Diplomatic Immunity (3 page)

I glanced down at my red cowboy boots, and really noticed for the first time the cracks showing near the toes and around the ankles. Tiny flecks of red dye were peeling off the sides. I might
as well have been wearing a billboard that said,
Outsider here. Do not engage
.

But really, what was the point of dressing nicely? My clothing choices wouldn't affect my scholarship.

I cut the engine just as the gas light came on. I wasn't sure where the money for the next fill-up would come from. I'd have to focus on the tip jar at the Yogurt Shop.

Right at that moment, the dark clouds that had earlier seemed so far off now blotted out the sun. As the first raindrops splashed on my windshield, I pulled my hood up and opened the door, acutely aware that I was taking my first official step toward the Bennington Scholarship. My ticket. My free ride. I tried not to think about it for my second and third and fourth steps, because that would seem obsessive, but I couldn't help it. My breath made cloudy puffs in the air, which should've been a sign of what was about to happen, but I had scholarship on the brain.

I was almost to the steps in front of the doors when the smooth bottoms of my cowboy boots slipped and I careened sideways into the rosebushes, ass first.

“O
wwwww,”
I said. “Effing freezing rain!”

A dark hand shot into the bushes.
“¿Estás bien?”

“
Qué?
” I said in response, using the one word I remembered from seventh-grade Spanish. “Um . . .
oui
.”

A chuckle came from somewhere above. “It's okay. I speak French, too.”

“That makes one of us,” I said. I grabbed the hand, and whoever it belonged to pulled me out of the bushes. When I was once again upright, I looked at the hand's owner.

And tried to keep my mouth from dropping open.

Standing before me was the most exotic, rugged, beautiful piece of personhood (of the male variety) I'd ever seen. I always got wordy in my head when I was caught by surprise, and the guy in front of me looked like the type who constantly caught girls by surprise. He must walk around thinking it was normal for people to pant. Tall, brown hair, gorgeous skin that covered his whole body, top to bottom . . . Ah, crap, was I panting?

It took me a while to realize I was having this whole inner monologue right in front of him, but I had yet to say anything out loud.

“Uh, thank you.” I tore my eyes away and brushed some leaves off my shirt.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice rich and layered, with a Spanish accent.

I took a mental assessment of my body. “Yes, only my pride is wounded.”

He tilted his head and scratched his chin. “Hmmmm. That being the case, I hesitate to share some news with you regarding your appearance.”

My hands flew to my face. “What's wrong? Do I have dirt on my cheeks? Are there rose petals in my hair? Oh my gosh, is it a booger?”

At the sudden movement of my hands, a man in a dark suit, with sunglasses and a coiled wire hanging from his ear, shuffled closer to the guy in front of me, like a Secret Service agent. Wait, this was Chiswick. He probably
was
Secret Service. So who was this boy in front of me? Why did he need protection? Was it from the likes of me?

The boy put his hands out, palms down. “Calm yourself, it's not a . . .
booger.
” He said it as though it was a foreign word to him, which it probably was.

“A booger is in this region,” I said, circling my finger around my nose.

He suppressed a laugh. “No, the problem is more . . . in the Southern Hemisphere.”

He seemed to be working hard to keep his eyes on mine. I looked down and caught a glimpse of familiar pink satin peeking through a fresh tear in my blue jeans right next to the front zipper.

I was wearing pink underwear.

“Ohmygosh,” I said. My hands flew to my crotch, but which would be worse? The new girl with the tear in her crotch? Or the new girl who couldn't stop touching herself?

Other students filed past as if this were something they saw every day. “Desperate,” one of them said. I couldn't see which one. My face burned.

The guy reached out for my hand. “Here. Follow me.” He paused. “Closely.”

I didn't have much choice. First off, he was very strong. Second, he was blocking the view to my nether regions. Maybe I did look like a desperate scholarship student, but it was worth hiding the view. He dragged me behind him and kept me close.

“Just act normal,” he said.

“Sure. Normal. Because whenever I walk anywhere, I always spoon the person in front of me.”

He chuckled, a rich, smooth sound that didn't resemble the word “chuckle”—it sounded more like “
chocolat
,” pronounced as the French do.

Thank goodness he couldn't hear thoughts. At least, he
probably
couldn't, unless he had superpowers. The man in the dark suit followed, about ten feet away.

“Since we're basically twerking, shouldn't we at least know each other's names?” I said, gasping a little for breath. “I'm Piper.”

“Pipper?” he said as he darted around a group of students. “Nice to meet you. I'm Raf.”

