Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
I was pretty pleased with myself. The tides were turning.
Now it wasn’t just the most extreme leftists who believed Laura had authored the post; the moderately extreme leftists were also starting to come around.
I wanted to celebrate with my friends, but of course, I wouldn’t be able to tell them why I was in such a good mood.
That was okay. I decided that I’d reveal to them my other piece of good news: I had gotten into Harvard!
Okay, I knew that wasn’t totally accurate.
I hadn’t quite gotten into Harvard yet. I was going to get into Harvard.
But to state the latter would require that I explain the whole pregnancy situation to them, which I was not yet ready for.
To make things simpler, I’d just tell them that I had already gotten in.
And then only later I’d tell them about the baby.
Only when I was ready, when it was too late for an abortion so they wouldn’t try to talk me out of having it.
It was the perfect opportunity to celebrate with my friends.
Not only was the campus population starting to turn on Laura, Alex and Leah were finally back together, restoring the four-person harmony of our friend group.
Their reconciliation had almost been as messy as their breakup.
One day, I had come home to find Alex packing their clothes into the same oversized suitcase they had rolled into my room a couple months prior.
Alex explained that to get back at Alex for hooking up with their ex, Elliot, Leah had decided to hook up with Elliot as well.
According to Alex, this had somehow evened the score in Leah’s mind, and now she was no longer upset about Alex hooking up with him, even though he was a boy.
Leah’s explanation was a little different.
She said that hooking up with Elliot opened her eyes to the fact that he had no redeeming qualities except for his generosity in bed.
In terms of personality, he was exceedingly dull.
All he wanted to talk about was his recent ADHD diagnosis and bitcoin, and she finally believed Alex’s explanation that Alex was hooking up with him solely for sexual pleasure.
It seemed that things were back to normal.
They had canceled their request to switch roommates.
The only change to their living arrangements was to keep the twin beds separated rather than like before, when they had pushed them together to form one large bed.
“I think what we really needed in our relationship was a little space,” Leah had explained, and I nodded, pretending I agreed.
I told my friends to meet me in my dorm at 8:00 p.m., just a few hours after Amala had posted the evidence I sent her.
I spent the afternoon cleaning up the place.
I made my bed, threw out all the trash, straightened the posters, mopped the floor, and wiped down all the surfaces.
I even sanitized the inside of the microwave.
I opened the window to let in fresh air, then I lit a stick of palo santo and waved it like a magic wand around my entire room, letting the woody and minty aroma encourage an atmosphere of renewal and positivity.
They all arrived at around 8:30, even Eunjin, who literally lived next door.
But she said she had been running late from a rehearsal, so I guess I couldn’t blame her.
I only had one chair, so the three of them sat on my bed, leaning against the wall.
I was a bit annoyed that all of them were late for my special announcement, but I decided that now I was a future Harvard-trained lawyer, I would need to be a bigger person.
I couldn’t let myself be affected by these silly little things.
I brushed off my irritation like swatting away a bothersome fly.
“Dang, what’s the champagne for?” Leah asked.
“For all of you! Once I make my announcement,” I said. “Anyway, I’ll just get right into it.” I tapped my hands on my desk to simulate a drum roll. “I got into Harvard!”
I expected a chorus of congratulations, but Alex, Leah, and Eunjin just stared at me in confusion.
Alex broke the silence first. “Like, graduate school? A master’s program?”
“No, no. I only applied to law schools, you obviously know that. Harvard Law! My dream school!” I beamed.
Both Alex and Leah glanced over at Eunjin. She cleared her throat.
“Oh. Wow. Well, first of all, congratulations! Uh…I thought that you had gotten rejected?”
“Nope, nope!” My smile dropped a little bit from the lack of conviction in the first congratulations I had received tonight, but I beamed again, stretching my lips even wider this time.
“Turns out it was just a mistake! They called me today and told me.”
“Like, the admissions office called you?” Eunjin asked.
“Massachusetts number and everything?” Leah asked.
“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“No, no. We’re happy for you. Obviously. We’re just…surprised. Surprised, but in a happy way!”
“Yes, yes.” Leah nodded. “We’re so so so happy for you. And we know that you deserve it. More than anyone I know.”
“Yes, congratulations!” Alex said.
“I just…I’m just coming from a place of being your friend and having never heard of something like this happening before,” Eunjin said. “Just want to make sure it’s not like a scam or something. I’m totally sure it isn’t, that’s not what I’m saying. Just want to be absolutely sure.”
I frowned. “Um…you are all acting so strange. I invited you here to celebrate. We should be partying.” I held up the bottle of champagne by the neck. “I should be popping the cork right now.”
“Yes! Yes, you should,” Leah said. “You know what, let’s forget about all this and just celebrate.”
“Hey! I saw that.” I pointed at Leah and Alex. “You two just exchanged a look.”
“We exchange looks all the time. Nothing to do with you,” Alex said.
“No. That was a look.”
I was angry now. Did they think I was stupid?
They obviously exchanged a look, exchanged information that they wanted to withhold from me at my own celebration, at my own party, right in front of my face!
I didn’t want to yell and cause a scene, but there was no outlet for my fury except for the visions I could conjure in my own mind.
I imagined holding the two of them by their hair and crashing their heads together, then knocking their heads against the wall until they both passed out.
During their slumber perhaps their brains could marinate over why they had been wrong to exchange that look, that look that was communicating that I was crazy. I was not crazy.
“You know what?” I said. “Never mind. You guys should just go.”
“What? Liz, I promise we didn’t mean whatever you think we meant. We want to celebrate with you. We’re all so happy for you,” Alex said.
“No, it’s fine. I just want to be alone now. The moment’s over.”
I avoided their eyes and waited for them to leave. I hoped they knew they fucked up; I hoped that they would both lose sleep over it.
“Do you want me to stay?” Eunjin asked, as though she were not also complicit in ruining my night.
I shook my head. A few seconds later, I was alone.
—
The champagne was nonalcoholic. Also, it wasn’t technically champagne; it was prosecco.
So really just sparkling juice. If any of my friends had asked me about it, I would’ve told them that I had felt so great doing dry January that I had extended my period of sobriety to March.
I popped the cork and poured some into one of the plastic champagne flutes that I had purchased just for this occasion, and drank it on my bed.
I always liked carbonated drinks, the way that it kind of hurt when they slid down your throat, like tiny little knives stabbing your insides over and over again.
I finished off my glass and tried to swallow it all at once, tried to maximize the stabbing sensation.
By glass two, I was feeling drunk. The nonalcoholic champagne tasted almost identical to normal champagne, or at least close enough that it could elicit the same dizziness by sheer association.
My face even seemed to grow warm. I pressed the bottle against my skin, letting it leave a damp spot on my cheeks.
I put on an episode of one of those trashy reality TV shows where a group of hot people spend time together on a tropical resort.
It made me feel a little better to compare Laura to the people in the show.
She wasn’t as hot as them. She could never get cast. And if she did, she’d be that boring person who didn’t get any screen time and didn’t hook up with anyone. This made me smile.
I paused the show when the camera had zoomed in on the group of women standing side by side in bikinis.
I pulled up Laura’s Instagram profile so that I could more accurately compare their faces and bodies to Laura’s.
I already knew the picture I was looking for—the one of Laura standing on a beach during spring break in the Bahamas.
But before I scrolled down, I noticed she had broken her radio silence; just fifty minutes ago, she posted something new.
I knew even before starting to read that it would be an attempt to clear her name. I rolled my eyes. My scheme had been airtight. What was she going to say?