“I met the weirdest guy just now. He said he’d gone to high school with you,” she said.
The Solo of Rolling Rock crackled under my grip. “Oh yeah?” I asked casually, praying she’d stop talking immediately. I was someone different now—albeit still sad, still tentative—and I needed the past behind me.
“Yeah. He said he did something really bad to you right at the end of high school. He said he didn’t know you’d react that way.” She took a sip of beer.
“Sounds like he was pretty drunk.”
“No, actually he seemed sober, like he needed to unburden himself.”
I shook my head. “Well, I don’t know what he could be referring to. Like I said, sounds like he was pretty drunk.”
I walked home alone. Abby was still out when I got back to the room. I undressed and took a long shower, letting the hot water pelt my back good and raw. In the mirror, my reflection stepped out of her robe, put lotion on her face. “He said he did something really bad to you right at the end of high school,” my friend had said. What had happened then, at the end of high school? Harrison had broken up with me months earlier. I had gotten a B in Calculus. I did not graduate in the Top Ten. Since leaving Texas, I had been afraid to focus on that painful epoch of my life, and even now tripped round it.
And of course, I had been voted “Thinks She’s Smartest.” Hadn’t my Superlative been the humiliating non-award I deserved? Many years later, my husband would recognize this for what it had been: school-sanctioned bullying, which my parents should have done something about. But, loving reassurance lay in the future. Here, in the present, as a freshman in college, I willed my personality to shrink. I swept the brush through my hair.
But then, what my friend divulged in the tap room clicked together like shifting glass in a kaleidoscope:
Harrison had been the yearbook editor. He had seen all the Superlatives sheets as they came in, and perhaps Mrs. Loring knew and looked away. Was it possible that my title was decided not by election but by someone who had wanted to pull me down a peg? Maybe the entire senior class hadn’t hated me—only Harrison had.
Now he was blabbing to random people on campus, trying to redeem himself. But I couldn’t have anyone here know how “superlative” I’d been in high school. My first day on campus had been an assault on my expectations that college would be for learning what the real things are. Over the course of the year, what I’d found at Princeton was the world as it ever was: an unaccommodating place I would have to bend toward. Inside the crucible of my senior year in high school, I had been melted and altered. Was the firing not over? This small, burnished, and black substance was the soul of myself, and no late revelation about my worth could change it now.
In the mirror, my eyes shone steely and cold. Arrested by a look I did not recognize in myself, I stopped brushing my hair. The kaleidoscope rotated some degrees then, the colored glass falling into a new configuration.
In high school, my self-made identity as “the Smartest Girl” had sprouted as the socially acceptable answer to a more complicated identity, one I did not let myself explore. In the end, the most significant education I’d received was to strip myself of anything inconsistent with the station I’d been assigned. In high school, I had fallen short of the requirements of that station, and someone—a white boy—had taken it upon himself to punish me.
Now, nearly a year later, I had accepted the Superlatives as truth, and nothing could prevent me from sliding back into depression. Over the next weeks, I spent more time with Nik. Neither of us wanted anything serious with the other. He simply knew to call or stop by once in a while. Eventually though, I heard he was hooking up with someone else, and I went back to lying in my bed and wanting to die.
4.
TWO WEEKS INTO MY SOPHOMORE year, sometime well past midnight, I boarded the New Jersey Transit to New York’s Penn Station to find the City That Never Sleeps to be, for once, asleep.
“Alone alone alone,” I chanted, shuffling around the Amtrak waiting area. Between the TGI Friday’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, a homeless man also shuffled. “Alone alone alone,” did I hear him say?
Coming round the other side of Penn Station, I ventured out a little, cast my eyes toward the direction of Times Square, and was met with a bright aura of light from the north, the signs and screens playing for no one. A newspaper somersaulted across the avenue like a tumbleweed in the desert. The purpose of this spontaneous, solo, middle-of-the-night trip was escape: I needed to step out of the beautiful house of mirrors that was college. But I had wanted clamor, disorganization, and life from the city, not eerie quiet.
I ducked back into the station, where I paced underneath the central ticker-board until the tiles whirred, announcing the 5:07 a.m. train to Princeton. An hour later, I was back, with the perfect dawn breaking on the south end of the campus.
