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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.”
    â€œWill 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.
    â€œIf I swear, will I go to jail?” he said. Jail was the scariest punishment Michael could think of.
    â€œNo, bud.”
    â€œIf 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 .
    â€œThey might.”
    â€œOkay, 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.
    â€œHe 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