Chapter Nineteen #2
I read some studies online about whether Klonopin would affect your pregnancy, and the results seemed mixed.
Technically, taking a higher dosage increased the chance your baby could get side effects, but I just wouldn’t take a high dosage.
I’d take half the recommended dosage for a standard prescription.
Besides, being stressed all the time probably also affected the pregnancy, and the Klonopin made the stress much more manageable.
You could make the argument that the benefits outweighed the risks.
Two nights after the email came out about Laura’s death I lay in bed, feeling the 0.
25 milligrams cushion the dark edges of my anxiety like a thick quilt.
I had focused most of my mental energy on the practical task of protecting myself from legal danger.
Only now was I starting to consider a moral one.
Even if nothing bad happened to me, was it possible that I was still a bad person?
Or at the very least, had done something bad, maybe even unforgivable?
Based on the campus gossip, I was starting to think I knew what had happened, what had killed Laura.
According to the rumor mill, multiple people that night had seen her snorting a line at Gina’s party.
I was no doctor, but it seemed likely that cocaine could aggravate the effects of pepper spray.
If my hypothesis were true, then the answer to whether I killed Laura depended on the definition of “kill.” Someone could make the argument Laura would be alive if it weren’t for my actions, if it weren’t for the fact that I had dispersed pepper spray directly in her face.
But someone could also say the same thing about her use of cocaine.
If she hadn’t done the coke, then she wouldn’t have died from the pepper spray.
My logic was foolproof, a digital circuit that would always spit out a true or false based on a set of binary inputs—and in this case, the answer was true.
If I was guilty of killing Laura, then Laura was equally guilty of killing herself.
—
Most people on campus now believed the theory that Laura had taken a bad batch of cocaine.
They wore their certainty like a badge of honor, proof that they didn’t fall for the type of sensationalism that a less smart person might be susceptible to.
Their confidence brought me some ease. I still had not been questioned by the police, and I too began to suspect that it would be only a matter of time before they attributed her death to drug use.
Still, I didn’t want to think about it, any of it.
It only reminded me of Laura’s body writhing on the floor.
It only reminded me that I was probably the last person to see her alive.
Months ago, my friends and I had decided to go to Leah’s parents’ beach house in Ocean City for spring break.
I was in no mood for a beach trip, but I had promised myself that I would act as normal as possible.
Who knew which actions that would appear minor today might end up significant later?
So on the last Saturday of March, I slung a duffel bag containing a few changes of clothes and toiletries over my shoulder and waited with Eunjin in the lobby of our dorm.
I was no longer avoiding her, and not just because it would help me appear more normal in case I became a suspect.
I felt genuinely grateful for her company and realized I had been an idiot to avoid her after she told me about MDW.
If I knew she was leaving, didn’t that mean I should try to spend as much time with her as possible?
Make the most of the time we had left while we were still living just two feet away from each other?
A few minutes later, Leah pulled up in front of our building in a rental car. Alex was already sitting in the passenger seat, adding songs to a playlist. Eunjin and I threw our bags into the trunk and shuffled in the back.
As Leah drove us through Harlem to get to the bridge, she reminded us that Ocean City was a dry town, and I pretended to be disappointed.
In actuality, I was relieved. I was running out of excuses for why I wasn’t drinking.
Without noticing, I pressed my left hand against my abdomen to feel the baby’s presence.
“Are you feeling okay?” Eunjin asked.
“Just a little nauseous,” I said, and I wasn’t lying.
The constant stopping and starting on the George Washington Bridge made my stomach churn, so I closed my eyes and pressed my head against the window, feeling the condensation cool my skin.
By the time I opened my eyes again, two hours had passed and we were turning into a driveway.
“We’re here!” Leah announced.
I had never been to Leah’s parents’ beach house before.
My first impression was that it looked like it belonged in a PG-rated movie, a film for which I could already imagine the opening scene: a white kid running barefoot down the street, who wouldn’t stop running until he reached the two blocks to the beach.
A film that you could tell would have a happy ending just by the trailer.
