Chapter Three #2
Before I could stop myself, I blurted it out. “Oh, you’re going to Harvard?” The question came out a little too loud. Even I could hear the needy curiosity in my voice. Laura flinched as she turned toward me.
“Yes.” Her answer was intentionally vague, dripping with haughtiness in response to my obvious envy.
I knew I couldn’t hide this vulnerability.
Unlike sadness or anger, which can grow just by feeding on themselves, envy demands more knowledge, like an itch that you must scratch, even when you know it will make the wound worse.
Laura understood this dynamic all too well, and her vagueness was proof; it didn’t matter that she wanted me to know she had gotten in.
To answer my question, Laura was implicitly demanding that I first admit in front of both her and Justin that I wanted to know the details, that I expose my own jealousy-driven curiosity.
I willingly handed her that last bit of satisfaction in exchange for the information I so desperately wanted, even though I could already feel the stab in my chest from what I knew, at least deep in my gut, would be her answer.
“For…law school?”
“Yep.”
“You…got in?”
“Yes. Found out yesterday, actually.”
“Did your parents go there?”
“No.”
She and Justin exchanged a look. This had already turned into an interaction the two of them would text about later. It was too late to stop that, and I controlled myself before I could make things even worse.
“Sorry for being nosy. That’s just so impressive.” I mustered a smile.
“Thank you so much,” she said, shifting her tote bag farther up her shoulder. “Anyway, I gotta run now. See you later!”
I watched her glossy hair swing back and forth like a pendulum as she exited the law school lobby.
—
I couldn’t sleep that night. The knowledge of Laura’s acceptance to Harvard played in the back of my mind like a horror movie I couldn’t turn off, her petty smile a jump scare that kept me wide awake.
To think that Laura got in while I didn’t…
the notion was too much to stomach. I tried to think of anything else, any other gruesome image that would be disturbing enough for my brain to hold on to instead of Laura’s terrifying smile.
A stab wound, a pile of puke, dog shit. It didn’t work.
Occasionally I comforted myself with the knowledge that I still had a few applications out.
I was still waiting to hear back from Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.
Sure, Harvard was considered the best university with the best name recognition in the country, and I had secretly assumed that I would get in, but it was fine.
And sure, all my hopes and dreams of impressing my dad and everyone I went to high school with were predicated on the expectation that I’d get in, but that was also fine.
But the sense of comfort from these mental affirmations was hopelessly fickle, and I always ended these ruminations even more depressed than before.
Attending a still-good-but-indubitably-inferior school was a Pyrrhic victory.
It was basically admitting that you still wanted to go to law school but couldn’t get into the best one.
Because if you did get into the best one, why would you go anywhere else?
As if it weren’t bad enough that I didn’t get in, I couldn’t believe that out of all the people who could have bested me, it had to be Laura Kim.
Laura, who didn’t even need Harvard, who would be fine working in one of those underpaid jobs for brain-dead trust fund kids in industries like fashion or interior design or PR.
And why law school? She already had the coveted internship at Goldman Sachs, the object of envy from all the economics majors on campus.
And she already had everything else: looks, wealth, status, popularity.
Why did she need more? Why did she need to take the one thing that I wanted, the one thing that I worked so hard for?
If I were more prone to believing in conspiracy theories, I would think that the universe was in cahoots with the elites, that meritocracy—such as the idea of getting into law school based on your grades and test scores—was a lie to keep strivers like myself complacent with the status quo, complacent with the notion that we couldn’t move up in the world because it was we who didn’t work hard enough, not that the system was rigged against us.
It was simply impossible to fathom that this had been a fair outcome unless Laura had truly surpassed me in both grades and test scores, which I found ludicrously unlikely.
I had spent the entire summer between junior and senior years studying for the LSAT.
Meanwhile, she had been interning at Goldman Sachs.
I worked my ass off to obtain a 3.9 GPA.
Meanwhile, she spent Friday nights taking tequila shots with promoters in the Meatpacking District.
I wanted proof of her inferiority, proof that the system was rigged against me. At least that would bring a little bit of comfort. The problem wasn’t me; the problem was the system. But I didn’t know how I could get my hands on the information I was looking for.
I checked Laura’s LinkedIn profile. She didn’t list her test scores, but she did list the semesters in which she had made it onto the dean’s list, which included every semester besides two.
The dean’s list required a 3.6 GPA. I pulled up a spreadsheet on my laptop.
Even if she obtained a 4.0 every other semester, anything below a 3.
6 for two semesters would pull her GPA down to 3.
87 or lower, which was inferior to my 3. 9.
The light from the laptop screen cast blue shadows across the white walls of my room, making them look bruised.
Sitting at my desk, I could imagine Eunjin asleep through the wall we shared, almost as though I could hear her breathing, like a whistle from a teakettle each time she exhaled.
It was already 3:00 a.m. Physically, my body was urging me to sleep.
My eyes burned from staring at the screen, and the drowsiness reverberated in my chest like when you throw a pebble on the surface of a lake.
But when I closed my eyes, all I could see was a split screen of two terrible images: On the left, the letter from Harvard spelling out that I wasn’t good enough for them.
On the right, Laura’s smug smile when she told me she had gotten in.