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 oncollege for so long, but once I scratch the surface, it all comes bubbling tothe fore. Starbucks every Tuesday after our Women in Victorian Litseminar: an iced mocha for me, a Very Berry Hibiscus Refresher forAthena. Nights at slam poetry events during which we’d sipped gingerbeers and giggled at the performers, who were not real poets, and whowould one day certainly grow out of this nonsense. A Les Mis sing-alongparty at a drama major’s apartment, where we’d shrieked at the top of ourlungs, “One day more!”As I transcribe all this, I wonder if our friendship had indeed been asstrained as I’d perceived it. Was that jealous tension always there? Were werivals from the start? Or had I, in the throes of my insecurity, projected it allagainst Athena?I remember the day during our senior year that Athena received thefirst offer on her debut novel, when her agent called and told her on her wayto barre class that she would soon have her book on shelves. She called mefirst. Me. She hadn’t even told her parents yet

What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don’tghosts just want to be remembered?

that Daniellahad a habit of saying all sorts of bigoted things during meetings (“Wealready have a Muslim writer,” she’d told the team once duringacquisitions. “Any more and we’ll be outnumbered.”

I’ll play up the sapphic quality of it all, too. Readers will love that;queer love stories are all the rage now. Drop in a little hint of girl crushingand the TikTokers will go rabid.

’ll write about us. Well, no—a fictionalized version of us, a pseudo-autobiography in which I blur fact and fiction. I’ll describe the night shedied in all its heart-stopping, lurid detail. I’ll describe how I stole her workand published it. I’ll describe every step along my way to literary stardom,and then my horrifying fall. Academics and scholars will have a field daywith this text. They’ll write entire books about how I cleverly blended thetruth with lies, how I reclaimed the rumors about me, subverted the uglygossip about a treasured friendship into a tale that confronts the reader withtheir own sick desire for scandal and destruction. They’ll call it radical.Groundbreaking. No one’s ever refuted literary expectations like thisbefore.

daisychain453

A musicianneeds to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts.I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn’t stand to be likeMom and Rory, living their little and self-contained lives, with no greatprojects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want theworld to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words tolast forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I’m gone, I want to leavebehind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and shetold us what was on her mind.

A musicianneeds to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts.I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn’t stand to be likeMom and Rory, living their little and self-contained lives, with no greatprojects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want theworld to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words tolast forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I’m gone, I want to leavebehind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and shetold us what was on her mind.

toput Rory and me through good schools with minimal student debt

Juniper Song and Aurora Whisper.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that it was Rory who liked Chinese,and that Chinese food makes my stomach roil,

and no onecares about the inner musings of a plain, straight white girl from Philly.They want the new and exotic, the diverse, and if I want to stay afloat,that’s what I have to give them.

Marketing and publicity make you distill hundreds ofpages of careful, nuanced reflection into cute, tweet-size talking points.

pixie cut

ut then I take stock of the whole situation, and it’sastoundingly pathetic. I don’t need to engage in a she-said, she-said battlewith a seventeen-year-old. I’m too big for this

I’ve won. It’s a pathetic victory, sure, but it’s better than sitting hereand suffering their mocking glares.

“You think she took it right out of her apartment? Like, the night shedied?”“Oh my God,” says Skylar, delighted and horrified. “That’sdiabolical.”“Do you think she killed her?”“Oh my God, don’t—

I glimpse my students through thewindow of Mimi’s, one of the many bubble tea cafés near campus. Thetwelve of them are crowded around a table meant for six; so many chairspulled up that they each get only a little bit of table space. They seemtotally comfortable around one another, hunched over their laptops andnotebooks. They’re writing—perhaps working on my homeworkassignment. I watch as they show one another snippets of work, laughing atfunny turns of phrase, nodding appreciatively as they take turns reading outloud.

(“Anna Karenina,”declares Johnson. “Only Anna wouldn’t kill herself.”)

I’m not sure that Brett understands that the people who are intomagical realism are so not into near-future science fiction of this sort.

Women are raised in institutions, born and bred to bebaby-makers, and they’re sold to their husbands as house slaves.

