“Maybe she was just allergic to pepper spray,” his friend replied. “I mean, I’ve been pepper sprayed before. It sucked, but it didn’t kill me. Seems like just a really, really unlucky situation for everyone involved.”
I found it jarring how quickly Gina’s friends became convinced that she was culpable.
The common sentiment was that Gina likely hadn’t meant to kill her; otherwise why would she have chosen to use pepper spray? They believed it had been a tragic accident, but they still believed that she did it. Gina had been furious over Laura’s betrayal, they said. And besides, we all knew what it was like toget ghosted by a guy you really liked. It sucked. It made you crazy.
“The worst part is, the Harrison guy isn’t even that hot,” Leah complained. She was right, but I couldn’t blame either Laura or Gina for their choice in guys. It was slim pickings for normal-ish heterosexual men at Columbia University, and Harrison was tall, was not a sociopath, and looked like he showered regularly.
As for my involvement—that, in my humble opinion, was the most interesting part. The police did indeed find the footage of me sneaking into Laura’s town house. They did find out that the person claiming to be Laura was not actually Laura. But here’s what was absolutely hilarious: They thought that it was Gina in the footage! They thought it was Gina pretending to be Laura to the housing employee and getting access to Laura’s room. They thought thatIwasGina! I laughed until I cried when I learned about this. To make matters even funnier, the housing employee himself identified Gina as the person to whom he had given the temporary key card. I never thought I’d ever say this in my entire life, but thank the heavens that people think all Asians look alike! Thank the heavens for stereotypes! Thank the heavens for racism!
Once I got over the relief of not being accused of murder, I found there was even more to be elated about. Clearly, my physical appearance bore some similarity to that of Gina. Gina was quite pretty—not as pretty as Laura, but obviously she was pretty enough to be friends with Laura and get into Theta. And they mistook me forher. That meant I had increased my percentile of attractiveness. Maybe I was getting a pregnancy glow.
“Have I been looking better than usual?” I asked Eunjin one day.
“Uh…” She looked bewildered. “I mean, I think you always look great.”
I rolled my eyes. She saw me almost every day, which was why she didn’t notice the difference.
After the elation wore off, the guilt began to sink in. Gina would be facing consequences for something that she didn’t do. With the arrest report, we now knew for sure that the pepper spray I used had killed Laura. And Gina would be paying for the crime. It was a counterbalance to the relief of no longer being a suspect, but I was numb to experiencing either sensation to the greatest extent. I was hovering on the edge of a black hole. The black hole sucked in both the guilt and the relief. In the place of these emotions it left an insatiable addiction. My mind kept going back to Laura and those last moments in her room, the fact that I had been witness to her last moments of consciousness. I compulsively checked Laura’s social media accounts to the point that I had memorized every caption, could describe every picture in every post.
When I ran out of material on Instagram I went to her lesser-used accounts, like Facebook. She had never been very active on the platform, but I went to her profile to look at the groups that she had joined, wondering if any of them would clue me in to which law schools she had been accepted to. No “Harvard Law School Class of 2027” group or “Yale Law School Class of 2027” group, unfortunately, and I found it such a shame that she would’ve missed the opportunity to join an online circle of other 99th percentile people. I felt that familiar pinch of envy. Envy for a dead girl, but envy nonetheless.
I rubbed my stomach. With the baby, it was practically guaranteed that I would get into Harvard Law School. I had alreadystarted working on the letter I’d send about my situation. It’d only be a matter of time before I could join one of these Facebook groups myself. Days, maybe weeks, depending on how quickly the admissions officers made their decision. Still, that was too long. If only I could join now. Oh, I wanted so badly to join now.
The cursor on my laptop screen moved like it was being controlled by a ghost. Maybe Laura was the one moving it. I looked down. No, it was my hand, but I was disassociated from its movements. Laura was moving through me, I liked to think.
I created a new Facebook profile. First name Laura, last name Rose. Rose was actually her middle name, but plenty of people used their middle names as their last names on Facebook, and I used it this time to arouse less suspicion. For the profile photo, I uploaded a generic photo of a waterfall. I set my occupation as “student at Columbia University” without specifying which school. The key was to provide enough information for the admins of the Facebook group to believe I was one of their admitted students, but not enough for the Columbia students I was about to add as friends to suspect I was impersonating the dead Laura Kim. I added a hundred people, then added a hundred more the next day and the day after that. Most people rejected or ignored my request, but by the end of the week I had about 200 “friends.” In the meantime, I shared a few more photos of nature on my feed. Then I looked up the official admitted students group for Harvard Law School and requested to join the group.
All it asked for was my first name, last name, and undergraduate school. Easy-peasy. Laura Kim, Columbia University. A day later, I was in.
—
How wonderful it was tobe with my peers, to be with these like-minded, hardworking future lawyers. It made me almost feel okay that Eunjin was abandoning me to move to Austria. I no longer needed her. I would be surrounded by other future lawyers who would probably be a bore to talk to, but that was a price I was willing to pay. Besides, I would have the baby, my own little Eunjin 2.0.
The Facebook group was filled with introductions from accepted applicants. I loved reading about their hometowns, their undergraduate schools, their majors, their summer plans, what job they worked before law school or whether they were matriculating straight from college, like me. I commented on each of them as Laura Rose. No one suspected a thing. I hadn’t gotten into Harvard yet, but it was only a matter of time. It was opening a bag of chips while standing in line for the checkout counter. Sure, you hadn’t technically paid for them yet, but you were going to, and no one would arrest you for this harmless act. The order was just a formality. Just semantics.
