Yale-New Haven Emergency at eleven p.m. is fluorescent and full of people from worse nights than mine.
My mother goes through the double doors on a gurney. The transplant resident from Dr. Patel's team comes out to meet us; she has been paged. She knows my mother by name. She is moving fast.
I sit on the orange plastic chair in the corridor.
My hands are on my knees and they will not stop shaking.
Margot is two chairs down. Dr. Reiner has draped his wool coat around her. Her makeup is in tracks. Her hair is wet at the ends. She is wearing my Goodwill fleece. She is staring at a vinyl baseboard with the expression of someone who has discovered the ground is not as solid as everyone said.
Forty minutes ago she was the heiress.
Now she has learned where my walk home leads.
"Sara," she says. The first time she has used my name without the last name behind it.
I look at the door of the ER bay.
"I didn't know your house was like that."
"You didn't know," I say evenly, "so the things you did don't count."
She bites her lip. "I know I've been a bitch. But I never wanted you to — I didn't want anyone to die."
I laugh. Just once.
She flinches at the laugh.
I keep my eyes on the ER door.
"The day you spilled iced matcha on my FAFSA verification packet, my mother had been moved up the transplant list. She had to re-notarize the medical hardship documents within ten business days or they were going to suspend the scholarship. I had to take her, sick, on the train, to Bridgeport City Hall."
She doesn't speak.
"The Friday you locked me in the basement music room overnight — I missed the nine p.m. cutoff to authorize her dialysis copay over the phone. She skipped her Saturday session."
"Sara —"
"The video. Of me changing in the locker room. That was on the senior Snapchat group. I read it on my phone on the Q-Bridge that night. I sat on the rail for twenty minutes."
She is shaking.
"It wasn't me who sent the video," she whispers. "It was Hadley —"
"You watched her record it."
"I —" She bites down on the inside of her cheek. "I saw. I didn't stop her."
She says it small, but she says it.
Dr. Reiner is two steps down the corridor on the phone, arranging a private room and a senior renal attending. I can hear the word now in his sentences.
Margot pulls her knees up under the wool coat. She makes a sound that is supposed to be a laugh.
"I just hated you."
"Yeah."
"You had — nothing. Why did you always have the highest score. Every single test. My parents would sit at the dinner table and say, Sara Mendez would have known that, Margot. Like it was a joke. Like it was funny."
I don't say anything.
"They said if you had what I had you'd be the salutatorian. Probably the valedictorian. They said it once at the club, in front of the Vosses. I had to sit there."
She sobs once, into the coat.
"I had to make you smaller. I'm sorry. I had to."
I keep my eyes on the ER door because if I look at her I will have to do something with what I am hearing, and I am not yet ready to do anything with it.
The doors open. The resident comes out. Stabilized. We need to get her up to renal for an emergent session. You'll need to pay down the outstanding balance at the cashier — I'm sorry, I know this is — there's a window down the hall to the left.
I stand up.
I am about to ask Dr. Reiner if his card will float it until morning when Margot reaches into the pocket of my fleece and pulls something out.
A blue prepaid Visa, the kind Harvard mails to incoming need-based students as an emergency cushion. There is MENDEZ embossed across the front.
She holds it out to the resident.
"There's twenty-four hundred on this. Run it first."
I stare at her.
She doesn't look up. "I hid it in Beloved. On your shelf. The PIN is your mother's birthday. Zero seven two nine. I — I guessed."
My mother's birthday is July 29.
Margot has known my mother's birthday for at least a year.
That was the first time she ever used something of mine without using it against me.
Bunny and Whit arrive at 1:14 a.m.
She is in a Burberry trench damp at the shoulders and the pearl studs in her ears are the size of Tic Tacs. Her hair is still blown out from this morning. She comes down the corridor on her heels and she is making a sound, a small repeating cooing sound, before she even reaches me.
"Sweet pea. Oh my God. Sweet pea, you scared Mommy half to death."
Her arms are around me before I can decide whether to let them be. She is smaller than Margot. I had not registered this.
She holds my chin up to the light. She checks my temple. She checks my hands. The expression she does next, when she looks past me to the orange plastic chair where Margot is sitting in my wet fleece, is the most fluent expression I have ever seen on a human being. It is dressed up as concern. It is contempt.
"What is — sweetheart, what are you doing in this kind of place."
Whit is behind her in a charcoal half-zip and an expression that says he has spent his entire car ride from Greenwich preparing for the apology he is owed.
He looks at Margot. He frowns.
"That's the Mendez girl?"
Margot lifts her head.
She sees her mother. She sees her father. She tries to stand. Her legs almost don't take her.
