Diplomatic Immunity (2 page)

The following Monday morning, Charlotte and I were hunched over the layout for the front page of our school paper, the
Clarendon Community Gazette
. We were arranging the placement of the cover story, an exposé about nonrefrigerated times for the lunchroom mayonnaise. But I wasn't focusing as I should have been. I was working up the nerve to tell Charlotte about the scholarship.

When I left for Chiswick next week, Charlotte would have the editor in chief job to herself, but I knew she would rather share the job and work as a team. I took a deep breath.

“So, Char, I've got some news.”

“Perfect.” She smiled. “We just so happen to be in a newsroom.”

“I got the scholarship to Chiswick.” I took in a breath.

“What?” Charlotte looked up from the layout.

I nodded, feeling a little pit in my stomach that I was abandoning her. “I got the scholarship.”

“But it's October.”

“One of the scholarship students must have dropped out or something. The point is, I'm starting there Monday.”

“Wow,” Charlotte said, her hands gripping the stylus as if this news might throw her off balance. “Top story, team coverage. But what about the paper? What about school? What about . . .” Charlotte gasped in dismay, as if Barry Manilow had just canceled a concert. She loved him more than anything. It was the weirdest thing about her. “The Schmulitzer?”

The “Schmulitzer” was Mr. Peters's version of the Pulitzer. The student with the best-reported story of the year would win a cheap plastic trophy, and also a letter of recommendation and résumé packet assembled by Mr. Peters himself.

“Well, now you have a clear path to the most prestigious award in the entire boundaries of Clarendon High.” I bowed toward her and made a circular gesture with my hand.

“Nobody likes to win by default,” Charlotte said. She frowned.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“It's okay,” she said. “I'll be fine.” She studied the layout so closely, I was afraid she'd impale her eye on the stylus.

Right then, Jorgé Robles came over to our desk. “Hey, Piper, do you have any contacts at the dog pound? I'm doing a story on—”

“Paul Jensen,” I said, cutting him off. I pulled out my phone and sent the contact info to Jorgé. “Ask him about his eclectus parrot. That always gets him talking.”

I turned back to Charlotte, who seemed to be blinking back tears. The sight pricked at my eyes. So I resorted to the only surefire way to coax her out of her funk. I switched my phone to camera mode and then to film, and turned the lens on her.

“Charlotte Giovanni, you've won the Schmulitzer Prize, despite what some might call insurmountable odds.”

It was a game we liked to play, the Joyce Latroy Game. Joyce Latroy was a talk show host notorious for making everyone who came on her show cry. She even made the ousted dictator of Libya tear up when she mentioned his boyhood dog, Giaque.

The rules of the game were simple: first person to laugh was the loser.

“Your father was an alcoholic,” I said in a low, grave voice. “Your mother lost one of her legs in the war and the other in a freak toaster oven incident. The money your family received in the toaster settlement was stolen by your mailman.”

Charlotte nodded solemnly. “That bastard. We never should've hidden the money in our mailbox in the first place, but still, that bastard.”

I felt my lips twitch.

“But the tragedy didn't end there,” I said. “You wrote in your memoir about a humiliating incident with a kebab stick . . .”

Charlotte pressed her lips together.

I continued. “Your uncle made you chicken kebabs for your fourteenth birthday. But when you went to raise the kebab to your mouth, you missed your lips completely and impaled your left eye.”

Charlotte nodded, her lips trembling. “The other kids made so much fun of me. They would stand behind me and tap my back and then move to my left.”

I knew I almost had her. “To add insult to injury, your father then gambled away your other eye.”

That was it. She spit-laughed. But it didn't count as a win, because I laughed too.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a freshman, Scott Summerdorf, hovering.

I kept my eyes on the layout. “Scott! Stop loitering. What do you need?” I frowned deeply and caught Charlotte's lips twitching out of my side view. Mr. Peters had warned Charlotte and me that we could be intimidating to the younger reporters. But his news hadn't had the effect he'd intended. It just made us torture them a little bit more.

