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.
I open my eyes under a chandelier.
Crystal, dimmed-amber, the size of a coffee table. The pillow under my head is so soft my neck has nothing to do. The air smells like orange blossom and clean linen. I count to three on the ceiling rosette and sit up fast.
The floor-length mirror across the room shows me a face so symmetrical it hurts to look at.
Margot Marlowe.
Top ten in our class but not number one. Equestrian Team captain. Daughter of Whit and Bunny. The Marlowe Family Science Center has her last name in two-foot limestone letters over the door. She got into Brown ED and her parents framed the letter. Tomorrow morning she sits for AP Calc BC, which she doesn't actually need — Brown already took her — but which her father has been making her practice for since November because Marlowes do not soft-pedal. Day after tomorrow she flies to St. Barths for a graduation cruise.
Also: she is the girl who has spent three years grinding me into the dirt of a school her family's name is carved into.
I look down at my hands.
Long fingers. Round, clean, French-tipped nails. A tennis bracelet on the right wrist — small round diamonds in 18-karat white gold, the one I have been clocking from twenty feet away since freshman year, the one I would never own.
Not my hand.
A phone vibrates on the nightstand. The lock screen is a selfie of Margot and her horse. Unknown number, calling for the fourth time.
I pick up.
A scream on the other end. Sara. Sara. Sara — where are you. Are you in my house.
I don't say anything.
Sara, listen to me — we switched. I'm in your apartment. There's a man here. He just kicked the door in and he's telling me to go buy him beer.
I lean back against the headboard. I let the smile come.
"Margot," I say. "Welcome to my life."
She stops. For exactly one second.
Then she shrieks, voice climbing into a register I have never heard from her, the register of someone who has just understood. Don't be cute. Get over here. We have to switch back, we have to — Sara, I have AP Calc, my dad is going to lose his mind —
I look at the nightstand.
There is a passport. A boarding pass folded into a leather sleeve — Bridgetown via JFK, July 14. A Crane stationery card, monogrammed M, handwritten in black ink: Margot — knock 'em dead at AP Calc tomorrow. We're so proud. Mom & Dad.
I flip the card.
Behind it, slid into the envelope: a spare Amex Platinum. No preset limit.
I have never received a handwritten note from anyone in seventeen years.
"No rush," I say. "You have AP Calc in the morning."
She loses it. Are you insane? That's the whole point — I can't take it in your body, Sara, I can't — do you have any idea how long I've been studying for —
I close my eyes.
I do, actually. Know.
She has been studying for it exactly as long as she has been crushing me.
Three years ago I started at Ashford Hall.
I was the kid from Bridgeport Magnet, the kid who'd taken the Connecticut state SCAT exam two years early and scored in the 99.9th percentile, the kid Ashford recruited for the diversity-and-merit composite at a full need-met scholarship plus housing stipend. My homeroom advisor my freshman year told my mother that I was one of the most promising students Ashford had admitted in a decade.
First day of upper school, Margot Marlowe walked into Mr. Petrocelli's English class fourteen minutes late, in Golden Goose sneakers with the deliberately-scuffed gold star and a tennis racket she didn't bother to put down. She looked at the empty seat next to me. She smiled at the teacher.
"Could I switch? I think Sara's clothes are washed in something weird. I'm getting a migraine."
The class laughed. Not all of them. Enough.
I didn't say anything.
After that:
My copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God was found in the boys' bathroom, soaked through with an iced matcha. My field hockey jersey had SCHOLARSHIP written across the back in Sharpie. There was a dead mouse in my advisor mailbox. There was a series of pictures of me changing out of my gym clothes that someone left in my locker in a printer envelope.
I went to Dean Caldwell.
She closed her door. She sat me down in the leather chair across from her desk. She had a photo of her grandchildren on the windowsill and a coaster from the Litchfield Country Club under her coffee.
"Sara," she said. "I hear you. I want you to know we take this seriously."
A pause.
"But you have to understand. The Marlowes — Whit chairs our board, and Bunny has been on the development committee since the science center campaign. They have been incredibly generous to this school. The science center wouldn't exist without them. Let's ride it out for now. I'll talk to Margot. Quietly."
The cameras in the hallway outside her office had been replaced with new ones the previous fall. I had watched them go up. I asked, the second time I came back to her office, about the footage.
"Unfortunately the system was experiencing a temporary glitch during that window," she said. "We're looking into it."