I imagined someday raising my own baby in a house like this one, just somewhere nicer, like the Hamptons.
We’d drive there every summer to eat lobster rolls and take bike rides along the beach.
The house would also look like it belonged in a movie, just a more aspirational one.
“Are you coming?” Leah asked. I was still out in the cold, staring at the white porches that wrapped around each of the three floors.
I nodded and joined my friends in the foyer, leaving my shoes at the door.
Grains of sand tickled my feet as I walked over the ceramic floors.
I followed Leah up the carpeted stairs and set my duffel bag in one of the spare bedrooms.
Eunjin and I offered to cook dinner. In the freezer there was an unopened bag of broccoli that she sautéed with some lemon juice and olive oil.
I boiled water for the pasta and heated up the alfredo sauce I had found in the pantry.
The smell of cream and garlic wafted through the house like wandering ghosts.
I tried to see the ocean through the sliding glass door next to the kitchen, but my reflection obstructed the outline of the waves, and they blended in with the indigo sky.
—
During dinner, I tried bringing up topics that I knew would keep the conversation flowing: the latest column written by the token conservative writer for the school newspaper, progress on their senior theses, the job search.
But no matter how much I tried to steer the conversation, it always came back to Laura.
“The room is still roped off and everything,” Leah said. “And I heard the police are still bringing in people for interviews.”
“Still? But aren’t people saying that it was a drug overdose?” Eunjin asked.
Alex shrugged. “Maybe they just need to cover all their bases.”
“This girl in one of my seminars said that she was questioned,” Leah said.
“What?! Like, she’s a suspect?”
“No, no, at least it didn’t sound like it. The police just asked her a lot of questions straight from TV. Was there anyone out to get her, did she have any enemies, et cetera.”
“Enemies? Jesus Christ.”
“I mean…it’s not like Laura was Mother Teresa. All virtual signaling with zero substance. A lot of people didn’t like her. Elizabeth, for instance.” Leah gestured at me. “You hated her.”
I stifled a cough. “ ‘Hate’ is a strong word. I didn’t hate her. I just found her insufferable.” I threw up my hands. “Come on, all of us here have shit-talked her. She was an easy person to shit-talk.”
“What do you think, Alex?” Eunjin asked, turning toward them.
Alex shrugged. “I default to the theory that the simplest explanation is usually closest to the truth.”
“Occam’s razor!”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“And what would the simplest explanation be?” Leah asked.
“Something related to the coke, if I had to guess. Maybe it had fentanyl in it.”
Leah nodded. “More likely than not, but it’s still good they’re covering all their bases. If I were the family, I’d want to know for sure.”
“Yeah, of course,” Alex said. “I mean, it’s great that the NYPD seems to actually be spending time and energy on this. You just can’t help but wonder if that’d still be the case if she weren’t a privileged light-skinned woman at Columbia.”
“But if there was fentanyl in the cocaine, how come everyone else is fine?” Eunjin asked. “I wonder if there was something else that happened, even if it doesn’t involve some sexy murder story.”
“Maybe she had some kind of preexisting condition,” I said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do coke if you have health issues, but who knows how responsible she was.”
Eunjin and Alex nodded, but Leah shot me a look I couldn’t decipher.
“I mean, no one is supposed to do coke,” she said, taking a sip of her water.
“I’m pretty sure anyone who’s been through the American educational system has had that drilled into their brain since the fourth grade.
We all know it’s a dangerous drug for anyone, regardless of whether you have a preexisting condition.
But despite all of that, everyone at this table has done it, have we not? ”
“I haven’t,” Eunjin said.
“Okay, you haven’t.” Leah rolled her eyes. “But Liz definitely has.”
—
After dinner, the four of us watched You’ve Got Mail in the living room.
I didn’t pay much attention, too preoccupied with replaying each of our interactions during dinner.
Had I come across as too cavalier or crass about Laura’s death?
I would need to adjust my demeanor. I would need to appear more empathetic, less victim-blaming.
To sell my grief, I could try to muster a few tears.
Whenever Laura’s name came up, I would think of something sad, like not getting into Harvard.