Scott stared at his feet. “Um, I'm supposed to interview the janitor, but he's, like, playing deaf.”

I sighed. “Start the conversation by telling him how annoyed you get when the students don't dump their own trays. His temporary deafness will subside.”

Scott stood there for a moment more, probably wondering if it was safer to thank me or to just stop talking. I decided to put him out of his misery.

“You're excused.”

He all but ran out of the room.

“You're terrible,” Charlotte said with a smile.

“I know.” I raised the camera again.

“My turn.” Charlotte tried to reach for the camera, but I shook my head. If there was one thing I was really bad at, it was being on camera. I had this stupid nervous tic where my mind would go blank and my mouth would stammer. I also had this overblinking problem.

“Please? Just once?” Charlotte said. “Our last days together must be documented.”

“You're the one who wants to be on camera. This is good practice.” Print reporters are rarely seen, except for a favorable head shot next to the byline.

Charlotte sighed. “Fine. Piper Baird. You've just found out you've been awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Chiswick Academy.”

I let the camera sink. “Wait. We don't address real subjects.”

“Don't interrupt Joyce Latroy!”

I frowned and raised the camera back up to my eye. Joyce could be so demanding.

“Yes, you'll miss out on the Schmulitzer, but you gain the chance to win the Bennington Scholarship, an opportunity many
of us would give Mr. Peters's right arm for.”

“I heard that, Miss Giovanni,” Mr. Peters said from his desk at the front of the room.

It was quiet for a few long moments, save for the clicking and clacking of students finishing up their edits. Charlotte had an uncle who worked at
People
magazine. She wanted to be just like him, except the television version. I knew Charlotte would've killed for the chance I was being given.

“What if I fall flat on my face?” I said softly.

“What if you do?” Charlotte said.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Well, Joyce,” I said. “You know what my father used to say every time I fell down. . . .”

“What's that?” Charlotte said.

“He'd say, ‘Son, why do we fall down?'”

“I think that was Batman's father,” Charlotte said.

“Oh. Right. Well
my
father always said, “With great power comes great—”

“That's Spider-Man's uncle,” Charlotte said.

“Hmmm . . .” I put my finger on my lips like I was thinking really hard. “What
did
my father ever say?” I thought about my real father, and what he had told me when he was facing a difficult raise negotiation at VP&L. “Oh, yeah. He said, ‘Don't be afraid to live on your edges. That's where you'll find the truth.'” My dad was always saying stuff like that. He was like a walking platitude.

“I have just one more question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“What is your best friend going to do without her most kindred soul?”

I frowned and reached over to pat her leg. I would miss seeing her every day. I shook my head and pushed the sadness back to the special compartment in my brain labeled “Painful stuff that I'm not ready to deal with now. Or maybe ever.” It was a large section of my mind—probably because I was always putting stuff in and never taking stuff out.

“Just promise me you won't become one of
them
,” Charlotte said.

I knew the “them” Charlotte was referring to. The privileged elite, who made up the other 95 percent of the student body at Chiswick. The nonscholarship part. The part that came with chauffeurs and nannies and silver platters and no side jobs.

I'd had a job ever since my first paper route at age twelve. By the time I was sixteen, I'd earned just enough to buy a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla.

“I promise,” I said. “I won't change one bit.”

We stood there awkwardly for a moment. I wasn't sure where to go next, but Charlotte pulled me over to a laptop in the corner.

“I think we need a little bit of Post-Anon,” she said.

Post-Anon was our guilty pleasure. It was a website full of postcards that people sent in anonymously, revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. Things they would never dare tell anyone else but had to say somewhere.

Light things like:

I rationalize my Fig Newton binges because they are vegetarian.

And darker things like:

I fear something horrible happened to me as a child that I've blocked out and that my parents keep from me.

And:

I love you more than anyone I've ever known, but I still wish I'd never met you.

We always said someday we would send in a secret, but not until we had a really good one. Maybe I'd find one at Chiswick.

