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

Athena and I had bonded instantly over our love of the same book, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.

My heart’s pounding so hard I can feel it in my boobs.

“So is stealing words from a dead woman,” Diana says.

Someone else tweets a photo of me taken off my Instagram paired with a photo of Scarlett Johansson, captioned: Corporate wants you to find the differences between these two images LMAO.

For the first time since I submitted the manuscript, I feel a deep wash of shame.

Isn’t it racist, in a sense, to assume my race based on my last name?

I’m not fooling anyone on purpose.

Her lack of formality strikes me as rather unprofessional.