8
At home that night, I was stewing in my room. I couldn’t get the story idea out of my head, but I didn’t know how to approach it. Getting an invite to one of their parties seemed as likely as stealing nuclear codes from the CIA.
Besides, for now, it was just research.
My dad seemed to sense that I was fretting, because he knocked on my bedroom door with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand.
“What’s on your mind, Pipe?” he said, setting the mug on my desk and taking a seat on the edge of my bed.
“How do you know something’s on my mind?”
He reached over and grabbed a pencil from my desk. It was riddled with bite marks.
“Okay, maybe there are a few things on my mind,” I admitted.
“Like what?”
I took in a deep breath. “Like how I’m going to pay for college. And why I’m not totally the editor in chief already. And president of the New York Times. And why a show like The Bachelor is still on television.”
My dad nodded. “That’s some heavy stuff.” He took a sip of my hot chocolate. “First off, there’s nothing either of us can do about The Bachelor, so let’s leave that one alone. Second, your school record is impeccable. I have faith you’ll get a scholarship.”
“But every student who gets into Columbia will have an impeccable record. I need more than that to get a full scholarship there. I need the Bennington.”
“You know, there are other colleges besides Columbia,” my dad said. “You could get a full ride to eighty percent of them.”
“Eighty percent?” I said skeptically.
“Yes. I conducted a study.” He grinned.
“Maybe. But Columbia’s my dream.”
He nodded. “I know.” He pointed to one of my bedroom walls. “The Columbia poster hanging above your bed was my first clue.”
Right then, Michael burst into my room, tears filling his eyes. When he saw me, they started to flow down his cheeks. He rarely expressed this much emotion, and so I dropped everything else.
I stood up and held my arms out. “What’s the matter, bud?”
He gave me a little head butt to my stomach—his way of making contact—and I put one hand on his chest and the other on his back and pressed. Sometimes the pressure helped to calm his storm.
“Mr. Flannigan said I sweared, but I didn’t,” Michael said.
My dad gave me a look like You got this?
I nodded and he stepped out.
“Shh. It’s okay. What word did you say?”
Michael said the F-word. “That’s not a swear, right?” he asked, desperate.
I sighed. The rules of social behavior were very important to Michael. From an early age, his therapy had focused on social skills and “fitting in,” so the fact that he’d done something that was not generally acceptable was distressing for him. “It is a swear word. But it’s okay. We’ll work on it.”
“Will you teach me the swears so I know not to say them?”
Michael liked charts and ranking systems, so we got out a pen and paper and I wrote down every curse word I could think of and helped Michael with their pronunciations and then we took turns using them in sentences.
Afterward, we ranked each one from most worst to least bad, and by the time we were finished, his storm had subsided.
“If I swear, will I go to jail?” he said. Jail was the scariest punishment Michael could think of.
“No, bud.”
“If I say the swears in my videos, will they get flagged?”
Michael loved to make videos of himself, narrating while playing his favorite video game, Clan Wars.
“They might.”
“Okay, then I won’t swear.” He took a deep breath. “Until I’m eighteen.”
Michael grabbed his hanger and began spinning it and wandering around my room and eventually meandered out without saying anything else.
I went down to the kitchen to grab day-three leftovers (meat loaf), brought it back to my room, and turned on my computer. Time to do some research. First I looked up past Bennington winners to see whether my story idea would fit in with the stories that had won previously. But the stories in the general media that kept coming up were less about alumni achievements and more about the rich kids of Washington’s elite and their late-night clubbing and partying habits.
Rafael Amador popped up in more than a few of these. In one, he was pictured with a joint in one hand and a drink in the other. In another, he was onstage, playing a duet with John Legend. That one bugged me more, because I had a thing for his music. Another story showed him on a motorcycle with some glamorous girl on the back. She looked familiar, and I realized I’d seen her face on magazine covers.
How was this boy not in jail?
Probably the same reason why he’d gotten out of detention that first day.
Powerful dad.
Charm.
Money.
Diplomatic immunity.
Like Michael, I was into lists too.
As I went on, my research started to look a little less like research and a little more like stalking, partly due to curiosity and partly due to the face that kept popping up. Rafael’s face. Even caught off guard, he was beautiful. Just looking at a picture, I found it hard to remember how annoying he was. There were a lot of stories about him, lots of pictures, but there was one article with no pictures. It didn’t even seem to be about Raf specifically. It was about a recent surge in teenage binge drinking. It mentioned a boy who had nearly died of alcohol poisoning at a party at an embassy. The Spanish embassy. Rafael was quoted in the article as a friend of the victim.
“He is American. Americans don’t know how to drink.”
That seemed so callous. Maybe diplomatic immunity meant he was also immune from manners. My story, if I pursued it, would be a mirror for him to take a good hard look at himself.
