Dylan: Don’t give up! We can figure this out. The perp shall pay!
I feel the knot in my stomach twist.
Me: No. It’s over. I’m dropping the story. Fitz was right. I don’t have time. I need to focus on my other commitments.
I sigh and press Send. His response is exactly as I expected.
Dylan: I thought you were braver than to listen to Fitz.
He thinks I’m a coward. He thinks I really am a brainless zombie. But I don’t care. If it keeps him off my back, I can live with that.
Getting kicked out of school for a crime I didn’t commit? That I can’t live with.
Me: I guess you were wrong.
I power down my phone before he can respond and toss it onto my bed.
I’ll just have to lie low. Keep my head down. Do my work. Follow the rules. Be a good Windsor student. Eventually the administration will realize that the test stealing has stopped and maybe—hopefully—they’ll just let it go. Maybe—hopefully—everything will return to normal. And I can go on with my life and forget this ever happened.
I navigate through the folders on my computer until I find the document where I typed up my story notes. Without a second thought, I delete it. Then I click on the little trash icon in the corner of my screen. Other Me tried her hardest to screw up our lives. She tried to take me down with her. But I won’t let her.
It’s time to take out the garbage. It’s time to erase Other Me forever.
I hover the pointer over the Empty Trash button, sucking in a huge, courageous breath. But before I click, I notice something out of the corner of my eye.
Another file.
Kennedy Rhodes—Personal Essay—Version 1
I remember seeing that before. When I was revising my PE for Fitz’s class. Other Me must have deleted it but then forgot to empty the trash.
I tell myself to let it go. Erase it all and move on. But some invisible force is tugging on my finger. Call it curiosity. Call it intuition. Call it whatever you want.
But I open the document.
I read what’s inside.
Then I collapse into tears.
The Choices That Define Us—First Draft
Kennedy Rhodes
AP Language Arts, Period 7
Mr. Fitz
The topic of this personal essay is “The choices that define us.” But the topic itself is a flawed one. Or, at the very least, incomplete. Choices don’t just define us. They define everything around us. When we make a decision, we don’t only decide for ourselves, we unknowingly decide for every soul connected to us. It’s impossible to do anything without affecting the world around you.
That’s what makes choices so significant. And also what makes them so destructive.
Three and a half years ago, I was faced with such a decision when I received my acceptance letter to the Windsor Academy. And now, three and a half years later, from the outside, it would appear that I made the right choice. I’m currently ranked number one in my class. I am liked and respected by my peers. I am single-handedly responsible for raising a total of more than a quarter of a million dollars for the school that I chose.
But that’s the thing about the outside. It doesn’t tell the whole story. It conceals. It hides. It lies.
Underneath, I feel like a shell of a person. I’m tired. I’m empty. I’m plagued by guilt.
Because, as it turns out, my choice wasn’t just about me. Perhaps it started out that way. In that single decisive moment—when I signed my name on the acceptance letter, when I licked the envelope, affixed the stamp, dropped it in the mailbox—perhaps then, for just a brief flash of an instant, it was all mine. It was a choice that belonged solely to me.
But then the moment was over. The choice grew. It expanded. It multiplied and poisoned like a plague. It affected people outside of just me.
People like my dad, who gave up on his dream of becoming a photographer and sold out for a high-paying corporate job, just so he could afford the Windsor Academy’s exorbitant tuition.
People like my mom, who watched her husband lose his identity, sell his soul, and then get farther and farther away from us because of it. Until he felt like a ghost in our house.
And that’s what led me to my next life-defining decision. The one I made six months ago when I installed a piece of software on the school server that logged every keystroke, every username, and every password of every faculty member. When I began stealing exams and selling them to students for a price.
It was the only way I could think to pay my parents back. For everything they gave up. For everything I stole from them. Because I’m selfish. Because choices are selfish.
But then, that choice, too, started to grow and infect and spread its poison. To people like Lucinda Wallace, my best friend, who is now expelled. Because of me.
In the end, there is no escape. No matter what you do, no matter what you choose, someone suffers.
Our choices don’t define only us. They define everyone around us. They are powerful, evil things full of a dark, dark magic. They ruin lives. They wreak havoc on worlds. They turn good people into villains. Innocent people into victims. And promising students into criminals.
Some people weren’t meant to make life-altering decisions. Some people simply can’t handle that much power.
Some people just wish they could go back and do it all over again.
Then I Try to Go Back
A cold chill blows through my room, making me shiver. Freezing the tears on my cheeks. Turning my whole world into an endless ice age.
During all of those years I dreamed of going to Windsor, and pored over the online catalogs and obsessed over the pictures of green grass, I never even considered the price. How much it costs to keep that grass so dang green.
I never considered what it would do to my family. But now the cold, hard truth is written right in front of me. In an essay far too personal to be read by anyone else. In a confession my other self never had the courage to turn in.
It’s impossible to ignore now.
Impossible to deny.
My dad traded his dream for mine.