“It's not ‘Pipper'—”

“You prefer just ‘Pip'?”

I sighed. Maybe we should wait to discuss personal details until we had only the language barrier and not the wardrobe malfunction to deal with. Raf led us through the main entrance, down one hallway and then another, and finally to a darker corridor that looked as if it hadn't been used since the Civil War.

“This is the least crowded toilet,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows. “This is a horror movie waiting to happen.”

He cracked a smile and pulled me toward one of the swinging doors. I could barely make out the remnants of a blue stick figure with a skirt painted on it.

Raf pushed through it and motioned me inside. “After you.”

“Wait,
you're
coming in too?”

The man in the dark suit stepped closer. Raf held up his hand.

“Fritz, you cannot come in the girls' bathroom. Remember what Papa said about not embarrassing me?”

I raised my hand. “What about embarrassing
me
?”

Raf pointed to his backpack. “I have the answer to your problem in here. Trust me.”

Before I could ask why in the world I would trust him, he pulled me inside and let the door swing shut behind us.

I thought about my recent decisions. In the course of ten minutes, I'd fallen into a thorny bush, torn my pants in an
unmentionable spot, and then allowed a complete stranger to drag me to . . . What was this place? The Restroom of Getting Shivved?

“You look scared,” Raf said. “I told you I have something that can help.” He swung his backpack up onto the counter and opened the zipper.

Please don't be rope. Or a gag. Or chloroform. Or a drink laced with a roofie.

He dug around and produced a roll of duct tape.

Or duct tape
, I thought.

“Duct tape fixes everything,” he said.

“What?”

“Duct tape. It fixes everything. That's what my grandmama always told me.”

I smiled. “My gramma Weeza says the same thing. Whenever I get a hole in the heel of my socks, she puts duct tape over it. She says it buys you an extra month of wear.” I had a drawer full of duct-taped socks to prove it.

“Your grandma is a smart woman,” Raf said.

I doubted someone like Raf had ever had to duct-tape socks in his life. He probably had a new pair each morning.

He peeled off a strip of the tape and ripped it, then handed it to me. “Overlap the two sides of the tear. Then put the duct tape on the inside. It will give you a little bit of time until you can get a needle and thread.”

I held up the tape on my finger. “That's what all this superspy
stuff was for? A square of duct tape?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You have something in
your
backpack that will hold it together?”

He had a point there. I ducked behind the door of one of the stalls and did as instructed.

“So, you seriously walk around with a roll of duct tape in your backpack?” I said from the safety of the stall.

“Well, it was left over from an experiment last week.”

“What kind of experiment?” Zipping up my jeans, I emerged from the stall and checked out my repair job in the mirror. No pink underwear to be seen, and the tear was barely noticeable.

“The very important experiment of seeing if we could duct-tape Chiswick Academy's smallest cheerleader to the wall.”

I stared at him for a long moment.

“It turns out you can,” he said. “But the amount of duct tape used is proportionate to the weight of the subject you would like to attach to the wall.” He explained this as if he were debriefing a room full of scientists.

“You duct-taped a cheerleader to a wall?” I asked.

“Yes. But it wasn't without her permission, if that's what you're worried about.”

At this point, I wasn't sure what I was worried about. There were so many things.

“And now, Pip, since I have helped you,” he said, “I was wondering if you might be so kind as to return the favor.” His expression was super innocent, which made me super skeptical.

“How? You . . . person who tapes random cheerleaders to walls. How can I help you?”

“One cheerleader, and she was by no means randomly chosen.” Raf glanced at the door. “I'm a little parched, and I'd like to procure some libations, but I have this . . . constant companion.”

My mouth dropped open. “You want me to help you ditch your security detail so you can get booze?”

He scoffed. “You make it sound so pedestrian.”

I sighed and then thought about it for a moment. He
had
helped me. And it was just booze. For him, not me. “What would I need to do?” I asked.

“One of two things,” Raf said. “The first, less fun, way is to provide a distraction while I climb out the window.”

I glanced at the window near the top of the ceiling. It looked like it hadn't been opened in centuries.

“A distraction? Like you want me to blow something up?”

“I was thinking more like you could run down the hall screaming, ‘Fire.'”

I frowned. “That doesn't sound fun at all. What's the ‘more fun' way?”

This time his expression was decidedly mischievous. “Well, Fritz out there gets ruffled when in the presence of romantic liaisons. He is new to my security detail, you see. If we were to exit the toilets while kissing—”

I smacked my forehead. “Oh. My. God.”

