The Application That Changed Everything
“Deleted your med school application. Now you can’t compete with me,” my sister texted at 11:42 p.m. By dawn, my status read WITHDRAWN and she was laughing in the next room.
I spent the night begging admissions, convinced my future was gone with one click. By noon, our landline rang, my parents froze, and an unfamiliar voice asked for me. My sister smirked—until he mentioned IP logs, sabotage… and then said he was the dean.
The text came at exactly 11:42 p.m. I remember the time because I had my laptop clock, my phone clock, and the tiny digital alarm clock on my nightstand all lined up in my field of vision, like three silent witnesses to my obsession. I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, laptop balanced on my thighs, a half-cold mug of coffee abandoned on the nightstand.
My room was dark except for the bluish glow of my screen, and the rest of the house had gone quiet hours ago. Every few minutes, I refreshed my email—the application portal, my inbox, even the spam folder sometimes, just in case. Months of preparation were folded into that application like layers of delicate paper: entrance exams that had eaten my weekends, interviews that had left my palms damp and my throat dry, personal statements rewritten until three in the morning.
I had poured every version of myself onto those pages: the daughter, the student, the volunteer at the free clinic, the scared little girl who once watched an ambulance drive away with someone she loved. This application wasn’t just paperwork. It was my way out.
Out of this town that felt too small, out of the narrow corridor of expectations my family had built for me, out of the unspoken rule that my life had to orbit around my older sister. I was in the middle of reading through my own personal statement again when my phone buzzed on the bed beside me. I glanced at the screen.
My sister’s name. The preview flashed up before I could ignore it. “Deleted your med school application.
Now you can’t compete with me “
At first, I thought I was misreading it. My eyes skimmed it once, twice. The smiling emoji at the end looked like some small, cruel fingerprint smudged onto the sentence.
My heart started pounding so loudly I could hear it in my ears. No. I unlocked my laptop with shaking hands, fingers tripping over the keys.
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