I tried to avoid other people. Gina’s arrest had sparked a flurry of gossip on campus. It was all anyone could talk about, including my friends, and I was worried that I would blurt something incriminating if I were involved in one of these conversations. My brain hadn’t been working well recently. Sometimes I’d look in my wardrobe and wonder why my clothes looked so bland, so cheap. I’d look in the mirror and wonder how I had gotten shorter overnight. I’d look at my desk andwonder where all of the economics textbooks had gone, and where was the postcard from that cute little Parisian bookstore that I had gone to with my friend Gina? Did it fall off my wall? Was it under my bed? I quite liked the postcard, even though it served as a reminder that Gina was still upset with me. Upset with me for sleeping with Harrison. I had already apologized a billion times, told her I was just being drunk and stupid that night, that I regretted it more than I regretted anything I had done in my life, but she still hadn’t forgiven me. Maybe I’d try apologizing again. Maybe I’d send her a twelve-pack of those little cupcakes that she liked. Maybe I’d go to that party that she was throwing. She couldn’t avoid me forever; she’d have to forgive me at some point. I took out my Hermès scarf and wrapped it around my neck. I checked Facebook for new posts from my future peers at Harvard Law School. “Omg! I also love skiing,” I commented on one. “My favorite drink is also an espresso martini!” I commented on another.
Eventually, I’d snap out of it. Usually after five minutes. The longest was half an hour. A deep, aching disappointment always accompanied my returns to reality. I’d remember that I didn’t know how to ski, and that I didn’t drink espresso martinis. I’d remember the strands of hair that stuck to her forehead when she fell down onto the floor. The scent of her perfume that I could smell a little even after I went home.
The first few weeks after I found out that Laura had gotten into Harvard, I’d sometimes daydream about confronting her about her inferiority. I’d show her her stats, her essays, and ask her point-blank how she managed to get in with such a mediocre profile. She’d surprise me by telling me that she was aware of her own mediocrity. She’d tell me that she didn’t deserve to attendHarvard Law, that her cousin was the admissions officer or something. She’d admit that I was more worthy of the spot. Her acknowledgment wouldn’t have made up for her taking my place, but it would’ve been something.
—
It was nearing the endof April, and if I had it my way, I’d spend all my time just going to class, working on the addendum, and scrolling through the Harvard Law School Facebook group. But I knew it was important to socialize. Socializing was an important part of my plan to act as normal as possible. In the event that the police figured out that I was the one who tricked my way into Laura’s room and decided to pull my friends in for questioning, I needed them to say that I had been acting completely fine these past few weeks. Not at all like someone who committed manslaughter. It couldn’t have been me.
Leah invited us to a rave and I said yes. It was the perfect type of social outing in my current state. You couldn’t talk at raves. They were too loud. So if I started blabbering things I shouldn’t be blabbering, no one would be able to hear me anyway.
She had gotten the tickets from some old hookup who was now a record producer. Eunjin and I met her and Alex in their dorm. We sat on their beds with our feet dangling a few inches from the floor like children on adult-sized chairs. Leah spread glitter over our eyelids. I counted down the minutes until we would be at the concert venue. Whenever someone spoke to me and I felt obligated to respond, I repeated my words twice in my head before speaking them out loud.
Alex offered us acid. I said no. All three of my friends looked at me in surprise. “You’re going to go stone-cold sober?” theysaid. My palms began to sweat. I had already said no to alcohol. It was quite suspicious to also say no to drugs. Who went to a rave stone-cold sober? Eunjin had said no to the acid, but she was on her third drink. I could feel myself spiraling, and I pictured a mini figurine of myself screaming for help as I was getting flushed down the toilet, around and around until I disappeared out of sight into some gross sewage system that I would never escape from. But I thought of the baby, and I knew I had to stick with my answer. “I’m just not in the best mental state right now,” I said, and to my surprise and relief, they didn’t say anything else about it.
We shared a car to the venue. Inside, it stank of sweat and weed. Beams of light flashed like sensors out of a spy movie. The music was so loud it felt like my heart was thumping along with the bass. I wondered if the baby could feel it too; I wondered if the baby was doing its own little dance inside the womb. Leah stood behind Alex with both hands on their waist. Their eyes were closed, and they swayed their hips to the beat. They reminded me of the congregants at an evangelical church. If those people were worshipping God, what were we worshipping? Whatever it was, we were devoted to it.
Eunjin grabbed my hand and yelled into my ear.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
A warm hand touched my waist. A couple of guys, grinning and pumping their fists, were trying to dance with Eunjin and me. One of them was wearing a mesh top, and the other had on a fanny pack that glowed in the dark. They asked for our names. Eunjin started to tell them we had boyfriends, but before shefinished, one of them grabbed her waist to try to pull her toward him. I froze, but Leah and Alex instantly started to yell and push them away.
“You fucking bitch,” one of them said. Leah held up her phone and turned on flash. “Say that again to the camera,” she said. They gave her the middle finger and disappeared into the crowd.
The concert ended with confetti, as these things always did. I tried to spot the two guys from before, but there were too many mesh tops and glow-in-the-dark fanny packs. It was too bad I didn’t have my pepper spray anymore. We walked a couple blocks south of the venue to catch a taxi back to campus. Eunjin went to bed, and I went to the bathroom. The glitter had stayed loyal to my eyelids. I quite liked the look. Black and silver. Like the color scheme of a bachelor pad. Or a satellite picture of outer space.
