Chapter Seventeen #3
None of the bedrooms were marked with a name tag.
All of the doors had been left ajar. The first one I walked into had a bed with navy blue sheets that could’ve been the exact same ones as Rory’s.
I closed the door. The second room I walked into had the kind of baby blue gingham bedding that I could associate with Laura, but the shelf connected to the desk was filled with anthropology textbooks.
The third room had scarcely any decorations.
On the bed, there was a simple green duvet and matching pillow, and on the desk there was a MacBook Air and a stack of notebooks.
It didn’t seem like it’d be Laura’s room but I needed to double-check.
Laura’s computer had a few stickers, if I recalled correctly, but there was always a chance she had gotten a new laptop or had just taken the stickers off.
I flipped through one of the notebooks. Chicken scratch handwriting inside.
I had sat behind Laura for enough History of the Modern Middle East classes to know that couldn’t be hers.
The fourth room stank of cheap men’s cologne, so I also ruled that out.
Finally, I went to the top floor. Two rooms left. I opened the door on the left first.
As soon as I walked in, I knew that this was it.
A row of French candles on the windowsill.
Fig tree, coffee, jasmine, lavender leaf, sandalwood.
I held each one up to my nose and breathed deeply, imagining the fragrance traveling through my nostrils to my throat, my lungs, my chest, my heart, my stomach.
I imagined the fragrance also traveling down Laura’s nostrils to her throat, her lungs, her chest, her heart, her stomach.
The laptop on the desk with its stickers: Columbia Economics Society, Columbia Women in Business, the drawing of Aristotle with his fluffy beard and tortured eyes.
The drawers under her bed were overflowing with shirts, sweaters, and pants, a few pieces sprawled on and by the bed.
Inside her closet, more clothes, mostly coats, jackets, and some ski gear.
I took out the puffer coat that she always liked to wear.
The Hermès scarf was sticking out of the pocket, neatly folded into a square.
It felt precarious to leave such a nice scarf in the pocket of this coat, a pocket that was not very deep and did not have a zipper or a button to prevent it from falling out.
Who was to say that it hadn’t fallen out?
I took out the scarf and tucked it into the front pocket of my crossbody bag, which did have a zipper, and felt a rush of adrenaline as I fastened the zipper all the way closed.
On top of her mini fridge were a shower caddy with organic shampoo and conditioner, a container of eucalyptus body wash, and a separate caddy for what appeared to be just face products.
Three types of Korean sunscreen, two different moisturizers, prescription tretinoin, and little bottles of serums—multi-peptide, hyaluronic acid, vitamin C, niacinamide—with droppers that reminded me of the medicine my mother used to give me when I had pneumonia.
I nearly tripped on something when I walked back to her desk.
I looked down. It was an electronic scale.
The paint was chipping off the sides, and there was the outline of two feet on its shiny black surface.
But none of this was helpful. The purpose of this excursion was to find out ways to get Laura rescinded from Harvard.
I needed to move more thoughtfully. I flipped through the designer agenda on her desk, but it just contained test dates and deadlines for assignments.
I looked at the shelf on top of her desk.
Core Curriculum textbooks, piles of PDF printouts, college-lined notebooks, and a stack of LSAT prep books.
I counted ten in total, more than twice the number that I owned.
But of course she hadn’t gone through all of them, that would be unreasonable.
It took me an entire summer just to get through four.
I took out one at random and flipped to the practice tests in the back.
Each page was filled with not just answers, but detailed notes on the margin justifying why the answer was correct or incorrect.
I shoved it back where I found it and took out another one.
It was the same: each page covered with annotations in that neat handwriting that I had grown so accustomed to seeing in front of me in class every Monday and Wednesday.
I did not like looking at her notes. I did not like that objectively speaking, they were better than mine.
But these marked-up LSAT books didn’t mean anything.
Everyone had to study for the LSAT, and taking neater or more meticulous notes didn’t mean that you absorbed more information or did better on the test. I just used a different and better way of studying that didn’t require taking so many notes.
And even if my way wasn’t better, my aptitude more than made up for it.
