Chapter Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
I walked up to him and introduced myself.
“It’s awesome to meet you!” he said. He told me that I was the first to arrive. There was the hint of a lisp in his voice. Maybe that’s what he wrote about in his law school application. Maybe that’s what made him interesting.
Jason had convinced Harvard Law School to send over some merch for the get-together.
He set out the goodies on the table. There were T-shirts, all extra-large, some mini notebooks, markers, and name tags.
I stuffed one of the T-shirts in my bag.
I was about to write “Laura” on my name tag before I remembered that I wasn’t impersonating Laura anymore.
I was Elizabeth. I had already written the “L,” so I added two horizontal lines to turn it into an “E.”
It was a bit awkward with just Jason and me at the table, so I excused myself to the bathroom.
I took out Laura’s scarf from my tote bag and wrapped it around my neck.
I closed my eyes to silently manifest all of my plans seamlessly coming into fruition.
I didn’t really believe in manifesting but I believed that I needed all the help that I could get.
I, Elizabeth, did not intrinsically have the confidence and grace that others did, but maybe I could channel Laura and borrow some of hers.
My manifestation seemed to work. When I opened my eyes, I found myself naturally emulating her mannerisms—the gentle flip of her hair, the readjusting of her scarf, the way she lowered the pitch of her voice when speaking about a topic she deemed important.
I found myself also starting to think like Laura.
Who at the event would be someone important for me to know?
By the time I returned from the bathroom, more people had arrived.
My social mannerisms were more graceful, more polished than they had ever been in my entire life.
I remembered everyone’s names even without looking at their name tags, I came up with a personal connection to each person’s hometown, I made jokes and laughed at other people’s jokes.
An hour into the event, while nursing my second espresso martini, I was blanketed by a heartening realization: They liked me.
They all really liked me. It must’ve been the effect of Laura’s essence guiding me through my motions.
I wondered if this was what it’d be like to live like Laura all the time.
At around 9:00 p.m., a young woman with sharply layered blonde hair and long, wispy eyelashes walked in.
We collectively turned our heads to watch as she strolled toward our table.
I recognized her as the Harvard undergraduate I had looked up earlier.
Her name was Antigone, like the daughter of Oedipus from those Sophocles tragedies I had to read freshman year.
It was one of the names that you’d only give your kid if you had at least studied a bit of Greek, if you were cultured.
You don’t see anyone in South Dakota naming their kid Antigone.
Unlike Jason, she looked even better in person.
She told us that she would be taking a gap year to work for an NGO in Southeast Asia, but came to our meet-up because she happened to be in the city this weekend.
A varsity tennis player, Antigone was one of those people who was so much better than me that I wasn’t bothered by it at all.
It was just a fact of life. It would be like envying an A-list celebrity—a waste of energy in a world where there would literally always be someone better than you.
I took my rightful place as an admirer. I reminded myself to look up more information about her later.
But then again, maybe if I continued channeling Laura, I stood a chance at being her friend.
Not someone she would treat as an equal, but perhaps she’d offer me the opportunity to at least be a hanger-on, a fan she was willing to keep close by.
Jason and a few other people introduced themselves to Antigone.
She nodded and smiled with her movie-star teeth.
Jason suggested that we take turns introducing ourselves and sharing a fun fact.
Unsurprisingly, his fun fact was that he was going backpacking in South America.
Antigone shared that she was named after a lost play by Euripides (not the Sophocles one) and that usually she just went by Anni.
When it was my turn, I said that I went to Mallorca the past summer break.
As we continued going around the circle, I caught Antigone eyeing me from time to time.
I was flattered by her attention. Maybe I was doing such a good job of embodying Laura’s privilege and confidence that she had clocked me as a potential member of her posse.
After we finished our fun facts, the conversation shifted to the professors we wanted to impress for clerkships and the drama that took place with the board of last year’s review.
Then there was a lull in the conversation, and I noticed Antigone hesitating before she finally asked the question that was on her mind.
“Hey, Elizabeth,” she said. I raised my eyebrows and smiled. “You said you’re currently at Columbia, right?”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“Sorry, maybe this is weird, but my blockmate works at Harvard Law’s admin office part-time.
” She took a sip of her drink with a self-deprecating smile, as though she had just committed a minor faux pas that she would brush over by acknowledging outright.
“Oops, ‘blockmate’ is what we at Harvard call roommates—I forget sometimes that not everyone knows that.” She set her drink down.
“Anyway, my blockmate mentioned to me last night that there was only one person from Columbia attending the law school this year.”
“Well, then I guess you’ve met the one!” Jason said.
“Well, no,” Antigone said, clearing her throat. “Because the one person who was accepted was someone named Laura Kim.”
“Oh.” Jason furrowed his eyebrows. “That’s weird. You’re right. I’ve been talking to Laura for a while now and she did mention she’s a senior at Columbia.”
“Well,” Antigone said. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I felt like she had trapped me in a cellar and I could hear the door closing and the clink of the key as she threw it away. “What’s even stranger is that Laura Kim actually died a few weeks ago.”
Everyone was looking at Antigone now, uttering things like “That’s so fucking creepy” and “What the fuck?” She nonchalantly ran a hand through her hair, then folded her arms.
“She was murdered by one of her classmates. In her dorm.”
“Oh my god, yes! I heard about this.”
“Holy shit, I never made the connection.”
Jason looked petrified, as though he had just witnessed the murder firsthand. “But…who was I talking to the entire time, then?”
“We were wondering the same thing,” Antigone said.
“My friend told me that their office didn’t know one of their prospective students had died until today, when Laura’s parents sent an email telling them she had passed away and wouldn’t be attending in the fall.
