In the fall of our senior year of high school, weeks before we stopped being friends, I took Odelia to the track for her to run while I did yoga on the infield. I was injured, but I liked making excuses to go to the track anyway so that I could bask in the tickly bounciness of its surface, and also so that I wouldn’t have to go home.
Odelia was a long jumper, one of Nassau County’s best. When she tried running distance, she bounded along the track like a true long jumper, spending too much time in the air by making unnecessarily powerful strides. But that day, I didn’t say anything about her bad form, because clearly she was vibing. She was listening to “Riptide” by Vance Joy on loop and evidently not getting tired of it, despite all the nana nanananana nanananana nanananana. After she finished running she went to practice long jump.
Maybe I should’ve stopped her. I knew that since it was the offseason, the sand pit in which the jumpers usually landed softly was now covered by thick aluminum boards. But I was in a compromised position, and I didn’t know she was that dumb. When I was in updog, she walked up to me crying, holding her elbow in her opposite hand. She had tried to long jump and landed on the pit covers, and to show for it she had a knee and an elbow both gushing blood.
“What did you do?” I asked rhetorically, standing up. “Come with me.” We went into the middle school, but by now everyone had gone home, and it was empty. I sat her down at a table in the cafeteria and told her to relax. “Don’t move,” I said. “I’ll go find paper towels.” I came back from the girls’ bathroom and dabbed her knee and elbow with wet paper towels while she continued to cry. But even as I dabbed, I knew her knee and elbow didn’t hurt that much. I had done my fair share of falling while running too, and I never cried.
We got bored and left the school. I walked Odelia back to her house on the other side of town while she cried and squeezed her elbow. Soon, she stopped sobbing long enough to tell me something.
“Rachel,” she said, “I’m so jealous of you. You’re so strong, smart, and accepting. You’re much better than all the other Persians.”
“Aww,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Did you ED Columbia? You would definitely get in.”
“No. I’ll apply regular. I probably won’t get in.”
“Same. I’ll probably apply regular. I’m going to visit there on Sunday.”
“There are so many nerds who apply that it’s probably just random who they take,” I said. The idea of applying anywhere early decision scared me; it seemed like too big a commitment. And wasn’t college, like, expensive? Until a few weeks earlier, I had known nothing about the college admissions process and hadn’t visited any colleges. The only reason I bothered to apply at all was because all my friends were.
“You should’ve applied early, Rachel. They like people like you.”
When we got close to her house, we sat on a bench at a small park nearby so that we wouldn’t have to go home. By then it was getting dark and I relished the thought of how worried my parents must be.
“It’s not fair,” I told Odelia. “When you’re an adult, you know where you are, you have a husband, a family, a house, a job, you don’t have to worry about anything. But when you’re our age, you have nothing, and you have no idea what your future will be. We may never get married. We can still end up homeless.”
At this point I didn’t know how she had any tears left, but she did. They looked and sounded so glamorous, streaming out her blue eyes. At first, when Odelia immigrated to the U.S. from Israel in sixth grade, she went to a Jewish private school. She transferred to our heathen public school in tenth grade, but even now that we were seniors she didn’t have many friends. How was that possible for someone so pretty and cultured? I wondered. How nice it was to have her all to myself, to have her cry to me and no one else, to have someone so tall, with blonde hair, actually be jealous of me. After I dropped Odelia off, I walked home alone. My Achilles tendon had me limping as I passed the Ashkenazi synagogue, the kosher Chinese restaurant, the new Dunkin Donuts, but I didn’t mind. I liked the feeling of being empty and exhausted. As I limped, finally, onto Redbrook Road, I was in no rush to get home.
*
“Rachel,” Odelia said as she walked past me in the hallway on the way to second period on Monday. “I have to talk to you!” We would’ve talked either way. She was saying this purely for the hype.
“Sixth period,” I said. That was our lunch period, which we spent in the library because the cafeteria was too loud and smelly and in my opinion didn’t have enough books. During sixth period, Odelia told me that on her visit to Columbia, she met a boy — ehem — a man, who, by some sequence of events incomprehensible to me, she ended up kissing. “What the fuck, Odelia?”
“QUIET,” yelled the librarian.
“He was one of the tour guides,” she said. “He invited me to hang out at the library after the tour and he told me all about what his freshman year was like.”
“How exactly did you end up smooching this rando?”
“I don’t know. He sat really close to me and offered me a piece of gum.”
“GUM?”
“QUIET,” yelled the librarian.
“Yeah. And then he just kissed me.”
