Chapter Thirteen
THIRTEEN
“That bitch.”
I looked around uncomfortably. We were sitting at the table in the shared lounge in Leah’s dorm building. Fortunately, the other students looked like they were too preoccupied with studying to pick up on our conversation.
“Isn’t ‘bitch’ a gendered term? Are you allowed to call Alex that?”
“Oh my god, Elizabeth.” Leah shook her head in exasperation. “Shut up. Who the fuck cares?”
I swallowed. Would it be insensitive for me to say right then that I cared? I decided not to say anything. I knew that Leah was just upset and she didn’t mean it. We all said things we didn’t mean when we were upset.
“Bitch, asshole, cunt, dickhead, I literally couldn’t care less.
I can’t believe Alex pinned this whole thing on me.
And how dare they claim that I’m some kind of self-hating bisexual?
Alex is the one who crossed the boundary that we both agreed upon.
It has nothing to do with the gender of the person who they crossed the boundary with. ”
I nodded, trying not to say anything bad about Alex while still validating Leah’s feelings.
For the past few weeks, I had tried to handle the situation the way that an advice columnist for a progressive online publication would tell me to handle it.
After Alex asked to crash with Eunjin and me, I checked first with Leah to make sure that it was okay with her.
And I intentionally did not communicate information that one had told me in confidence to the other.
But earlier in our conversation, I had inadvertently brought up the wine night at Eunjin’s a few weeks ago.
Leah claimed that she knew all about that night, and that Eunjin had already told her everything Alex said, which led me to actually reveal everything that Alex had said.
“The problem wasn’t that the person Alex hooked up with was a man,” Leah said, enunciating every word as though she were a TA explaining a complicated topic to a group of first-years for the billionth time.
“The problem was that Alex hooked up with an ex, and we explicitly agreed that we would only pursue ‘entanglements’ that were void of any emotional connection. Now, you tell me, Elizabeth, is having sex with someone you literally dated for over two years an interaction that you would count as void of emotional connection?”
I was trying to agree with everything she was saying and accidentally nodded to her question, before mumbling an apology and shaking my head.
“Exactly. It’s not. And as any couples therapist would say, an open relationship is all about trust. And Alex broke my trust by breaking the rules. With the first person they hooked up with! Can you believe that?”
This time, I managed to shake my head on the first try.
“I can’t believe it. But I probably should, and that’s my fault.
I should’ve seen right through their holier-than-thou facade.
Did you know they wouldn’t talk to me for three days just because I called someone a cunt?
Like yeah, it wasn’t great on my part, but to not talk to me for three days?
And now they’re trying to spin the story to make me out to be the villain when they are obviously the villain.
I wonder who else they’ve said this to. After they hurt me so much.
You saw how upset I was. And for them to go and spread all these lies. How dare they?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it seems like you two aren’t on the same page.”
“No, no, no. It goes beyond being on the same page. I’m clearly in the right here, and they’re in the wrong. I’m on the objectively correct page, and Alex is on some crumpled-up Post-it note with scribbles that they’re pretending is legible but is actually incomprehensible.”
“That’s a really good metaphor,” I said.
Leah rolled her eyes. “And I can’t believe they would try to turn my own friends against me. Like, seriously?”
I shrugged. “Hey, I’m here now, so at least you know it didn’t work.”
“Besides, I don’t understand why they would go through all this trouble of spinning up a fake story to you. Like, Alex doesn’t even like you that much.”
At this, my ears perked up. “Wait, what?”
“They think you’re a sellout. And they think you purposefully have been getting their pronouns wrong.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, like they suspect you’re secretly a Republican because you’re from South Dakota.”
“Do they think the same about Eunjin?”
“Nah. Eunjin’s a violinist. She’s an artist, so that automatically means she’s a liberal.”
“But I swear the pronouns thing is an accident!”
“I told Alex the same thing. I mean, I completely believe you. I guess you could say it’s just another lie that they’ve made up to feel morally superior to everyone else.”
