeHo, she was already on a plane to Argentina with enough stolen credit card numbers to comfortably fund a long exile.

I think it was being thwarted like that, being denied her vengeance, that sent my mother into full-on, movie cliché, water-breaks-in-the-elevator labor, causing me to come into the world far more prematurely than anyone would have liked.

My parents’ business ultimately recovered from the Melinda Incident. And mostly, I recovered from the trauma of my early birth. I still have the usual preemie problems: allergies and asthma. I’ve had three heart surgeries and steroids shot into my lungs. I’ve worn glasses since I was three (though now I sometimes switch them out for contact lenses). And then I have a few other ailments, impediments, maladies, and shortcomings.

There’s the stutter that, despite my speech therapist’s assurances, never quite resolved itself and a sibilant S that still gives me trouble if I try to pronounce the letter while thinking about it too much or not enough. And my right