Abby was already at morning practice when I climbed into bed, and I was relieved I didn’t have to answer any questions about where I’d been. Despite the easy distance, Princeton students rarely visited New York, their lives restricted to the bubble that was campus, and if there were ever a poster child for Princeton, it was blond-haired, blue-eyed varsity rower Abigail Mayfield Cross, healthy in mind, hardy in body. Abby was kind—she saw the sadness in me this September, but found it alien and didn’t know what to do. That made two of us.
I was restless in my sheets. Why do I feel so weak? Why can’t I make it here like everyone else? What is the secret? The questions came round and round at me answerless, as if they were written inside a hamster wheel and I was the hamster. When my stomach grumbled, I threw off the covers. On the way to the dining hall, I bumped into one of my student advisors, Bong Ju, chewing on a bagel.
“Are you okay?” he asked, stopping in his tracks. Bong Ju was Korean and my friend. I must have looked bad, because there was concern on his face. It looked so much like mine—the subtle features, the smooth brow, the coloring. In that moment, I knew I could say anything to him as my brother.
After I had confessed everything to Bong Ju, an hour later, I walked into the dean’s office. Inside the capacious room, the leaded casement windows were closed to the autumnal morning, the sunlight making glitter out of the flying motes of dust.
Dean Kay was in her early fifties. She wore her blond hair sensibly in a short bob and a sympathetic expression. On her mammoth wooden desk, behind which she sat dwarfed, she had placed framed pictures of her family, facing them outward instead of toward herself, as if what she wanted weren’t reminders of her beautiful children but humanization in front of her audience.
“Bong Ju says you’ve been having a hard time,” she said once I was settled across from her. “You don’t seem to be suffering from the standpoint of academics: your grades last year were impressive, Hyeseung, and I know you are well-liked. Bong says so himself.” She threaded her fingers together.
I forced a smile. “I’m a first-generation Korean American, Dean Kay. I don’t ever have a choice but to succeed.”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re enjoying yourself at Princeton despite the achievement.”
“When I came here, I thought all of this”—I swooped my arm in a big circle—“would be a new start. But now I’m here, and Princeton expects me to achieve even more, wants me to blaze in the direction I’ve always been pushing but at a heightened level.
“The problem is that what I have been doing in the past hasn’t served me at all. I need to be able to fail, Dean Kay, and not have it mean the end of me.”
She nodded. “Failure is an important part of education.”
“Is it?” Suddenly, I felt surly hearing her truism. “I’m constantly wondering why my friends get upset about anything. They’ll never fail. Their parents will never let them fail. Princeton will never let them fail. Is that perfection even real?”
“Well, it’s college. It’s real and it isn’t real,” she said, moving her head to one side and then to the other, her bob never losing its shape.
My eyes blurred in the sunlight. I knew what it looked like—that safe, perfect, guaranteed life my parents wanted for me. They believed if I traveled the deep-grooved path in front of me, a blueprint they themselves had not followed, I’d make no mistakes, never be hurt, never suffer as they had. But to live was to suffer. Here was yet another truism, and what a truism it was. Pinning everything on the nail of achievement had meant that failure was death and life was small. Ultimately, I had suffered anyway and my belief in this ontological structure had faltered.
“I just want a simple life that isn’t being lived for anyone but myself. And, I suppose, I want it to have the risks attendant in real life.” This had been the impetus behind last night’s jaunt to New York, my attempt to grab at any experience that felt more genuine.
I scratched at a spot on my leg and tried to think. “Dean Kay,” I said slowly. “You see a lot of students…”
“I do.”
“Am I the only one who thinks like this?”
“No,” she replied, also slowly. “But it feels like it’s been your experience that you are quite alone. That sounds hard. And it’s important to acknowledge, even if I hope it isn’t the truth for any student.”
“I can’t get up in the morning because of how worthless I feel. I cry all the time, I’m scaring Abby. On the outside, it might look like things are okay most of the time, but on the inside, nothing is, and I’ve been acting. I’ve been a good actor, but at any second, everything is going to fall apart.”
She smiled faintly. “Tell me again about the simple life.”