That Saturday, my gramma Weeza invited me over for coffee to celebrate. We sat in her tiny kitchen as she poured fresh brew into a mug in front of me and another one for her. She put a few drops of cream in the coffee, then added one . . . two . . . three spoonfuls of sugar.

“When,” I said, putting my hand out.

“Sorry, is that too much sugar? That's the Danish in me.”

She always said that. Her own grandma came to America from Denmark in the late 1800s, and if there's one thing those Danes like, it's their sugar. Either that or Gramma Weeza just liked it and wanted to blame her addiction on an entire nation.

“How's the plumber?” I said. Grandma had been seeing a plumber for a few months now, and by “seeing,” I mean they bowled in the same league two nights a week.

“Oh, he's seasoned but sturdy,” she said. “And if my pipes
ever get clogged . . . Know what I mean?” She did this exaggerated wink.

“Ugh, Gramma.”

“Well, dear, just because we're old doesn't mean we don't have pipes.”

“Gramma!” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. “I prefer to picture you bowling. Not . . . cleaning each other's pipes.”

“All right, have it your way. We'll talk about bowling.” She grinned mischievously. “And I'll tell you, he can sure knock down my pins.”

“Gram! How do you make even bowling sound dirty?”

“It's a talent, dear.” Gramma refreshed my coffee and added another spoonful of sugar. “Now tell me, what have you been up to?”

I shrugged. “The usual. Reporting on stuff. Uncovering truths. You would not believe how the lunch ladies handle mayonnaise.”

“I'm referring to life outside the paper.”

“Is there . . . ? Life . . . outside . . . ,” I joked.

She laughed.

“I'm all for fun, but I'm not going to do anything to mess up my chance at college.”

“I know, dear. I've heard.”

That night, as I was watching the evening news, I made a chart documenting every time the anchors dropped the “to be” verb.
It happens when they try to sensationalize a headline, like “DC Residents Waking Up to Icy Roads Today,” or “Government Employees Feeling the Pinch.” They said them as if they were complete sentences. But they weren't, because there was no “are.”

It was a new trend in reporting, and I didn't like what it was doing to the English language and the rules of basic grammar.

When the news was over, I got a text from Charlotte.

Charlotte:
Male anchor, 22 drops. Female anchor, 17. Because girls are awesome.

Me:
Much awesomer than boys.

Monday morning, I reached into my closet and took out my blue cardigan, then threw it on the floor. Too dowdy. I flung out the floral shirt I'd modified from the Salvation Army. Too obvious. I appraised the green skirt that I'd updated from a donation from Gramma Weeza. . . . I threw it over my shoulder.

“Hey!” Michael's voice came from behind me.

I turned to see the green skirt on top of Michael's head.

“Sorry, bud.”

“Why are you throwing green clothes?” Michael asked, as if he was personally offended for the color green.

“I'm just trying to go through my closet.” I settled on a red sweater and a gray T-shirt. I assessed the look in my mirror.

“This'll have to do,” I muttered.

“It will have to do what?” Michael said.

“My outfit, bud.”

“What will it have to do?”

“It will have to do . . . fine.”

He shrugged and walked away.

Chiswick Academy wasn't a very far drive. I lived in Arlington, Virginia, and Chiswick was in DC, which basically meant it was across the Potomac River. But when the school came into view, I thought I'd entered the nineteenth century. It looked like a Southern plantation out of
Gone with the Wind
. I followed the other cars up Cathedral Avenue and pulled into a cement roundabout, my Toyota sticking out among the dozens of long black sedans. Several of them were limousines with colorful flags sticking upright above the headlights.

The parking lot was only about a quarter full. At my old school, I had to arrive early to get a good spot, but at Chiswick, most students clearly had drivers. I was probably parked by the faculty and any other scholarship students who'd bought their own junky cars.

I stared at the students milling about in front of the main doors. They looked . . . different. I couldn't exactly explain why; but something I couldn't pinpoint made them seem more sophisticated. Their clothes were sleek. Their hairstyles seemed about two trends ahead of those at Clarendon. It all made them seem exotic. Older.