Yes, I probably had. For weeks I had intentionally isolated myself and allowed the depression and anxiety to fester like an infected wound until it spread to all my major organs. But therewere other facts in contention. For instance, no one, not even my mother, believed me when I said that I wasn’t trying to kill myself. To me, it was obvious. I couldn’t inflict that kind of pain on my mother, who had always loved me unconditionally. I could not bear the thought of imposing upon her that kind of infinite grief.
During my stay at the hospital, I asked the doctors many questions on my physical condition, my treatment plan, and my recovery time. I wanted to know the scientific names of the bones that were broken, the exact kind of physical therapy I would need, the reason they were giving me one type of drug instead of another. They joked that it felt like they were in residency all over again, and asked me why I wanted to know so many details. I said that I was just curious. Of course, I was lying. Because I was Asian, everyone generally was predisposed to thinking that I was a nerd, so it became quite simple to play the part of the intellectually curious inquirer. In reality, I was storing these facts in my brain one by one for future use: for when I reapplied to Harvard in the fall. These complex medical terms would add excellent color to my new essays. It was just unfortunate that I hadn’t discovered this sooner, that I hadn’t discovered sooner that I didn’t need a pregnancy to make me interesting. Getting hit by a bus was plenty interesting. Even better, I wouldn’t have to deal with a kid for the rest of my life. It was so much cleaner, so much easier. I only wished I had thought of getting hit by a bus sooner. Then I actually would’ve jumped in front of one on purpose.
—
The bus apparently had notbeen moving quickly, which was the only reason why I hadn’t sustained worse injuries. It had just picked up a few passengers at a station and was slowlybuilding up speed when the driver saw me crossing the street. He hit the brakes as soon as it appeared I was not bluffing in my willingness to walk into oncoming traffic.
The university contacted my mother. They decided it’d be best for me to take medical leave and finish my courses over the summer. I would still be able to walk at graduation in May with my friends, but I wouldn’t receive my diploma until the fall.
After coming to terms with the initial shock of my situation, I began to wonder if I had incriminated myself in Laura’s death. There were at least a dozen people at the meet-up who suspected I had been impersonating Laura online. I had even been wearing her scarf. What if one of them reported me to the police, suspecting that I may have been involved, or what if I was already on the police’s radar and they had heard about my outburst? Each day at the hospital, I waited for the police to show up. I waited for someone to ask me whether I had anything to do with Laura’s death. The dread made a home for itself in my psyche, a constant presence no matter what I was doing. I almost wished that the police would just show up, just question me, so at least I would know more about my own plight. I still believed that they did not have enough evidence to convict me. I had gone over the details one by one. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try, that there wouldn’t be more trouble for me in the future.
Still, no one around me brought up Laura. I had no idea how much other people, including my friends and my family, knew about the night of the accident or any of my other plans. When I checked my phone I noticed that the fake Laura account had been flagged and deleted by Facebook just a couple of hours after the meet-up. But the passwords to my computer and my phone were still intact, and it didn’t seem like anyone had gotteninto my accounts or connected me to any of my other plans. I wondered if anyone knew I had attended the meet-up pretending I was an admitted student, but no one brought that up to me either. When the psychiatrist asked me why I had been walking around late at night, I told her that I didn’t know. I told her that I didn’t remember much of that night. I wasn’t sure if blacking out was a common symptom of psychosis, but she didn’t push me too hard on my claims. The fact that everyone seemed to believe me so easily made me suspect that they didn’t actually believe me; they were just trying not to cause me further distress.
My twenty-second birthday loomed like a midterm I was woefully unprepared for. At least it wasn’t a particularly special birthday. Not like the year before, twenty-one, when I was serenaded down a catwalk by a drag queen at the gay bar near campus, drunk on ’80s music and vodka sodas that were mostly vodka. After all, wasn’t it true that adults didn’t care that much about birthdays? Maybe this was the first birthday that I wouldn’t care much about either. I guess it meant I was finally an adult.
But Eunjin insisted that we still do something. The past three years I had celebrated by downing carbs at Pisticci, an Italian restaurant on La Salle Street. My friends brought pasta from Pisticci in takeout containers to my room in Mount Sinai Hospital. My penne was lukewarm but I hadn’t had non-hospital food in days, so I enjoyed it even more than I had enjoyed it in the past in person.
“By the way,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as though digging for a piece of gossip far removed from my own reality, “whatever happened with Gina and Laura? Have there been any updates?”
Eunjin finished swallowing her bite of pasta. She glanceddown so I couldn’t make out her expression. “Rumor is that they dropped the charges.”
I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. They must’ve figured out that Gina wasn’t the one who snuck into Laura’s room. It would only be a matter of time before they found out it was me.
