I put on an episode of one of those trashy reality TV shows where a group of hot people spend time together on a tropical resort. It made me feel a little better to compare Laura to the people in the show. She wasn’t as hot as them. She could never get cast. And if she did, she’d be that boring person who didn’t get any screen time and didn’t hook up with anyone. This made me smile.
I paused the show when the camera had zoomed in on the group of women standing side by side in bikinis. I pulled up Laura’s Instagram profile so that I could more accurately compare their faces and bodies to Laura’s. I already knew the picture I was looking for—the one of Laura standing on a beach during spring break in the Bahamas. But before I scrolled down, I noticed she had broken her radio silence; just fifty minutes ago, she posted something new.
I knew even before starting to read that it would be an attempt to clear her name. I rolled my eyes. My scheme had been airtight. What was she going to say?
SIXTEEN
Two minutes later, there werefurious knocks at my door. I opened it just enough to pop my head out. It was the RA, a short pimply guy with a half-grown beard who was usually a good RA. By that, I mean that he usually minded his own business.
“Hey, everything all right here? There was a loud crashing sound.”
I managed a terse smile. “All good. Just broke a lamp. I’m clumsy, what can I say?”
“Got it. Anyone else here?”
“Nope. Just me.” I flung open the door for a second. Just long enough so he could see that I was alone. Not long enough that he could see anything else.
“Cool, just wanted to double-check. You have my contact info if you need anything.” He waved goodbye and headed down the hall.
—
It was either let outa bloodcurdling scream or do something else equally cathartic, and I chose the latter. Specifically, I had thrown the bottle of champagne on the floor as hard as I could. The first time it stayed intact. The second time I swung it like a baseball bat against the wall. Now there were shards of glass and nonalcoholic champagne all over the floor.
I was livid that once again, Laura had bested me. I ran through the arguments in the post, each one like a stab in the chest. The list of college seniors I had compiled was not comprehensive; it only included students in the college and the engineering school, but not anyone at Barnard, the all-women liberal arts college that existed under the Columbia umbrella, or General Studies, the college for nontraditional students. Additionally, plenty of restaurants served caviar tater tots, but sometimes this dish didn’t appear on menus because it would only be offered as a special. She named a restaurant in Manhattan that had a number of online reviews referencing caviar tater tots even though the term “tater tots” did not appear anywhere on its menu.
She ended with the following paragraph: “The bottom line is, I am not the author. Like most of the students and faculty at Columbia, I found the arguments in this blog post both dangerous and despicable. But beyond that, I am disappointed that some of my peers would be so quick to attribute authorship to me based on extremely limited evidence while completely disregarding the work that I’ve done during my time at Columbia to uplift marginalized groups. I’ve always been vocal about why Asian people should use our proximity to whiteness to uplift those with less proximity to whiteness. To suggest that I’ve donethe opposite is not only untrue, but deeply hurtful. I will be deleting this post in 48 hours so that I can move on from this incident, and I hope that you all will too.”
—
Amala was now the pariah.Well, it served her right for taking credit for all the sleuthing. Now she just looked dumb, and that was the kindest word people were using to describe her. Others were saying toxic, malicious, problematic, etc. She officially stepped down from her position as president of the Columbia Students for Anti-Racism organization, which also released an official statement condemning the actions of their former leader in the strongest possible terms.
—
Leah, Alex, and Eunjin hadtexted me apologizing for the night of my party, and I decided to forgive them. Forgive, but never forget. Once I got to law school I would make new friends. Both Leah and Alex were in a high percentile of intelligence, but neither was in a particularly high percentile of ambition, so I would let the friendship taper off gradually, and in the meantime, enjoy their company. There was no reason to end things on a sour note. On the other hand, I could forgive Eunjin for this minor mishap, but only because she was in such a high percentile of everything. And obviously, she was my best friend.
With Laura’s name cleared, the manhunt continued, but much more cautiously. Two days after Laura’s post, the Columbia Students for Anti-Racism released a statement on therealauthor. This time, they were sure. Fortunately for me, they were wrong again.