When my friend told me about it, I thought the name sounded familiar, so I looked it up and found all of these posts from after she died. ”
“Maybe it’s her ghost!” someone joked. Antigone ignored them.
“Anyway, the whole thing isn’t a huge deal—probably just an online troll.
But since we were meeting up today, and this meet-up originated from the same Facebook group, I asked my friend to quickly check all the names of people who RSVP’d with the names of people who have actually been accepted to Harvard Law.
And everyone checked out.” Antigone turned to me, pointing a perfectly manicured finger in my face. “Except for you.”
Everyone in the circle was looking at me now.
Some of them looked confused, while others looked like they had just seen a ghost. Maybe that’s what they thought they were seeing: Laura’s ghost. Jason was typing rapidly into his phone while Antigone was eyeing me as though assessing an art piece at an auction.
“Wait, so are you the troll?”
“Were you the one impersonating a dead girl?”
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
“I…I…” There were a million things I should’ve said.
For starters, I should’ve vehemently denied that I was the troll.
I should’ve said that it obviously would’ve been Gina, the prime suspect of her murder.
I should’ve accused all of them of racism for assuming that I was the impersonator just because I was Asian.
I should’ve admitted that I hadn’t been accepted to Harvard Law yet, but that I came to the event out of curiosity.
I should’ve turned the accusations back onto Antigone, argue that it was fucked up for her to make a scene like this.
She could’ve just pulled me aside and I would’ve given her a perfectly reasonable explanation, but clearly she just wanted the attention.
Despite the defense I had built up in my head, my mouth wasn’t able to catch up to my brain.
Instead, tears welled up in my eyes. When I finally managed to put together a sentence, the voice coming out of my mouth was barely a whisper.
“What?” Jason said. “We can’t hear you.”
I realized that I had been whispering to myself.
“She…she had everything. I just wanted this one thing.” My pitch had risen to a quiet wail. A sob erupted from my chest. “Just this one thing.”
Jason placed a hand on my shoulder. “Um…how about I call you a car? What’s your address?”
The pity in his voice sent a red-hot shock of anger through my body. I pushed his hand off.
“I did everything right. Every single thing. She didn’t deserve it more than me.
None of you deserved it more than me.” I picked up the nearest cocktail napkin and rubbed the snot from my nose.
A couple of people from nearby tables were looking at me now, but I didn’t care.
I didn’t care that I was raising my voice.
I didn’t care that I was making a scene.
My anger surpassed the shame; and besides, I had nothing to lose. This was all over anyway.
The fury rolled inside me like waves. “You guys think you’re so much better than me, don’t you?
” I was shouting now. “Especially you.” I pointed at Antigone, who raised her eyebrows but looked otherwise unperturbed.
It made me disproportionately angrier. “All I’ve wanted my entire life was to have the things you take for granted every single day.
And you don’t even care! People like you and Laura are the problem.
You don’t even care that you have everything.
You don’t even care that you were born at the top of the world. ”
I couldn’t help but laugh. I laughed so loud that I snorted.
Then I cried some more, while still laughing like a madwoman.
Am I making the type of decisions that I’m going to regret in the morning?
Oh well, it’s too late now. I was thirsty.
My voice was cracking. I picked up the pint of beer in front of me and drank it as fast as I could.
As I was setting it down, I knocked over another glass. It crashed on the floor.
“Hey, hey, hey.” The bartender, a scraggly man with a beard, approached our table. “Everything okay here?”
What a ridiculous question. Was everything okay here? Of course it wasn’t. No! I screamed in my head. But then I realized by the expressions on everyone’s faces that I hadn’t screamed it in my head. I had shrieked it out loud.
“All right, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
The entire bar was staring at me now. They wore their expressions naked on their faces.
Pity, fright, curiosity. Let them, I thought.
Let them look at me. I flashed them all a dazzling smile.
I felt like a celebrity. No, I was a celebrity.
The sticky linoleum floors were my red carpet.
The curious, drunk strangers were my paparazzi.
I loved their attention. I loved their shock, their discomfort, and I loved my own vulnerability.
My emotional state splayed out like organs for everyone to see.
My motives, my insecurities, my anger, my jealousy.
This was not how I would’ve liked to be recognized, but at least I was recognized.
So this was what it felt like to be somebody.
It was as great as I expected. No, it was better than I expected.
The bartender escorted me outside. A cool chill hit my face, but my body felt like a furnace, like every inch of it was emanating heat, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to look down and find that my skin was glowing red.
Was it all the martinis and the beer? No, I knew it wasn’t the alcohol.
I had experienced this sensation before.
It was a sweet, familiar sensation. The sensation of hitting rock bottom.
It was all quite funny, wasn’t it? I had already “hit rock bottom” many times now.
I thought I hit rock bottom when I got rejected from Harvard.
I thought I hit rock bottom when I accidentally killed Laura.
But now I knew that rock bottom was only something humans made up to convince themselves that life could only get better.
But the secret was that rock bottom didn’t exist. Each time you thought you had reached the lowest point you could go, the floor would fall out from under you, and you’d simply be demoted to an even lower level of failure and despair.
It was oddly comforting, the inverse of climbing a mountain.
Just like how there were no limits to how high you could go, there were no limits to how low you could fall.
Maybe I should embrace the fall, dive headfirst into the abyss, see where it’d take me.
Maybe it’d be somewhere warm. Maybe it’d be somewhere safe.
Maybe it’d be somewhere percentiles didn’t exist, Harvard didn’t exist, and failure didn’t exist. Maybe Laura would be there.
I laughed so loud that my voice hurt my ears. I bet she’d remember me now.