Just as I was grabbing another LSAT book from the shelf, the door opened. The scent of jasmine, sandalwood, and booze. Mostly booze. Laura stumbled in.
—
Her brows furrowed in confusion.
“Hey…what’re you doing here?”
She did not appear frightened or angry, just amused, as though I were a child who had accidentally stumbled upon her room when I meant to go to the bathroom.
“I…I don’t know.”
“What’s your name again? I keep forgetting, but it feels like I see you around everywhere.”
I tried thinking of a convincing fake name to give her, but fortunately, she moved on from the subject rather quickly.
“Like, it’s a small campus, so obviously there are some people you just see all the time, but I feel like I see you all the time. Like, all the time.”
“Mhm.” I nodded. How was I going to get myself out of this situation? She was still standing near the door, one hand holding on to the handle for balance.
“And it’s like you’re always glaring at me.
Like, what’s the deal with that? I couldn’t tell if maybe you just had a resting bitch face or something, or if you were intentionally glaring at me.
Like whatever the fuck did I do to you?” She threw her head back and laughed.
A strand of hair, sticky from sweat, remained stuck to her forehead.
She sniffed a couple of times and rubbed her free hand against her nostrils.
I moved toward the door but she blocked it with her body.
“Wait, no. You can’t leave yet. I want you to tell me why you’re here. Why are you in my room?”
“Uh…”
“Oh! Wait a second, are you hooking up with one of the guys—did you accidentally come to my room instead of theirs? But both of them have girlfriends. That’s why you’re acting so weird.
” I nearly cried out from relief. Of course!
Why hadn’t I thought of that? That was the perfect reason for why I was here.
Laura was coming up with excuses for me.
Maybe she really was smarter than I was.
Her eyes narrowed. “So, which one? Who are you hooking up with?”
I tried to recall the letters on the name tags posted to their suite door, but my mind was hitting a blank.
“I…uh…”
“Okay. So you’re lying to me.”
“No, I just…”
“Ugh!” she said, pulling her hair. She sat down on the rug by her bed.
It had a beige background with different-sized rectangles of different shades of pink.
I wondered if it felt as soft as it looked.
I wished I could take off my shoes and my socks to rub my feet against its surface. I realized I was getting distracted.
“This has been such a weird fucking semester,” Laura said. “I literally looked up last week if Mercury could be in retrograde for many months at a time. It’s like someone is sabotaging me. But I can’t even say that out loud, because I’d sound like a lunatic. Has it been a weird semester for you?”
“Uh…I mean, kind of. I guess.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like, first I have this scammer pretending to be my friend’s sister, and I was thinking I must’ve been chosen at random, but the scam was weirdly involved.
They actually sent me a fucking essay to correct and everything.
And then there was that insane thing with the blog post. Like, some people actually thought I wrote it.
Me! And now you’re here in my room, and I have literally no idea why. ”
I attempted to keep my voice level, like pressing a helium balloon to the ground. “It must be hard for you to go through these struggles when your life has been so wonderful up until this point,” I said.
“Oh my god,” she said, as though I had just told her that I thought she was an alien.
“That was…wow. Very rude. Is this your thing? You break into people’s dorm rooms to, I assume, steal stuff?
Here, you want this?” She picked up a T-shirt crumpled on the floor and threw it toward me.
It hit my face before dropping back onto the floor.
I didn’t react. For once, I felt like I held power over her.
Sure, I was intruding on her space, but she was the one acting dramatic.
I was the one staying calm. She was the one who was drunk.
My mind had never been clearer. I would win by continuing to keep my cool, by using my neutrality to make her appear even more hysterical.
Later, I would replay this situation over and over in my mind, savoring the memory of the time I had bested Laura Kim.
I thought of the perfect question to ask, the perfect question to cement my superiority.
“Have you ever thought that not everyone was born into a perfect life where they get everything they’ve ever wanted without even working that hard for it?”
“Oh, honey.” I couldn’t stomach what I heard in her voice. Amusement, disgust, but worst of all: pity. How could she pity me when I was so much better than her at this moment? When I was quite literally standing over her?