The night my family toasted the first doctor in the Morgan family, a server in Baltimore, Maryland, quietly logged a federal crime in real time.

In the living room of our suburban East Coast home, a champagne cork exploded against the ceiling with a sharp pop, bouncing off the crown molding and disappearing somewhere behind the curtains. My sister Jessica’s laughter followed a second later, bright and bubbling, mixing with my mother’s high, tearful squeal and the deeper rumble of my father’s congratulations. Someone turned up the music. Someone clinked a glass with a fork. Someone shouted, “To Johns Hopkins!” like we were already inside the mahogany halls in Baltimore.

All of that was happening one room away.

I wasn’t there.

I was sitting cross-legged on my childhood bed in the next room, still in my old Johns Hopkins sweatshirt, the one my dad bought me during a family trip to Maryland when I was twelve and announced to anyone who would listen that this—this—was where his daughters were going someday. The laptop on my knees was humming softly, warming through my pajama pants.

On the screen, in clean blue font, the applicant portal for Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine refreshed.

My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears. The Wi-Fi bar blinked. The page loaded. The familiar logo at the top pushed the rest of the text downward, and a status bar appeared in the middle of the screen with a single line of text.

Application Status: Withdrawn by Applicant.

For a second, my brain refused to process the words. It was as if someone had switched my life into a language I didn’t understand. I blinked. Blinked again. The line didn’t change.

Withdrawn.

By applicant.

A roaring sound filled my head, drowning out the distant music. I scrolled, fingers numb, trying to convince myself it was some kind of glitch. There had to be an error. A maintenance bug. A mis-click on their end.

I hadn’t withdrawn anything.

Three months earlier, I had checked the box and clicked the button and watched confetti animation swirl across the screen when my application was officially submitted. I could still picture the confirmation email. I had triple-checked every document, every line of my personal statement, every date and GPA and MCAT score. I knew exactly where each letter of recommendation had come from, the time stamps on my uploads, the way my hands had trembled when I hit submit.

Four years of undergrad. A 4.0 GPA in a brutal premed program. A 99th percentile MCAT score. Volunteering at three different hospitals. Weekends in the emergency department at a city hospital back in the U.S., listening to patients talk about pain and fear at three in the morning. Research in pediatric oncology that had already been published in two peer-reviewed journals. All of that, every sleepless night, every sacrificed holiday, every tear, had flowed into that one portal.

And now it said: Withdrawn by applicant.

The laughter from the next room rose again, a wave cresting over my thoughts.

“Jess, hold it up! Let me take a picture!” my mother shouted.

My sister’s voice rang out, heady with triumph. “Smile like you’re proud of your future doctor, Mom!”

My phone buzzed beside me, vibrating across the duvet like a frantic insect. For one delirious instant I thought: Maybe it’s a correction. Maybe they realized. Maybe this is their office.

The text preview glowed on my lock screen.

From: Jessica

The message looked wrong even before I opened it, a block of letters smashed together like angry fingerprints.

DELETED your med school app lol now you see we can’t both compete. guess you should’ve password protected your laptop better. only room for one Dr. Morgan in this family.

My hand went cold around the phone. Every nerve in my body seemed to misfire at once.

No.

I read it again, slowly, tracing each word with my eyes as if there were some other meaning hiding inside them. Then again. And again. The letters didn’t shift. The little grey “Delivered” beneath it sat there, obnoxiously calm.

My sister—my own sister, the girl whose hair I braided before her middle school dances, whose panic attacks before exams I’d talked her through, whose organic chemistry notes I’d color-coded—had logged into my portal and withdrawn my application.

Jessica, who was currently being toasted as “the first doctor in the family” in our living room. Jessica, who had texted me emojis asking for my MCAT flashcards, who had cried into my hoodie after bombing her sophomore biochem exam until I retaught her the entire metabolic pathway unit. Jessica, who knew how much Johns Hopkins meant to me and to Dad. Who knew that it was our father’s alma mater. His pride, his dream, his story about coming from nothing in a small American town and making it into one of the top medical schools in the United States.

The room tilted. My vision tunneled in and out. I could hear my pulse in my throat, see the words on the screen blur, reassemble, blur again.

I was halfway off the bed, feet hitting the carpet, body already leaning toward the doorway to the living room, when my phone lit up again—this time with an incoming call.

The caller ID made my heart stop.

Johns Hopkins SOM Admissions.
Baltimore, MD.

Underneath, a name: Dr. James Thornton.

For a split second, my brain tried to stitch this call into some normal narrative. Maybe they were calling to confirm I’d withdrawn. Maybe this was a courtesy. Maybe they were going to tell me it was irreversible.

My thumb hovered over the screen. I swallowed, tasted metal, and answered.

“Hello?”

“Miss Morgan?” The voice on the other end was deep, crisp, and unmistakably professional. I could hear the faint hum of an office behind him, the clicking of keyboards, the distant clank of a door. “Is this Amelia Morgan?”