“While the gum was still in your mouth?”
“No. We spit it out.”
“When?” Poor Odelia, I thought. She immigrated from her home country in the middle of her education and look, now she can’t even tell a proper story. She barely seems to grasp the importance of the details. Where was this guy from? What was he majoring in? What was his life story? I thought it was a waste for Odelia to be kissed instead of me.
“There are people here trying to STUDY,” yelled the librarian, and all the students who had been studying looked up.
“I probably won’t apply to Columbia,” Odelia said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. My parents aren’t even gonna let me dorm. Wherever I go, I’ll have to commute.”
“Rip. Maybe you can sleep over at your lover’s dorm.”
*
By the time the blue heart emojis devoured my computer screen, Odelia’s Facebook status already had 195 likes and more than 40 congratulatory comments. I read all the comments one by one, and then I went back and read the status again. “COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 2022!!!!!!”
At school, Odelia was so busy being congratulated that she barely even noticed my death stare in orchestra. At the library during lunch, she sat at a table with fellow Ivy Leaguers: a loaded Tehrani kid who’d gotten into Penn despite barely passing AP Stat, an Asian kid bound for Cornell, and a blue-eyed Yalie who always claimed she “barely” studied for physics tests. On no other day would such a truly inspiring display of multiethnic harmony have been possible than after Decision Day, when all the model minorities took a break from saying racist shit behind each other’s backs to finally see that they had more in common than they thought. I would’ve killed to join them.
Finally, the bell rang; sixth period was over. As she left the library I caught her arm. “Odelia,” I said. “Congratulations on getting into a school you didn’t even apply to!” “Thanks,” she said.
*
I submitted my last college application on December 31 at around 9:30 p.m. Afterward, I looked up “Admissions Officer at Columbia University” on LinkedIn and opened each result in a new incognito tab. I studied each admissions officer and then re-read my Common App essay in what I imagined was their voice, based on what they looked like and where they were from. I did the same thing for Penn, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins. I knew none of the admissions officers at any college would be able to pronounce the Farsi words in my essay. They wouldn’t even pronounce Iran right. “Eye-ran,” they would probably say. “Muh-shoddy.”
For several weeks after I submitted my applications, my life was characterized by sheer, unadulterated torture. I knew the responses wouldn’t come until late March, but I refreshed my email constantly anyway, weekends, nights, 2:15 a.m, 2:22 a.m, 2:45 a.m, I checked my email, I checked my spam. Reruns of That 70s Show on Putlocker provided background noise while I looked up the admissions officers on LinkedIn again. Then I looked them up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads, and Strava. Only one of them had a Strava. She was faster than me, and her Achilles tendons seemed to be functioning at full capacity. One of the ones from Georgetown was pregnant. While the gang smoked weed in Forman’s basement and had sex in the Vista Cruiser and jumped off the water tower, I hid under my blanket and used my thinspo account from middle school to watch the Georgetown admissions officer’s Instagram stories where she routinely compared her fetus to various fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Her husband was tall and blond and handsome. I pretended to be dead so I wouldn’t cry.
One day in January, on the afternoon after midterms, I slammed my laptop shut before I could think about it, put on two layers of every item of clothing I could think of, and walked to the track. My Achilles tendon didn’t hurt but my feet were on fire from the friction. I heard the music before I saw her.
Lady, running down to the riptide
Taken away to the dark side
I wanna be your left hand man
I love you when you’re singing that song
And I got a lump in my throat
‘Cause you’re gonna sing the words wrong
I sat down next to the long jump pit, took off my shoes and both pairs of socks, bent into a pretzel, and blew as hard as I could on my feet. “What the fuck is a riptide?” I yelled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something with the ocean.”
“Why does he like for her to sing the words wrong?”
“Huh?”
I hated Odelia more than ever at that moment. I hated her for barely speaking English and still getting into Columbia. I hated her for having a boyfriend. I hated her because that day when she hurt her knee, she said all those nice things about me, and now she wasn’t saying any nice things about me.
She paused the music.
“He says he loves her when he gets a lump in his throat before she sings the words wrong,” I said. “Shouldn’t he prefer for her to get the words right? Men think it’s cute when women are dumb.”
“I never thought about the lyrics.”
“Maybe that’s why you have a boyfriend and I don’t.”
“Maybe.”
I put one of the pairs of socks back on my feet and held the other in my fist and began limping home. When I got there, my mom gave me a glass of tea with honey and some cucumbers. I went to my room and checked my email. Nothing.
