Her eyes narrowed. “So, which one? Who are you hooking up with?”
I tried to recall the letters on the name tags posted to their suite door, but my mind was hitting a blank.
“I…uh…”
“Okay. So you’re lying to me.”
“No, I just…”
“Ugh!” she said, pulling her hair. She sat down on the rug by her bed. It had a beige background with different-sized rectangles of different shades of pink. I wondered if it felt as soft as it looked. I wished I could take off my shoes and my socks to rub my feet against its surface. I realized I was getting distracted.
“This has been such a weird fucking semester,” Laura said. “I literally looked up last week if Mercury could be in retrograde for many months at a time. It’s like someone is sabotaging me. But I can’t even say that out loud, because I’d sound like a lunatic. Has it been a weird semester for you?”
“Uh…I mean, kind of. I guess.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like, first I have this scammer pretending to be my friend’s sister, and I was thinking I must’ve been chosen at random, but the scam was weirdly involved. They actually sent me a fucking essay to correct and everything. And then there was that insane thing with the blog post. Like, some people actually thought I wrote it. Me! And now you’re here in my room, and I have literally no idea why.”
I attempted to keep my voice level, like pressing a helium balloon to the ground. “It must be hard for you to go through these struggles when your life has been so wonderful up until this point,” I said.
“Oh my god,” she said, as though I had just told her that I thought she was an alien. “That was…wow. Very rude. Is this your thing? You break into people’s dorm rooms to, I assume, steal stuff? Here, you want this?” She picked up a T-shirt crumpled on the floor and threw it toward me. It hit my face before dropping back onto the floor.
I didn’t react. For once, I felt like I held power over her. Sure,I was intruding on her space, but she was the one acting dramatic. I was the one staying calm. She was the one who was drunk. My mind had never been clearer. I would win by continuing to keep my cool, by using my neutrality to make her appear even more hysterical. Later, I would replay this situation over and over in my mind, savoring the memory of the time I had bested Laura Kim. I thought of the perfect question to ask, the perfect question to cement my superiority.
“Have you ever thought that not everyone was born into a perfect life where they get everything they’ve ever wanted without even working that hard for it?”
“Oh, honey.” I couldn’t stomach what I heard in her voice. Amusement, disgust, but worst of all: pity. How could she pity me when I was so much better than her at this moment? When I was quite literally standing over her?
“You don’t even know me,” she said, shaking her head. “You have no idea what I’ve been through, trust me.”
“Uh. Look around. I’m pretty sure I do.”
“At what?” Laura swiveled her head around haphazardly. She stood up, nearly losing her balance before steadying herself with a hand placed on the corner of her desk. “At my normal room decor? If you think this is the epitome of the high life, you are…so sheltered.” She laughed. “You know what, I don’t need to justify myself to you. Just because I don’t share every detail about my struggles to the world doesn’t mean they aren’t real. But still, I’m glad you’re here. Now I know I was right to believe someone was out to get me. It was you, wasn’t it? It was you the entire time.”
I wanted to ask what she meant by the accusation that someone was out to get her. How much did she know? She probably suspected me of concocting the Suzie Ehrlich plan, but whatabout the blog post? That part could’ve just been a coincidence. My heart thumped in my chest and I swallowed, holding myself back from asking her directly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Um, I think you do. That’s why you’re here, huh? To poison my water bottle or something? Because I represent everything you hate about the school, or maybe even about the world? All because of some false narrative that you’ve formed about my life based on having had literally zero real conversations with me.”
“No.” I started to grow hot. I could feel my cheeks burning. I was sure Laura could see my entire face turning red, which just increased the feeling of agitation.
“So whyareyou here, then?” Her demeanor had shifted. She wasn’t just teasing me anymore, and the steadiness of her voice made me wonder if she wasn’t as drunk as I had thought. Just like how she lowered her voice to sound smarter, maybe this was another strategy she used to portray a certain image of herself, to get what she wanted out of the people around her. She looked at her open closet, the pieces of clothing that had dropped onto the floor.
“Were you looking through my things?” Her gaze shifted to the agenda open on her desk. “And my planner? Wait, what the actual fuck?”
I couldn’t think of a good explanation, or even any explanation.
“I want you out of here. Now.” Her voice had grown louder, and the intensity of her stare was like a heat lamp directed inches from my face. She pointed a finger at the door. “Leave, or I’m going to scream. Or call the police, and they’ll drag you out. Your fucking choice.”
Laura was standing closer to me now, saying something about how she’d drag me out of her room if she had to. Or maybe she wasn’t standing closer, it was just that the walls appeared to be shrinking, enclosing me as though I were about to be trapped in a box. My body felt out of my control, and I was reminded of the incident on the subway platform when the loser spit on me and I couldn’t even do anything about it, I couldn’t even react in time to chase him down and push him onto the tracks like he deserved. And as we stood across from each other, face-to-face, I realized, with a brilliant and blinding clarity, that there was no way to explain myself out of this one. She really was moving toward me now, and with her left hand she took out the phone from her purse. What was she going to do? Call security to escort this unhinged person out of her room? Snap a photo of this crazy girl so she could send it to all of her friends? Maybe she’d even post it on her social media with some caption about how she had been victimized by this crazy stalker, how this crazy stalker had impersonated a high school student, then impersonated her, all to try to ruin her life. Maybe she’d even try to crowdsource help. “Does anyone know who this person is?” Because of course, she still didn’t know my name.
I had to stop her. I had to stop her before it was too late, before she’d forever ruin my reputation—what if she took a video and sent it to Harvard? Then all of this would’ve been for nothing. I had come so far; I couldn’t let her ruin everything now. Maybe I could recordherin return. I could record her hysterically accusing me of stalking her. At minimum, the video would embarrass her, and possibly be enough leverage to convince her not to ruin my reputation and my life. Mutually assured destruction, that’s what I needed, and I only had a few seconds left toput a plan in motion. I shuffled through my bag for my phone. I knew I had to do something, anything, even if my mind was blanking on a more coherent plan. Otherwise, I’d be completely and utterly fucked. Suddenly, my fingers wrapped around something cylindrical. Before I realized what I was doing, I had grabbed the pepper spray from my bag and pushed the button as hard as I could, aiming it directly at Laura’s face. I breathed a sigh of relief as the phone dropped from her hand, then choked from inadvertently breathing in some of the chemicals I had just released. She cried out and pressed both hands to her eyes, then on her chest, gasping for air, as she crumpled down to her knees. She was saying something that I couldn’t understand. I was frozen from fear: I had never seen someone writhing in pain the way that she was now; I didn’t realize that pepper spray could elicit this effect. Laura was crawling toward me now, and before she could reach my feet, I stepped over her body and ran out.
EIGHTEEN
The next morning, I wokeup with shame and mortification burning under my skin like a fever. What story was I going to spin to justify my behavior last night? How would I explain to Laura why I had pulled out the pepper spray? Or why I was in her room in the first place?
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had fucked up even more than I had imagined. Laura could come after me, could sue me for pepper spraying her, and there was a chance I’d get kicked out of school. What would my mom say? What would my friends say? What if the facts of the situation were made public and the school newspaper covered it? Or theNew York Timescovered it? Then everyone would remember my name, and not in the way that I wanted them to.