“Yes.” My voice came out in a whisper. I cleared my throat. “Yes, this is she.”

“This is Dr. James Thornton, Dean of Admissions at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine here in Baltimore.” He said it like a formality, but those words—Dean. Admissions. Johns Hopkins. Baltimore—landed in my chest like small, heavy stones. “I’m calling about an extremely serious matter.”

My fingers tightened around the phone. There it was. The moment he told me it was over. That my application had been withdrawn and accepted as final. That the dream that had floated above my head like a guiding star since I was twelve had just been snuffed out in a twenty-second lapse of password security.

“I…” My throat closed. “I know my application status changed. I—”

“I’d like to clarify a few things first,” he said, and there was something in his tone—measured, careful, but not unkind—that made me pause. “Our portal tracking system flagged unusual activity on your application approximately twenty-five minutes ago. Someone attempted to withdraw your application from a different IP address than the one you typically use.”

Attempted.

The word sliced through my panic like a tiny, precise scalpel. It took me a moment to process it.

“Attempted?” I repeated, clinging to the syllables.

“Yes.” Paper rustled faintly on his end, as if he were glancing at a printout. “Miss Morgan, as of last year, our applicant portal is protected by a new security system. Because we are a major academic institution in the United States, we’re required to maintain extensive logs of all access. The system records everything—keystrokes, time stamps, IP addresses, browser fingerprints. We also have the ability to capture screen recordings during certain high-risk actions, such as withdrawal requests, especially when permissions are granted.”

I sank back onto the bed, free hand gripping the duvet like it was the edge of a cliff.

“You… you saw it?” I asked.

“We saw everything,” he said calmly. “Including the text message your sister sent afterward, bragging about deleting your application.”

My brain tried to do three things at once: understand that my application might not be gone, process that the Dean of Admissions had just said the word “sister” in relation to a cyber crime, and not scream.

“How—how do you know she’s my sister?” I managed.

He exhaled softly, a sound that was almost a sigh. “She used your saved password on her own device, Miss Morgan. Our logs show that she accessed the portal from a different location—looks like the living room Wi-Fi extender, if I’m reading this correctly—using a laptop registered under the name Jessica Morgan. The screen capture shows her pulling up your status, navigating to the withdrawal page, and clicking the withdrawal confirmation. The window is visible long enough for us to see her smiling. Laughing, actually.”

For a moment, nausea rolled up my throat, hot and bitter.

“She then pulls out her phone,” he continued in the same even tone, “and sends what appears to be a text message. Our overlay shows the content. It matches the text you just received.” He paused. “We also have screenshots of a group chat on her laptop where she appears to have been discussing this plan with several friends over the past few weeks. The phrase ‘Amelia always gets everything’ shows up multiple times, along with the sentence ‘Not this time. I’ll make sure of it.’”

The room spun gently. “Weeks,” I whispered. “She… she planned this for weeks.”

“Miss Morgan,” he said, and his tone shifted subtly, becoming a hair gentler. “I need to inform you of several things. First, your application was never actually withdrawn.”

My heart lurched. “What?”

He cleared his throat. “Our system requires email confirmation from the applicant for a withdrawal to be finalized. The withdrawal request triggered the security capture, but the process was incomplete because the confirmation link in the email was never clicked. As of this moment, your application remains active and under review.”

My shoulders slumped, tension leaking out of my muscles so fast it made me lightheaded.

“So it’s… it’s still there?” I asked. “You still—have it? You can still see it?”

“We can,” he said. “In fact, that brings me to the second point I need to convey. Based on your exceptional qualifications—your GPA, your MCAT score, your extensive clinical volunteering, and notably your research in pediatric oncology—you had already been selected for admission.”

I stopped breathing.

“I—what?”

“You have been offered a place in our incoming class,” he said, as if he were telling me the weather. “And, additionally, the Harrison Merit Scholarship.”

The world narrowed to that phrase. “The… the Harrison?”

“Yes. The Harrison Merit Scholarship is our most competitive full-ride scholarship. It covers tuition, fees, and standard room and board for all four years of medical school here in the U.S., along with a small stipend for research. The committee was unanimous in their decision. Congratulations, Miss Morgan. Or perhaps I should say”—and for the first time, his voice warmed in a way that let me glimpse the human being behind the title—“congratulations, future Dr. Morgan.”

Tears blurred the edges of everything. I pressed the heel of my hand to my mouth, trying to contain the sob that was clawing its way up.

“I—” My voice cracked. “I don’t… I can’t…”

“I understand this is a lot to take in,” he said gently.

Through the thin walls, someone started cheering again. “To Jessica!” my uncle yelled, his voice thick with alcohol and pride. “First doctor in the family! America, baby!”

I almost laughed, but the sound came out watery.