He took that job to pay my tuition. He took that job to make sure I could have everything I always wanted. Now, instead of doing what he loves, he’s doing something he hates. He gave up on his passion. His big project. The one that would have eventually landed him a sold-out gallery show. But he’ll never know that because he’ll never get there.
I erased it all. I cut and pasted it right out of his life.
He was on his way to something huge. He was going places. He was finally on the precipice of success and I took it away. All because I wanted to go to some fancy school where they wear fancy uniforms and sit in fancy classrooms and track their tasks on fancy apps.
Is that what’s been keeping her up at night? Other Me? Is that why she has five different kinds of sleeping pills? Is that why her reflection looks like she’s just survived the apocalypse?
The guilt was eating her alive.
And I can already feel it doing the same to me.
I stuff the cash box back into my bottom drawer, unlock my bedroom door, and dash into the hallway.
“I need to go back!” I cry as I barge into Frankie’s room.
He’s sitting on his bed, drawing. “What?”
“I don’t want to be in this life anymore. I want to go back. I don’t want to be her. I want to be me again. I choose my other life. I choose Austin and Southwest High and locker doors that fall off and libraries with mysteriously missing books. I choose all of it. Please. Tell me how to get back.”
Frankie studies me for a long, agonizing moment before setting his drawing pad aside. “Kennedy,” he says in a serious tone. “It doesn’t work that way. You can’t just go back.”
“Sure you can!” I argue, tears rolling down my cheeks. “You said something about an overlap. The exact same thing happening at the exact same time in two different universes. You said that’s how I got here. By h
itting my head on the stairs in both lives. So let’s create another one of those.”
Frankie looks at me like I’m crazy. “You can’t create an overlap.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Frankie says, fumbling for words, “you just can’t! It’s not like a special order at McDonald’s. I’ll take one overlap, hold the pickles. For starters, I’m not even one-hundred-percent certain that’s how you got here. It’s a theory. One theory. And even if it were true, it was a fluke. A miracle. I mean, the odds of you and one of your other selves being in the exact same place, doing the exact same thing, at the exact same instant are like billions to one. Even if I’m right, even if that is how you got here, there’s no way of making it happen. It’s like predicting where lightning will strike … twice!”
I wilt in defeat. “So you’re saying I’m stuck here? Forever?”
Frankie offers me a waxen smile. “I’m saying it’s a high statistical probability.”
Then I Visit Two Best Friends
“Mom!” I call out, swatting tears from my face as I stagger down the stairs. “I’m taking your car!”
I don’t wait for permission or acknowledgment. I grab the keys and go. I have to get out of here. Away from that money. Those emails. That reflection in the mirror.
It’s still raining when I back out of the garage. I drive straight to Sequoia’s house and sprint for the front door. I need to talk to someone. Someone who gets it. Gets the pressure. Gets the stress.
Gets Windsor.
I ring the doorbell and she answers a few seconds later wearing her pajamas. I can tell from the crease between her eyebrows that she’s been staring at her computer screen for hours. Studying. Always studying. Always trying to maintain that 89 percent Ivy League acceptance rate they’ve been drilling into us since day one.
“Crap!” Sequoia swears, gaping at my face. “What happened to you?”
It’s then I realize how horrible I must look. With my tearstained cheeks, messy hair, and chocolate cream still on my uniform.
“I think I’m having a meltdown.”
She nods rapidly. “Hold on. I’ll get the Xanax.”
“No,” I say, grabbing her arm. “I don’t need a Xanax or a sleeping pill. I just need to talk to someone. I did something horrible. And I don’t know what to do or how to fix it.”
Sequoia stares at me like she doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. And I can’t blame her. I’m rambling so fast and more tears are streaming down my face and sobs are cutting off my words.
“I was with Dylan. In the library. And then Peabody’s and we were trying to figure out the whole test-stealing thing and then—”
“Stop,” Sequoia says, in the most forceful tone I’ve ever heard come out of her mouth. “Stop talking right now. I can’t do this. I can’t hear this. I can’t be implicated. Not when early decision letters are being sent out next week!”
“Sequoia,” I beg. “Please. Can you stop being a Windsor Academy student for one second and just be my friend?”
She holds her hands over her ears, blocking out the sound of my voice. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Then she slams the door. And I’m left crying alone in the rain, feeling even emptier than I did before.
I can’t believe she would close the door on me like that. I can’t believe she would just shut me out when I needed her the most.
She’s supposed to be my friend!
Or maybe we never really were friends. Maybe we were just horses in the same race, keeping each other company while we sprinted for the finish line. Always secretly knowing that, in the end, only one of us could win.
I wander back to my car and start the engine. I’m freezing and shivering so I blast the heat, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. The cold is coming from somewhere inside me. Somewhere I fear will never be warm again.
I shift into Drive and pull away from the curb. I don’t even know where I’m going until I find myself parked in front of Laney’s house.