“Her parents requested a second autopsy. It turns out that the official cause of death is inconclusive. My friend who’s in medical school said that he would bet a million dollars on the pepper spray being the actual cause of death. But when you look at it from a legal perspective, there were too many compounding factors for them to charge someone,” Alex said with a helpless shrug.
“What? What compounding factors? The cocaine?”
Eunjin shook her head. “Her parents actually released the results of the drug test because they were so upset about the rumors. She tested clean for everything, including cocaine. People remembered wrong, or maybe she was just pretending to do it.”
“So if it wasn’t cocaine, what was it, then?”
“It turned out she had a congenital heart defect. She had been in and out of hospitals her entire life. Her parents said she wasn’t even supposed to live past the age of three.”
The last time I ever saw Laura, when she had caught me in her room, she had said that I knew nothing about her life, that I had no idea what she had been through. At the time, I had brushed it off. I knew a lot of people who acted like their lives had been harder than they actually were. With this information, I could no longer deny I had been wrong about Laura. She was right. I really didn’t know anything about her life. But I couldn’t say this out loud, so all I said was “Wow.”
“I’m just glad that they put an end to all of this,” Leah said. “There were so many theories floating around. Remember for a couple days the rumor was that it was a suicide? They found a note in her pocket that almost made it sound like she knew she was going to die. It was like, ‘I love you, Mom and Dad. Don’t worry about me.’ But her parents said that she’s been carrying around notes like that her entire life. A habit from when she was in the hospital a lot.”
I shuddered at the thought. Did she write these notes in the same neat little handwriting she used for class? And in her last moments, when she was suffocating from the pepper spray, had her mind returned to whether anyone would find them? I had never known this morbid side of Laura’s personality, but perhaps she didn’t see it as morbid. Her health issues as a child had forced her to face head-on the truth of her own mortality, a truth that most people did not acknowledge or accept until much later in life, if at all. She may not have seen her actions as morbid, but simply pragmatic. I could not fathom the bravery that must’ve taken. It was yet another reminder of all the things I hadn’t known about Laura.
“Why isn’t any of this in the news?” I asked. I had set alerts for anything related to Laura’s case but didn’t hear about any of this.
“The stuff about the second autopsy was all just confirmed like two hours ago, but rumors have been circling for a while,” Leah said.
I pulled up my phone. Sure enough, there was an article from a local news outlet about the charges getting dropped.
“It’s still terrible that Laura died,” Eunjin said. “But to behonest, I’m a bit relieved that Gina has been cleared. Even if Laura did die as a result of the pepper spray, we don’t know what really happened in that room.”
Leah and Alex nodded. We moved on to a different subject.
—
A few weeks after thebus accident, I was cleared to go home. My mother rolled me in a wheelchair to our terminal at JFK, and we headed to South Dakota. I didn’t like that I thought of South Dakota as home, but where else would “home” be? It certainly wasn’t my dorm room, which was now just four blank walls and standard-issue furniture that was slightly more worn down than when I first moved in. My mother had hired packers to ship all of my possessions to South Dakota. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I would return in a month to walk on the stage for graduation, but I would need to stay in a hotel, and I wouldn’t receive my diploma until I had finished all of my summer classes.
My mother and I came to a compromise that allowed me to narrowly avoid institutionalization. Instead of an inpatient clinic, I’d attend three online therapy sessions each week and avoid anything related to law school. It was a precarious situation; my mother made it clear that at any point she could change her mind and ship me off to a psychiatric center. I managed to convince her that I was not suicidal, but she thought that I still suffered from some extreme case of anxiety and depression. If I were being totally honest, I’d say that she was probably right. In addition to the painkillers for my physical wounds, I was prescribed 10 milligrams of Lexapro per day and rest. Lots of rest. But secretly, I was already starting to work on my law schoolapplication. I’d change my screen to a show or a movie every time she walked into my room, but as soon as she left, I’d be working on my essays once again.
But my mother was sneakier than I expected. There was a spot on our living room couch that I particularly liked to work from, curled up in the corner with my laptop perched on my legs. She installed a mirror on the wall behind the couch under the guise of making the room appear larger. I didn’t think much of it until one day she confronted me about my online activity. Each time she had approached me with a bowl of sliced fruit was actually an excuse to spy on my online activity in the mirror. I tried to deny it but the evidence was indisputable. She had photos of the mirror reflection that, upon zooming in, showed the exact words that I was typing. “I’d be a good fit for Harvard because…”
I tried to reason with her. “Mom, I can’t put my life on hold forever,” I said. “Besides, I’m better now. My injuries are healing nicely and I’m medicated. It’s okay. You know I don’t do well being idle all the time. I need something to work on, something to hope for. Isn’t a feeling of hopelessness like the number one symptom of depression?”