“However,” Dr. Thornton continued, and the temperature of his voice dropped back down, turning cool, clinical, precise. “Regarding your sister.”

Automatically, I flinched, even though he couldn’t see me.

“Jessica Morgan’s acceptance to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is hereby revoked,” he said.

For a moment, I thought I’d misheard him. “Revoked?”

“Yes. Effective immediately. An official notification has just been sent to the email address on file.” I could hear him clicking something, the faint clack of keys. “Furthermore, she will be reported to the American Association of Medical Colleges. Attempted sabotage of another applicant, unauthorized access to our university systems, and intentional misrepresentation of identity are extremely serious violations of professional ethics in the United States. Our report will recommend that she be barred from consideration at any accredited medical school within the country.”

I pressed my free hand to my chest, as if I could physically steady my heart. For a split second, a flicker of savage satisfaction flared in my chest—an ugly, primal little flame—then fizzled into something more complicated and heavy.

“The champagne laughter from the living room suddenly sounded like a funeral dirge,” I murmured before I could stop myself.

“If I may be blunt, Miss Morgan,” he said, “your sister has demonstrated a level of deception and cruelty that is incompatible with the practice of medicine. We take that very seriously. Medicine here is not just about intelligence. It requires integrity above all else. If someone is willing to sabotage their own sibling’s future in this way, what might they do to a colleague who gets a better residency? A nurse who questions their judgment? A patient who refuses their recommended treatment?”

He was right. I knew he was right. I had spent years hearing attending physicians talk about the trust patients place in us in the U.S., about the fragility of that trust, about how one dishonest physician could damage more than just one life.

But this wasn’t a hypothetical unethical applicant. This was my sister.

“Dr. Thornton,” I started, my throat raw. “She’s… she’s my sister.”

“She tried to destroy your future because she couldn’t bear to share a spotlight,” he said carefully. “I don’t say this to be cruel. I say this as someone who has devoted his career to gatekeeping a profession that can literally mean the difference between life and death. The stakes are high here. We cannot ignore what she did. She committed a serious act that in the U.S. falls under computer fraud and identity-related offenses.”

My fingertips had gone numb.

“What… what happens next?” I asked.

“From our end, we finalize your acceptance and scholarship,” he said. “We document this incident thoroughly. Our legal team will be forwarding our logs and screen captures to the appropriate authorities. The FBI’s cyber crime division may contact you for a statement, as unauthorized access to protected educational systems is a federal offense in the United States. You are not under investigation,” he added quickly. “You are the harmed party in this case. But they may want to establish the chain of events.”

The FBI. I had grown up hearing about the FBI like some distant, abstract federal agency that lived in Netflix docuseries and law school hypotheticals from our cousin Mark. Hearing that acronym tied directly to my family made my skin prickle.

“Can you come to my office in Baltimore tomorrow morning?” he asked. “We’d like to formally document your account of what happened and go through your admission packet in person. I know you’re out of state, but we can cover your travel expenses if necessary.”

“I… yes,” I said automatically. “I can come.”

“Good,” he said. “We’ll schedule you for nine a.m. If you check your email, you should already have the official acceptance letter, the Harrison scholarship details, and a separate notice regarding the incident. There’s also a consent form regarding the use of the portal recordings for legal purposes. Review it when you can.”

I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me, and whispered, “Okay.”

“Again, Miss Morgan,” he said, his tone softening for a moment, “I’m very sorry that this happened to you. But please remember this: you earned your place here entirely on your own merits. Your sister’s actions—terrible as they are—do not define you. We’re looking forward to having you at Johns Hopkins.”

His words settled over me like a strange, fragile shield.

“Thank you,” I managed.

We hung up. The call log slid away, replaced by my home screen. For a moment, I just sat there, phone in my lap, laptop screen still glowing with that accusing line: Application Status: Withdrawn by Applicant.

In the living room, someone turned down the music. My mom’s voice drifted through the crack under my door. “Where’s Amelia?” she was asking. “She needs to be in the pictures. Come get your sister!”

I stood up.

My legs felt like they belonged to someone else as I walked down the hallway, past the old family photos—me with missing front teeth holding up a science fair trophy; Jessica in a soccer uniform grinning under a too-big helmet; the two of us in front of that iconic dome in Baltimore on a family campus tour, both wearing matching Johns Hopkins sweatshirts.

The living room looked like an ad for American success. Balloons floated near the ceiling, shimmering in silver and blue. A “CONGRATULATIONS JESSICA!” banner hung crookedly along the wall. Our extended family—uncles in wrinkled dress shirts, aunts with lipstick smudged on wineglasses, cousins glued to their phones—was scattered across the couch and armchairs. And in the center of it all stood Jessica.