Alex was the one who told me about how they did it. Alex was friends with the new president of the Columbia Students for Anti-Racism. Apparently, one of its members was dating a coder, Michael, a Columbia senior double majoring in physics and computer engineering, an anarcho-capitalist who had secured job offers from the top quantitative hedge funds in the world. Michael traced the IP address of the blogger to a public computer at Columbia, which posed a problem, as Columbia refused to hand over the data that would lead them to the perpetrator. Fortunately, one of the students knew someone who knew someone whose work-study job was in the Columbia IT department, and they were able to access the log-in records.
George Reynolds. The blond guy who had graciously allowed me to use his computer at Butler Library. Who could’ve said no to my request, could’ve told me to fuck off, but was so trusting that he didn’t even bother to log out of his email before leaving me be.
“But you three have to promise you won’t tell anyone that that’s how they got the information,” Alex told us after showing the picture of George on their phone. “Otherwise the person who looked up the log-in information could get fired from their work-study job.”
In a tragically perfect storm, poor George had gotten unlucky in a couple of other ways. The author described themself as a history major living in East Campus. George was minoring in history and lived in East Campus. The author said that they were a senior and from the suburbs of New York City. George was a junior from Tennessee, but the students easily brushed that off as a minor discrepancy, as something George probably made up to throw us off his scent. They found an old photo of George with some relatives in New Jersey. Close enough.
The campus reaction was just as much of a firestorm as you would expect. Three hours after the Columbia Students for Anti-Racism Instagram page revealed George’s identity, George posted a statement that he was definitively not the author of the post, and that he strongly disagreed with all of the arguments it espoused. No one believed him. Twenty-four hours later, he posted a second statement about his hypothesis for what had happened. He said that an Asian woman had approached him late one night in Butler Library and asked to use the public computer after him. I would’ve been a bit nervous about the post had it not been for the fact that again, no one believed him. They thought he was just trying to pin things on Laura because she had been the only other suspect. By day three of the post getting released, George had deleted all of his social media.
The rumor on campus was that he flew home to Memphis and was officially taking a leave of absence. Within a week, over three thousand students had signed the petition for Columbia to officially expel George from school and impose a lifetime ban on him ever stepping foot on campus. Columbia didn’t respond, and because George had left school and thus voluntarily taken himself out of our lives, the outrage began to die down. We probably wouldn’t hear from him again. He’d need to change his name; no employer would ever hire him. He hadn’t had much of a social media presence to begin with, so I couldn’t figure out if he came from a wealthy family who had the resources to help him bounce back, perhaps by setting him up at a prestigious university in a foreign country where the scandal would not follow him. That was the standard tactic for sons of prominent families who were accused of sexual assault.
I felt terrible. Of course I felt terrible. I’d be a sociopath if Ididn’t experience an overwhelming sense of guilt for destroying George’s reputation. But while I did regret ruining this random man’s life, I regretted even more that I hadn’t yet ruined Laura’s.
—
The college sent emails aboutour graduation ceremony. I skimmed through each one with dread. The celebration meant nothing to me, only an irritating reminder that I was behind schedule in the master plan of my life.
I admit that the baby still seemed like an abstract entity to me, except for the physical symptoms that it caused. The most annoying part was that I needed to pee a lot. It got to the point that I stopped drinking liquids starting an hour before class, which I knew wasn’t good for my body, but was better than getting up to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes. I didn’t want people to suspect me of having irritable bowel syndrome. That would be embarrassing.
But one day, while the professor was lecturing on the 1973 Yom Kippur War, my bladder felt like it was bursting at the seams, and I rushed to the bathroom down the hall. When I pulled down my pants, there was a large, angry red dot on my underwear. I thought it was just my period, but then I remembered I didn’t have those anymore. Was I having a miscarriage? I clasped my hands together in spontaneous prayer.Please God, please don’t let this be a miscarriage. Please. You already destroyed my Plan A. I need my Plan B to work.