I always knew that I was destined to be extraordinary, and that the path to becoming extraordinary was not always linear. Those were the most compelling stories anyway. The people who followed a linear path were just boring or beneficiaries of nepotism. I was neither. I was born and raised in South Dakota, moved to New York City to attend one of the best universities in the world, accidentally killed someone at said university, decided to have a baby while still in college, and would attend one of the best law schools in the world. Someday the baby would tell the story of me to her friends, and they would all feel so nervous andexcited to meet me. I would invite them to dinner at my classic six apartment where my private chef would cook us all a delicious and healthy three-course meal. I would let them drink wine even if they were underage, but only a little bit. I would be a “cool mom” in the sophisticated, cultured,evolvedway, not the tacky, low-class, irresponsible way. At dinner, while they were all trying hard to use proper table etiquette, they would ask me why I decided to become a lawyer. I’d give them some bullshit answer about how rewarding it felt to be intellectually stimulated every day and how much I just loved the people at my firm. It would be me at the head of the table, mentoring all these wonderful young women who were friends of my daughter. For some reason, I always imagined the baby as a girl.
In my vision, there was no man. Why would I need a man? It was just me and Eunjin 2.0 against the world. But if I didn’t have a man, others might assume that I just couldn’t get one, that I was a sad, lonely spinster, and they would use my singledom as a reason why I wasn’t that much of a winner after all, why they didn’t need to envy me. But I needed them to envy me! So I would have a husband. An impressive husband, but not more impressive than me. A husband who was successful and doted on me. It would be better for him to meet me after I had already established myself as a successful lawyer so his first and forever impression of me would be of someone strong and successful. He needed to feel that I was born a winner, that I had been a winner all my life, that I was never the college senior who had a panic attack in her room, whose friend had to call the ambulance because she thought she was dying.
No one in my life would know about that embarrassing incident. Well, Eunjin would know, but by that time it would’ve beenyears and years since she abandoned me, so she wouldn’t be in my life anymore anyway. I lifted up my shirt until I could see my belly button. “Isn’t that right, Eunjin 2.0? By then, you won’t be Eunjin 2.0. You’ll just be Eunjin 1.0. Scratch that, just Eunjin.”
I smiled at my belly button. It was an innie, not an outie. It was quite a deep innie, actually. When I was young, I thought that there was no end to the hole, that it was a channel directly to my stomach. I thought that if I slept on my tummy, a little bit of intestine would fall out. Or if I put my finger in far enough, I would touch the food I had eaten for dinner. I would touch the baby. No, I wouldn’t touch the baby, that was a silly thought. I knew how belly buttons worked now.
“Oh no! I just remembered. I have some unfinished business to take care of,” I said to my belly button. I tugged my shirt back down. I logged in to my admissions portal for Georgetown and confirmed that I would not be attending their school. There was an optional survey asking me what I would be doing instead. I pressed “Committed to a different program.” In the box asking me to provide which program, I typed in “Harvard” and clicked submit.
—
When I wasn’t scrolling throughthe Harvard Law School Facebook group, I started working on the note I would write to the admissions committee about why they should accept me to the incoming class. I had spent November and December figuring out why Laura had gotten in. I had spent February trying to get her rescinded. I had spent March and April making sure I wasn’t getting convicted of murder. And now that Laurawas dead and no one suspected me of having anything to do with her death, my path was clear. All that was left was drafting the damn email.
But how could I write the perfect email that would strike the right balance of sincerity and ambition? I could pump out a ten-page essay in the span of a day, but when it came to this three-paragraph explanation, I found myself staring at a blank page on my computer screen for hours at a time. My plan to use the baby to get into Harvard had consumed my headspace for so long that when the time finally came to complete the last step, my mind went blank.
I researched online for how people typically emailed admissions officers for updates to their application. Usually, they would send a short note and attach an addendum with a description regarding their situation. For instance, they could explain they had received a bad grade that semester because they had been taking care of a sick relative at home. But there were no example addendums available for how to explain your decision to have a baby, subtly but effectively using that to make yourself appear like a more interesting applicant.
Five hundred words seemed like a good length for the addendum: enough to explain my situation without being too verbose. I set a goal of writing one hundred words a day. By day five I’d have a complete addendum. I told myself not to worry about a bad first draft. It was more important to get words down, and I’d just edit it later. But after the first five-day cycle, when I read through the first draft that I had written, I deleted it all. I tried restarting again and again, with the same result. None of it was good enough, not even a good enough starting point to shapeinto something better. No matter how hard I tried to brute-force my way into finishing the addendum, I always ended up back where I began: with a blank sheet of paper.
—
It became harder and harderto feel motivated to work on the addendum, especially when I knew that my future self would likely just delete all my progress anyway. But I couldn’t just not work on it—eventually I would need to turn something in. I needed an external incentive. So after I finished writing the hundred words each day, I allowed myself to scroll through the Harvard Law School Facebook group, liking and commenting on every new post—not just the introductions, but also the questions, like “What is everyone here doing about housing?” and “Best restaurants in the area to take my parents to?” It was quite effective at filling the void. The only problem was that every time it filled the void, the void would appear to expand, like an insatiable monster from a fairy tale whose appetite only increased with every little creature it was fed. I could feel the marginal joy I derived from each new post decreasing every time I checked the group. I would soon need something else to feed the void. I just wasn’t yet sure what that would be.