“He would probably turn away, which would give me time
to run out the side door. Provided, of course, that you can still make the kissing sounds and perhaps a soft moan here and there to throw him off.”

I pointed my finger toward his chest. “You are exactly the type of person I plan on avoiding here. I want to get into Columbia. I want to be a journalist. And I'm not going to let some Don Juan Casanova get in my way.”

“‘Casanova?' Did you grow up in the nineteen thirties?”

“You're a casanova,” I said definitively.

“A casanova who saved your honor today.”

“By dragging me to a secluded bathroom! On my first day!” I closed my eyes and shook my head, and when I opened them I gave him what I hoped was a determined look. “Raf, it was nice to meet you. Thank you for the duct tape. I will repay you by buying you a new roll. Not by kissing you.”

As I walked toward the door, he glanced up at the ceiling. “This is what I get for helping the less fortunate.”

“Who says I'm less fortunate?” I asked, indignant.

He just shrugged. It was probably written all over me. Not to mention the fact that I'd just admitted I get more wear out of socks by using duct tape.

I sighed, determined not to say anything else, and pushed through the swinging door, where Fritz was standing guard.

“You'd better go in before your boy slips out the window,” I said. I turned to search for signs leading to the front office and nearly ran into a woman in a brown pantsuit.

“What are you doing here?” she said, her eyes narrowed.

I was suddenly at a loss for words. “I . . . I fell, and then there was a tear . . . and I'm new here.”

“What's your name?”

“Piper Baird.”

“New or not, I assume you can read?”

“Yes,” I said, not sure if the question was rhetorical.

“Then I can also assume you simply chose to disregard the numerous signs forbidding entrance to this hallway.”

“I . . .” I fell silent, not sure how to explain that I didn't see the signs because I was glued to the backside of the tall boy in front of me.

“Welcome to Chiswick, Miss Baird. Enjoy detention.”

“What?” I'd never had detention before. Never ever. I started to hyperventilate. There went the bullet point on my college résumé that said I'd never been sent to detention. I loved that bullet point.

The restroom door behind me squeaked open, and the woman in front of me tugged at the bottom of her jacket.

“Mr. Amador,” she said.

Mr. Amador?
I looked over my shoulder expecting to see a professor, but it was just Raf.

He gave Mean Pantsuit Lady a killer smile. “Ms. Wheaton, I'm sorry. It's my fault Pip is in this hallway. She had a wardrobe incident that would have been embarrassing had anyone else seen her. She doesn't deserve detention.”

I nearly snorted at his audacity, speaking to an authority figure like he had any power to change her mind.

But Ms. Wheaton nodded. “Very well. Get to class, both of you.” She walked away at a clipped pace, her sensible heels clicking on the floor. She didn't get very far before I called out to her, “What? We both broke the rules. We should both have detention.
Both
of us.”

She turned on her heel slowly and narrowed her eyes. “I was prepared to let you both go. But if you want detention so badly, Miss Baird, you've got it. After school. The Potomac Room.” She produced a yellow notepad from her pocket, wrote my name on the top page, tore it off, and handed it to me. Then she stalked away.

My eyebrows crinkled. “What just happened?” I asked.

“I believe you were about to owe me two favors, but then you basically asked the Beast for detention.”

“The Beast?”

“That's what we call Ms. Wheaton. She's the assistant principal,” Raf said.

“I'm more interested in why she didn't give you detention with me in the first place,” I said emphatically.

“So you
want
detention with me?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No!” I lowered my voice back down to calm levels. “I'm just saying we both should've received the same punishment for breaking the rules.”

He looked at me as if I weren't too bright. “She wouldn't
punish me. She knows who my dad is.”

“Who's your dad?”

“The Spanish ambassador to the United States.”

“Oh,” I said. That explained the security detail. “That's impressive, but doesn't everyone here have a powerful parent?”

He leaned toward me and said in a low voice, “My father is also scary.”

“
My
dad can be scary too. He can be totally scary. Especially when his union is threatened with new overtime guidelines.” I shook my head at how stupid and nonscary that sentence was.

He smiled. “My father gets people fired.”

I sighed. “We still should've had the same punishment.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up in a way that probably came from hours of practice, perfecting the smolder. “You're cute.”

“What?”

He ignored me. “Welcome to Chiswick, Pip. Where some of us don't get punished.” He gave me a confident grin, as if he didn't grasp the gravity of my outrage.

“I have to go,” I said.

