In the Shadow

The candle in my hand flickered, as the sound of our voices filled the auditorium of the 19th century school building during the evening of December 13th 1991. Lucia. The outline of the audience was barely visible from the stage, but I knew they were there. Dressed in a white gown, a red sash around my waist, and a lingonberry greenery head-wreath, I was pleased that I no longer wore tinsel on my head as had been customary when I was younger. But I was still just a handmaiden, positioned next to, and yet behind the Lucia. I was in her shadow, as I had been for 11 years, standing in the background as she received all the attention. I looked at the back of her head. The blonde locks cascaded down her back and the candles in her crown were shining brightly. I stared at her, as if my stare could blow out all those candles or set her hair on fire. 

My mother always said; there will always be someone to upstage you. No matter how talented you are, no matter how pretty you are, there will always be someone more beautiful, more skilled than you. There will always be someone who casts a shadow over you, and you might as well get used to living in that shadow. 

For me, that shadow was Elin. 

Elin had secured the nomination for Lucia, every year since the 1st grade. Never once had the teachers thought to disqualify the winner of the previous year, to give another girl a chance. Never once had the classmates thought to vote for someone other than Elin. I had always been the runner up, never the one selected, and the edge that she seemed to have over me translated into every lead role available; in school plays, in musicals and for vocal solos. I was sick of it. 

After the performance, everyone was talking as we were changing into our regular clothing. A murmur of noise surrounded me; the sound of orange lockers closing without a fraction of care, the rustling of zippers being pulled up on boots and jackets and voices making conversation either loud or whispering. But I was quiet. Contemplating. 

“Mia.”

The voice became audible as the fog of my thoughts dispersed a little.

I looked up and stared at Katia. She waved her hands in front of me.

“Where are you?”, she said. “I’ve said your name like 10 times, but it’s like you don’t hear me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as I was putting on my boots. “I’m almost ready.” 

“The bus leaves in like 7 minutes,” she said. “Let’s go!”

I shoved the white gown and the wreath into my backpack, zipped up my puffer jacket, put on my hat, mittens and scarf and slung the backpack carelessly over one shoulder before Katia and I headed outside into the dark evening. The frosted air bit our cheeks, and I wrapped the scarf tighter around my face. My hands grew cold and stiff inside my mittens. The winters in Stockholm could be harsh. 

When we got on the city bus towards home, I rubbed my hands together to warm them up. Katia got off after a few stops and I was sitting by myself, leaning against the window and staring at my own reflection. 

I got off the bus a few stops after Katia, and I walked the short distance to the apartment building where I lived with my mom. There was a thick forest of pine trees on the right, and large high rise apartment buildings, interspersed with playgrounds and parking lots, on the left. Once inside the building, my footsteps made an echoing sound against the bare concrete floor, as I walked towards a three story elevator ride and pressed the button. It was dark inside the apartment. My mom had already gone to bed. 

I turned on the light in the kitchen and made myself a sandwich and some hot chocolate, and when I sat down to eat I stared at my reflection in the kitchen window. This time of year, when the landscape was enshrouded in darkness, reflections were everywhere. 

My reflection didn’t tell me much, other than that I wasn’t as invisible as I felt. I was pretty, but no one else seemed to notice. I was talented, but my talent went as unrecognized as the painstaking labor of someone who was emptying the trash cans on the subway stations. My frustration was staring back at me from the depths of the darkness outside. My eyes looked discontent and unhappy.  

My mother didn’t mind living in the shadow of others. She always said: If you’re happy with little, you’ll always be happy. But I wasn’t like her. She got up at five every morning, and as she entered the subway station, on the way to work, amidst a crowd of faceless people, she probably didn’t care that she was invisible. She probably didn’t even check her reflection in the subway train window as it moved towards her destination; the hospital, where she cleaned hospital rooms for 8 hours a day. For her, being a gear in the intricate clockwork of society was fine. 

But for me, ever since that hopeful day in first grade, late October of 1980, when the teacher was about to announce who had been selected Lucia, and I had sat with my head bowed and my hands in my lap, just waiting for my name to be called, I knew I didn’t want to be one of the crowd. I wanted to stand out. And for eleven years, Elin Olofsson had snagged my opportunity to stand out at every turn. And if I ever wanted to be Lucia and lead the beautiful choir procession onto the stage of the old 19th century auditorium at the school, I only had one more opportunity left. After that, I would graduate. 

I was the only one who saw Elin in the bathroom that morning and I was the only one who noticed that she was crying. She was washing her hands and her face was drenched in tears, which she attempted to wipe off with the back of her hand. 

