Ralston.
My writing.
The rejections.
It’s painful and embarrassing for one, but it also feels unfinished. It hurt too much to talk about it back then, and now I can’t talk about it—about any of it—until I know how it resolves. Until I know whether this will have a happy ending or be labeled as one of my life’s biggest tragedies.
While I wait for her to answer, I pull my suitcase out and dress in athletic wear. A hoodie that hasn’t been washed and my ratty sweatpants.
I wouldn’t be caught dead at the fireside chat wearing this. By leaving the dorm now, dressed in this, I’m ensuring I can’t attend. I just need to stay gone until the event has started, until there’s no way to arrive without being seen.
When I was little and my mom was on whatever diet she was trying that month, I remember watching as she dumped all ofthe “bad” foods into the trash and doused them with Windex so she wouldn’t be tempted to drag them out and eat them anyway.
This is the same thing.
I leave the dorm, locking my door and shoving the key into my hoodie pocket. Outside, I run. Past the housing office and the empty benches. My feet hit the sidewalk with sharp, satisfying thuds. I haven’t run in years, though during my time at Havenport, I started each day with a run around campus to keep my health in check—mentally and physically.
After Ralston, I guess I started to feel like there was no point.
It’s strange, looking back over the last fifteen years. Without realizing it, without ever making the conscious decision, it’s as if I’ve put everything on hold, waiting to see her pay. To see the truth come to light.
Now, I fear I never will unless I’m the one to force it.
I think about my stolen words.True feminism is a call for radical change. Disruption. Explosion and implosion. It requires you to force the change yourself, even if you stand alone.
Once, those words were used to shame me, but now? Maybe they’ll be what liberates me. Maybe I’ll be the one who liberates us all, even if I stand alone.
Each breath in the cool night air cuts like glass, but I can’t slow down. I need to get as far away from my dorm, from the possibility of changing clothes and finding myself at Ralston’s event as possible.
I refuse to sit there, nodding along to her curated wisdom and rehearsed lines while everyone melts with admiration.
Screw that.
Screw her.
That isnotwhy I’m here.
She made me feel small, stupid. All while plagiarizing my work—rearranging it, softening some edges, and shoving itinto her books and TED Talks, selling theft to the world as empowerment. And now she’s being honored—again—in the biggest way thus far, for ideas that were never entirely hers.
Then the thought hits me: If she stole mine, and so many others, wereanyof her ideas ever hers? Or was it all just a lie? A package she put together and sold.
Was she just a marketer all along? Someone who stole our ideas and profited off of them while we were left with nothing? Who built a platform and a thriving business, credibility we will never have, off our voices?
I cut across the lawn behind the history department, chest heaving, and freeze when I hear her voice. Crisp. Measured. Coated in warmth like honey.
“Well, the first revolution is always internal, isn’t it? You can’t upend the world if you’re not willing to first upend yourself.”
Her voice is everywhere—blaring from speakers on the corners of the ivy-covered buildings as if she were a god. I take a step, then two, my throat tightening. Instinctively, my hands go to my ears, trying and failing to block her out.
It’s a good line, and I hate that I have to admit that.
But of course, it is. That’s what makes her so dangerous. Her words sound genuine. Youwantto believe her. She covers her lies in velvet and gift wrap.
I veer toward the Solace Garden before I can talk myself out of it. Every chair is filled. It’s standing room only, and most of the people gathered around don’t even have a view of Ralston. They can only hear her.
I tell myself it’s okay if I linger, if I listen, as long as she never knows I was here. From where I stand, blanketed by the darkness of the night, no one sees or notices me. They’re all facing forward, transfixed by her words as if they’re a siren song.
She speaks as if she personally discovered the secret to happiness and is slowly doling it out.