My sister was radiant, cheeks flushed, dark hair styled in loose waves that tumbled over the expensive designer dress she’d bought “just in case I get good news,” she’d told me last week with a tight smile. She held an oversized printed acceptance letter from Johns Hopkins, the university seal visible even from across the room. My father stood beside her, one arm around her shoulders, his other hand clutching a champagne flute. His eyes were damp. My mother was half-crying, half-laughing, taking photos on her phone.

“Amelia!” Mom spotted me in the doorway and waved. “There you are! Come celebrate with your sister. She’s going to be a doctor!”

The words, once a dream, now rang hollow.

“No,” I said quietly.

The sound of my own voice felt foreign. But it cut through the room like a blade. The conversation stopped. A fork slipped from someone’s fingers and clattered against a plate. The music hummed softly in the background, out of place.

Jessica turned toward me. I watched excitement flicker into confusion. Then, for the briefest moment, I saw something else: a flash of naked fear, quick as lightning behind her eyes. She smothered it almost instantly under a derisive laugh.

“Someone’s jealous,” she sing-songed, shoulders tilting with practiced carelessness. “I’m sorry you didn’t get in, Amy, but not everyone is meant for med school, okay? It’s brutal. You can always do something else.”

The familiar nickname—Amy—sounded like an insult.

I took a step forward into the circle of light.

“That was the Dean of Admissions at Johns Hopkins,” I said, holding up my phone. Dr. Thornton’s name still sat at the top of the recent call log. “They saw everything, Jess.”

A murmur rippled through the room.

“What are you talking about?” Dad demanded, but his eyes were already moving between us, his engineer’s brain analyzing, calculating.

“They saw you log into my portal,” I said, my voice steadier now, surprising even myself. “They saw you use my saved password on your laptop. They recorded your keystrokes. They recorded the screen while you navigated to the withdrawal page and confirmed it. They have video of you laughing while you tried to delete my application.”

The champagne flute slipped from Jessica’s hand. Time slowed. I watched the glass drop in a slow, glittering arc, watched the pale gold liquid catch the light, watched it hit the hardwood floor and explode into shards. My mother gasped. My cousin Mark flinched.

“What?” Jessica said. The color drained from her face. “That’s… that’s ridiculous. You’re making stuff up to ruin my moment.”

I tilted my phone so everyone could see the text message she’d sent me. The cruel, gleeful little block of words glowed on the screen.

DELETED your med school app lol now you see we can’t both compete. guess you should’ve password protected your laptop better. only room for one Dr. Morgan in this family.

Mom’s hand flew to her mouth. Dad went a shade paler than I’d ever seen.

“Jessica?” he said, voice low, dangerous in a way that made all of us children again. “What is this?”

“It was a joke,” Jessica snapped, eyes darting wildly from face to face. “I was joking. Obviously I didn’t actually do it. I mean—God, can’t you people take a joke?”

“They also have screenshots of your group chat,” I said, overriding her. My heart was racing, but my words came out clear, like they’d been waiting in some hidden drawer in my chest. “The one where you’ve been planning this for weeks. Where you wrote, and I quote, ‘Amelia always gets everything. Not this time. I’ll make sure of it.’”

Our cousin Mark, the one who went to law school and never missed an opportunity to remind us, pushed himself up off the armchair slowly. He looked years older than when he’d walked in.

“Jessica,” he said carefully, “if this is true, you’ve just admitted, in writing, to unauthorized access to an educational portal, identity-related fraud, and attempted sabotage. That’s… that’s not just a family fight. In the U.S., that’s a crime. A federal crime.”

“Oh my God, Mark, shut up,” Jessica exploded. Her carefully sculpted composure cracked. “I was going to fix it!”

“When?” I shot back. “After the withdrawal deadline passed? After all the spots at every other medical school filled? After you were safely in and I was locked out?”

“That’s not—” She choked on the words.

My phone buzzed again, vibrating insistently against my palm. Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward it like it was a bomb.

I answered on speaker this time.

“Miss Morgan?” Dr. Thornton’s voice filled the living room, cutting through the tension. “It’s Dr. Thornton again. I apologize for calling back so quickly, but I wanted to inform you that we’ve just sent an email to Jessica Morgan formally revoking her acceptance.”

Jessica made a sound then, an animal noise that didn’t sound like any word I knew.

“She has also been reported to the AAMC,” he continued calmly. “Additionally, our legal team will be pursuing charges for unauthorized access to our university systems and attempted interference with another applicant’s file. Standard procedure here in the U.S. for this kind of breach.”

My mother sank onto the couch as if her legs had given out. My father stared at Jessica like he didn’t recognize her.

“Furthermore,” Dr. Thornton added, and there was a faint rustle of paper, “I wanted to personally congratulate you again on your Harrison Merit Scholarship, Miss Morgan. It’s an honor given to only one student per year. Your research on pediatric oncology treatments was particularly impressive to the committee.”

“The Harrison scholarship?” Dad whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. “That’s… that’s the full ride. That’s the one I applied for thirty years ago and didn’t get.”

