She brushed a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Elizabeth…”
“I know, I know. But we’ve been over this a million times.”
“You’re not going to get into Harvard.”
This was not what I had expected. A lecture about mental health, yes. A lecture about how there were plenty of fantastic law schools besides Harvard, yes. But discouragement? This was new.
“I spoke to your psychiatrist and we weren’t sure the righttime to tell you, but given that you’ve started to go down this rabbit hole again, I think it’s in your best interest to know.”
“Know what?”
“Someone at that bar recorded a video of you during your…episode.”
“What?!”
“That’s why we made you delete your social media accounts.”
“And…people have seen it?”
She nodded. “Not a lot…a few thousand. We were able to get it taken down afterward.”
“But those could be just bots! We don’t know that Harvard has seen it. And how would they prove it wasn’t AI?”
“That’s true,” she said carefully, “but after everything, Harvard just doesn’t seem like the best place for you right now.”
“But…I…maybe I can spin this. Maybe I can spin it so that it makes me interesting. It makes me an interesting candidate.”
She shook her head. “Elizabeth, I think it’s time to close this chapter in your life. Think of all that it’s led to. Your depression, your anxiety. And don’t forget, you nearly died.”
“That had nothing to do with it. Nothing, I swear. That was separate.”
“You hold such little regard for your own well-being. Maybe if you’re not willing to let go of all of this nonsense for yourself, you should let go of it for me. What would I do if you were gone? And your friends. Think of Eunjin. Think of Leah. Think of Alex. Do you know how worried all of us were when you were in the hospital?”
My eyes welled up with tears. “I…I’m sorry.”
“And apart from all that, you should be grateful that the newautopsy results for Laura came out shortly after your incident. Otherwise, I might’ve had to hire a defense attorney.” She raised her eyebrows. “Can you imagine? They would think that you killed her.”
—
I spent the next seventy-twohours holed up in my room like an invalid. Day one was spent scheming, thinking of ways that I could work the embarrassing video in my favor. First, I needed to inspect the damage. But even I, with my extensive experience in online stalking, was not able to find the full video. I imagined my mother must’ve had to pay an expensive service to get it taken down. I promised myself that I’d pay her back once I graduated from law school. I’d take her on a vacation. International. Not just international, but somewhere expensive, like Switzerland. We’d fly first-class.
Of course, all of that still required that I first get into Harvard Law School. I was finally able to obtain a ten-second clip from an obscure website. It was even worse than I thought. The clip was captioned “Hysterical Asian woman throws fit at bar in New York.” The ten seconds felt like they dragged on for a millennium. I looked like I had been possessed by a demon. Mascara was running down my cheeks, and there was a tear in my right shoulder, exposing the corner of my bra, which also had a tear. I was bent over and shouting, waving my arms around frantically. Why did I not remember any of this? My only consolation was that I looked quite thin. It must’ve been all the not-pasta bowls I had been eating. The smeared mascara gave me kind of a grungy look that was not entirely unflattering. I was confident that, if you didn’t take into account any of my behavior, I hadreached the 75th percentile of attractiveness in the video. That was an all-time high for me.
Unfortunately, that initial elation did not last. After replaying the video with the sound muted a few dozen times in order to bask in my own lovely appearance, I realized that even I wasn’t delusional enough to think that I could spin this video in my favor. Best-case scenario was that they didn’t even see it, but I couldn’t justaskthem about it—I would essentially just be doxxing myself. If they did see it, I would be able to make the case that I had recovered from a severe psychological disorder, but I would need to prove that I had made a full recovery, and I doubted that they would believe my condition had sufficiently ameliorated in the span of a few months to ensure no future incidents would occur.
And now that I was thinking about it, they were probably right. Could I be sure that I wouldn’t have another episode? Now that I was home, it appeared clearer to me that my brain was not working the way that it was supposed to, like a fog had descended over all the things that my frontal lobe was in charge of. I read over the essays that I had turned in for class shortly before the “incident,” and I didn’t really remember writing them. The arguments in them weren’t incoherent, but I could tell that I had been operating on autopilot. Then I read the addendum I had drafted to send to the law school admissions office. That one was so incoherent that I had to delete it completely. It made me cringe too much.
I looked up Antigone, the woman who had exposed me at the Harvard Law School meet-up, on Instagram. Her most recent post was a picture of her smiling while crouched in front ofa group of kids.Limited access to internet for the next 3 months and have deleted all social media apps from my phone!she said in the caption.Working on living in the moment in a world full of distractions.According to her location tag, she was staying in a small village in Malaysia. On the bright side, she was probably too preoccupied with collecting worldly anecdotes to think about me, the unhinged girl from that event in the East Village.
Day two was spent coming up with alternative plans. Maybe law school was never for me, after all! Maybe this was a sign from the universe that I was meant to choose a different prestigious path that would still allow me to obtain the life I had always dreamed of. I could pivot to finance or consulting. Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. If that didn’t work out, Morgan Stanley or BCG. But almost as soon as I found temporary solace in this plan B, I learned that obtaining these jobs required you to start preparing as early as I had started preparing for law school. I didn’t have the right internships on my résumé or the technical interview skills needed. At best, I could get a job at a boutique consulting firm no one had ever heard of, and that sounded even worse than going to Georgetown.
Day three was spent numb. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling like the one time in freshman year that I had taken acid, except this time nothing was slithering. My mother knocked on my door just after noon. I figured it was, as usual, to bring me lunch and try to convince me to go outside, the former of which I dutifully accepted, as eating was required to stay alive, and staying alive was required to accomplish all of my goals, and the latter of which I always declined. Almost as soon as she opened the door, though, I noticed the energy was different. For one,she was speaking to me completely in English. For two, she was wearing that type of wide smile that moms put on only when other people are around.
And just like that, Gigi walked in. Georgiana Van Aartsen, high school prom queen, varsity volleyball player, natural blonde, heiress to the Van Aartsen Midwestern distribution company. Gigi Van Aartsen, the precise archetype of person for whom I had escaped South Dakota to prove my superiority. Yet here she was, looking as blonde and bubbly as ever in her floral sundress, and here I was, looking like an invalid in my childhood bedroom wearing the same pajamas for the third day in a row. The floral sundress would not have been considered fashionable in New York, but Gigi was blissfully unaware of her own basicness. Only I knew. So I guess you could say it only mattered to me. It didn’t matter at all to her.
She plopped next to me on the bed.