I wadded the detention slip in my fist and followed the signs to the front office. I really hoped someone would have a needle and thread. This was my favorite pair of jeans.

This was my
only
pair of jeans.

As I walked away from Raf, I finally noticed the school itself. I couldn't get over the marble in this place. Clarendon High was all industrial tile and cinder-block walls. But Chiswick Academy? Marble floors, marble banisters, marble walls. Portraits of prestigious men in tuxedos and women in pantsuits, with gold plates on the frames noting their achievements. I didn't know whether the paintings were of donors or graduates or the board of directors, but they all looked down on me and my peeling cowboy boots and duct-taped jeans.

I checked in at the office and the secretary printed up my schedule and my locker assignment, and although she didn't have a needle and thread, she did give me a safety pin. As I left, an electronic gong sounded, which meant five minutes until class. I hurried to the bathroom, replaced the duct tape with the safety pin, and then tracked down my locker.

The one to the left of mine was open. A girl with long black hair was standing in front of it, rifling through what looked to be a series of drawers and shelves that seemed custom-made. I glanced around at other open lockers. Many of them had similar custom carpentry inside. Others had jeweled mirrors. Minifans blowing. Electronic displays of nature scenes and weather forecasts. Paintings. Real ones, not prints.

I turned the dial on my locker. What would I find inside mine? A butler, perhaps? The crown jewels? A personal masseuse?

I pulled the door open, and found . . . nothing. Just an empty shelf and metal walls.

The girl on my right had a simple calendar and a framed picture of herself and two people I assumed to be her parents hanging on her door. Nothing spectacular. “What's with the other lockers?” I said.

She grimaced. “Locker bling. Parents get a day before school to ‘decorate'”—she used air quotes—“their kid's locker. It's a tradition, although it's gotten out of hand. And usually it's not parents. It's servants.”

“Why isn't your locker ‘decorated' like theirs?” I said, using air quotes again.

“Scholarship,” she said. “I have no servants. My actual parents decorated mine. I'm guessing you're scholarship too?”

I nodded.

“It's not like my parents don't have better things to do than ‘bling' as a verb,” she said.

I laughed.

“My name's Una,” she said.

“Piper,” I said.

“What's your first class?”

I checked my schedule. “Chemistry?”

“Me too. I'll show you the way.”

I sat next to Una in class. She leaned over several times during the lecture to whisper page numbers. Raf Amador was sitting at the front of the room. His hand shot up each time the professor
asked a question. Rich and hot, and now smart. Some things were so not fair.

Una caught me staring at him.

“That's Rafael Amador,” she said.

“I met him this morning,” I whispered.

“His locker is stocked with Pellegrino every day. Orange, lemon, and plain.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

Raf's security detail, Fritz, was standing silently against the wall, looking dark and forbidding and ready to tackle students if necessary.

English was next. We'd be reading a classic book each month, which seemed daunting, given the time I'd spend on the paper and at my yogurt job.

Gym was the only part of Chiswick that seemed comparable to my old school. Same wooden floor, same expectations for coordination. Coach Lambourne dragged out a net of basketballs and told us to divide up into teams of three. Everyone seemed to immediately clump together. I glanced around nervously and then made my way toward a tall, lanky girl in hand-me-down shoes. I figured she was scholarship too. I'd recognize hand-me-downs anywhere.

“I'm Piper,” I said.

“Julia,” she said. “Basketball scholarship.”

“I'm
scholarship
scholarship.”

She nodded as if she could already tell.

“What position do you play?” she asked.

“I don't,” I said.

She frowned. “Can you set a screen?”

“Is that a basketball term?”

She laughed. “Stick with me.” A blond girl joined us and we passed the ball around us until Coach Lambourne called us to attention and began the three-on-three matchups. It was a disaster, but at least I could say I'd scored for the opposite team. Twice.

I spent lunch hour in orientation, where I learned how to use the lunchroom credit cards and where not to park my crappy Corolla.

By economics, I'd started to realize something. The only people who had acknowledged my existence, or my newness, had been other scholarship students. The rest had ignored me. I hated to judge a school by its cover, but there seemed to be a pattern developing here that had nothing to do with IQ.

By the time journalism rolled around at the end of the day, my bag was heavy with books and notes, and my brain was heavy with class divide, but nothing could erase my anticipation.

The entrance to the journalism class was right by a painting of a woman named Hilda Reginald, founder of Reginald Assembly Hall, platinum donor. She glanced sideways as I walked in, as if to say,
Are you sure you belong here?