“Thank you,” I managed, my voice small but audible. “Thank you, Dr. Thornton.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “We’ll see you in Baltimore tomorrow.”

The call ended. Silence fell over the living room, thick and heavy.

Then everyone started speaking at once.

My mother burst into tears, a raw, keening sound. She grabbed my hand with one of hers and reached blindly toward Jessica with the other. My father’s voice rose, sharp and furious, demanding answers. Aunts and uncles whispered frantically, their heads close together like spectators at an accident scene, unsure where to look. A cousin quietly stepped away to sweep up the broken glass, his movements mechanical.

Jessica stood in the middle of the chaos, the letter from Johns Hopkins crumpled in her fist, ink smearing where her hand pressed too tightly. Her mascara had begun to smear, dark shadows blooming beneath her eyes. She was trembling.

“You’ve ruined my life,” she spat at me, tears spilling over.

“No,” I said, and my own voice surprised me with its steadiness. “You ruined your own life, Jess. I would have been happy to go to medical school with you. We could’ve been the Morgan sisters taking on medicine together. I would have helped you study, just like before. I would’ve shared my notes. But you couldn’t stand the idea of us both succeeding.”

“You always have to be better,” she sobbed. “Better grades. Better scores. Better everything. For once, I wanted something that was just mine. Just me. Jessica Morgan, MD. Not ‘Amelia’s little sister.’”

My chest ached. “And you thought you’d get it by destroying me?”

Dad stepped between us then, his jaw clenched so tightly I could see a muscle twitching in his cheek.

“Jessica,” he said, and there was more pain than anger in his voice now. “How could you do this? To your own sister?”

“She’s not my sister,” Jessica snapped, pointing at me with a shaking hand. “She’s my competition. That’s what you made her. ‘Why can’t you be more like Amelia, Jess?’ ‘Amelia got straight A’s again, Jess.’ ‘Amelia is so responsible.’” She mimicked Mom’s tone cruelly. “You think I didn’t hear it? You think I didn’t see the way you looked at her versus me?”

“We never compared you,” Mom said weakly, but even she sounded unconvinced by her own words.

I looked around the room at my family, at the faces I’d known my whole life. I saw, in quick flashes, a montage of offhand comments:

Why can’t you be more like your sister?
Ask Amelia; she always knows what to do.
Amelia’s going to make us so proud.

I had never asked to be the standard. I had never wanted to be the yardstick they used to measure Jessica’s worth. But I had still benefited from it. I had been the one they bragged about at Thanksgiving, the one whose grades made it to the family group chat. Jess had been “pretty and social and fun,” the one with “so much potential if she just applied herself.” It was a compliment that came with a knife inside it.

“Jess,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry if I ever made you feel less than. I swear to you, I never wanted that. I never wanted to be the reason you felt small. But what you did… it’s not about me being better. It’s about you choosing to be worse.”

Her phone buzzed on the coffee table. The sound was oddly loud in the room. She snatched it up, glanced at the screen, and whatever color was left in her face vanished.

“The email,” she whispered. “My acceptance… it’s gone. They’re… they’re recommending criminal prosecution.”

Mark the lawyer took a step forward, his expression grave.

“Jess,” he said, “you need to stop talking right now. Don’t say anything else about what you did. I’m going to call a criminal defense attorney. Anything you say from this point on can be used against you if this goes to trial. That’s how it works here.”

The party was over.

People began to leave in a hushed trickle, avoiding eye contact, muttering awkward excuses about early mornings and long drives back home. The balloons bobbed silently. The congratulations banner sagged, one corner coming loose and dangling toward the floor as if embarrassed. Someone put the champagne back in the fridge. Someone else turned off the music that had never quite matched the mood in the first place.

Eventually, the living room emptied out, leaving behind only silence and the faint smell of spilled alcohol.

That night, after hours of raised voices behind closed doors—my mother’s sobbing, my father’s low, exhausted anger, Jessica’s choked pleas—I walked past my sister’s room and saw the light under her door.

Her suitcase lay open on her bed, half-filled with clothes, textbooks, and the makeup organizers she’d obsessively curated. She was stuffing things into it with a frantic, jerky energy, breathing hard, mascara streaks dried like battle lines down her cheeks.

“Where are you going?” I asked from the doorway.

She didn’t look up. “Away.”

“Jess,” I said, stepping into the room. “Away where?”

“Anywhere that isn’t here,” she snapped. “I can’t stay here. Everyone knows. It’s all over social media already. Someone leaked it on a premed forum. I’m trending on Twitter, okay? ‘Med school sister sabotage.’ That’s what they’re calling me. My life is over, Amelia.”

The words sliced at me, because as much as I wanted to deny it, I knew there was a piece of truth in her panic. The American premed world is small. Medical school admissions committees talk. Residency directors gossip. Stories like this stick.

