Chapter Thirteen #2
Then they were supposed to band together to document every single student living in East Campus along with their hometowns, which sounded harder than it actually was, as every student’s email profile referenced their residential hall, and most students referenced their hometowns in their social media profiles, so it would just take a simple web-scraping to consolidate this data in one place (I hired a coder from Bangladesh to do just this for a hundred dollars; that’s how I knew it wasn’t that hard).
After gathering this data, they’d discover that there were exactly ten students living in East Campus who hailed from one of these three towns, and that only three of these students were studying history, one of whom was an Orthodox Jew (so he could not eat caviar), which would leave two people, Laura and a kid named Sam.
But it couldn’t have been Sam, because he was a terrible writer, which everyone would figure out by reading his entertainment column for the school newspaper.
The blog post, while espousing terrible beliefs, was written quite well. So that would leave Laura.
But clearly, I overestimated the capabilities of these impassioned students. That was not a problem. I would simply upload blog posts number two and number three, which would both reveal more clues, ensuring that they would set their sights on the right perpetrator.
—
For the most part, I succeeded in keeping the pregnancy off my mind.
My philosophy was to deal with one thing at a time, and the pregnancy was not at the top of the docket just yet.
But sometimes I experienced a sharp pain in my abdomen, like period cramps but worse, as though the fetus were upset that I was not paying enough attention to it.
The first time it happened I was sitting at my desk, reading an essay by Tolstoy, and I cried out—not from the pain, but out of worry that I was miscarrying the child, and thus, my future at Harvard.
I cried out so loudly that Eunjin even texted me to ask if I was okay, and I told her that I was, that I had just bumped my knee against the corner of the desk.
Fortunately, the internet told me that these cramps were normal, and I noticed no accompanying spotting, which the internet informed me would require me to see a doctor.
Speaking of doctors, I knew I was technically supposed to go to one, but I was still on my mother’s insurance, and I imagined she would have some questions when she noticed I was going to regular appointments with an obstetrician.
Besides, I was young, I was healthy, and literally billions of women had gone through the exact thing that I was going through. I didn’t have anything to worry about.
While I did not enjoy the cramps, I became accustomed to them after the third or fourth time they appeared.
When I felt an episode starting I’d grit my teeth and try to distract myself, usually by watching “a day in my life” vlogs from students at Harvard Law.
The vlogs made me feel happy the way watching Eunjin play violin made me happy: seeing someone succeed in a way that did not threaten your own self-worth.
I wasn’t threatened by or jealous of any of these vloggers because I knew I’d be one of them soon enough.
I imagined them as my friends, I imagined how I’d pick the right moment on campus to say hi, say “You look super familiar, do I know you from somewhere?” upon which they’d blush and say that they sometimes vlogged, so that might be why, which was the perfect conversation starter, as they’d feel flattered I had seen their vlog, but I wouldn’t appear too much like a fan, which would immediately lower my status in their eyes and prevent a true friendship—a friendship of equals—from flourishing.
But sometimes I’d scroll to the comments section of these vlogs and feel angry.
No, not just angry, but furious, the same intensity of fury I imagined the campus activists felt when reading Musings of a Freethinking Columbia Student.
The troll comments didn’t get to me; they were trolls, they weren’t real, they were just trying to elicit a reaction.
The ones that made me burn with rage were the long, eloquent, seemingly well-meaning posts from users claiming to be Harvard Law alumni about their own personal experience at a prestigious law school, lessons learned, all ending with some version of the message “Don’t go into big law, it’ll take a toll on your health that will take years to recover from” and “Trust me, the money isn’t worth it” and “There’s more to life than status, wealth, and prestige. ”
They were like ungrateful children, given the opportunity of a lifetime and still acting like they were the victims. Didn’t they realize they had won?
Didn’t they realize just how lucky they were?
I was sure it wasn’t pleasant to work eighty hours a week, to defend greedy executives and shitty corporations, to be yelled at by your boss for not having enough billable hours, but it was all a small price to pay for the chance to be wealthy, successful—to be someone important, someone who mattered.
I promised myself that when I got to law school, when I became a lawyer, I wouldn’t be like them.
I would be grateful. I would recognize the value of what had been given to me as a result of what I had achieved.
—
Clearly, I needed to push the students infuriated about the blog post in the right direction.
I considered going along with my original plan—releasing two more blog posts with clues to Laura as the author, but I was worried that the more posts I wrote, the greater the chance I could miss some detail that would inadvertently reveal me as the author.
So I came up with a different plan that could be just as effective.
I created a burner Instagram account and messaged one of the people who seemed to be leading the manhunt.
Or womanhunt, if you wanted to be more accurate, but it seemed most people thought they were looking for a white man, which further demonstrated the need for me to help them out a little.
A group of students in the Columbia Students for Anti-Racism organization had been informally leading the charge against the perpetrator.
The president, Amala Smith-Dupont, had penned an op-ed for the Columbia Daily Spectator about how the viral blog post was symptomatic of a larger problem: the university’s history of anti-Blackness and colonialism.
The burner account was easy to make. I would pose as a concerned student who wanted to remain anonymous, so I didn’t need to try to rack up followers or attempt to tie the account to a real person. I even included the phrase “burner_account” in the handle along with a string of random numbers.
Then I sent Amala a message request.
Hey, love the work you’re doing to help bring attention to the shitty right-wing blog post. I know we’re all still trying to figure out who wrote it, but when I was reading there was one person who came to mind bc they fit all the descriptions.
And during private convos with this person they often said pretty sketchy things despite their online presence.
Would highly recommend looking into Laura Kim.
Amala accepted my message request almost immediately. I kept the conversation open until I received a response.
Hmm…v interesting. I could actually see that. I’ll look into this some more.