I started to notice that most of the articles on the internet were from last year, but hardly any were more recent than that. I kept searching until I came across a gossip blog with a story about Rafael’s father. The entry claimed the ambassador had ties to the Spanish mafia—I didn’t even know there was one—and through these ties, he got the editor in chief of Star Lives fired.
Raf did say his father was scary. But I didn’t realize he was mafia scary.
I exited out of the article and did a general search of diplomatic immunity. Basically, it was a perk among countries that had been around since ancient times, and diplomats had been abusing the system for just as long. Defense attorneys had invoked immunity numerous times to get diplomats off for the crimes they’d committed.
I closed out the window and got back to looking for the Bennington-winning stories, and that’s when I came across a story from the winner five years ago. Liam Rathbone wrote an article about how he had pretended to be a paparazzo and embedded himself with a group of photographers who hounded the rich and famous. But he turned the story around and made the tactics of the paparazzi the story.
Readers love a good story about someone who dares to embed themselves. One of my favorite books I read as a young girl was the story of a reporter named Nellie Bly. She exposed the horrors of Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum by pretending to be insane herself. She was admitted, and once inside she documented the inhumane conditions. After she was released, she published her story.
She was one of my heroes. She made me want to act insane and embed myself everywhere I went. That’s who I could channel in my story. I would be the Nellie Bly of the DI kids. The next night, at the Yogurt Shop, all I could think about was my story, and because of that I messed up four orders in one hour. Charlotte wasn’t working tonight, which was too bad, because I could’ve used another person to bounce ideas off. At the end of my shift, the tip jar was empty, but my head was filled with the exposé. And if it got me the Bennington, I wouldn’t need the tip jar.
Except now I had no gas money.
The next morning at breakfast, my mom was check
ing her emails when she gasped.
“Four hundred sixty-two dollars?” She squinted at the screen. “For gems?”
Michael’s face went ashen. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“What are gems, Michael?” my mom said, trying and failing to keep her voice calm.
“They’re for his game,” I said.
I thought she was going to blow up, but then her lip quivered and she burst into tears. Michael started pacing and spinning his hanger faster. He was upset.
My dad put his hand on my mom’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay. We’ll explain the situation to the credit card company. I’m sure they’ll expunge the charges.”
Why would she burst into tears instead of scolding Michael?
I didn’t think now was the time to ask questions, especially if one of the questions was going to be Can I borrow some money for gas?
Mom got up quietly from the table and went to her room.
“She’s feeling a lot of pressure,” my dad said.
“At the bakery?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
9
The rest of the day, I readied myself for my plan to embed with the diplomatic immunity kids. A reporter’s best weapon is the art of conversation. Without sitting down for a formal “interview,” any reporter worth her salt knows how to get the most out of a casual conversation, as long as she follows a few simple guidelines.
Ask open-ended questions. Avoid yes or no. Don’t ask, When you have diplomatic immunity, do you get away with things other students don’t? Instead, ask, When did you first realize you weren’t like the rest of us?
Start with broad questions to get the interview subject comfortable. Establish trust. Then, as the conversation goes on, narrow the questions.
Don’t be afraid of silence. Silence may make some people uncomfortable, but it will also provoke expansion on answers.
Never let the subject get the questions ahead of time.
Do some background work. Get to know your interview subject before the interview.
I started with the background work. One of the keys to embedding yourself with an exclusive group is to make sure they think it was their idea to invite you, so I tried to find some common interests.
I memorized the DI kids’ class schedules. (It’s not stalking if it’s in the service of a story, by the way.) Monday morning, I walked down hallways convenient to the schedule of one of the diplomatic immunity kids, Mateo Lopez, but by the time lunch rolled around, I’d failed to bump into him. Maybe his security detail was making him take less obvious routes. Which meant that probably everyone else’s detail was doing the same thing.
I decided to try to make friends with Giselle. But every attempt of mine looked like:
Me: Hey, Giselle! I want to be friends!
Her: You sound like a loser! Please leave!
I found myself watching the DI kids at lunch.
“Quit staring,” Mack said.
“What?”
“At Rafael. It’s kind of obvious.”
Faroush nodded in agreement.
“No, it’s not. I’m looking out of the corner of my eye,” I insisted. “And I’m looking at all of them. Not just Rafael.”
Mack gave me a skeptical look. “Look, you think he’s hot. You’re not the only one. But try to be a little more subtle.” She crunched on a piece of celery. Her lunches were always made up of water and water-based foods like celery and watermelon. I wasn’t sure where her actual calories ever came from.
“I don’t think he’s hot. I’m thinking of a story idea.”
“‘Hot Boys and the Girls Who Pine for Them’?” she said.
I threw a piece of cheddar popcorn at her. “No. This isn’t Us Weekly.”
I turned to subtly glance at Raf from the corner of my eye, only he was suddenly standing two feet in front of me.
“Gah,” I said, surprised. But a good reporter can gather herself after a surprise. “Hey.”