“It doesn’t have to be over,” I said, because that’s what a good person is supposed to say, even when they’re not sure they believe it.

“Yes, it does,” she hissed, finally looking at me. Her eyes were bloodshot. “Every medical school in the U.S. will see that report. AAMC will flag my name. I’ll never get into an MD program. Four years of undergrad, every lab, every exam, all those MCAT hours… all of it gone. For nothing. Because of twenty seconds of stupidity.”

“Twenty seconds?” I snapped before I could stop myself. “You planned this for weeks, Jess. Weeks. You typed out that group chat. You bragged about it in writing. You wrote speeches about how you were going to ‘make sure’ I didn’t get in.”

She dropped onto the edge of the bed like her knees had given out, the half-packed suitcase yawning open beside her.

“I know,” she whispered. “God, I know. I wish I could say I blacked out or something, that I lost my mind for a moment. But the truth is, I saw your laptop open on the kitchen table. I saw your saved password. And when I got my acceptance email…” She swallowed. “All I could think was: they probably sent one to Amelia too. There goes the one thing that was supposed to be mine.”

“You could’ve called me,” I said. “We could’ve screamed together. We could’ve planned our move to Baltimore together. Do you have any idea how proud Dad would’ve been? Two daughters in his alma mater. Both of us wearing white coats.”

She laughed, a bitter, jagged sound. “Exactly. Both of us. Both, both, both. That’s the whole problem. With us, there’s never just ‘you’ or just ‘me.’ It’s always the Morgan sisters. The overachiever and the one trying to keep up. And I was so tired, Amy. I was so tired of being the one people were surprised by. ‘Wow, Jessica did well on the MCAT? Good for her!’ It never occurred to them I could be the one in front.”

“Being in front doesn’t mean shoving someone else off a cliff,” I said.

She looked at me then with a raw, devastated honesty that almost hurt to meet.

“The Dean was right, you know,” she said quietly. “What kind of doctor would I have been, if this is what I do to my own sister? If this is how I handle the pressure before I ever touch a patient? What would I do in a residency program when a co-resident gets a better evaluation? Or when a nurse calls out my mistake in front of an attending?”

I sat down in the desk chair across from her, the one where I’d helped her with physics homework and personal statement drafts over the years.

“You need help, Jess,” I said. “Real help. Therapy, counseling, something. This level of jealousy, of resentment—it’s not normal. It’s not healthy. And it’s not just about med school. This didn’t start with Johns Hopkins.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she whispered, dropping her head into her hands. “You think I don’t hear the voice in my head saying, ‘You’re crazy, you’re petty, you’re cruel’ on repeat? I’ve been hearing that voice my entire life. I just… I didn’t know I could actually become the villain.”

We sat in silence for a long moment, the packed and unpacked objects of her life scattered between us.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked finally.

She sniffed, wiped at her face, and stared at the wall.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe go into research only. Or teaching. Something where the AAMC blacklist doesn’t matter as much. Something where my name won’t automatically make people think ‘sabotage.’ I still love science. I still want to help. I just… I don’t get to have the letters MD in front of my name anymore. Not here. Not in America.”

I thought of all the ways people could help without being physicians. There were lab techs, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, researchers, public health experts. Jess could still have a life in science. A good one, even.

“Will you ever forgive me?” she asked, voice small, not looking at me.

I could have lied. I could have said what she wanted to hear. I didn’t.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe someday. Maybe after enough time, enough work. But forgiveness and trust aren’t the same thing, Jess. Whatever happens, that trust…” I shook my head. “That’s gone. You set it on fire.”

She nodded, a tiny movement, as if she’d already known the answer.

The next morning, I drove to Baltimore.

The city skyline rose ahead of me under a clear blue American sky, glass and steel catching the sunlight, the brick buildings near the university solid and old. The Johns Hopkins campus looked almost unreal after everything that had happened—a postcard version of an institution I’d built up in my mind for years. Students crossed the quad with white coats draped over one arm, ID badges swinging from lanyards. The dome glinted in the distance. A flock of birds lifted off a rooftop.

In the admissions office, Dr. Thornton turned out to be a man in his early fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and kind, tired eyes. His office was lined with medical texts, framed degrees, photos of past graduating classes in white coats and caps and gowns. A small American flag pin sat discreetly on his lapel.

He shook my hand and gestured for me to sit.

“Miss Morgan,” he said, settling back into his chair. “First things first.”

He slid a thick envelope across the desk toward me, embossed with the Johns Hopkins seal.

“This is your official acceptance packet,” he said. “Welcome to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.”

My fingers trembled as I picked it up. It had weight—not just physical weight, but the weight of every dream, every late night over Anki cards, every anatomy diagram I’d taped to my dorm wall.

“I want you to know,” he continued, “that you earned this entirely on merit. The committee had already decided on your acceptance and on awarding you the Harrison Merit Scholarship before any of this with your sister came to our attention. Her actions, awful as they were, are completely separate from our evaluation of you.”

