—
I read the last paragraphof the email announcing Laura’s death as though it were a convoluted line from an academic paper. My eyes were dry and itchy, and I rubbed them until my contact lenses popped out. Then, I put on my glasses and continued reading.
My first thought was that with Laura out of the picture, my path to Harvard was finally clear. Harvard was down one Asian Female, so now they had the space to accept another—especially one who was a single mother and therefore not at all boring.
The only problem: I couldn’t exactly go to Harvard if I was getting charged with murder. The email from the dean didn’t mention anything about the cause of death, which wasn’t unusual based on previous emails announcing the passing of a student. But the email had also included a tip line for the police, which suggested that they suspected a crime. I thought of Laura’s body after I pressed the button on the pepper spray, the helpless, desperate expression as she wriggled on the floor. What were the chances that someone would’ve attacked Laura twice in one week?
I needed to find information about the fatality of pepper spray. Then, I would research whether anyone had been convicted of murder for pepper spraying someone. But the more logical side of my brain stepped in and forced me to sit in silence before I did anything that I would regret. Anything I searched with my phone or computer would leave a digital trail. The safest course of action right now was to keep all of my thoughts inside my head where no one could access them. In the worst-case scenario, if someone was looking into me as a murder suspect, itwouldn’t help if they saw an internet search history full of questions that happened to be relevant to the crime. If I were going to leave a digital trail showing I knew about the pepper spray, which the dean had never mentioned in her email, I might as well hand myself over to the police right now.
But I was getting ahead of myself. I still didn’t know whether Laura had died from the pepper spray or if she had died from something else. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that her death had nothing to do with me. Almost a week had passed since the party, and something else could’ve happened that caused her to die.
Everything hinged on the pepper spray, on whether it was even possible for Laura to die from that one incident. My hands were shaking; all I wanted to do was open the laptop and look up the information that would determine whether I had played a role in Laura’s death. I considered going to the library to look for a book on pepper spray, but even that was too risky. I was worried that my searches in the online catalog would leave a footprint and that asking a librarian for help could appear suspicious.
There were too many unknowns, too many dark clouds shaped like question marks floating inside my head. I tried to organize my thoughts by boiling what I knew down to a few key principles. The first principle was that I could not change the events of the past. Understanding the possible complications from pepper spray could only provide hints as to whether I was responsible for Laura’s death; it could not change the fact that I had pepper sprayed her. The second principle was that I needed to focus on what I could control. I did not know that I was guilty. As far as I could tell, no one thought that I was guilty. But if I started acting suspicious, if I started to let the guilt or worryvisibly eat away at me, then I would increase the chances that someonewouldthink that I was guilty.
This led me to the only reasonable conclusion: I needed to act as normal as possible. I needed to act how any innocent student would act if they found out a classmate had died. I had always been good at compartmentalizing. My entire life I had trained myself to focus on goals that were bigger than today, bigger than this week, bigger than this year, to repress present urges in favor of the future I wanted. And the future I wanted involved me not being in prison.
—
After twenty-four hours of mourning,the student body collectively seemed to decide that it was socially acceptable to speculate about the cause of Laura’s death.
Common theories in the rumor mill were the following: a suicide that her family refused to accept, hence the ongoing police investigation. A drug overdose alone in her dorm. A fatal alcohol-induced fall. Her dorm was sectioned off with yellow police tape. Her suitemates were all moved to a different dorm.
I went to an electronics store and bought in all cash the cheapest laptop that they sold. I spent an afternoon at the McDonald’s on 110th looking up all the questions I had stopped myself from researching the day before. Pepper spray could be lethal in rare cases, usually when the victim had a preexisting condition. But as far as I could tell, no one had ever been convicted for murder or manslaughter for pepper spraying someone. This information did not make me feel better or worse. Even if I were not convicted for murder, it still wouldn’t look great if the police found out I had assaulted someone with pepper spray,leading to complications that caused their death. There were plenty of terrible things between no one finding out what I had done and getting sent to prison for life on a murder charge.
When it started getting dark outside I dumped the laptop in the McDonald’s trash can and poured the entire contents of my large Diet Coke on top. I walked back to my dorm and scrubbed each of the three cans of pepper spray with a sanitary wipe. I wrapped the bottles with a cloth bag so they wouldn’t make any noise as I was walking, then stuffed them into a large trash bag. I put the trash bag into my backpack and took the subway to 72nd, tossing it in one of the public garbage cans on the side of the street.
I wondered whether the police would bring me in for questioning. I thought back to the night of Laura’s death. Had I left fingerprints? Probably from opening the various doors to the individual rooms, but it was a six-person suite, and there were different people’s fingerprints all over the place from parties and hangouts. I did touch Laura’s LSAT books, but the detectives probably wouldn’t think to check them. I mean, why would a killer want to study for the LSAT? I went over the worst-case scenario: the police would find out that I had impersonated Laura to get into her dorm room around the same time that she passed away. But I did not think that they could prove anything beyond that. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew my rights. When they questioned me, I wouldn’t say a single thing. The police might suspect it was me, but they wouldn’t be able to prove it.
