“I know, and I really wanted to tell you, I did. You were the first person I wanted to tell. But I got the acceptance letter around the same time you were hearing back from law schools and I didn’t want to rub it in your face and be like, ‘Oh hey, I got into this awesome program’ while I knew you were still figuring stuff out.’ ”
“I know I’m crazy jealous and insane, but only about other people. Never about you. You know that.”
“I know. But still, I didn’t want to be insensitive.”
We walked back into the lobby. I offered to buy us two glasses of champagne to celebrate, but she said no. We took the elevator back down to the mall and walked outside.
“Do you have anything to do this afternoon?” she asked. “Maybe we could take a walk on the High Line.”
“Sure,” I said. If I didn’t go home now, I’d need to stay up all night to finish an essay that was due the next day. But it didn’t matter. I would go to the High Line with my best friend.
We headed south on the High Line for a few blocks but found ourselves sandwiched between crowds of slow-walking tourists and their crying children. So we exited the trail on 23rd Street and started walking on Tenth Avenue instead, stopping by a bookstore, and then an art gallery. The time passed comfortably,like we were floating along a lazy river, and it was nice to not begoing somewherefor once, like the library or class or a club meeting, and instead float through the streets of Chelsea, stopping inside storefronts whenever we wanted to, not because we had to.
I wondered with a deep, aching melancholy how many of these afternoons together we had left. Eunjin would move to Austria, and we would no longer live next door to each other. She would make new friends, maybe start dressing or acting differently, and of course the first few months we would talk every day and video chat every week but eventually, our diverging experiences would lead to diverging identities so that we were no longer the two Asian girls from the Dakotas who made it to Columbia University, but a famous world-traveling violinist and a corporate lawyer living in New York City who had overlapped during a four-year stint of their lives. It was funny how you could go from seeing someone every day to not seeing them at all. That this friendship, even if it existed in the future, would never exist again in this same form. That it would just be a single thread among a disparate assortment of embroidery in the comprehensive picture of our lives. Just a tiny part of a much larger picture. A part so small and insignificant that when you look at the picture from afar, you may not notice it at all.
SEVENTEEN
I avoided Eunjin for acouple of days after she told me she was moving to Austria. I spent more time with Leah and Alex, intentionally asking them to hang out when I knew Eunjin was busy.
But I couldn’t avoid Eunjin entirely. We still lived next door to each other, after all. Every time I passed by her in the hallway, all I could think about was that she was going to abandon me. Why hadn’t she told me she was applying to MDW? She said she had mentioned it to me long ago, but I didn’t believe her. And even if she had, why didn’t she bring it up again when she knew the results would be coming out soon? Why hadn’t she mentioned the possibility that we would no longer be following the plan that we had both agreed upon?
A frightening possibility entered my mind: Maybe I didn’t mean as much to her as she meant to me. Maybe she had known all along that I was just a college friend, not her lifelong friend. Or a lifelong friend, but based on a friendship that would havepeaked in college. That our relationship, for the most part, would be fossilized based on this four-year period, that we wouldn’t continue to grow together for the next few years, for the next few decades, side by side as we found our life partners, got married, became real adults. I was starting to think I had gotten it all wrong.
The terror of losing Eunjin led to another development in my life that I wouldn’t have expected. For the first time since learning about the pregnancy, I actually found myself feeling grateful for it, and not just because it’d help me get into law school. Now that Eunjin was abandoning me, maybe the baby could be my new companion, someone to take the place of the hole that Eunjin would leave. Maybe the baby could ground me the same way Eunjin always had. Maybe the universe was giving me the baby because it was taking away Eunjin. The nice part was, the baby was stuck in here, inside me, no matter where I went. It wouldn’t be able to move to Austria even after telling me that it’d stay in New York. And the baby would have so many similarities to Eunjin, it would basically be Eunjin 2.0. The baby would also be half-Asian. I guess that was about it in terms of similarities, but the baby could also go to Columbia. The baby could also start learning violin at a young age. Maybe the baby could also be called Eunjin. That would be nice. One Eunjin in my life replaced by another.
