I could barely hear what she was saying; something about being here when the ambulance arrived. After a few minutes, I felt my breathing slow down. I no longer felt like I was going to die, and my vision had cleared up. A droplet of something was sliding down the side of my face, reaching my upper lip. I licked it with my tongue; it tasted like salt. It was only then that I realized my entire body was covered in sweat. Eunjin was still sitting next to me on the carpet, furiously texting on her phone.
“Shit,” I said. “I think I feel better now.”
“Did you take something? Acid? Coke? Adderall?” Eunjin asked. “What did you take?”
“No! I literally was in my room.”
The elevator dinged. Two EMTs emerged, and they speed-walked down the hallway while rolling a bright red stretcher.
“I’m fine now!” I yelled across the hall. They didn’t seem to hear me. The two of them approached where Eunjin and I were sitting on the floor and looked down at us with concern. One was a middle-aged woman with brown hair tied in a low ponytail, and the other looked like a student. I remembered that Columbia’s EMT service hired undergraduates as a part of their program. My panic instantly alchemized into embarrassment. This guy might’ve been in one of my classes.
“I’m fine now. False alarm! Sorry for making you guys come all the way over here,” I said.
“Are you sure?” the undergraduate asked.
“Yes, false alarm. I’m totally fine! I was just overreacting. Everything is okay now.”
As if the arrival of the EMTs wasn’t bad enough, my next-door neighbor also peeked out of her door. Her name was Allie, Amy? Something like that.
“Is everything okay over here?”
“Yes, it is! You should go back to your room! It’s all good.” By acting upbeat, maybe I could make them think that Eunjin was having a medical emergency, not me. I stood, only to feel my vision growing blurry again. I instantly crumpled against the wall.
“Whoa, easy there,” the middle-aged EMT said, helping me to the floor. Humiliation washed over me. All I wanted to do was hide away under the covers in my bed, but I imagined thatwould be even more of an inconvenience to them, as they probably had to get certain information from me to make sure I was okay. I wanted to seem cooperative, to give them everything they needed to feel certain I was fine and move on. They asked questions about my health and I tried to downplay the symptoms I had experienced to the point that I even started believing my own assurances. Did I really think I was going to die? No, I must’ve just blurted that out without thinking. Did I really have trouble breathing? No, it must’ve just been heartburn from something I ate at the dining hall.
They asked if something had happened to trigger my episode. I told them that I had received some bad news but that it was no big deal and I was over it now. In reality I thought that it was an extremely big deal, but I didn’t want all of their attention on me, and I didn’t want to speak into the world what was, for now, relegated to just my computer screen.
The older paramedic encouraged me to visit a psychiatrist. “You might’ve had a panic attack,” she said. “It’s okay. Plenty of people have them, and you can take some medication to prevent them from happening again.”
I promised I would, and the two of them left with their stretcher, the older paramedic rolling it down the hall like those nannies I saw pushing strollers whenever I went to Central Park. My neighbor had returned to her dorm. I prayed for no more curious onlookers.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Eunjin asked. She helped me stand up and led me into her room. She handed me her water bottle; I took a gulp and realized how dehydrated I was. I emptied it within a few seconds.
“Yes, I’m totally fine,” I said, wiping my mouth with a sleeve.
“Do you want me to call your mom?”
“No! Absolutely not.”
Eunjin insisted that I lie on her bed for a few minutes. My head still felt woozy so I slipped off my shoes and lay down on my back. She didn’t have a mattress topper, and I could feel every bump of the flimsy foam interior. The springs creaked as I rolled around in search of a comfortable position.
To make matters worse, I realized that I didn’t have my key card. I was locked out of my room.
I didn’t realize I had been mumbling my thoughts out loud until Eunjin said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll call housing services.”
Her kindness devastated me. I knew I didn’t deserve it, that nothing about my situation, from an objective point of view, warranted the drama that I was enacting upon myself and everyone around me. There were people who overcame tragedy, illness, war, devastation—in other words,real problems—while I was crying over a law school rejection as though it were the end of the world. Yet no amount of reasoning could stop me from feeling like itwasthe end of the world; no amount could bridge the disconnect between my rational thoughts and my visceral reaction. This was my whole world. Every day, I went to class and studied hard and wrote my essays to get good grades so I could go to Harvard. This singular goal had occupied my mind every day, become as much a part of my routine as eating or sleeping. If anything, sometimes I would even sacrifice my eating and sleeping—skip a meal or stay up late studying—so that I could meet this goal. It wasn’t catastrophic in the grand scheme of things, but it was catastrophic to me. Ineededthis.
Twenty minutes later, a staff member came and unlocked thedoor. “Here you go. Careful you don’t get locked out twice. Next time there’s a twenty-five-dollar fee,” she said to Eunjin, ignoring my presence. Eunjin nodded. The staff member thought that Eunjin was the one who was locked out, even though she had access to the name and picture of the person living in the room. I hated how flattered I felt to be mistaken for her. But maybe it was just because no one could tell Asians apart.
I returned to my room and flipped off the lights. I didn’t bother changing into pajamas or closing the blinds before climbing into bed. The streetlamps outside created shadows on the ceiling. I let my imagination warp them into a bear, a desk, and a very obese cat, pretending I was taking a Rorschach test. Did people still take those? I was pretty sure they didn’t, but I couldn’t remember the reason. Finally, I was too tired to make anything out of the shadows; they just looked like blobs. I stared at them until I fell asleep.
THREE
The rest of the weekI waited for an email from Harvard: something along the lines of “We made a mistake. We meant to send you an acceptance, but it seems like our system messed up.” It didn’t arrive. I went through my classes on autopilot, averting my eyes whenever I passed by someone like Laura, the type who I always felt jealous of, who seemed straight out ofThe East Siders, who I always told myself I would be just as good as—as soon as I got into Harvard and became a corporate lawyer in New York; as soon as I became just as wealthy and important as they were.
After a few days, I was no longer in denial. Not like the first week after the rejection email, when I waited desperately for a follow-up from the admissions council apologizing for a communication mistake, a news article lambasting Harvard for falsely destroying or lifting the hopes of thousands of law school hopefuls.
The low points would sneak up on me by surprise, oftenwhen I was alone and my mind was insufficiently distracted. Still, it was difficult to predict when I’d reach a nadir. It happened a few times while I was reading. I would cease to comprehend the sentences on the page. Then the text would grow fuzzy. I’d feel the dread rising in my stomach and settling in my chest, tailoring its discomfort for each body part so that first I was nauseous, then I couldn’t breathe.