“Are you okay?” I asked.

I saw our reflections in the mirror. Despite her crying, she was unbelievably beautiful, with long, curly, honey blonde hair, dark green eyes, and eyelashes as long and thick as miniature hairbrushes. 

She looked at me, as if she wasn’t sure whether or not to answer. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, giving me a forced smile, and turned to leave. My next comment stopped her cold:

“If you’re so fine, why are you crying?” I asked.

She turned around and said tiredly:

“Just the essay. Literature. Stig, he’s just such a jerk…Just a nasty comment on my paper.”

“Like what?” 

Elin seemed a little flustered when she talked to me, as if she didn't really want to have this conversation with me, but she wanted to have it with someone and maybe she didn’t want to admit to her friends that she hadn’t performed well.

“He said it was flat. Unoriginal…” She wiped a few more tears off of her face. “He’s letting me rewrite it, but I don’t know how to fix it.”

I nodded, empathetically.

“I could help you, you know,” I said. “I could help you rewrite the essay, if you let me read it.”

She contemplated this for a moment. 

“Sure,” she said. “That’d be great. When?”

“If you let me borrow your essay today, we can meet tomorrow after school. At the library, or maybe at Lily’s cafe.”

“Oh, sure,” she said and smiled. “That’d be nice. I’d appreciate that. Thank you!”

When Elin handed me the essay later in the day, I noticed it wasn’t typed. I smiled, realizing that I had just stumbled onto something valuable. This was the first time I had truly thought of a way to ruin Elin. It was a complicated and far-fetched idea and it wasn’t very well thought out yet, but I focused on the possibility that it could work. At the end of the school day, I walked the short distance to the library and copied her essay.

I read her essay in the light from the desk lamp in my room. I needed to come up with some pointers, so that I had something to say at our meeting the next day. I kept rereading it, and offered some tips in the margin of the story. The tips weren’t great, but maybe good enough for her to get a better grade 

If any of Elin’s friends had stepped into Lily’s café the following day, they might have felt the odd tension that stemmed  from my disingenuous attempt to help her out, but none of her friends were there. Elin and I both ordered coffee and sat down at a table by the windows. She smelled like fragrant shampoo and strawberry lip gloss and she kept twirling a lock of her hair. I couldn’t help but think that she seemed nice. Kind. 

“Descriptive language,” I said. “He’s right. It’s a little flat. I think you could elaborate a little.”

She sighed. 

“Like how? I really hate this. This isn’t my thing, “ she said.

I smiled,

“Yeah, but it’s mine. I’ll help you.”

Having a copy of Elin’s essay meant that I had access to her handwriting. If I could just learn to copy her handwriting, I could do anything with it. Write fake love letters if I felt like it, or more importantly, get her disqualified for every performance opportunity for the following year, by getting her accused of plagiarism. While cheating on a test was bad, plagiarism was in a whole different category altogether. If you got accused of plagiarism, besides earning a poor grade in the class, you were disqualified to participate in any of the extra curricular activities the school offered, including, of course, choir, and theater. If she was out of the picture, I might finally get the chance for a solo performance in choir, a lead role in a musical, and have the opportunity to be Lucia. 

At home, I placed the copy of her essay underneath a sheet of notebookpaper, and started tracing her handwriting, to see if there was any way I could master it. When I was done, I placed the two copies next to each other, and cringed. Even though I had traced her handwriting, it didn't look authentic. But maybe if I practiced every day, until I had perfected it, it would actually work. If not, I’d have to come up with something else.  

We had an assignment that was due after Christmas break; to write a poem. What I needed was a poem famous enough that the plagiarism wouldn’t fall under the radar and short enough that I could write it in her handwriting, without messing up. I spent hours at the library looking for the right poem to copy before I found one that was perfect; Indra, by August Strindberg. 

During Christmas break, I declined to go to all of the holiday parties mom and I were invited to, pretending I was sick. I placed a dab of brown eye shadow underneath my eyes and smudged it until it looked as if I had caught a cold. At the breakfast table, I leaned my head against the wall, and told my mother I wasn’t feeling well.

“But we are invited to aunt Caroline’s Christmas party,” my mom said. 

I shook my head, looking despondent. 

“I’m too sick…my head…but you can go.”

My mom looked disappointed, and a crease formed between her eyebrows, and a forced smile appeared on her face as she said:

“Okay, honey.”

I felt bad, but I had things to do. Things I couldn’t do at aunt Caroline’s Christmas party. 

