Yellowface

It’s fucked up, yes. But I could survive a murder investigation. I can’t survive what Candice will do to me if she walks out of here alive.

Years of suppressed rage—rage at being treated like a stereotype, like my voice doesn’t matter, like the entirety of my being is constituted in those two words, “white woman”—bubble up inside me and burst.

I write about how inadequate Athena has made me feel since college, how I swallowed back vinegary envy every time she achieved something I could not. The way I felt when Geoff told me how she’d mocked me at that convention. I recount the way she stole the story of my maybe-rape. I describe how, despite it all, I still loved her.

But as I dig into the past, I find myself lingering on good memories, too. There are more of them than I realized. I haven’t let myself dwell on college for so long, but once I scratch the surface, it all comes bubbling to the fore. Starbucks every Tuesday after our Women in Victorian Lit seminar: an iced mocha for me, a Very
Berry Hibiscus Refresher for Athena. Nights at slam poetry events during which we’d sipped ginger beers and giggled at the performers, who were not real poets, and who would one day certainly grow out of this nonsense. A Les Mis sing-along party at a drama major’s apartment, where we’d shrieked at the top of our lungs, “One day more!”

As I transcribe all this, I wonder if our friendship had indeed been as strained as I’d perceived it. Was that jealous tension always there? Were we rivals from the start? Or had I, in the throes of my insecurity, projected it all against Athena?

I remember the day during our senior year that Athena received the first offer on her debut novel, when her agent called and told her on her way to barre class that she would soon have her book on shelves. She called me first. Me. She hadn’t even told her parents yet.