I know that no matter what Tara becomes, I would never let her go down to her knees in front of strangers.

Tara looks at me. Her eyes are deliberately stretched wide beneath heavy mascara, her ruby red lips slightly pouting, and her precision-carved eyebrows raised high to form what others might call her trademarked “pleading expression.” Her face epitomizing the expression: “help me, please, I’m so innocent yet so very desperate.” Any guy on campus would have fallen for her, his heart immediately her personal putty to shape or deform to her will, his brain an asset out of which she can dig homework and examination solutions. Walking by, she would win the eyes of the entire male population in an unlimited radius around her locus. With a mere smile, she would send his heart racing. A slight impersonal peck on the cheek would give him a heart attack. Such is Tara’s power.

But, her charms die with me. I have been her roommate for the past three years… and I know her. We grew up together. We met in third grade and instantly became best friends forever, “BFF.” She was different then. Her hair, like mine, was often disheveled, her fingernails, often muddled with dirt, as we dug around underneath the ubiquitous pine trees in our backyard making etchings of rooms in our childhood games of “house.” On rainy days, we would bunch up with hot chocolate and Lego blocks, watching the rain demolish our “house” of pine needles in the back yard. We’d plan the ultimate rebuild as we wrought up make-believe stories of how there were ants and microbes in the backyard which sailed in the tiny origami boats we made, like Noah floating in a paper ark.

The years flew by, but Tara’s change was gradual. I think it all started with the Halloween she decided to dress up as a fairy instead of as a bloody surgeon, as we had done in both third and fourth grade, or Pocahontas, as I had dressed up as that year. She went through legions of stores to purchase the right fabric—it was all satin and silk and pink and violet frills—a lot more, but not less. And then she had thrown a tantrum so that her parents would hire a professional seamstress to put it together for her. When it was done, and she was wearing it, we had all naïvely complimented on how beautiful she looked. Puberty had struck her early, and there was too much cleavage spilling out of the low neckline. The silk clung to her as if a second skin, flaunting off the perfection of curves already showing on her body. There had been the look of something strange in her eyes. A gleam of something deadly, yet scandalously powerful; an expression that didn’t belong in the visage of a little girl.

We went out into the night, trick or treating as we’d done since we’d met. Except this year, our parents finally decided that we were old enough to go out our on own. We were fifth graders, but we were both short for our age, and from afar, we looked like just two little girls prancing around for candy galore. We went through a bunch of houses, ringing doorbells, only to be greeted by adults, brimming with candy, cooing in high-pitched voices. Our giant pillowcases were teeming with candy by the time we’d gone down the third street, and I seriously thought that this was going to be the best Halloween ever.

And then suddenly, I realized Tara was gone. We’d cut through Mrs. Rivera’s jungle of a frontyard, skimming through trees in which we’d played countless make-believe games of adventure. I hadn’t heard from her for a while, as we’d gone through the thistles in our usual “race through the jungle.”

I’d always thought she was right behind me. But, as I stood there alone for the hour, waiting for her to come out of the jungle, I slowly realized that I had lost her. Over the years, I would ignore that realization, as if purposefully repressing the death of a best friend. As the night darkened into a full blackness, the trickle of little children disappeared into groups of teenagers with nothing better to do on a Friday night. They yelled profane curses when the occasional neighbor asked if they were a little too old to be trick or treating, then unloaded a battalion of rotten eggs on the unfortunate neighbor’s door when it closed. Their voices echoed around me, and as I peered into the jungle, night-time illusions of torn branches that looked as if the claws of wicked witches, I felt as if I was stuck in some haunted woods. Still, I waited for Tara, but she never came out of the jungle. I went home, silent, speaking to no one, merely shrugging when my parents asked how it went. I cried myself to sleep.

When I met her at school the next Monday, she acted as if nothing had happened. She brushed me off coolly, laughing at my childish concern over her. At recess, she left me, walking over to hang out with the sixth graders. As she let a sixth grader sling his sweat-stenched arm, around her shoulders, allowing his other hand to lewdly caress her, I realized that she blended in with them perfectly. I stood there watching her silently for what seemed like an eternity, before Tara lapsed into a different personality all-together. Her voice became high-pitched, and there was the tone of fake concern, as she told me to come join them. Tears brimming in my eyes, I stood frozen for a moment. Then, I ran away: past the soccer field, down the cemented slopes, my feet nearly tripping, until I was well out of sight. I was on the far side of the playground, near the classrooms and the bathrooms. I disappeared into the lav, and I cried until recess was over.