I returned to my room and crawled under my duvet. I was suddenly very cold; I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t have an extra blanket so I took out all the towels from my closet and layered them on my bed. I curled up into a fetal position, tucking my head in between my legs. I imagined the baby inside my stomach doing the same. I needed to go to sleep. I hopped out of bed and dug through my drawers until I found the melatonin. I took twice the recommended dose. Soon, I entered that twilight state where I wasn’t totally conscious and I wasn’t totally unconscious, and I remained in that limbo for minutes, hours, I wasn’t totally sure—until suddenly I jolted awake.
It was still dark in the room. When I opened my eyes, I had the vague sense that my body had woken me up out of discomfort, like when you realize that you urgently need to use therestroom. There was a sharp pain originating two inches below my belly button. I was used to suffering through these unpleasant waves, biting the edges of a pillow and willing the episode to end. But unlike those other times, there was a stream of liquid trickling onto my underwear and down the side of my leg. The smell of iron told me everything that I needed to know.
I did not move from my fetal position. The blood was soaking through my pants. I could tell that it was getting on the sheets. But still, I lay there, envisioning the life draining from my body. Not really a life, but the potential of a life. Briefly, I considered trying to shove it all back up my body, all the blood and tissue, as though that would make a difference, like rewinding a video, like these discharged elements could once again become a fetus.
I let out a sob, and suddenly there were more, and I physically could not will my chest to keep still as it just kept on heaving and heaving, as though the despair inside me had already filled up the entire container of my body and now was threatening to spill out into the open air, and soon it would fill up the room as well and would smash through the windows, billowing through the streets of New York. I could not tell you what I was sobbing about. It was a more general despair. All I could do was let it pass on its own.
Twenty minutes later, I mustered up the courage to peek under the covers. A crimson cloud had spread across the sheets. When I stood up, I felt more blood falling from me, pooling in my underwear, trickling down my thighs. A hint of dawn was seeping through my closed blinds, or maybe it was moonlight, or maybe my eyes had just gotten used to the darkness.
My room looked hopelessly bland, hopelessly normal. You would not know anything had changed unless you peeked underthe covers, noticed the pool of blood. But why should my room, the physical realm I resided in, not mirror my internal state? Why should my room look so orderly, so normal, when inside I did not know what I was feeling, I just knew what I wasn’t: I was not feeling orderly, I was not feeling normal. I remembered painting the walls with my mom, choosing the colors at Home Depot to match the moods we wished to evoke for each space. Sky blue, contemplative, for the office. Lavender, feminine, for the bathroom. Pewter, unthreatening, for the living room. What about red? Did anyone paint their walls red, or did that evoke the wrong moods, which would be what? Anger? Sexuality? Bloodthirst? I pushed my face into the pillow and screamed.
—
I woke up the nextmorning in a pool of my own blood. I stripped off the clothes from my body and the sheets from my bed. I called the free clinic, told them I had just had a miscarriage and that I needed to see the doctor as soon as possible. Fortunately, they told me that Dr. Jordan was available. There had been a last-minute cancellation, and if I could get myself to the clinic in twenty minutes, she could see me right away.
Dr. Jordan’s office smelled like antiseptic. Or maybe that was just me, having just used half a container of disinfecting wipes to clean some of the blood off my floor. I told her about what had happened, and she conducted a short exam to confirm the miscarriage. Afterward, she said that she was very sorry for my loss. I told her that I was also sorry for my loss. She said that each woman reacted to the process differently, but that it was important to have a support system in place. Did I have a supportsystem in place? she asked. I nodded. Fortunately, she said, my body was doing a “good job” of taking care of things naturally.
“Is there anything else that I can do for you?” she asked.
There wasn’t, but I found myself racking my brain for reasons to stay in this room with her. I asked her questions that I already knew the answers to. Would the miscarriage affect any future pregnancies? Should I be worried about how much blood I had lost? It was only then that I realized how attached to Dr. Jordan I had become. Even though I had only met her a few weeks ago, it felt like we had known each other for much longer. I would miss her coffee breath, her wrinkled white lab coats, her brown hair that was parted just slightly to the left of the middle of her forehead. I wondered whether that was intentional, or whether she meant to part it in the middle. I wanted to ask but held my tongue. That felt out-of-bounds for a doctor-patient relationship. Wasn’t that strange? You could tell someone your biggest secret, the secret that not even your mom or your best friend knew about, but you could also not feel comfortable asking the same person about how they did their hair.
—
After my appointment with Dr.Jordan I returned to my dorm, searching the building’s storage closets until I found a bucket large enough for my purpose. I brought it to the bathroom and filled it up with warm water and soap. It was too heavy to carry, so I scooted it inch by inch along the carpeted hallway until I made it back to my room, careful not to splash too much onto the floor. I dumped in half a container of stain remover, then gently placed my sheets inside the bucket, watching thesoapy water darken the streaks of blood, which had faded to a dull brown overnight. After a couple of hours, I scooted the bucket back to the bathroom and I dumped out the murky water. Then I brought the sheets in a garbage bag to the laundry room, washing them on the strongest cycle. It helped that the sheets were purple to begin with, so when I took them out of the dryer, I couldn’t spot the stains.
But seeing the sheets restored to their prior state brought me a profound sense of loss. Like most things in my life, the baby to me was just a means to an end. But I couldn’t bear that I would continue on with my life as though the baby had never existed at all. I tried to comfort myself with scientific facts. Dr. Jordan explained that I had miscarried at fourteen weeks, meaning I had just barely passed the first trimester. The fetus had been barely the size of a nectarine. I was stupid to even think of the pregnancy as a baby. But if anything, these numbers and facts, so abstract and sanitized from the individual experiences of real life, just made me feel more alone.
