Cat Jacobi

Short Story by Catherine Jacobi

I met her in one of those college hallways that always smelled faintly of hair bleach and Essie nail polish, the kind of place where every girl’s Marc Jacobs Tote Bag carried a half-finished dream and a half-empty oat latte. She was blonde, the kind of blonde that looked rinsed, like it had been dipped in milk too many times. Mousy features, small mouth, a little too eager smile. You could tell she wanted to be seen, but only through a filter.

She had that washed-out kind of prettiness that only exists in artificial light. Hair too blonde for her eyebrows, a tan that didn’t quite match her knuckles. Her voice was high, a little trembly, like a string pulled too tight. Like she was choking on her own falsehood.

She told me she got into fashion school through some big-deal connection. Her godmother knew someone at Vogue, her cousin worked with Miu Miu, her ex-boyfriend modeled in Paris. Every sentence was a namedrop with an aftertaste of desperation. She’d talk about these imaginary internships and phantom vacations like she was trying to hypnotize me into believing her. “When I was in Italy last summer…” she’d start, and I’d already feel the lie slide across the table, smooth as silk, impossible to catch but obvious in its shimmer.

The thing is, she wasn’t a bad storyteller. She knew how to build a scene, how to pause before a punchline, how to look up just long enough to make you feel like you were lucky to be included. Sometimes I caught myself halfway through believing her. I think she wanted to be Anna Delvey, or at least the poor-student version of her: the myth of the girl who faked her way into the upper crust. Except this girl never had the charisma to pull it off. She was more failure-to-launch than fake-it-till-you-make-it.

When she spoke, it was always about herself: her internships, her connections, her projects. But the names she dropped never stuck. People she “knew” always somehow lived “abroad” or had “just moved.” No one could ever verify anything. Still, she had a knack for faking proximity to success, like standing near a window and pretending the view was yours.

Still, she had a kind of gravity. You couldn’t help but get pulled in, the perfume, the pout, the tragic aura of someone who wanted to be adored but didn’t quite understand why she wasn’t. She was from somewhere unglamorous, maybe the Midwest or the South; she spoke with that tight, nasal American accent that sounds perpetually on the verge of complaint. She’d tell stories about her “housekeeper” and “family driver,” but then she’d Venmo-request me for coffee money. She carried herself like she was auditioning for the life she wanted.

Her dorm room looked like a millennial’s Pinterest board, all beige and white, the kind of decor that wants to look expensive but can’t hide its IKEA tags. There were fashion magazines stacked like trophies on her nightstand, and taped on the mirror, a printout of an Anna Wintour quote in cursive font: “If you can’t be better than your competition, just dress better.” I remember thinking: she didn’t understand what that meant. She wanted to be identifiable, but she had no self to begin with. How could she dress better if every outfit she put on was so calculated to a character that it bordered on costume?

When she wasn’t performing, she was dissecting. Other girls’ outfits. Their hair. Their bodies. Their pronouns. Their parents. “I’m just being honest,” she’d say, like honesty was an excuse for cruelty. It wasn’t the loud kind of hate, it was the kind that hides behind the word normal. The kind that laughs a second too late when someone says something queer or brown or foreign.

“I just don’t understand why they can’t just… be normal.” She’d say, like normalcy was objective and the pursuit of fitting in was easy.

I’d sit there, sipping my coffee, wondering if she realized how transparent she was. I could see it. The insecurity clinging to her like static, the way she’d search my face after every comment to see if I approved. She’d talk and talk and talk, her words spilling out in a breathless stream of nothing, and I’d nod, half-listening, studying the chipped polish on her thumbnail, the tremor in her laugh. There was something feral in it, a hunger, a need to be adored that bordered on violence.

She had this passive, razor-edged cruelty, the kind that hides behind a smile. “She tries too hard,” she’d whisper about another girl in our class, eyes flicking over someone’s outfit. Or, “He’s so performative about being gay, don’t you think?” said as if it were a critique, not a confession. She thought of herself as “open-minded” but was really just bored and mean. The kind of person who believed diversity looked good in campaign photos but not at her lunch table.

Once, I asked her where she learned to sew. She told me she’d been “hand-stitching silk gowns” since she was thirteen. Later that week, I watched her struggle to rethread a bobbin in class, her hands shaking, jaw tight with irritation. I wanted to help her, but she was too proud, pretending the machine was broken instead. I recognized that brand of delusion: the kind that prefers fantasy over humility.

