“See! She agrees with me,” Eunjin said.
Eunjin and Leah both had to leave, but I still hadn’t finishedmy food, so I told them I’d stay awhile longer. I was heading to the pizza section to grab a couple of garlic knots when I saw the familiar outline of Laura’s leather backpack, the glossy black hair with those ashy blonde highlights. The shiny designer puffer with the beige logo’d patch on the sleeve. She was giving her order at the pasta bar. Broccoli, spinach, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, chicken, and marinara sauce. No pasta. I didn’t even realize you could ask for no pasta at the pasta bar.
“Ahem, what would you like?” Startled, I realized I had accidentally joined the line, and now the worker at the pasta bar was talking to me.
“Um…broccoli, spinach, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, chicken, and marinara sauce. No pasta.” Would she notice that I had ordered the same thing as the person in front of me? Even if she did, she didn’t seem to care, and she tossed the ingredients into the pan without a second thought.
—
I kept going back toRobert’s explanations for why Laura might’ve gotten into Harvard over me. The first possibility he listed was that her parents had donated a lot of money. Interesting.
Laura was of course wealthy, but I didn’t know to what extent. Wealthy in South Dakota just meant one or both of your parents were doctors. Wealthy at Columbia could mean anything from a net worth of ten million dollars to a net worth of ten billion dollars, the difference between only flying first class versus only flying private. That’s why even some of the trust fund kids self-identified as “upper-middle-class.” If Laura was on thelower end of the wealth spectrum, I doubted her parents would’ve been able to buy her way in. They would need at least a nine-figure net worth.
I needed to find out who her parents were and what they did for a living. I needed to find out whether that was why she had taken that last spot meant for me. I scrolled through her Instagram until I found a picture from her high school graduation standing in between her parents on a football field. I tapped once; only her mother’s account was tagged. Fortunately, the account was public, so I wouldn’t need to attempt to follow her using a burner account. Her mother’s name was Nina, and she was relatively easy to find. An outdated LinkedIn profile showed that she worked as a mid-level marketing manager for a beauty company, but from her Instagram account, it appeared that she did quite a bit of yoga and traveling. I doubted she still held a nine-to-five.
I needed to find out what her dad did. I scrolled through her mom’s posts until I found one of a middle-aged, Korean-looking guy smiling on a golf course.
The caption read, “James broke 100 today!”
Got it, so his name was James Kim. The problem was there were about a billion James Kims. But Laura had mentioned previously that her dad was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. I looked up “James Kim Goldman Sachs” on LinkedIn but couldn’t find a good match. Everyone looked too young to be her father. I pivoted strategies: I looked up “James Kim Nina Kim Greenwich CT” and found property records dating from 2001 for a two-story house with a pool. It looked like they had also purchased an apartment unit in Hell’s Kitchen a couple of years ago. That would make sense; Laura frequently postedphotos on Instagram from a location that looked way too nice to be a dorm room. From what I could tell from her social media, she still lived on campus, but it wasn’t uncommon for the parents of rich kids to buy an apartment in the city as an investment, somewhere for them to stay during the summers and after graduation. The property records revealed her father’s middle name: Haneul. I put his entire name into the LinkedIn search bar, and his profile came up right away.
James H. Kim. He wasn’t an investment banker; it was possible I had misremembered, or maybe Laura had intentionally overblown his credentials. He worked in “operations,” what the finance kids would call “back office” in a derogatory tone since it wasn’t as prestigious as “front office”—client-facing jobs like investment banking or sales and trading. I looked up the salaries for people with the same title as her dad and found plenty of data. Laura’s family was certainly rich, but they weren’t extravagantly rich, not the type of rich that could mean a large donation to Harvard Law School that would secure her spot in the upcoming class. She must’ve gotten in on her own.
That meant there was something I was missing about Laura—something that the admissions officers had seen, but I did not. There could be no other explanation. For some reason, I was boring and she was not. If only the admissions officers could spend some time with the two of us in person. Then they would know that I was obviously the more deserving applicant. The problem was, they could only rely on how we appeared on paper, and Laura had somehow managed to appear far more interesting than she actually was.