I stare out the window at the darkened, two-story brick home. The porch light is on, illuminating the familiar red door that I’ve knocked on so many times. I know which window is hers. It’s the second floor, last one on the right. I spent so many nights in that bedroom. Sleeping on her blow-up air mattress, talking until the wee hours of the morning, giggling about everything under the sun.
Laney would know what to say to me right now. Laney would know how to make everything feel survivable. She could make Everest look climbable. The entire Atlantic Ocean look swimmable. The farthest star in the farthest galaxy look like nothing but a plane ride away.
That’s what she did. She turned mountains into molehills. She talked me down from so many ledges. She was my life jacket.
And without her, I drowned.
The front door opens a moment later and Laney exits holding an umbrella. She starts skipping toward my car, like she’s been waiting for me. Like she always used to do when I would pick her up to go to school or to the movies or out for a late-night snack. She would always skip out her front door like a little kid.
And for a brief second, I dare to think that maybe Frankie was wrong. Maybe it’s not impossible to create an overlap. Maybe I just did it. Simply by driving here. Maybe somewhere in a faraway universe, in another version of this life, I’m doing the exact same thing. I’m here to pick up my best friend on a Monday night and we’re going to spend the rest of the night laughing and goofing around and being Laney and Kennedy again.
But that brief moment comes to a crashing halt when Laney suddenly stops in the middle of her front lawn and tilts her head to the side, studying my car in the limited light. Her expression quickly turns from one of excitement to one of trepidation and she takes a few steps back to the safety of her front porch.
I’m not who she was expecting, I realize with a twist of my stomach.
I’m not Austin.
I watch as she deliberates whether or not to go back inside or wait on the porch. She continues to eye my car warily, wondering what this stranger is doing parked at her curb with the motor running.
Finally, she makes a decision. She turns toward the front door and inserts her key in the lock.
I kill the engine and hop out.
“Laney!” I call.
She stiffens and turns, squinting through the darkness. I step into the light of the streetlamp so she can see that I’m harmless. I’m just a girl.
A girl she once knew. But doesn’t anymore.
“Hi,” she says tentatively. I know that inflection in her voice. She’s trying to fight her incessant instinct to be polite. Laney never had a mean bone in her body. She was the least confrontational person I knew. She had a hard time saying no to people. It’s how she always got roped into feeding dogs and watering plants and bringing in the mail for all her neighbors when they went on vacation.
She can’t even be unkind to a stranger who pulls up to her curb at eight o’clock at night and calls her by name.
Because that’s Laney.
She would never hurt anyone. Least of all me.
As I stare at her face lit by the porch lights of her house, I get a sudden flashback to that night in Austin’s basement. To the look in her eyes when she saw how much pain she had caused me. When I asked her how long it had been going on and she bravely told me the truth, even though it was like releasing an arrow aimed straight for my heart.
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
And now, on this strange moonless night, as I stand in the shambles of my perfect life, suddenly I believe her. I know she was telling the truth.
I know she didn’t fall in love with Austin out of spite or jealousy or malice. She just fell in love with him. Like she fell in love with him in this life, too.
They were always the ones meant to be together.
It was never Austin and me. It was always them. I was just the conduit. And then, I was just the obstacle.
“Do I know you?” Laney asks from
her front porch, and it’s not until then that I realize I’ve been standing here staring at her like a creepy stalker.
Yes! I want to scream. You know me! I’m your best friend! We do everything together. We brought a newspaper back from the brink of death. We won three Spartan Press Awards. You were my rock and my balloon. You lifted me up and kept me grounded. And I never realized how little I gave back to you. How long you stood in my shadow without ever complaining about the cold. You betrayed me but I betrayed you, too. Because I was never the friend to you that you were to me. You were one of the best things about my life and I gave it all up. I traded it in because I thought this would be better. I thought I would be better. But I’m not better without you. I’m worse.
Obviously, however, I don’t say any of those things. They’re words that have no meaning. At least not to her. They will stay where they are forever. Trapped in my mind as echoes of the past.
Instead, I say, “No. Sorry. I must have the wrong house.”
I turn back to my car and open the door. Laney watches me. No longer with concern, now with genuine curiosity. I glance back at her one last time. Then in a whisper, I add, “But I forgive you. And I hope you can forgive me, too.”
Then I Run Away from It All
“The captain has turned on the fasten-seat-belt sign, indicating our initial descent into New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts for the remainder of the flight.”
I watch the city far below appear through a blanket of clouds. I already feel better. I can already breathe easier. See more clearly. Think without all that noise in my head.
As soon as I got back from Laney’s house last night, I made a decision. I figured out what to do with the money in the lockbox.
I used it to get as far away from the Windsor Academy as possible.
When I woke up this morning, I called a cab to the airport, I bought a plane ticket, and I left. I didn’t tell anyone I was going. I figured it wouldn’t take long for the school to call my mom and my mom to call me. I’ll explain everything to her then. If I can even explain it.
In Some Other Life: A Novel Page 26
