It takes me a minute to realize that the first person I would have called,the only person who would have understood this news for what it was, andwouldn’t have reacted with petty jealousy or feigned support, is Athena.

yields only one new tweet in the past hour,written by someone I assume is a random audience member:

Athena.Blood thunders in my ears. I blink several times, hoping desperatelyshe’s an apparition, but every time I open my eyes she’s still there, smilingexpectantly at me with bright, berry-red lips.

“Of course everything I wrote in college was utter tripe, becausecollege students don’t know how to write about anything other than theromance of being a college student.

And though I would never say this out loud about a fellow woman—theindustry is tough enough as it is—I hope I got that bitch fired.

and this gives me some moral discomfort,

I ball both hands intofists and jump high into the air.

I decry what’s happening inXinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers aday once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice thatmany of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and#FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track.

which makes me look sortof racially ambiguous

Or was beef nowreserved only for Discord?

Jesus Christ. Cultural appropriation? Cultural leeching? What is herproblem?

Candice Lee, Daniella’s editorial assistant, is the only person at Edenwho doesn’t like me. She never makes it so evident that I have grounds tocomplain about it—she’s unfailingly polite in emails, she likes and retweetseverything I post about the book on social media, and she always greets mewith a smile during videoconference meetings. But I can tell it’s all forced—there’s something in her pinched expression, the curtness of her words.Maybe she knew Athena. Maybe she’s one of those wannabe writersdaylighting as an underpaid, overworked publishing junior staff memberwith a China-inspired manuscript of her own, and she’s jealous I’ve made itbig when she hasn’t. I get that—in publishing, that’s a universal dynamic.But that’s not my problem.

And Juniper is so, so unique. What kind of nameis that? It sounds Native, almost.”). Nobody talks about the difference inhow “Song” might be perceived versus “Hayward.” No one says explicitlythat “Song” might be mistaken for a Chinese name

Of course,” Emily says smoothly. “But you’re . . . that is, you arenot . . .”I see what she’s getting at. “I am not Chinese,” I say curtly. “If that’swhat you’re asking. It’s not ‘own voices,’ or whatever you want to call it. Isthat a problem?”“No, no, not at all, we’re just covering our bases. And you’re not . . .anything else?” Emily winces the moment those words leave her mouth,like she knows she shouldn’t have said that.“I am white,” I clarify. “Are you saying we’ll get in trouble because Iwrote this story and I’m white?

clearly terrifiedof what lies within

“I see.” Mrs. Liu’s eyes are red, watery with tears. “Thank you, June. Inever even considered . . .”

she kept asking why the sisters were so insufferable, which baffled me,because the sisters were supposed to be us.

She drew so much from her childhood, from stories herfather and I told her, from things . . . things in our past. Our family’s past. Idid read her first novel, and that’s when I realized it’s very hard to readabout these memories from someone else’s point of view.” Her throatpulses. She touches her collar. “It makes me wonder if we should havespared her all that pain.”

terlingMemorial Library

Her enthusiasm makes me a bit uncomfortable, especially since therest of her feed is exclusively stuff about racism in publishing and theindustry’s shoddy treatment of marginalized writers. But, if she’s going touse me, then I’m going to use her right back.

The new versionis a universally relatable story, a story that anyone can see themselves in

The rest can go in anafterword, perhaps, or a personal essay we can put out in an outlet closer topublication. Or perhaps as additional material in the paperback, for bookclubs?

We also soften some of the white characters. No, it’s not as bad as youthink. Athena’s original text is almost embarrassingly biased; the Frenchand British soldiers are cartoonishly racist. I get she’s trying to make a pointabout discrimination within the Allied front, but these scenes are sohackneyed that they defy belief. It throws the reader out of the story. Insteadwe switch one of the white bullies to a Chinese character, and one of themore vocal Chinese laborers to a sympathetic white farmer. This adds thecomplexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to theproject to see.

I can tell she’s trying to add texture to her characters’ lives, to showthe readers where they come from and the webs in which they exist, butshe’s gone way overboard. It’s distracting from the central narrative.Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.

jumping back ten or twenty years toexplore a character’s childhood; lingering in rural Chinese landscapes forlong, unrelated chapters;

Chinesehistory and baby name sites to find names that will be culturallyappropriate

and culturalallusions. Athena likes to make her audience “work for it.” On the topic ofcultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move thetext closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectlycapable of moving closer to the text.” She drops in entire phrases inChinese without adding any translations

a thriller about a classical pianistwho makes a deal with the literal devil in exchange for a legendary career

we owe nothing to the dead.Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.And fuck it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt likereparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.