"Dad — Mom — Mom, please — Mom it's me —"
Bunny's face does the second thing I have ever seen it do. It goes cold.
"Excuse me?"
"Mom — please, listen — I'm — I'm —"
"Young lady. I don't know what you think this is. But I am not your mother. And you are not going to keep using that word."
Margot looks at me. The look is bottomless.
I don't speak.
Bunny turns back to me. Her hand comes up under my hair like she's fixing my collar. "Sweet pea. The Vosses have been calling Daddy nonstop. The Hadley thing — sweet pea, you have to walk it back. It's been such a hard semester for her. They are friends. And this Sara girl —" Her voice drops. "Stay away from her. You hear Mommy? Stay away from her."
Margot stands up. Her hands are fists in the wool coat.
"It wasn't a joke, Mom. Hadley stole my Common App packet. She put it in a toilet tank. That's not a joke —"
She is yelling. The word mom keeps slipping out the way an instinct slips out before the cortex can catch it.
Bunny's mouth tightens. The disgust comes up from underneath the concern, and she lets it.
"Sara — Ms. Mendez — I know your family situation is difficult. I know things are hard. But you are not going to manipulate my daughter by performing some — some breakdown — to use her compassion to your advantage. Do you understand?"
Compassion.
I almost laugh.
Margot is crying. "Mom, I — Mom, I'm Margot, I —"
I cut in. The word comes out before I plan it.
"Mom."
Bunny pivots to me. The contempt vanishes. The honey comes back, instant. "Yes, sweet pea?"
I say it level. "I want Hadley to be charged. The investigation. All of it."
She blinks. "Sweet pea —"
"And anybody else who was involved in bullying Sara Mendez. I want the school to open the records."
Whit's face hardens. "Margot. It is one a.m. The night before AP exams. We are not having this conversation right now."
I look at him.
"If it was my Harvard packet in the toilet tank," I say, "would you also be telling me it could wait until morning."
He doesn't answer.
Bunny says, reflexively, sweetly, lovingly, "Sweet pea, that's not the same thing. You're our daughter."
The tears come down Margot's face faster.
I look at her, and I make my voice match Bunny's exactly.
"Right," I say. "It's not the same thing."
We drive back to Greenwich in the Range Rover at two in the morning, Margot in the third row in Dr. Reiner's coat.
Bunny doesn't want her in the car.
"Sweetheart, she has a hospital. There are people to take care of her. Why on earth are we bringing —"
"She has an AP exam at eight."
"She has an AP exam? Sweet pea —"
I look at the window. My reflection looks back. The face is hers. The eyes are mine.
"I owe her," I say.
The car goes quiet.
In the third row, Margot lifts her head.
She had not expected me to say I owe her using her body.
At the house Maria has set out chicken soup and saltines, the way she does whenever someone in the family has had a bad night. Bunny tells her to set out one bowl.
I look at Maria.
"Two."
Maria pauses, looks at Bunny, looks at me.
"Two."
She sets out two bowls.
Margot sits at the breakfast bar in my wet fleece and my old sweats and she eats the soup with both hands wrapped around the bowl, slowly, like the bowl will go away.
She used to push the dining-hall lasagna away because the marinara had too much sugar.
She drinks the broth like it's mercy.
At one-thirty in the morning, she knocks on my bedroom door.
She is in a pair of my old Bridgeport Magnet sweatpants the housekeeper has lent her, plus a borrowed Ashford T-shirt. Her hair is in a wet braid she has done herself, badly.
"Sara." Her voice is gone, hoarse from the crying. "Tomorrow. AP Calc. Are you going to take it?"
"In your body?"
She nods. She shakes her head. "I'm not telling you to. I — you're better than me at it. You'd ace it. With my name on the seat — you'd get my five. And if I — if I'm in your body, the score sits with me anyway, but it's on your record, which doesn't matter because Harvard is already in —"
"And then you take whatever score I would have gotten on your body's transcript," I say.
She doesn't speak.
I smile.
"You're scared now."
She starts to cry. "I can't be you."
The line is small.
It is the most accurate insult anyone has ever delivered to me. She has been telling herself for three years that my life was so beneath hers it would be funny to live. She has now measured it from the inside and her honest answer is that she would not survive it.
I open my bedside drawer.
I take out the Common App enrollment packet — the one Hadley brought me on a tray three hours ago — and the test admission ticket for tomorrow's AP Calc BC exam, the one with Margot's photo on it.
I hold them both out.
"Take it. You're going tomorrow."
She stares.
"But — I'm in your body. The face on this ticket is —"
"Right," I say. "It's mine."
I close her fingers around both.
"You've been trying to beat me for three years. Take my life. Try."