I could go for a Star Warsnovel, maybe. I mean, it sounds very difficult, and I’d have to really digdeep into my nerd past to make myself care about whatever bit characterthey fling my way, but I could make something work

I’msupposed to take down quotes as we’re talking, but I don’t want to have mypen and notebook out in case that intimidates him.

Ratatouille and Mulan combined.

Stop being such a nervous white girl, I scold myself. Real people livehere; it’s not a war zone. I can’t learn their stories if I’m acting like a jumpytourist.

I think one of my grandparents or great-grandparents might have been Jewish

on Nathan Hale’s statue on campus

Like Taylor Swift, I had nointention of becoming a white supremacist Barbie. Obviously I’m not aTrumper—I voted for Biden! But if these people are hurling money at me,is it so wrong of me to accept? Should we not celebrate scamming cashfrom racist rednecks whenever we get the chance?

“I know,” says Mrs. Liu, and now there’s a hard edge in her voice. “Iknow, June. Athena never would have written something like that.”

But she is terrified of what lies inside those Moleskines. That is clearernow than ever. I’m speaking to a mother who, when it comes down to it,would really rather not confront what dark things lay buried in herdaughter’s soul. No mother wants to know her child that well. Here, then,are the terms of our bargain—she’ll keep my secrets, as long as she neverhas to confront Athena’s.

I’ve torn that from her. I’ve denied a mother her daughter’s finalwords. If I tell her the truth now, Mrs. Liu will at least get those wordsback. She’ll see the effort that occupied the last years of Athena’s life.

It’s Patricia Liu. Athena’s mom.”

What happensnext will happen, no matter what I do or say.

I should have known it wouldn’t last.

I flipped the issue open to page twelve, Athena’s story, and found myown words staring back at me.But they weren’t quite my words. Just my feelings, all of my confusedand tangled thoughts, articulated in a clean, understated yet sophisticatedstyle that I didn’t then have the eloquence to achieve.

I woke up the nextmorning with my panties around my ankles and violent, purplish-blackhickeys on my neck. My vagina, to be honest, felt fine—later I would pokeand prod at it, trying to tell if I was sore or bleeding,

And yet it’s this story that brings me down

Our protagonist is a barefootgirl, a young witch chasing her immortal mother through eternity,uncovering her secrets only to form more questions about herself and where

In my nightmares she walks into a dark and never-ending hallway, andas many times as I call her name, she never turns around. Her dress leaveswet streaks on the carpet. Her pale arms are bloody and scratched. I knowshe has slain the bear. I know she has escaped the forest. She moves nowwith that same urgency, abandoning the past like Orpheus, inverted, like ifshe never glances back over her shoulder, it will cease to exist. She forgets Iam trapped here, unable to move, unable to make her see me. She forgetsme entirely.

if I hit you, would it feel like a kiss?

Rook was alreadydead when I arrived

which involves a YA writer who sent anonymous death threats to arival for months before slipping up and sending one from her own emailaddress

the affected writer has started a GoFundMe to raise money to sue foremotional damages.

Geoffrey Carlino isn’t an alphamale whose fury can’t be tamed. He’s a pathetic, insecure little boy who’sall bluster, who has no more cards up his sleeve.

She called you some loser fromschool. Said she didn’t know why you were still hacking at it, that yourdebut was thoroughly mediocre, and that you’d be better off calling it quitsbefore this industry chewed you up entirely.

He looks like the love interest from some dark andsteamy YA novel come to life, all mussed dark hair and rough stubble

Does anyone get weird looks when they ask for “real spicy, not just white people spicy” at Indianrestaurants?

android girl named Xiao Li who puts up with anumber of abuses from lecherous human clients before self-destructing in ablast that destroys over half of New Beijing.

Heart hammering, I pull up Twitter and search “Geoffrey Carlino” tosee what Athena’s ex-boyfriend has been up to lately.

She was too pretty, too successful,too suspiciously clean to have nothing on her ledger. She had it coming forher,

He doesn’t ask any more questions. Tom, bless him, takes everythingat face value. So does Rory. I feel a deep pang of affection for them rightthen. There’s no guile in this family; just open, loving trust,

The SpiderwickChronicles

Hey, Tom? Could you trace theIP address of, like, any random Twitter account?

TikTok-obsessed basic bitch in training.