I felt like the kind of person who now listened to Kanye.

My treasuredfriend.

The whole time I’m thinking, I’ve made it. I’ve fucking made it. I’mliving Athena’s life. I’m experiencing publishing the way it’s supposed towork. I’ve broken through that glass ceiling. I have everything I everwanted—and it tastes just as delicious as I always imagined.OceanofPDF.com

I don’t have writtenevidence that Athena wanted me to finish the book—though I’m sure that’swhat she would have preferred, since what writer wants their work tolanguish in obscurity? Without proof of permission, however, my versionmight never be authorized at all.But then. No one knows Athena wrote the first draft, do they? Does theway that it’s credited matter as much as the fact that, without me, the bookmight never see the light of day?I can’t let Athena’s greatest work go to print in its shoddy, first-draftstate. I can’t. What kind of friend would I be?

like it was divinelyordained

when I find outthat Liu Dong never made it back home to his waiting bride.

But here Athenadoes something similar to what Christopher Nolan does in the movieDunkirk: i

I suffer through half an hour of the wake before I make up an excuse toleave—I can only take so much pungent Chinese food and old people whocan’t or won’t speak in English. Mrs. Liu presses against me, sniffling, as Isay my goodbyes. She makes me promise to keep in touch, to let her knowhow I’m doing. Her tear-smudged mascara leaves clumpy stains on myvelvet blouse that won’t come out, even after half a dozen washes, soeventually I throw the whole outfit away altogether.

which is strange tome because I thought Athena was Chinese, but whatever.

feellike a bitch saying it, but she just wasn’t that important to me, and shedoesn’t leave a hole in my life that I now need to build detours around.

thena’smanuscript sits like a hot sack of coals

I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her. That’s ridiculous; it’sridiculous I’m even worried about it.

Athena Liu, twenty-seven, female, is dead because she choked,to death, on a fucking pancake

She looks like she’s humping the chair,

Her eyes are shining. Her mouth is wet. We’re sitting side by side onher futon, knees so close they’re almost touching. For a moment I thinkshe’s going to lean over and kiss me

We both profess that thelatest twink with puppy-dog eyes in fact does nothing for us

willonly fuel my jealousy

I have to get used to itbeing out there. I have to give birth.

ovel has something to do with twentieth-century military history

ithout losingfocus and hopping over to Twitter

Would you tellme if you hated me?”

And it’s like, she just gets me, like she’s having sex with my words.Like, mind sex.” Athena giggles, then scrunches her nose up adorably. Isuppress the impulse to poke it. “You ever think of the revision process aslike, having sex with your editor? Like you’re making a great big literarybaby?”

a bizarre urge to stickmy fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatlypeel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.

Ng

I’ll be derailed for days, unableto focus on my own work

only make about thirty-fivethousand dollars a year, she blinked at me and asked, “Is that a lot?”

She always hugs me whenshe sees me. She likes my social media posts at least twice a week.

Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—and no matter how hard I work, or howwell I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu

“diverse” enough

Born in Hong Kong, raisedbetween Sydney and New York, educated in British boarding schools thatgave her a posh, unplaceable foreign accent; tall and razor-thin, graceful inthe way all former ballet dancers are, porcelain pale and possessed of thesemassive, long-lashed brown eyes

exotic

the ghosts of all the deceased women in her family

a richly detailed and subtly magical coming-of-age story about

But although we started out in the same place

I because my mother’scousin owned a condo in Rosslyn that she would rent to me for the cost ofutilities if I remembered to water her plants.

I’m drinking to dull the bitch in me thatwishes she were dead.

Probably I’m here because I’m just that pathetic.

which is thateveryone else finds her as unbearable as I do

proletarians

with blue checkholders

thena is so stupidly,ridiculously successful that it makes sense she wouldn’t want to minglewith mere mortals.

For Athena, the Netflixdeal was not a life-changing event, just another feather in her cap, one ofthe side perks of the road to literary stardom she’s been hurtling down sincegraduation.

THE NIGHT I WATCH ATHENA LIU DIE, WE’RE CELEBRATING HER TV deal withNetflix.