“Thank you,” I said, clutching the envelope like it might disappear.

“As for the incident,” he said, his expression turning more serious, “we’ve already forwarded our logs to the university’s legal counsel and to the authorities. There will likely be an investigation. The FBI may reach out to you for a statement, and you are fully within your rights to request an attorney present if that makes you more comfortable. Our job is to cooperate with the law, protect the integrity of our systems, and protect applicants like you.”

I nodded, the words FBI and investigation still sounding surreal when attached to my family’s last name.

“We’ve also implemented additional security measures effective immediately,” he added. “Two-factor authentication for all logins, stricter session timeouts, and additional alerts for IP address anomalies. No student will ever have to go through exactly what you did, if we can help it. In a way, your sister’s crime forced us to strengthen our defenses for the future.”

I thought about Jessica at home, her future in ruins, and swallowed the mix of guilt and relief that rose up.

“If it helps someone else,” I said quietly, “then maybe at least one good thing comes out of this.”

He studied me for a long moment, then nodded.

“You’re going to make a very good physician,” he said. “Not just because you’re smart. Because you’re already thinking beyond yourself.”

As I walked out of his office into the crisp Baltimore air, my phone buzzed with a notification. I pulled it out, expecting another email from the university. Instead, it was a tag on a premed forum thread.

The headline stopped me in my tracks.

“Premed in the U.S., sabotaged by sister, still gets full ride to Hopkins.”

The thread was already dozens of comments long, a digital canyon echoing with opinions. Someone had posted a summary of what had happened, cobbled together from whispers, half-glimpsed emails, and maybe a very talkative cousin. The details weren’t perfect, but the core was there: a story about jealousy, sabotage, and the American dream of medicine turned sour.

I scrolled through the comments.

This is horrifying.
My roommate tried to “accidentally” delete my secondaries last year.
Premed culture in this country is insane.
I’m so glad Hopkins protected her application.
This is exactly why integrity should matter more than stats.

And then, near the bottom, a comment from a username I recognized from years ago. One of Jessica’s old study group friends.

I knew Jessica was competitive, but this is next level.
Amelia, if you’re reading this, we all knew you were the better student. Jessica knew it too. That’s why she did what she did.
Congrats on Hopkins. You deserve it.

Six months later, I started medical school.

Orientation week was everything I’d imagined and then some—a blur of name tags, icebreaker games, carefully curated speeches about professionalism and the honor of joining one of the top medical schools in the U.S. I shook hands with future surgeons, future pediatricians, future psychiatrists. I got lost twice trying to find the anatomy lab. I bought scrubs that were slightly too big. I took a photo in front of the dome with my white coat folded over my arm like every other wide-eyed first-year.

My parents came to my White Coat Ceremony.

They sat in the audience, side by side, holding hands in a way I hadn’t seen them do in years, faces luminous with pride and a quieter, heavier sorrow. The empty seat where Jessica might have sat haunted me from the front row to the podium. When my name was called—“Amelia Morgan, Harrison Scholar”—the applause felt both triumphantly loud and strangely muted.

After the ceremony, Dad hugged me like he was afraid I might vanish.

“I didn’t get the Harrison,” he said in a hoarse whisper, pulling back to look at me, eyes shining. “But you did. And I couldn’t be more proud. You know, when I came here from nothing, from that tiny town—you’ve heard this one a million times, I know—”

“I like the story,” I said, because I did.

“I never dreamed I’d see one of my kids here,” he said. “I thought maybe, if I got lucky, one of you would want this. But two? For a while there, I thought I was going to get to watch both my daughters become doctors at my alma mater in America.” His voice cracked. “I still don’t know how to grieve the version of my life where that happened.”

I squeezed his hand.

“Maybe someday she’ll find another path she loves just as much,” I said. “It won’t be medicine. But it might be something that fits who she is now better than this ever did.”

He nodded, but his eyes were distant, seeing both the present and the ghost of what could have been.

Jessica, by then, was living in Portland, Oregon, working as a laboratory technician at a private research facility. I knew because my mother couldn’t help dropping little updates into conversations like crumbs: “She’s learning, Amelia. She really likes her team.” “She’s seeing a therapist now.” “She asked about you.”

We hadn’t spoken since that night in her room. I had not answered her calls in the weeks that followed, nor replied to the emails where she oscillated between apologies and defensiveness. We existed on opposite ends of a long, silent stretch of the United States, both orbiting the same parents but never crossing paths.

During my second week of medical school, after my first exhausting gross anatomy dissection and my fifth cup of coffee for the day, Dr. Thornton caught up with me as I was leaving a lecture hall.

“Miss Morgan,” he said, falling into step beside me. “Do you have a moment?”

“Of course,” I said, my brain automatically straightening its metaphorical tie.

