Chapter Twenty-Five #2
A better person than me would’ve turned herself in.
Regardless of whether I would be found legally at fault, it was the right thing to do.
But ruining my life would not bring back Laura’s.
Perhaps this was just as cruel of a logic as I had used before, but at least it was less twisted.
At least I was no longer lying to myself.
I knew that I was a bad person. This, I would spend the rest of my life trying to atone for.
I knew I wasn’t likable. I knew that anyone who could hear my inner thoughts would root against me.
Nora had not heard it all, but she had heard enough to know what kind of person I was.
Still, she seemed to care about me, or at least about helping me become better.
Perhaps she was motivated by gaining professional experience from our sessions.
The idea that this was a quid pro quo comforted me; it was something that I could understand.
The alternative I could not reconcile with my worldview.
But another possibility came to mind. Gigi’s visit had brought to light an alternative worldview that I began to consider more and more as the days dragged on.
The world shaped me, but I also shaped the world.
The latter would have an exponentially smaller impact than the former, but still an impact.
The simplest example being this: perhaps part of the reason I had felt underappreciated and ignored in high school was because I underappreciated and ignored high school.
Maybe it would be better for society as a whole if I became a better person.
Maybe a less status-obsessed version of myself would help to shape a less status-obsessed world, or at least push it in a minutely kinder direction.
But would this minute impact even matter?
Wasn’t it better to focus on exploiting the present systems for the maximum benefit to myself rather than feel shaped by some abstract idea of morality?
The former would at least have a much more tangible payoff.
But then I remembered my current state: sent home from college on the brink of psychological collapse.
My status-obsessed perspective had both worsened the world and worsened my own life.
Maybe the impact wasn’t minute. Maybe the impact was meaningful.
If I hadn’t been a percentiles-obsessed person from the start, Laura might not be dead.
And I probably also wouldn’t have gotten into Harvard, but I wouldn’t have cared, because I’d be the type of person for whom Georgetown was enough.
Maybe I’d be the type of person for whom everything was enough because my self-worth was not predicated on external, percentile-based distinctions.
Besides, it’s not like being a percentiles-obsessed person had gotten me what I wanted in the first place.
If anything, it had ruined my life—and ended another.
—
I returned to New York in late May for my graduation ceremony.
Because I was taking medical leave, I no longer had access to the dorms. Eunjin had to sign me in as a guest. The door to the room I had occupied for almost a year was locked.
I followed Eunjin to her room, which still looked exactly the same.
Eunjin was playing music from her laptop, songs that had been popular during our first year of college, the hits that screeched out of cheap speakers at crowded parties in the freshman dorm, Carman, and it was like I could suddenly smell the anxious sweat of eighteen-year-olds who had left home for the first time, the cheap vodka that we mixed with cranberry juice stolen from the dining hall, the grinding and the awkward eye contact and the piles of black puffer jackets strewn on the couch and the sticky floors.
A few minutes before our call time, we met Leah and Alex in front of Lerner Hall.
Together, we walked into the building and lined up against the diagonal railings.
The air buzzed with anticipation, and crowds of parents held out their phones to take pictures of us through the glass walls.
The weather was warm and sticky and the smell of sweat permeated the air.
During the ceremony, I clapped for any person whose name I recognized, ignoring that my palms were tingling and my fingers were sore.
Three hours later, it was finally my row’s turn to line up by the stage.
A third of the audience had already snuck out, but I knew that the people I cared about were out there, watching me—my mom, Eunjin, Eunjin’s mom, Leah, Alex.
I imagined my freshman-year self out there in the crowd, standing on the sidelines like a ghost, wearing her Henley, skinny jeans, and Converse, clothes that I had thrown out by the time sophomore year came around because I thought they didn’t look cool enough.
I wondered how that younger version of Elizabeth would feel if she could see me now. Would she feel surprised that I had ended up at this point? Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe this was the exact trajectory that I had been on all along. Maybe destruction had been inevitable from the start.
The dean called the name of the person standing in front of me, then called mine, sending the ghost of my eighteen-year-old self away from my thoughts. The breeze rippled through my dress as I walked across the stage. I shook a couple hands. It was over before I knew it.
The ceremony ended with another couple of speeches, and my friends and I met with our families in front of Butler Library.
Leah had snuck in a bottle of champagne and passed around plastic fluted cups.
Our parents toasted the new graduates, and we each took a sip.
For the first time in months, I felt at peace.
For the first time in months, I did not feel like I was trapped in an abyss, grasping onto anything to prevent myself from passing the event horizon, the point of no return.
I knew the freedom wouldn’t last, that I was on borrowed time and soon I’d fall right back into the abyss.
I thought of what Nora would say. She’d tell me that the freedom could last. I could make it last. The key was right in front of me, but it would mean throwing away everything my freshman-year self thought she knew.
It would mean telling her: “Fuck comparing yourself to others. Fuck placing too much value on what everyone else thinks. Fuck always caring about what comes next and not caring about what’s happening right now.
Fuck percentiles. Fuck Harvard Law School. ”
I stood with my eyes closed and my head tilted toward the cerulean sky, the May breeze playing with my hair and flapping the robe against my skin, the eager calls of parents echoing distantly in my ears, the sun shining on my forehead.
Through the darkness I caught a glimpse of the person who I could become: A person who loved and let herself be loved, a person who defined herself as a person rather than a list of qualifications.
A person who was still a work in progress.
A person who was okay. But when I opened my eyes, Nora’s voice faded away, and this alternate image of myself disappeared like a vivid dream that you forget as soon as you wake up.