Katia called me during break, wondering if I wanted to do something, but I told her I had the flu. I was in my room, tracing Elin’s handwriting for hours on end and it was so dreadfully boring, I only got through it by listening to music on my record player, spinning LP’s of Depeche Mode and David Bowie. But by the end of Christmas break, I had successfully managed to copy a poem in Elin’s handwriting, and I was ready to turn it in to the teacher. 

I still had one problem; I needed to get my hands on Elin's actual poem. My first thought was to steal her assignment off the teacher's desk when I was handing in my own, but it was a clumsy maneuver, and someone might see me. It was difficult to be inconspicuous in the midst of a classroom full of students. 

When it was time for us to hand in our assignments, I sneaked behind Elin in line, but I wasn’t able to grab her poem. There was no way I could have taken that poem without getting caught. By the time the class was over there were two poems by Elin Olofsson in the pile on the teacher’s desk and I needed to get my hands on one of them.  

I walked up to the teacher, Stig, and told him:

“I just need to double check something,” I said. “On my essay.”

He looked at me curiously.

“Sure,” he said. 

“Is it okay if I drop it in your mailbox later?” I said. “I think I might have misspelled something.”

“Sure, it’s fine. As long as I get it today.”

Since Elin’s real poem was positioned right under mine, I grabbed them both.

“Thanks,” I said to Stig and walked out. 

A few days later Elin was sent to the principal’s office. I heard about it after the fact, when she was complaining to her friends in a shrill voice:

“But I didn’t do it. I didn’t write this…but it’s my handwriting…Stig showed me the comparison with my other work, but I didn’t write this. Why would I be dumb enough to copy August Strindberg?”

“That’s so creepy,” one of her friends said.

“But who would do such a thing?” Elin said. “And why? And where is the poem I wrote? I spent hours on that stupid thing and it has just magically disappeared.”

You have no idea, I thought. 

“So what are you going to do now?” her friend Agneta said. “Are you in trouble? Like, what’s happening?”

“I got a warning,” she said. “And I need to rewrite the poem by Friday. I hope I can remember what I had actually written. This is so stupid.“

When I was walking to the bus stop after school that day, I was feeling despondent and discouraged. The sky was as dark as my mood and it was frigidly cold, but I didn’t care, because my adrenaline kept me warm. A warning? For plagiarism? I guess you can’t ruin someone when everyone else wants her to succeed. Any other student would have gotten into way more trouble than that, but apparently not Elin. Elin had gotten a second chance. 

That thought stopped me in my tracks, and I veered from my direction towards the bus stop and turned towards the library instead. Elin had been given a second chance, not two second chances, and if I could manage to turn in a plagiarized poem with her name on it, before she had a chance to turn in her poem, I might still have a chance to get her into some serious trouble. All I could hope for was that she wouldn’t beat me to it. 

I was up way past midnight that night, copying Emily Dickinson’s ““Hope” is the thing with feathers”, and in the morning I slipped the poem into the teacher’s mailbox. 

Elin approached me a few days later outside of math class. 

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, pretending to be surprised. “About what?”

“Follow me,” she said, and I followed her into the stairwell. We were on the top floor and she stopped on the landing and let the door close behind us.  

“Class is starting,” I said uncomfortably. “Like right now.”

“Perfect,” she said. “I need to speak with you alone.”

We were facing each other, like two bulls ready to fight. . 

“Is it you?” she said. “Are you copying my handwriting?”

I shook my head, probably too vigorously to seem innocent. 

“Yes, it is,” she hissed threateningly. “I can see it in your face. All this started after I let you read my essay. Do you think I’m stupid?” 

“No,” I said. 

“Why?” she said. “What did I ever do to you?”

You have no idea, I thought. 

 She took a step closer to me as if she wanted to hit me. She had high heels on and the heels made her a little unsteady. 

“I’m talking to Stig,” she said. “You are in so much trouble.”

She was so angry that she didn’t pay attention to where she was stepping, and she was dangerously close to the edge. She briefly lost her balance and that’s when I saw my opportunity. I pushed. I pushed her as hard as I could, and I heard her shriek, and then her body thumped against the concrete floor. First her body and then her head.

Later I convinced myself that it had been an accident, that I hadn’t meant to push her, that I had just been overcome by an impulse, and that impulse had taken over. There were no witnesses. Her death was ruled accidental. 

The candles on my crown are shining brightly as I am leading the Lucia procession onto the stage. December 13th 1992. I’m no longer hovering in the shadow of another person. During my solo, my voice fills every little nook of the auditorium, and the audience gasps. I briefly close my eyes, and I wish that this moment could last forever.