I tried to ignore it at first. I thought maybe she was insecure, or lonely, or both. I told myself everyone lies a little. About who they are, where they’ve been, what they want. New York is a city of reinventions, after all. 

Sometimes she’d talk about her hometown, too, a place she’d describe as “too small for my brain.” I imagined it: gas stations, chain restaurants, defunct malls, grey apartment complexes, sunburned boys who never left. I think she hated where she came from so much that she decided to replace herself entirely. Maybe the lies were her way of molting.

Once, she told me her parents were dead. Another time, she said they lived in Connecticut and ran a vineyard. Another time, they were diplomats. It became a game in my head: which life will she live today? She’d talk about “her” penthouse, “her” yacht, “her” portfolio. Then one afternoon, I saw her struggling to tap her MetroCard at the subway gate, nearly crying when it read Insufficient Fare. The universe has a sense of humor, cruel and cinematic.

She wasn’t completely unbearable, though. There were moments, rare and brief, when she’d drop the act. Once, in the middle of winter, she told me she felt like she was “rotting under the surface.” Said it in that flat way people do when they mean it but wish they didn’t. Her mascara was smudged, her voice quieter than usual. I wanted to reach out, to say something — but before I could, she laughed it off, said, “Ugh, sorry, that was so emo of me,” and went back to scrolling through her phone.

The problem with people like her is that they make you complicit. You start lying too, nodding, agreeing, pretending not to notice the inconsistencies. You play along, because it’s easier to let her believe her version of herself than to confront the hollow underneath. But I could feel it eating at me, that quiet disgust that comes from knowing too much about someone you don’t even like.

Eventually, I had enough. I told her, gently, that she talked down to people. Just after class, quiet, careful, like I was handling something fragile (because, in a way, I felt like I was). I told her that she was meaner than she realized. Maybe she shouldn’t be putting down random people she didn’t know on things they couldn’t control. She blinked at me, like she couldn’t comprehend being criticized. Then she smiled, small, icy, and said, “You’re just jealous.” That was her only vocabulary for conflict: jealousy. She couldn’t imagine being wrong, only envied. In her story, she was always the misunderstood genius, the heroine battling bitter side characters.

After that, I became the villain. She told people I was obsessed with her, controlling, toxic, competitive, and dramatic. She spun her little story, and people believed her, at least for a while. It’s easy to believe the pretty blonde girl who cries on cue.

The last time I saw her, she was sitting in the campus café, surrounded by her new friends: a group of first-years who still thought her fake accent was charming. She was laughing too loudly, her lip gloss catching the light. When she saw me, her smile faltered for just a second. I don’t know if it was guilt or fear or recognition, but it was something. A flicker.

A flicker of something real in her. That she saw me, knew I saw her, too. And knew that I wasn’t fooled by any of it anymore.

That’s when I realized she wasn’t a bad person pretending to be good. She was nothing pretending to be someone. And that, somehow, was worse.

I walked away before she could say anything. I didn’t want an apology or another excuse. I just didn’t want to be pulled back into her orbit. That slow, dizzying spin of make-believe. Some people aren’t lessons; they’re warnings.

I’d see her sometimes on Instagram, posting photos from “Paris” with the Eiffel Tower so pixelated it looked like clip art. Her captions were always lowercase and confessional, something like “i’m learning to love myself again” or “trust the process”. Every story with a soft filter, every tag vague. I wanted to comment, say something true and scathing that would unmask her to all of the other people she managed to lie to, but I didn’t.

Some people crumble when confronted with reality; she’d already built herself a fantasy too big to escape. She wasn’t the villain or the fraud or the caricature she’d built herself into. She was just a girl who’d lied so much she didn’t know how to tell the truth anymore.

Sometimes I think about her, though. I imagine her still lying somewhere. About her boyfriend, her grades, her family, her happiness. Maybe she’s built a new version of herself by now, one that even she believes in. Or maybe she’s still rotting under the surface, trapped in the costume she stitched together out of borrowed stories and stolen light. 

And I don’t know if I hate her or pity her. Maybe both. Maybe that’s what she wanted all along: to be unforgettable, even in her falseness.

I just know that I don’t feel angry at her. I just feel tired. Because in a city full of reinvention, she was the one person who took it too literally. She didn’t want to become someone new. She wanted to erase the fact that she was ever anyone at all.