“No,” I answered her, stopping in front of the portrait. “No, I'm not sure I do.”

“Did you just talk to a painting?” someone whispered in my ear.

Standing behind me was Rafael Amador. Making fun of me. Again.

“Yes,” I said defiantly. “But at least it didn't answer back.” As if that proved my sanity.

“Whatever you say, Pip,” he said with a smirk as he walked away.

I rolled my eyes and entered the state-of-the-art newsroom of the
Chiswick Academy Journal
and
Chiswick Academy News
and instantly forgot my annoyance with Rafael Amador because this was heaven. My heaven. This was what three years of applying for the scholarship was all about. This room, with the monitors and computers and cameras and expensive equipment even the local TV stations would envy. This was my ticket to the middle class.

I tried to calm my butterflies.
Just do your thing
, I thought. Things were different here, but journalism should be the same. Journalism was universal.

When I walked in, the students were gathered at the conference table in the center of the room. A guy with long shaggy dark hair and headphones around his neck sat at the head of the table, while an older man with gray hair—Professor Ferguson, I assumed—sat among the students.

The professor cleared his throat. “Piper Baird?”

I nodded.

“Welcome to Chiswick. Have a seat. Everyone, this is Piper Baird. Piper, why don't you tell us a bit about your experience.”

He was the first teacher who had acknowledged my newness.
I sat in an empty chair and pulled out a notebook. “Well, I was editor in chief at my school paper for two years. We produced a weekly gazette.”

That got a couple of patronizing smiles from the room. My cheeks turned red.

“What was your best story?” the professor asked.

I tapped my pencil nervously on the table and tried not to freeze up in the face of all the scrutiny. I made sure I didn't blink excessively. “Um, I uncovered a dognapping ring when my elderly neighbor reported her Yorkie-poo missing.”

“A dog story was your biggest break?” the guy at the head of the table said.

“It was a big ring,” I said. The table waited expectantly. “Lots of money being exchanged. Even dogs deserve justice.”

This got a few snickers. “Because dogs are people too?” someone murmured.

“Okay, thank you, Piper,” the professor said. “Here at Chiswick, we produce four twenty-minute newscasts per week, and we update the website daily, in addition to printing a weekly newspaper.” Then he turned to the guy at the head of the table. “Jesse, take us through the rundown.”

Jesse clicked a button on his laptop and a large monitor at the front of the room turned on.

“Our top story is the freak ice storm, and whether our groundskeepers were ready for it.”

I felt like raising my hand with a definitive
No, they were not!

“Next we have the information for the SAT prep courses.” Jesse continued on, and after about eighteen stories, he nodded his head toward me. “New girl, the school is shutting off the water system tomorrow for an hour. I'd like a ten-second voice-over on it and two paragraphs with the information for the paper.”

Hmph. The world's most boring story. I guess it was to be expected on my first day, but I still wanted to try for something better.

“Um, at my old school we found our own stories,” I said.

“Welcome to Chiswick, where we don't,” he said. “And remember, Professor Ferguson says there are no boring stories. Only boring reporters.”

What I wanted to say was
I believe this story proves you wrong
. What I actually said was “Got it. Thank you.”

If I just did my job for the next couple of weeks, I'd get something meatier. Eventually. I found an empty desk and started to look over the information. There was no way this piece would set me apart, unless, by some unfortunate accident, a student died from dehydration.

I studied Jesse. He was wearing a vintage T-shirt that looked more hand-me-down than fashionably old. He was probably scholarship like me, which meant he probably needed the Bennington, like me. Maybe Professor Ferguson already thought of him as the front-runner for the scholarship. I tilted my computer screen away from the rest of the class and typed Jesse Monson's
name. He'd had a story published in the
Washington Bugle
. The
Bugle
was no
Washington Post
, but it was a sizable regional paper, and it was more than I'd ever done.

If he was the favorite, at least now I had a target.

I made a call to Chiswick's head office and got the date and time of the water shutoff from a woman on the administrative staff, and then I called the plumbing company and interviewed one of their employees about the process involved.

It still wasn't a satisfying story, so I used one of the computers to research tips on how to survive when your water is turned off. Maybe it was time to add some drama to all the boring angles. I researched the worst tragedies that had occurred during shutoffs. A woman in Alabama had died soon after the water department had closed her pipes due to nonpayment, but the death couldn't totally be blamed on lack of water. Then I found a story from the
Detroit Free Press
about how their water department was criticized for shutting off the supply to thousands of people below the poverty line.