“Well, sure. But that’s just Wonder Woman; that’s not seriousliterature.

And it’s so crazy to call Chelsea a racist—I mean,she’s a Democrat. She voted for Obama

Islamicmysticism

Ailin for her thoughts onBridgerton.

“So you have a problemwith unacknowledged Asian labor?”

release of the French edition ofThe Last Front

oom where ithappens

This dress is Juniper Song’s villainorigin story

How much do you want to bet she loves the IDF, too?

You lost that right when you let a white man colonize yourcunt.

a YA writer wasdriven off social media for encouraging her fans to leave one-star reviewson another writer’s debut

I know some authors who have been able to jump from scandal toscandal with their reputations perfectly intact. Mostly white.

What happened to critical reading skills

All I did was write once that I couldn’trelate to an Indian writer’s romance novel, because all the characters wereunlikable and way too obsessed with their family duties to the point ofdisbelief

The literal definition of yellowface,

reyl089.

There’s then a heated debate over whether it’s appropriate to use thewords “lynch mob” when describing a white woman, and it ends withdozens of people calling the above referenced author a racist. Said author’saccount is locked within hours.

It’s notlike these two things are connected.

Wikipedia page about me. They’ll writeendless think pieces about me

The first tweet comes from an account named @Athena LiusGhost,created earlier this week; no profile picture, no words in the bio:Juniper Song, aka June Hayward, did not write The Last Front. I did. She stole my book, stolemy voice, and stole my words. #SaveAthena.

Why not the world

arm in arm with the handsome Asian actor they cast to play AGeng

“It’s a translation, really.And translation across mediums is inherently unfaithful to some extent.Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.”

“You are exactly right,” he says. “We need you. My English, it is notso good. Your generation has very good English. You can tell them ourstory. Make sure they remember us.” He nods, determined. “Yes. Make surethey remember us.”

t makes me feelrotten

Great Wall Express

I want to die. I want toopen the car door and roll out onto the highway and be obliterated byoncoming traffic

Kim Jong Un’s girlboss propagandist sisterimmediately comes to mind, only because I’d once seen a news photographof her wearing a similar suit and sunglasses

get that they’re armymen, and they’re uncouth, but this feels like tragedy porn,

domino theory

Profiting from someone else’s suffering. God, what a cruel way to putit. Athena used to struggle with this, publicly, performatively.

I often rehearse pretendarguments in the shower.

Annie Watersmeme,” which involves pictures of bland and mediocre-looking whitewomen paired with the caption, taken from the book, “She was a litheyoung thing, with hair the color of the rising sun and eyes like the ocean,and the men could not keep their eyes off her as she floated past

“For my next video,” drawls Kimberly Deng, “I will be doing anAnnie Waters makeup tutorial, featuring a turmeric face mask and whitetears.”

Annie Waters—a character I’d expandedfrom Athena’s draft, the seventeen-year-old daughter of YMCAmissionaries—visits the laborers’ camp alone to hand out Bibles andChristmas biscuits. The men, who haven’t seen their wives or any womenof their kind in months, understandably ogle over her. She’s blonde, slim,and pretty; of course they can’t get enough of her. One asks if he can kissher on the cheek, and since it’s Christmastime, she bashfully permits it.I thought the scene was touching. Here we have people divided bylanguage and race, who are nonetheless able to share a tender moment inthe middle of a war. The scene also fixed an earlier gripe Daniella had withthe novel, which was that it centered almost entirely on men. The era of themacho war story is over, she’d written. We need to start elevating femaleperspectives.

Also, what’s The Untamed?

“one of themany white women, like those who write queer fan fiction of The Untamed,who not only have an unexamined fetish for feminine-looking Asian men,but who think Chinese history is something to cherry-pick from in search ofintriguing and shiny nuggets, like nice Ming vases to set in the corner.”

“I am white,” I say, more frostily than I’d intended. What is sheinsinuating? That I can’t be a good mentor to her unless I’m Asian?

I am a woman who helps otherwomen.

Right,” I say. I’m a little surprised Heidi knows the word “subaltern.”“And without us, these stories wouldn’t get told.”“Precisely. Precisely.

Japanese art history, meaning tentacleporn,

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.