For two weeks, Athena Liu was my guardian angel. I thought she was so kind. I thought we would be friends forever.
But freshman friendships don’t last. By our second semester, I was running in my own circles, and she in hers. We still smiled and waved when we passed each other in the dining hall. We still liked each other’s Facebook posts. But we weren’t talking for hours on the floors of our rooms, trading stories about authors we hoped to meet and literary scandals we’d read about on Twitter. We weren’t texting each other during class anymore. Perhaps, I thought, the enormity of what I’d shared had killed a proper friendship in the bud. There are appropriate levels to intimacy. You can’t break out “I think I was raped, but I don’t really know,” until at least three months in.
We all moved on. I forgot about Andrew, or at least buried him so deep in the back of my mind that he wouldn’t resurface until therapy sessions many years later. The freshman girl’s brain is startlingly capable of selective amnesia; I believe it is a survival reaction. I made new, closer friends, none of whom would ever know what had happened. My hickeys faded. I settled into life at Yale, stopped going to parties where I made a fool of myself, and threw myself into my coursework.
But then Athena’s first short story came out in one of Yale’s alt literary magazines, a pretentious rag titled Ouroboros. This was a big deal—freshmen never got published in Ouroboros, or so I heard, and we all bought copies to support her. I took my print volume up to my room to read. I felt a snarl of jealousy—I’d submitted my own story months ago and had been resoundingly rejected within a day—but I wanted to look like a good sport, so I thought I’d read enough to find a few particularly witty lines, and then quote them back at Athena the next time I saw her.
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.
And the worst part was that I didn’t know, narrated the protagonist. I truly couldn’t tell if I’d been raped, if I’d wanted it, if anything had happened at all, if I was glad that nothing had happened, or if I wanted something to happen just so I could make it out to be more important than I was. The place between my legs is a lacuna. There is no memory, no shame, no pain. It’s all just gone. And I do not know what to do with the lack.
I read the story from beginning to end, again and again, spotting more and more similarities every time, identifying personal details changed with either astounding laziness or indifference. The guy’s name was Anthony. The girl’s name was Jillian. They drank strawberry lemonade Svedka. They were in the same Ancient Philosophy section. He invited her over to watch The Hobbit.
“I liked your story,” I told Athena at dinner; holding her gaze, daring her to deny it. I know what you did.
She met my eyes, and gave me a polite, nothing smile—the one she would later give regularly to fans at signing tables. “Thank you, Juniper. That’s really kind of you to say.”
We never spoke about that story, or what happened with Andrew, again.
Maybe it was a coincidence. We were small, fragile freshmen girls at a large university where such things are known to happen. My story isn’t remarkable. It is, in fact, utterly mundane. Not every girl has a rape story. But almost every girl has an “I’m not sure, I didn’t like it, but I can’t quite call it rape” story.
I couldn’t, however, overlook the similarity between the phrases I’d used when describing my pain and the phrases Athena used in her story. I couldn’t unlink Athena’s prose from the memory of her doe-like brown eyes, blinking in sympathy as I told her every black, ugly thing in my heart between choked sobs.
She’d stolen my story. I was convinced of it. She’d stolen my words right out of my mouth. She did the same to everyone around her for the entirety of her career, and honestly, if I’m supposed to feel bad about getting my revenge, then fuck that.
Mother Witch COMES OUT TO A MODERATELY WARM RECEPTION—plenty of critical acclaim, but modest sales. We expected as much. It’s a novella, not a full-length novel—I couldn’t think of a way to build it out longer than forty thousand words—and the market for those is always smaller. I do a three-city tour at bookstores in DC, Boston, and NYC, where it’s easier to wrangle together an audience of book enthusiasts on any given Friday. These are well attended. No one asks any nasty questions about my racial bona fides. No one mentions the plagiarism scandal.
The critical reception is good, in a faintly surprised way. From Kirkus, a starred review: “A quiet, heartrending tale of betrayal and innocence lost.” From Library Journal, also a starred review: “Juniper Song proves adept at handling mature themes in contexts entirely removed from World War One.” And our greatest achievement, in the New York Times, which I know Daniella had to pull strings to get: “If there were any suspicions that Juniper Song does not produce her own work, let Mother Witch settle those fears: this girl can write.”
There’s something unsettling about all this calm. Things are too quiet, suffocatingly so, like the air before a thunderstorm. But I’m too relieved, too ready to believe I might have put all the trouble behind me. I’m already thinking about the next contract, about possible film options for current properties. Maybe Mother Witch isn’t blockbuster material, but you could make a quiet prestige TV series with it. Something like Big Little Lies, or Little Fires Everywhere. Someone call Reese Witherspoon to produce. Someone tap Amy Adams to play the mother. Someone tap Anna Kendrick to play me.
I let myself relax. I fill my head with dreams. After all this time, I finally stop hearing Athena’s ghost every time I sit down to write.
I should have known it wouldn’t last.
Sixteen
TWO WEEKS AFTER MOTHER WITCH COMES OUT, ADELE SPARKS-SATO puts out a blog post titled “Mother Witch Is Also Plagiarized, and I’ve Fucking Had It with June Hayward.”
I glimpse the Google Alert just as I’m about to step into the shower. I sit back on my bed, clutching my towel tight against my chest as I click the link.
Like many of you, I was curious when Eden Press announced June Hayward, writing as Juniper Song, was releasing a stand-alone novella. After the allegations surrounding The Last Front, I had doubts whether she could write something of equal quality, especially now as there are no remaining works of Athena’s to steal from—or so we all thought. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I turned to the first page.
Mother Witch opens with identical lines from a story that Athena Liu workshopped at the Asian American Writers’ Collective summer workshop in 2018. Such overlap is not coincidental. Here’s the proof.
Below, Adele has included screenshots of Google Docs and photographs of printed story outlines with handwritten notes in the comments, along with so many corroborating dates and accounts that such an accusation would be impossible to fake.
In case anyone thinks this is some elaborate hoax, I’ve reached out to eight different attendees of the workshop that year. Not everyone still has their printouts from that summer, but everyone has gone on record as remembering Athena’s work. They’ve attached their names to this write-up as endorsements. If you won’t take my word for it, consider the weight of our combined testimonies.