—
I took a calculated riskand bought some Klonopin off a friend of Leah’s. My reasoning was that illegally purchasingprescription benzos from a peer was well within the actions of an innocent Columbia student. If someone asked, I would say that I was stressed out with classes and needed something to take the edge off. The Klonopin helped me feel relaxed, stopped the dark possibilities from consuming me. And I needed to act normal right now. I needed to ensure no one would think that I was guilty.
I read some studies online about whether Klonopin would affect your pregnancy, and the results seemed mixed. Technically, taking a higher dosage increased the chance your baby could get side effects, but I just wouldn’t take a high dosage. I’d take half the recommended dosage for a standard prescription. Besides, being stressed all the time probably also affected the pregnancy, and the Klonopin made the stress much more manageable. You could make the argument that the benefits outweighed the risks.
Two nights after the email came out about Laura’s death I lay in bed, feeling the 0.25 milligrams cushion the dark edges of my anxiety like a thick quilt. I had focused most of my mental energy on the practical task of protecting myself from legal danger. Only now was I starting to consider a moral one. Even if nothing bad happened to me, was it possible that I was still a bad person? Or at the very least, had done something bad, maybe even unforgivable?
Based on the campus gossip, I was starting to think I knew what had happened, what had killed Laura. According to the rumor mill, multiple people that night had seen her snorting a line at Gina’s party. I was no doctor, but it seemed likely that cocaine could aggravate the effects of pepper spray. If my hypothesis were true, then the answer to whether I killed Lauradepended on the definition of “kill.” Someone could make the argument Laura would be alive if it weren’t for my actions, if it weren’t for the fact that I had dispersed pepper spray directly in her face. But someone could also say the same thing about her use of cocaine. If she hadn’t done the coke, then she wouldn’t have died from the pepper spray. My logic was foolproof, a digital circuit that would always spit out a true or false based on a set of binary inputs—and in this case, the answer was true. If I was guilty of killing Laura, then Laura was equally guilty of killing herself.
—
Most people on campus nowbelieved the theory that Laura had taken a bad batch of cocaine. They wore their certainty like a badge of honor, proof that they didn’t fall for the type of sensationalism that a less smart person might be susceptible to. Their confidence brought me some ease. I still had not been questioned by the police, and I too began to suspect that it would be only a matter of time before they attributed her death to drug use. Still, I didn’t want to think about it, any of it. It only reminded me of Laura’s body writhing on the floor. It only reminded me that I was probably the last person to see her alive.
Months ago, my friends and I had decided to go to Leah’s parents’ beach house in Ocean City for spring break. I was in no mood for a beach trip, but I had promised myself that I would act as normal as possible. Who knew which actions that would appear minor today might end up significant later? So on the last Saturday of March, I slung a duffel bag containing a few changes of clothes and toiletries over my shoulder and waited with Eunjin in the lobby of our dorm. I was no longer avoiding her, andnot just because it would help me appear more normal in case I became a suspect. I felt genuinely grateful for her company and realized I had been an idiot to avoid her after she told me about MDW. If I knew she was leaving, didn’t that mean I should try to spend as much time with her as possible? Make the most of the time we had left while we were still living just two feet away from each other?
A few minutes later, Leah pulled up in front of our building in a rental car. Alex was already sitting in the passenger seat, adding songs to a playlist. Eunjin and I threw our bags into the trunk and shuffled in the back.
As Leah drove us through Harlem to get to the bridge, she reminded us that Ocean City was a dry town, and I pretended to be disappointed. In actuality, I was relieved. I was running out of excuses for why I wasn’t drinking. Without noticing, I pressed my left hand against my abdomen to feel the baby’s presence.
“Are you feeling okay?” Eunjin asked.
“Just a little nauseous,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. The constant stopping and starting on the George Washington Bridge made my stomach churn, so I closed my eyes and pressed my head against the window, feeling the condensation cool my skin. By the time I opened my eyes again, two hours had passed and we were turning into a driveway.
“We’re here!” Leah announced.
I had never been to Leah’s parents’ beach house before. My first impression was that it looked like it belonged in a PG-rated movie, a film for which I could already imagine the opening scene: a white kid running barefoot down the street, who wouldn’t stop running until he reached the two blocks to the beach. Afilm that you could tell would have a happy ending just by the trailer. I imagined someday raising my own baby in a house like this one, just somewhere nicer, like the Hamptons. We’d drive there every summer to eat lobster rolls and take bike rides along the beach. The house would also look like it belonged in a movie, just a more aspirational one.
“Are you coming?” Leah asked. I was still out in the cold, staring at the white porches that wrapped around each of the three floors. I nodded and joined my friends in the foyer, leaving my shoes at the door. Grains of sand tickled my feet as I walked over the ceramic floors. I followed Leah up the carpeted stairs and set my duffel bag in one of the spare bedrooms.
