They Thought I Failed—Until I Turned Down Harvard novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Version History

The history was a list of dates, one under another, with a tiny colored circle by each.

Mine was blue.

December 4, 9:12 p.m. Delaney Harwick.

December 5, 11:48 p.m. Delaney Harwick.

December 11, 4:30 p.m. Delaney Harwick.

The last edit in blue was the day I sent the essay to Stanford.

Under it there was a second circle.

It was orange, and next to it was a name I knew by heart.

January 8, 2:14 a.m. Camille Bogert. Viewed.

January 8, 2:19 a.m. Camille Bogert. Copied.

January 8, 2:31 a.m. Camille Bogert. Viewed.

I had not known she had access to my folder.

I had shared it with my whole family in November, because my mother said it would help them help me.

My mother had never opened it, and Camille had opened it at two in the morning, three weeks after she was deferred.

I took a screenshot of every line.

I took them on my phone, and then on my laptop, and then I emailed them all to myself.

Then I went down the hall again and knocked on the bathroom door, because Camille was brushing her teeth.

"Can I come in?"

She looked at me in the mirror with the toothbrush in her mouth.

She was still in her white pajamas with the little blue stars.

I locked the door behind me.

I held up my phone.

"The Hospice Hallway," I said.

She spat, and rinsed, and dried her mouth on the hand towel.

She did not turn around.

"Laney, I know you're hurting. We can talk tomorrow."

"I wrote that essay."

Her eyes in the mirror did not move.

"January eighth," I said. "Two fourteen in the morning. Your account."

Something crossed her face then, very fast.

It was not guilt.

It was arithmetic.

She turned around and leaned against the sink with her arms folded, quiet and calm.

"Okay," she said. "So what?"

"So what?"

"You didn't use it, right? You failed." She said the word like it was a coat she was handing me. "It was just sitting there. Do you know how many people at Harvard have a sad story? I needed mine to be better than theirs."

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