“Oh my god. What else did Alex say about me?”
“I mean, they think it’s fucked up you’re going to law school to defend evil corporations. They think it’s a waste of your brains. I guess that’s some consolation. They think you’re morally not the greatest person, but they definitely don’t doubt that you’re smart.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but the fact that another person thought I was smart did make me feel a bit better.
—
An hour later I returned to my dorm, and through Eunjin’s door, which was slightly ajar, I could hear that she and Alex were speaking in hushed, excited tones. I knocked twice, then walked in.
“Oh my god. You’re here,” Alex said, looking up. “We were just about to text you.”
I knew I should probably talk to Alex about what I had heard from Leah, but I could tell I was about to get some juicy gossip, so I decided that I’d table that discussion for later.
“Did you hear that the lovely educational institution we all attend has proven its cultural relevance once again by making it onto Fox News?” Eunjin asked.
“No. What is it this time?”
“Here,” Alex said. “I’m texting it to you right now.”
I clicked on the link. It directed me to a blog post. My blog post.
Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about the get-Laura-canceled scheme for a few days.
The morning after I made the first post, I found out I had received a B on a paper.
It was the first time I had gotten below an A on an assignment since freshman year.
Even the pregnancy couldn’t guarantee me admission to Harvard if I didn’t meet the basic requirement of having impressive grades.
You couldn’t be a Boring Asian Female, and you definitely couldn’t be a Boring, Dumb Asian Female, so I had taken a break from scheming, deciding that I’d stake out the library to post the second and third blogs once I got my schoolwork back on track.
But clearly, the scheme had marinated into something fruitful even without my intervention. More than just fruitful—it had gone viral.
A feeling of nausea rose up in my stomach, making its way to my chest and my throat.
I had not anticipated this outcome. If anything, I had been worried about the opposite—that no one would care about the blog post. More eyes on it also meant there was more at stake, and what if someone managed to trace it back to me?
But my plan had been airtight. I used a school computer, not even from my account.
I used a burner email for the author profile.
And I was actively framing someone else—but subtly enough that no one would suspect it was a setup.
There was no way someone could put all of the pieces together—not even the cleverest of internet sleuths.
I excused myself from Eunjin’s room and sat down at my desk.
It took me thirty minutes to figure out the sequence of events that led to the post’s virality.
Apparently, journalists for right-wing news outlets regularly browsed the internet for blog posts written by students of the most liberal universities, specifically Columbia and UC Berkeley, so they could use the most extreme leftist positions they found as straw man arguments to ridicule in their blogs, podcasts, websites, news channels, and more.
Except this time, they were shocked that a student at Columbia—the very university where patriotism, free speech, and common sense went to die—actually wrote an essay with some pretty stellar arguments.
Arguments that they totally, 100 percent agreed with.
Of course, the author chose to remain anonymous, which posed a slight speed bump to conservative pundits being able to hold up this student as a beacon of hope for the right-wing movement.
But it made sense: in an environment as opposed to free thought as Columbia University, of course a student espousing such anti-left viewpoints would want to remain anonymous.
A right-wing pundit who had also attended Columbia pointed out that the sheer specificity of the references to campus life strongly suggested that this wasn’t a hoax: the post was written by a real Columbia undergraduate.
That all happened in the span of a week.
The second week was when news started spreading at Columbia about the existence of this post, sparking a manhunt for the perpetrator.
Infuriated students scoured the article for clues, just like I had predicted.
But I overestimated the fastidiousness and imaginativeness of their research.
They were supposed to narrow it down to a Columbia senior majoring in history who was living in the East Campus dorm, which they did (because I revealed all these facts explicitly in the blog post).
But then they were supposed to figure out that the “wealthy suburb outside of New York City” that the author grew up in was Greenwich, Connecticut, because I cleverly included a reference to specialty caviar tater tots that the author stated was served by a restaurant in their hometown.
Someone was supposed to search for this dish online, upon which they’d find out that there were three restaurants in the tristate area that were known for this specific menu item.