Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“But…I…maybe I can spin this. Maybe I can spin it so that it makes me interesting. It makes me an interesting candidate.”
She shook her head. “Elizabeth, I think it’s time to close this chapter in your life. Think of all that it’s led to. Your depression, your anxiety. And don’t forget, you nearly died.”
“That had nothing to do with it. Nothing, I swear. That was separate.”
“You hold such little regard for your own well-being. Maybe if you’re not willing to let go of all of this nonsense for yourself, you should let go of it for me.
What would I do if you were gone? And your friends.
Think of Eunjin. Think of Leah. Think of Alex.
Do you know how worried all of us were when you were in the hospital? ”
My eyes welled up with tears. “I…I’m sorry.”
“And apart from all that, you should be grateful that the new autopsy results for Laura came out shortly after your incident. Otherwise, I might’ve had to hire a defense attorney.” She raised her eyebrows. “Can you imagine? They would think that you killed her.”
—
I spent the next seventy-two hours holed up in my room like an invalid.
Day one was spent scheming, thinking of ways that I could work the embarrassing video in my favor.
First, I needed to inspect the damage. But even I, with my extensive experience in online stalking, was not able to find the full video.
I imagined my mother must’ve had to pay an expensive service to get it taken down.
I promised myself that I’d pay her back once I graduated from law school.
I’d take her on a vacation. International.
Not just international, but somewhere expensive, like Switzerland. We’d fly first-class.
Of course, all of that still required that I first get into Harvard Law School.
I was finally able to obtain a ten-second clip from an obscure website.
It was even worse than I thought. The clip was captioned “Hysterical Asian woman throws fit at bar in New York.” The ten seconds felt like they dragged on for a millennium.
I looked like I had been possessed by a demon.
Mascara was running down my cheeks, and there was a tear in my right shoulder, exposing the corner of my bra, which also had a tear.
I was bent over and shouting, waving my arms around frantically.
Why did I not remember any of this? My only consolation was that I looked quite thin.
It must’ve been all the not-pasta bowls I had been eating.
The smeared mascara gave me kind of a grungy look that was not entirely unflattering.
I was confident that, if you didn’t take into account any of my behavior, I had reached the 75th percentile of attractiveness in the video. That was an all-time high for me.
Unfortunately, that initial elation did not last. After replaying the video with the sound muted a few dozen times in order to bask in my own lovely appearance, I realized that even I wasn’t delusional enough to think that I could spin this video in my favor.
Best-case scenario was that they didn’t even see it, but I couldn’t just ask them about it—I would essentially just be doxxing myself.
If they did see it, I would be able to make the case that I had recovered from a severe psychological disorder, but I would need to prove that I had made a full recovery, and I doubted that they would believe my condition had sufficiently ameliorated in the span of a few months to ensure no future incidents would occur.
And now that I was thinking about it, they were probably right.
Could I be sure that I wouldn’t have another episode?
Now that I was home, it appeared clearer to me that my brain was not working the way that it was supposed to, like a fog had descended over all the things that my frontal lobe was in charge of.
I read over the essays that I had turned in for class shortly before the “incident,” and I didn’t really remember writing them.
The arguments in them weren’t incoherent, but I could tell that I had been operating on autopilot.
Then I read the addendum I had drafted to send to the law school admissions office.
That one was so incoherent that I had to delete it completely. It made me cringe too much.
I looked up Antigone, the woman who had exposed me at the Harvard Law School meet-up, on Instagram.
Her most recent post was a picture of her smiling while crouched in front of a group of kids.
Limited access to internet for the next 3 months and have deleted all social media apps from my phone!
she said in the caption. Working on living in the moment in a world full of distractions.
According to her location tag, she was staying in a small village in Malaysia.
On the bright side, she was probably too preoccupied with collecting worldly anecdotes to think about me, the unhinged girl from that event in the East Village.
Day two was spent coming up with alternative plans.
Maybe law school was never for me, after all!
Maybe this was a sign from the universe that I was meant to choose a different prestigious path that would still allow me to obtain the life I had always dreamed of.
I could pivot to finance or consulting. Goldman Sachs or McKinsey.
If that didn’t work out, Morgan Stanley or BCG.
But almost as soon as I found temporary solace in this plan B, I learned that obtaining these jobs required you to start preparing as early as I had started preparing for law school.
I didn’t have the right internships on my résumé or the technical interview skills needed.
At best, I could get a job at a boutique consulting firm no one had ever heard of, and that sounded even worse than going to Georgetown.
Day three was spent numb. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling like the one time in freshman year that I had taken acid, except this time nothing was slithering.
My mother knocked on my door just after noon.
I figured it was, as usual, to bring me lunch and try to convince me to go outside, the former of which I dutifully accepted, as eating was required to stay alive, and staying alive was required to accomplish all of my goals, and the latter of which I always declined.
Almost as soon as she opened the door, though, I noticed the energy was different.
For one, she was speaking to me completely in English.
For two, she was wearing that type of wide smile that moms put on only when other people are around.
And just like that, Gigi walked in. Georgiana Van Aartsen, high school prom queen, varsity volleyball player, natural blonde, heiress to the Van Aartsen Midwestern distribution company.
