It was 2:00 a.m. I got out of bed and walked to the bathroom down the hall. The house was eerily silent, and I found that I missed the raucousness of a college dorm, the too-bright fluorescent lights in the hallways.
I looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was dull and dry. Ihad taken out my contacts and was wearing my wire-framed glasses, behind which there were dark circles under my eyes. The Stanford T-shirt I was wearing had a hole by the left armpit. My mom had bought it for me five years ago when we went to visit the campus. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, set my glasses on the sink, and splashed water on my face. I put my glasses back on and looked at myself again.
A smile appeared. I registered it in my reflection before I registered it on myself. I was smiling because my appearance held the truth. It was communicating to my inner self what my outer self already knew. Which was that I had nothing to worry about.
All you had to do was look at me. No jury would believe that I was capable of killing someone, even by accident. The murderers I read about in all those true crime stories were men. Ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, casual lovers. Random dudes off the street. If it came to it, I’d go to my trial just the way I was now. Pin-straight black hair, glasses that took up half my face, a T-shirt from a university with at least a 1500 average SAT score.
It was a truth that I could understand only because of the environment in which I had grown up, a truth that many of the Asian American students I met at Columbia, who I envied for their lack of self-consciousness of their own Asianness, simply couldn’t. Unlike me, they had grown up around other people who looked like them, who came from similar backgrounds as them. Unlike me, they had not learned to bifurcate their identities into who they were around other Asian people and who they were around everyone else. They didn’t feel self-conscious about having friend groups that were mostly Asian. They knew how it felt to be otherized; they had seen it on TV and in the moviesand around certain groups of people, but their otherness had never been the default state. They wore their Asianness as just another characteristic of themselves. There were so many other Asians around them that to be Asian was not unique enough to be a defining trait.
Meanwhile, being Asian had been my sole defining trait. The people I spent the most time around were those in my predominantly white high school, people who saw me as the other, as a foreigner, as someone who would never be quite the same as them. Growing up in this environment, I had learned how to perceive myself the way that they perceived me. Sometimes, it felt as though I had two identities: who I really was, and who others perceived me to be. And as I stared at myself in the mirror, with my tight ponytail and tortoiseshell glasses, my ripped Stanford shirt and baggy sweatpants, I saw not the first but the second, not the me that I knew, but the person that others knew as me. The person that Robert knew as me. The person that Harvard Law School knew as me. Meek, conformist, submissive, obsessed with school. A try-hard, an overachiever, a victim of tiger parenting with no real interests of her own.
I was a Boring Asian Female—but right now that was okay, because no one would believe that a Boring Asian Female could also be a killer.
—
The next morning, Leah andAlex biked to a bagel shop and brought us back bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. We spent the next few hours lounging on the couches while watching more Meg Ryan movies. In the afternoon, the weather had warmed up into the high fifties, and Leah suggested we “stopslothing around” and see the boardwalk. Most of the fried food vendors and souvenir stores were still shuttered for the off-season. A stream of high school students exited an imposing brick building and returned to near-identical houses with American flags jutting out from dormer windows. An empty rocking chair swayed gently in the wind and an overweight calico cat licked its right paw. He stared at us with disdain, like an elderly congregant turning to watch a family arrive late to Sunday service.
The water was too cold to swim in so we laid out a blanket and sat on the sand. As I watched the waves crash onto the shore, I could understand for the first time why writers made comparisons to the ocean all the time, why they all seemed to get a pass for using such a cliché reference. Some things in life are so magnificent that you can never talk about them enough, that no number of references would make them boring or derivative. I had never spent much time around the ocean, and I knew that this rocky shore in chilly Ocean City was probably not what came to mind when people thought of a breathtaking beach. Still, I found myself mesmerized by the great beauty of the sea, the calming sound of waves crashing onto the shore. Being from the Midwest, I had not spent enough time around the ocean for it to become a frame of reference for me. Instead of comparing things from my life to the ocean, I found myself comparing the ocean to things from my life. The water washing over my feet like the milky foam on a cappuccino from the dining hall espresso machine. The spray of ocean water on my face like the setting mist I used to keep my makeup in place. The waves crashing on the shore strong and relentless like the devastation I felt after getting rejected from law school. The murky depths of the water like my future, still unknown.
The sun was setting in the distance and a tangerine glow spread across the sky. “Let’s remember this moment,” I wanted to say. I wished I could slow down time and capture all of it: the sound of wet flip-flops on timber boardwalks, closed storefronts glinting in the Cheeto-colored sunset, the dusting of powdered sugar on Leah’s freckled nose. The disdainful expression that the locals at the grocery store made when we told them we were from New York, the decision for us to answer New York even though we all grew up somewhere else. The way Eunjin’s hazel eyes lightened under the sun, the way Alex’s skin turned translucent under the fluorescent streetlights.
My gratitude was not in complete earnest. Like a photograph with its negative, every moment I wanted to hold on to was one Laura would no longer be able to enjoy. And this gave me a bittersweet feeling: both that I was able to enjoy something that Laura couldn’t, and that someone could take it away from me at any second, the same way that I had taken it from Laura. My gratitude came from the newfound understanding of just how much I stood to lose.