“I thought you should know,” he said, lowering his voice slightly as we walked down the hallway lined with photographs of past cohorts. “Since your story went public on that premed forum and then on social media, we’ve had seventeen students come forward nationwide to report sabotage of their applications. Seventeen. They saw what happened to you and realized they weren’t alone.”

I stopped walking.

“Seventeen?” I echoed.

He nodded. “A roommate who “accidentally” logged into the wrong portal. A cousin who deleted draft essays. A classmate who submitted incorrect information on someone else’s forms while ‘helping.’ We can’t fix all of it—some of those withdrawals were finalized, some deadlines have passed—but we can investigate, and in some cases, we can offer second looks.”

I pictured seventeen faces I had never seen, scattered across the country—Texas, California, New York, the Midwest—each one standing at the edge of their dreams, thinking they’d simply failed, when beneath their feet someone else had been sawing at the floorboards.

“You’ve helped more people than you know, Miss Morgan,” he said.

I thought about that for a moment. About how my disaster had turned into a warning signal that rippled outward. About how my sister’s worst act had accidentally cracked open a dark, hidden corner of American premed culture, one where desperation metastasized into sabotage.

“Dr. Thornton,” I said slowly, a thought forming as I spoke. “Would it be possible to start some kind of support group? For students who’ve experienced this kind of sabotage, academic fraud, family betrayal. A place to talk about the pressure and competition without feeling like we’re whining. A place to process… all of it. I think we underestimate how much this culture breaks people before they even get to residency.”

He studied me for a beat, then smiled.

“That,” he said, “is exactly the kind of thinking we need more of in medicine. Healing more than just physical wounds. Yes, Miss Morgan. Set it up. The school will support it fully—space, a faculty advisor, whatever you need. And if you want to broaden it to students at other schools virtually, we can look into that too.”

Three years into my medical education, I run that support group.

We meet weekly in a small, bright room on the second floor of one of the newer buildings, with mismatched chairs and a front wall that’s more window than anything else. Sometimes the Baltimore skyline behind us glows gold with sunset as people talk. Sometimes it’s just a grey smear of rain.

The students who come are a cross-section of American medical education: first-year and fourth-year, future surgeons and future psychiatrists, kids whose parents are doctors and kids who are the first in their families to graduate college. Some are from Hopkins. Some join on Zoom from Ohio, Florida, Washington, Texas.

They tell their stories.

A woman from California, whose ex-boyfriend stole her laptop and replaced her carefully crafted personal statement with a rambling mess before submission. A guy from the Midwest whose own father “forgot” to mail his letter of recommendation because he secretly didn’t want his son leaving their rural town. A classmate of mine whose college advisor “accidentally” submitted the wrong letter to her dream program in favor of another student they liked better.

We talk about the way American premed culture pits us against each other, how a system built on rankings and limited seats teaches us to see our friends as threats. We talk about family expectations, about being “the golden child” or “the disappointment” or both at different times. We talk about the pressure to be perfect, and what it does to people who are already brittle from a lifetime of comparison.

Sometimes, people cry. Sometimes, we laugh so hard our sides ache, sharing the absurdity of things we once thought were the end of the world. We bring snacks. We share study tips. We build something resembling a safety net beneath a system that doesn’t always provide one.

And sometimes, late at night in the library, when the fluorescent lights have gone harsh and my eyes feel like sandpaper from staring at pathology slides, I think about Jessica.

I picture her in a lab in Portland, wearing a different kind of white coat, one with fewer expectations pinned to it. I imagine her pipetting reagents into wells, labeling samples, entering data into spreadsheets. I wonder if she’s found some kind of peace there, in the controlled environment of research where cells behave more predictably than human emotions.

I wonder if she’s forgiven herself.

I wonder if I have.

A month ago, a letter arrived in my campus mailbox. A real letter, on paper, with my name written in familiar loopy handwriting on the front and an Oregon return address.

I knew who it was from before I turned it over.

I haven’t opened it. Not yet.

It sits on my desk, tucked between my pharmacology notes and a coffee-stained anatomy atlas, a quiet, white rectangle of possibility. Some days I think I’ll open it when I graduate, when I can finally sign my name “Amelia Morgan, MD” the way she once dreamed of signing hers. Some days I think I’ll wait longer, until residency, until I’ve proven to myself that I can make it through this system without becoming hardened like stone. Some days I think I’ll never open it at all.

Because some wounds heal. Some leave scars that ache when the weather changes or when someone says the wrong thing. And some teach us that the people we trust most can hurt us in ways strangers never could.

But here is what I know now, in a way I didn’t fully understand on the night the champagne exploded in our living room in that American suburb:

They can’t stop us from becoming who we’re meant to be.

The Dean was right about one thing. Medicine, especially in this country where patients hand us their lives in the most vulnerable moments, requires integrity above all else.

Jessica forgot that on the night she tried to make sure there was only one Dr. Morgan in the family.

I never will.