Gigi Van Aartsen, the precise archetype of person for whom I had escaped South Dakota to prove my superiority.
Yet here she was, looking as blonde and bubbly as ever in her floral sundress, and here I was, looking like an invalid in my childhood bedroom wearing the same pajamas for the third day in a row.
The floral sundress would not have been considered fashionable in New York, but Gigi was blissfully unaware of her own basicness.
Only I knew. So I guess you could say it only mattered to me. It didn’t matter at all to her.
She plopped next to me on the bed.
“I saw your mom’s post in the BHS alumni Facebook group about how you had gotten into an accident, and I knew I had to come to visit,” she said. She set down a Tupperware container on my desk. “I made scotcheroos. I bet they don’t have those on the East Coast.”
She was right. My mouth was watering.
“Do you mind if I try one now?”
“Sure thing!” she said. “Just give me one moment. I’m going to ask your mom for a plate and napkin.”
As soon as she left I opened the camera on my phone and tried to do something with my hair.
I considered tying it in a ponytail but that just brought more attention to the pimple on my forehead.
I kept it down instead. I wished I could conjure my appearance from the clip, like those video games that let you choose the makeup and clothes for your avatar.
I couldn’t believe my mother had posted about my condition, going as far as inviting my high school archnemesis over.
Especially in the state that I was in now.
Talk about kicking someone while they’re down.
Georgiana must be so happy to see me like this, I thought.
She’s going to tell everyone about how Elizabeth Zhang came back from New York an absolute mess.
A couple of minutes later, Gigi returned with two plates, each with a scotcheroo.
“I hope you don’t mind if I have one too,” she said, giggling. “My excuse is that I thought it’d be rude to just watch you eat.”
I tried to maintain my emotional distance from Georgiana.
I remembered how she watched in silence as her friends from the football team asked me if my family ate dog.
I remembered how she played the lead in the all-white school play in which two students dressed up as Chinese railroad workers, putting on black wigs and black winged eyeliner, using exaggerated accents as the butt of each joke.
But even as I tried to hold on to these reasons why I should dislike her presence, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in person for so long, with the exception of my mom, and I couldn’t help but feel intrigued by her presence.
She shared the gossip about people we went to high school with, the best entertainment I had gotten in weeks.
Shauna O’Connor was having twins with a real estate agent ten years older than her.
Michelle Nelson’s home had just gotten foreclosed on.
Jack Murphy cheated on his high school sweetheart, Liza, with some girl who was underage.
“The dad beat him up and reported him to the cops. He’s now out on bail,” she said.
“You can still spot him at Hy-Vee from time to time, but he won’t say hi. He’ll just avert his eyes.”
She told me about her trip to Hawaii with her boyfriend, Sam, who she had met during college.
She showed me a picture of Sam. “You’re out of his league,” I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t.
She asked me if I was dating anyone, and I didn’t want to say “no,” so I said “kind of” and showed her a picture of David.
“Oh, he looks sweet,” she said. Then she looked at me with a sly smile. “You’re out of his league though.”
“Oh my god,” I said, pressing my palm against my forehead. “I was going to say the same thing about your guy, Sam.”
We laughed so hard that my mom came in to check that we were okay.
“You know, we weren’t sure if we’d ever see you again,” she said.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You know, all the people from BHS.”
“Oh. I mean, it’s not like you guys would want to see me again.”
“That’s not true! When we saw your mom’s post, everyone wanted to come. But my mom said it’d be better for one person at a time.”
“Wait, really?”
“We didn’t think you’d want to see us.”
“What? Why?”
She shrugged. “I mean, we know you didn’t have a good time in high school, which is totally fair. And we remember how excited you were to leave the Great Plains.”
I snorted. “I guess.”
“Everyone was so intimidated of you in high school. You were so intense. I mean, in a good way. You were so ambitious. Everyone knew you were going to do great things.”
“Intimidated?”
“Yeah. I remember you raised your hand for like every single question in class. You must’ve thought the rest of us were idiots.” She laughed.
“No, wait, it wasn’t that. I thought you guys didn’t like me.”
“What? You can’t be serious. We all liked you, but honestly you were kind of scary.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Joshua Sanders. You remember him, right? He told me to say hi.”
“Joshua Sanders used to call me a chink.”
Gigi winced. “Okay, that’s terrible. And you’re right, I do remember that.
He was such an asshole, my god. I totally understand why you would never want to hear from him again.
But if it’s any consolation, I promise that he’s gotten a lot better since high school.
I think we all have. I mean, are you the same person you were when you were sixteen?
” She grabbed her bag from the ground. “Anyway, I guess this is as good a time as any to give you the card.”
“Get well soon” was printed on the front. It was made out of heavy card stock, the kind you bought from a gift shop or boutique. Inside there were signatures from over a dozen people, all classmates from high school who I hadn’t spoken to in years.
“More people wanted to sign, but I wasn’t able to get to everyone on time,” she said. “Anyway, welcome back to South Dakota. We’re happy to have you here again. There’s no place like home, right?”