The next time I saw Laura at Ferris, I happened to be sitting at a table near the pasta bar. I was scarfing down my food so Icould make it on time to my appointment at the Writing Center. I had a meeting with an English PhD to get some feedback on an essay I was working on. I threw out my plate and started to head out of the dining hall, passing the line of students waiting to swipe in. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Laura was also walking out just a few steps behind me. I started down the stairs toward the lobby, and she started down too. I didn’t want to seem awkward by constantly looking back at her, so I let myself check twice that she was still following me and then willed myself to only look forward. By the time we exited the narrow staircase and reached the lobby, she was a few feet to the left of me. Both of us went out of Lerner and started walking north, passing by both Furnald and Pulitzer on the left. Then, our paths split: I took a right on College Walk, whereas she started heading up the steps to Low Library. Campus was crowded this time of day and I didn’t bother looking for where she was headed. There were plenty of buildings that she could’ve been going to and it wasn’t strange that we’d be going the same way.
Once I reached the east side of campus, I walked up the steps and continued heading north until I reached Philosophy Hall, the building where the Writing Center was located.
But there Laura was again: opening the door to Philosophy. We had taken different routes to the same place. I was more than a little annoyed that she had beaten me there. I always thought of myself as a fast walker. Was she even faster than me? She must’ve just taken a shorter route. I should start taking it next time. Why was she even here? Was she going to a class? No, she turned right on the first floor and entered the Writing Center. I wondered which tutor she was meeting with, but then she sat down at a table and placed a name tag in front of her.Shewas a writing tutor. This made me even more annoyed, and I wondered why the Writing Center would set their standards so low when it came to hiring tutors. It made me question whether I should even trust the guy I had an appointment with, who had happened to just email me to say he was running late. But I wasn’t annoyed for long. As I watched Laura take out her laptop and greet a freshman-looking student who had just arrived, suddenly I had a brilliant idea.
—
I went to the Instagrampage for the Greenwich Friends School, the prep school that Laura had attended. I pulled up the list of followers. Most of them were students or parents, who were easy to distinguish, as the former typically put their school and class year in their bio. I picked someone who was a junior with a public profile and wrote down their name. Suzie Ehrlich.
I created a new email account, SuzEhrlich567. I sent the following message from SuzEhrlich567’s account to Laura’s school email address. She had included her email on her LinkedIn profile, so she’d just assume that Suzie had gotten it from there.
Hi Laura,
Hope you’re well. I know that this is out of the blue, but I’m currently a junior at Greenwich Friends, and Columbia University is my dream school!
Hope this isn’t creepy, but I saw online that you are a tutor at the Columbia Writing Center, so I was wondering if there was any chance you could help me with some of my application essays. Of course, my parents would payyou for your time. Also, I saw in your bio that you’re interested in law school, which is a path I’m considering as well! I would love to hear about your journey.
Sincerely,
Suzie
Bingo. I was sure Laura would jump at the chance to help a fellow whatever-Greenwich-Friends’-mascot-was. Of course, I’d need to keep all interactions strictly over email, as I doubted I could make myself sound like a sixteen-year-old over the phone. Laura would offer to help (which meant I would have to pay her, but I was planning to just have her look at one essay, so hopefully not too much). I would flatter her, sing her praises, ask her questions about law school admissions, before making the final, big ask: “Do you mind sending me any of your law school essays? I know it’s still super early for me, but I’m super curious how they’re different from the undergraduate stuff, and I just want to be aware ahead of time.” Not only that, once I built her trust, I could start to gather more information about why Laura thought she got in. Specifically, “Why do you think you were an interesting applicant in the eyes of Harvard Law?”
—
Over the next forty-eight hours,I constantly refreshed the inbox. It was the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing I did at night. Laura hadn’t responded yet but I wasn’t worried. I needed to be patient, thoughtful. For now, my plan was on hold. Once she saw it, the plan would commence.
I was supposed to go on a date later that night with a guy I met on a dating app. Truthfully, I’d rather have just sat in my room and refreshed Suzie Ehrlich’s email inbox, but I knew going was the healthy thing to do. Better than spiraling down a Laura-themed internet rabbit hole all night.
His name was David. From his pictures I saw that he was handsome but not too handsome, like the love interest in an early- 2000s romantic comedy, the one the female protagonist isn’t interested in at first but falls for by the end. Before our date I had of course already done my usual extensive research on him. For one, I needed to check he was a real person, not a serial killer. And two, I needed to check I wasn’t wasting my time. The information I found on David was quite favorable. After college he had founded a startup that was sold for an undisclosed amount last year. His current job on LinkedIn was just listed as “advisor.” He was twenty-six years old.
We met at a speakeasy in the East Village. When he walked in, I thought he looked even better than in the photos. He was a bit out of my league, maybe by 5 to 10 percentile points. There were only two possibilities for why he was into me: either he only recently became more attractive or he had a thing for Asians.