My mother took the 7:14 Metro-North from Bridgeport up to Ashford in November of my sophomore year. She wore her dialysis-fistula-covering sleeves and a navy blazer she'd bought at Goodwill. She sat in Dean Caldwell's office with her hands folded.
"Mrs. Mendez," Dean Caldwell said softly. "I understand this is upsetting. But there's no record of a single substantiated incident on Sara's file. Children's social dynamics can be hard. Has Sara considered talking to our counselor about how she's processing the stress?"
My mother threw up at the New Haven train station. I learned about it from the conductor, who'd watched her go down and called the contact number she'd given when she bought the ticket.
I thought about transferring back to Bridgeport Central.
I came home that night and Ray was in the doorway with a Bud Light in one hand and our electric bill in the other.
"Transfer? You want to transfer? I've been carrying you for three years, you ungrateful little — I'm not paying for your fancy school so you can come back and what, work at the goddamn Stop & Shop?"
I had nowhere to retreat to.
I swallowed everything and stayed number one.
Margot wouldn't let me alone.
Spring of senior year — six weeks before the Harvard enrollment confirmation was due, three weeks before AP exams — she took my Common App final enrollment packet out of my locker. The one Harvard wanted hand-returned with the photo ID, the parental signature, the matriculation deposit receipt. Hand-carried because there was no working printer in my apartment.
She put it in a toilet tank in the second-floor faculty bathroom.
She filmed me checking every locker, every bathroom, every common room.
"You really do look like a stray dog, Mendez," she said. She was standing at the top of the back staircase of the Marlowe Family Science Center.
I ran at her.
She grabbed my wrist. She used the voice only the two of us could hear, the one she used for the lines that mattered.
"You think you're going to Harvard tomorrow? Try me."
She let go and stepped back.
She screamed and fell.
She pulled me with her.
When I woke up, the world was on the wrong side of a mirror.
The phone rings again.
The caller ID says Mom.
I look at the two letters for a long time, and then I press accept.
"Sweet pea." Bunny Marlowe's voice is honeyed and crisp at the same time, the way her dinner-party voice is. "Mommy and Daddy are at Teterboro. There's a storm system — the pilot wants to wait it out, we'll be home by midnight, baby. Don't worry. Maria made you the bone broth, the one Dr. Reiner says is good for your throat. The driver will take you to the testing center in the morning. We'll be there when you come out."
I say a small mm-hm.
She pauses. "Sweetheart, your voice is scratchy. Did you catch something?"
"I fell. My head hurts a little."
"You fell? Where? Did you see anyone? — you know what, Adam can be at the house in twenty minutes, I'll text him now —"
So this is what being worried about sounds like.
This is what one rasp in your voice triggers.
The slightest deviation, registered like an earthquake.
"It's fine," I say evenly. "I want to sleep."
"Of course, of course. I just — sweet pea, you know that whatever happens with that test tomorrow, Mommy and Daddy are proud of you. Of you. Brown is already done. The test is a formality. Don't put it on yourself, okay?"
I hold the phone.
I hold the phone for too long.
The line clicks off. A different number is calling. My own.
I pick up. I put it on speaker.
Glass breaking. A man's voice, slurred and shouting. Get up. Get the fuck up and walk to Wong's and get me a six-pack or I swear to God —
Margot's voice, screaming. Don't touch me — my father is Whit Marlowe — you put a hand on me and you go to prison —
Ray laughs. He laughs for a long time, with the wet wheeze that means he's not done drinking yet.
"Whit Marlowe. You out of your mind? You're Sara Mendez. Your mother's in bed waiting for you to bring back her dialysis copay and I'm out of cash, so go get me the goddamn beer and on the way back stop at the ATM and pull from your scholarship card."
Margot is sobbing. Into the phone, to me: Sara. Make him stop. He's going to hit me.
I keep my voice level.
"Don't worry. He mostly doesn't hit the face."
The line goes quiet.
I add, very calmly: "Because the teachers would see."
Margot makes a small sound.
"You — this is what — for three years —"
I don't answer.
She switches direction. Anger is easier. "What does any of that have to do with me? It's not like I made him hit you —"
"No," I say. "You just dumped iced matcha on my FAFSA verification packet. You locked me in the basement music room. You stood in the doorway of the staff bathroom while your friends posted my changing pictures in a group chat. And you put my Harvard packet in a toilet tank."
She gasps in the way of someone who needs the air. "I didn't put it in the tank, Sara, I swear to God I didn't —"
I look down at the boarding pass on the nightstand. I pick it up. I tear the corner off.
"Better not be."