Tara’s last two years in elementary school would land her with several sealed letters to her parents and calls from concerned teachers. She started missing class at odd times, asking for a bathroom pass, only not returning until five minutes before the bell rang. We stopped walking home together, when one day after school, she disappeared into someone’s luxury sedan, without a backward glance.

Perhaps in light of her change in behavior, her parents decided to send her to a private preparatory school. My parents asked me if I’d like to go, too. And, for the longest moment in my life, I pondered abandoning Tara. But, I agreed to go with her.

Our six years at the Academy were perhaps what etched the roots of our roles in life. Tara’s parents, from her high school anecdotes, stood looming above her aglow with some diabolic, unyielding, light. They were her demons, as well as her benefactors. If she met satisfactory academic achievement, her parents would supply her the money she needed for what to Tara was bare necessity: hair done at the expensive French salon, nails manicured by a “professional,” instead of with her own “unkempt” hands, and clothes from designer shops with cuts far too revealing for my tastes. As a result, Tara was constantly filled with the fear of flunking out—and losing her life. Yet, her parents’ stern requirements did little to galvanize her academic interest. Her mind was filled with things other than calculus and AP History—I think she was always daydreaming on which boy she’d like to seduce next. She was always on the phone or out shopping, as I studied silently. She made up so that I might allow her to copy my homework or to sit behind me on exam day.

I should have seen it coming—expected her to ask me to do this. If college is the “intensified” version of high school, as the alumni of the Academy often recounted, then Tara would merely become the more “intensified” version of her high school self.

So instead of seeing her as the seductress born to power over men, I see her merely as my roommate, and once BFF, no longer. Her eyes, are merely her eyes; her eyelashes, plastic; her eyebrows, the artificial product of hours of handiwork by Santiago at the salon; her ruby red lips as fake and inhuman as her heart...

“Please.” Her voice wavers, as her eyes fill with the sheen of unshed fake tears.

I consider the Bioengineering Department at UCSD’s “action” to tackle down cheating, and I wonder whether it would come to any efficacy. To avoid the handiwork of paid-test-takers or blind copying, they struck up a plan to force everyone present on exam day to show their UCSD ID’s.

One reason why I could never leave Tara was that I’d always seen her as the twin sister I’d never had. To me, it seemed as if we had the same brown eyes, the same long black hair, the same up-turned nose. She seemed beyond a best friend, to me. This belief of mine won her an extreme leniency, such that I’ve helped her out even in cases that anyone else would have found too humiliating.

I sigh as I look into her eyes. The shimmer of tears that would never be shed glimmer in an abject surreal-ness. The years of our lives fly by in my mind’s eye, and I could see Tara aging—but her face remains the same, as if a mask epoxy-glued onto her skin.

Dimly, I wonder about our differing roles in life. Me, always, the helper, and she, the helpless. I envision us entering the corporate structure, destined to live the lives of yuppies. We’d go to work in buildings that ascend upwards to the height of clouds, return home to luxury apartments, effortless by-products of paychecks we’d sold our souls to. The sort of fate our parents’ machinations starting with the Academy had ensured us.

A shadow of tears form over my own eyes, and Tara’s image in front of me blurs. And, I see myself as gone from her life. I see Tara going to random work partners, begging for help. Forever, possessing only the image of competency, always seeking others to do the work for her to keep her job. She’d always act helpless, and they would always fall for her. No one would know that she is exploiter, the user.

After a long silence, my tears dry. My trembling dies, and I realize that I have long since made the decision. I know that no matter what Tara becomes, I would never let her go down to her knees in front of strangers. Those who never knew her—and would never know her. Those who would merely give her undeserving pity, viewing her as a necessary yet undeniable evil in the corporate structure. A parasite in the shell of a human being, some might consider her, while shrugging to “help her out,” then take advantage of her bodily trade—the only “mutual deal” she could offer.

I sigh and I look down at my sneakers.

I agree to be her substitute for the examination. I let myself believe in her whining that I had nothing to lose—that I am a year ahead from my AP examinations, and that it would be “so easy and effortless” for me to help her out. That otherwise, she would “just totally die from this…”

And she hugs me, then goes back to staring at her face in the mirror, her eyes unblinking, her face, no longer hers, her soul, long gone.