Welcome to My Life

The day before my Harvard enrollment-confirmation deadline, Margot Marlowe and I fell down the back stairs of the Marlowe Family Science Center.

When I woke up, I was her.

She woke up in my mildewed walk-up in Bridgeport, across from a drunk stepfather and a mother three weeks past her last dialysis copay.

I woke up under a Venetian chandelier in Greenwich, with a framed Brown acceptance letter on the desk and a Harvard enrollment-deferral form already paper-clipped to a fresh Amex.

She called me twenty minutes in, sobbing. *Sara. Give it back. I have an AP exam tomorrow. I can't get destroyed on your record.*

I looked in the mirror at the beautiful, arrogant face that had spent three years grinding me into the dirt of a school her family's name was carved into.

I smiled.

Because she didn't know.

I had been waiting for this exact day for three years.