“Hey, Pip.” He stood there for another moment and glanced at Mack and Faroush.
“Oh,” I said. “This is Mack. She’s brilliant. This is Faroush. He likes Mack. Guys, this is Raf. He has . . .” What could I say that didn’t make me sound like I already knew a lot about him? “Very white teeth.”
The three of them awkwardly shook hands, and then Raf said, “Actually we’ve all gone to school together for three years. We’ve met.”
“Ah,” I said. “I guess that makes sense.”
“I was thinking about our conversation the other day,” he said. “The one about how I’m out of touch with the peasants?” He smiled as he said this.
Mack raised an eyebrow.
“It happens with royalty,” I said.
Raf grabbed a chair, swung it around, and straddled it. “Tell me more.”
“About what?”
“About my problems.”
“I’m not the kind of girl who goes around telling people what their problems are.”
“All evidence to the contrary,” Raf said.
“You don’t know me,” I said.
Mack chimed in. “She is like that.” At my glare, she added, “But in a cool way.”
“Give me your best shot,” he said.
I tried to remember my rules of interviewing through conversation: Open-ended questions. Silence. No aggression. Trust.
“Okay, for starters, how many people are involved in getting you out of bed and through your day?”
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged and remained silent. At least I could count on Mack and Faroush to remain silent too. They were good at that.
“Well, my father’s assistant, Lidia, posts my schedule. The house butler wakes me up. The cook makes me breakfast. Then I get dressed. The chauffeur takes me to school, where I spend all day actually fending for myself.”
“With your security detail.”
“Yes.” He looked wary. “Then the chauffeur takes me home. The cook makes dinner, which is served by the waitstaff. Then . . . sleep.”
“Cook, chauffeur, assistant, security, waitstaff . . .” I ticked them off on my fingers and I could feel that earlier frustration, the tension between the haves and the have-nots, creeping up inside me. Reporters weren’t supposed to succumb to their feelings, and yet here I was, succumbing all over the place. “My only other question is, who wipes your butt?”
Mack took in a breath.
Raf frowned. “You’re not the only person who gets to complain about their lot in life,” he said. “Maybe I’m sitting at the top of a marble staircase, but I’m staring straight across at someone who is on a very high horse.”
With that he stood up and smiled, but the smile was lacking his usual swagger. “See you guys around.”
When he was gone, Mack leaned over. “Okay, that was awesome.”
“What, my shredding the school’s most popular guy?”
“No,” she said shaking her head. “His comeback.”
She was right. His comeback about the high horse was really good. He’d probably planned it. And I’d just lost my first chance to embed because I’d let my resentment get in the way.
10
At journalism after the rundown (I was assigned a story on the school’s “Street Art” unit, and whether it’s art or graffiti, which was a step up from the fluff, in my opinion), I sat next to Jesse and leaned in close.
“What comes to your mind when I say ‘diplomatic immunity’?” I asked.
“Free pass,” he said, not taking his eyes off his monitor. “Why?”
“Just a story idea I was thinking of.”
“If you’re looking for controversy, Google ‘diplomatic immunity and human trafficking.’”
“Really?”
He looked at me and nodded. “Good luck.”
I went to my computer and did as he suggested, and story after story popped up about diplomats taking advantage of the help in their houses, and prosecutors unable to do anything about it. The Washington Time
s ran a story about how Hillary Rodham Clinton was taking a stand against what she called “modern slavery.”
School ended, and I wasn’t embedded. The week ended. I still wasn’t embedded.
That Friday it was my rotation for Chiswick’s horseback riding program. The school provided several monthlong units for things like horseback riding, watercolor art, CPR and EMT training, and other subjects that fell outside the jurisdiction of a regular high school. The property had a large stable at its west end, where a forest and hills provided plenty of riding trails.
I reported to the stables and looked around at the other students in my rotation.
There was Raf, talking to Giselle. Since my attempts with other people had failed to get me embedded, maybe approaching the most notorious of the DIs was my best shot.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi,” he said.
“So, I’m sorry about the other day. You wanted to talk to me, and I was mean. I shouldn’t have acted like that. What did you want to talk about?”
He sighed and shook his head slightly.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you ever speak without thinking?”
“I try not to,” he said. “It tends to get me in trouble.”
I snorted. “Like you’ve ever been in trouble.” He frowned, and I realized I was speaking without thinking. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
Raf gestured to Giselle. “Have you two met?”
“Not officially,” I said.
“This is Giselle,” he said. “Her father is the French ambassador. She is France, I am Spain, so historically we should be at war, but instead we’re friends. Giselle, this is Pipper Baird.”
“It’s Piper,” I said, holding out my hand.
“New scholarship student,” he added.
“Is that a necessary part of my introduction?” I asked.
“I could already tell by the shoes,” Giselle said. The way she said it wasn’t totally mean, though, just matter-of-fact. She took my hand. “Nice to meet you, Pip.”