—
Now that I was pregnant,I was also starting to feel more tired than usual. I’d get breathy just from walking the half mile from 110th to 122nd, so I started taking the subway instead. On a particular Tuesday, the train was still seven minutesaway, so I scrolled through photos of Eunjin and me from freshman year on my phone. My favorite was one from the first week of college, when our orientation group went to a Mets game at Citi Field. There we were standing next to our seats in the very back of the stadium, smiling with our arms around each other as though we’d been friends for years, when in reality, it had been two days. I hadn’t realized it before but we looked so much younger back then. More baby fat on our cheeks and that glimmer of naivete in our eyes that all freshmen seem to have. It usually disappears by year two. I could feel myself starting to tear up, so I closed the tab on my phone. When I looked up briefly to check how much longer until the subway would arrive, I felt something spray my face.
“Holy shit,” someone behind me said. “That guy just spit on you.”
I was too surprised to react. A few people asked me if I needed help, but I told them I was fine. I tried to take a picture of the perpetrator, but he was already walking away, disappearing through the crowds of commuters who hadn’t seen what happened. I took out a tissue from my backpack and wiped the saliva off my face. A small part of me wanted to cry, but the greater part of me was furious. How dare he do this to me? I wished I had fought back, pushed him onto the tracks. I hated feeling weak, feeling like I couldn’t defend myself.
I immediately looked up places that sold pepper spray. The nearest store I could find was in Hell’s Kitchen. I decided to skip the recitation I was headed to, which had been optional anyway, and went straight to the store to purchase three bottles: one for my jacket pocket, one for my backpack, and one for my handbag. Besides, it wasn’t just me that I was trying to protect. There wasa literal human being growing inside of me. If an attacker ever tried to pull something on me again, he should be worried about what I was capable of.
—
It was now the thirdweek of March, a week after Eunjin and I had visited the High Line, and to distract myself from the spitting incident and from the sorrow over Eunjin moving away, I decided to go to a party. I typically went to parties with my friends, almost always with Eunjin, but I needed to follow through with my plan to wean myself off my dependence on Eunjin and instead practice going to places with only Eunjin 2.0. Of course, no one else at the party would know that I was arriving with a guest, as I was around ten weeks pregnant, so my belly was still relatively flat. They would all think I had shown up alone. However, I was willing to stomach that small social embarrassment. The baby was my secret for now.
Gina had invited me to some get-together she was throwing in her dorm. Over a hundred people had RSVP’d, mostly the finance crowd, but that meant they’d have good alcohol. When I got there, barely anyone had arrived, and Gina looked a little too eager to see me. “Oh my god, Elizabeth!” she cried. “I’m so glad you’re here.” She was wearing a sparkly two-piece set and holding a red Solo cup with something that looked like orange juice but smelled much stronger. A plastic tarp covered the wooden dining table in the living room shared by her and five other suitemates. There was an assortment of vodka, rum, and spiked seltzers and cartons of juice that were suspiciously the same brands as the ones from the dining hall.
“Yo, Elizabeth. Want some coke?” I turned around and sawEthan, one of Gina’s suitemates, leaning against the doorway to the bedrooms with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face.
“Bro, shut up,” another guy said as he walked out of one of the bedrooms. He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t remember his name. He was bulky, with a square face and jaw, and he looked like he could be a football player—the Ivy Leagues, however, were the only places in America where that didn’t make you cool, so I wasn’t intimidated. He grabbed a can of spiked seltzer and plopped on an oversized bean bag chair next to the couch where I was sitting.
“I’m Elizabeth,” I said.
He feigned shock by pressing his hand against his chest. “I know you’re Elizabeth. We’ve met before. You don’t remember my name?”
“Forgive me, but I don’t.”
“It’s Rory. We were in the same LitHum. You don’t remember my incredibly insightful contributions to class?”
“I really don’t. I must’ve blocked them out because they made me feel bad about how not insightful I was in comparison.”
“Oh, no. You were great in that class. Great contributions. I’m sure you got an A.” I knew it was just banter but felt shy anyway. I did get an A. He asked me if I wanted a drink.
I nodded, and Rory poured the equivalent of three shots of rum in a plastic cup, filling up the rest with Diet Coke. I pretended to take a sip.