—
The clarity that the tripprovided me faded away once I returned to campus. In place of the gratitude there was a growing void. It started the size of a pinprick. Or maybe it started as the size of an atom, and I only noticed it when it grew to be the size of a pinprick. But its radius compounded with each day, with each breath that I took, until it threatened to swallow me whole. The void was the absence of Laura, not as a person, but as a subject that was always on my mind. What was she doing right now? Which friends was she seeing this weekend? WouldI see her at Ferris again? I found myself refreshing her social media feeds even when I remembered she was dead. Some part of me believed that even if the flesh-and-blood Laura was gone, there still existed an online Laura who’d continue to live not through a bodily form but as a ghost in a parallel digital realm, who’d still graduate from college, get married, have kids, and each of these milestones would be marked in the form of stories, photos, captions, shares, and so on and so forth. And I would continue to follow her progress alongside my own.
Laura’s family made one public statement before retreating from social media to grieve privately. They thanked everyone for their well-wishes and for sharing memories of their daughter. They posted a photo of Laura on her seventh birthday, stuffing her mouth with a slice of chocolate cake, the frosting covering her face like a beard. I couldn’t help but notice that Laura and I looked quite alike at that age. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon monkey making peace signs. It was similar to one that I liked to wear. But I reminded myself that everyone had those types of shirts back then. It wasn’t something I should get too sentimental about.
The email from Columbia about Laura’s death said that she had planned to attend law school in the fall, but it didn’t specify where. I checked the social media accounts for all the law schools but none of them had posted anything about Laura. A terrible, insensitive thought entered my mind. If Laura had only died a year earlier, if she had never even applied for law school, then maybe I would’ve gotten in. What was the difference between dying at twenty-two and dying at twenty-one? If the gods had just relinquished one year from her lifespan, I would’ve been spared from my own despair.
To try to fill the void, I obsessed over nuances like these, but they were as effective as tossing a penny into a black hole. I filled my time with school and parties. I went to every professor’s office hours, every optional recitation. I ate my not-pasta bowl in the dining hall while pretending to pay attention to my friends’ conversations. Sometimes I’d see a flash of orange and look up in anticipation of Laura. Then I’d remember that she was dead, and that even if she weren’t dead, she wouldn’t be wearing the scarf because it was at the moment stuffed in the bottom of my lower desk drawer. I knew it was dumb of me to keep the scarf, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. It was a salve for the emptiness I felt. I liked to trace a finger over its sheeny surface, fold it in half, then in half again, guided by the creases in the fabric that Laura must’ve made by doing the same.
TWENTY
The next Wednesday, when Ireturned to my dorm at around 4:00 p.m., the moment that I was dreading had finally arrived.
There were two police officers waiting outside the door. One was short and plump, and the other was tall and skinny, as though they had been plucked straight from a sitcom. I would’ve found it funny had I not felt like I was going to faint.
“Elizabeth Zhang?” the short and plump one said, holding up his badge. “We’d like to take you to the station to ask you some questions.”
—
The inside of a policecar smelled the same as the inside of a cab, sweat and air freshener with a hint of peppermint. I tried to remember all of the things I was supposed to do when this moment arrived, but it was like someone had wiped them clean from my brain. On our way to the precinct the officers chatted with oneanother as though I were not there. The tall one complained that his wife wanted to have a third kid, while the short one, who was behind the wheel, listened and grunted every couple of seconds.
At a red light, the short one turned around to ask if I was okay. I mustered a slight nod.
“Don’t look so nervous, kid,” he said. “You’re not in trouble.” But I knew not to believe a word he said.
The drive could’ve been five minutes or fifty, I wasn’t sure. It was a warm day for mid-April and the AC was turned on. I was cold but I also couldn’t stop sweating and could feel the moisture gathering in my armpits and on my bottom, dampening the seat. I imagined the call that I would have to make. You were allowed one call, right? At least in the movies you were. What would I say to my mom? “Hey, Mom, I’ve been arrested because I accidentally killed someone.” And what about the pregnancy? Would I have to give birth in prison? I shook my head. Obviously, if it came to that, I would just have the abortion. Harvard would be out of the question anyway. Ironically, getting charged with murder would make me pretty interesting. But that was probably the wrong kind of interesting. Even in this dire situation, I couldn’t help but smile a little bit at the thought.
Eventually, we pulled up to the precinct. The officers led me through various hallways and I felt as though we were navigating a maze. I wouldn’t have been able to retrace our steps if someone had held a gun to my head. Finally, the tall cop opened the door to a small room with a desk and three chairs, one on one side and two on the other. It was just like in the movies, except the lights weren’t as dim. They directed me to sit on the side with just one chair. The short officer sat on one of the chairs on the opposite side.
“Are you thirsty?” the tall officer asked while still standing.
“Yes,” I croaked. He left and came back with a plastic cup of water while the short officer pulled out a notepad and a pen, setting both on the table in front of him. Then the tall officer left, leaving the two of us in the room.
“Is your partner coming back?” I asked. I did not pay attention to his answer. I wasn’t even sure why I asked. I assumed he had said no since he didn’t wait for the other guy to return before starting to ask questions.
