I Am Not Jessica Chen(11)
“Nah, fuck that.” Celine dusts the croissant crumbs off her tanned knees, lifts one long leg onto the seat. “My parents aren’t paying forty thousand a year for me to watch my tongue everywhere I go. And swearing is therapeutic.” She glances back at me and wriggles her manicured brows. “You should try it sometime, Jessica.”
“Stop trying to drag our sweet, darling Jessica over to the dark side,” Leela says, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching out to shove Celine’s shoulder. The car lurches slightly, my stomach jolting with the motion, but the two don’t seem to notice. “And not to, like, get caught up in the specifics, because you know I’m always on your side, babe—but you only pay twenty thousand a year.”
Only a Havenwood student would use the word “only” next to “twenty thousand.”
“That’s just because of my scholarship.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Well, I’m trying to speak on behalf of the student body.”
“Please.” Leela snorts. The car lurches again as she turns abruptly onto the main road, and I grip the seat belt tighter. “As if most of us aren’t on academic scholarships.”
“Most of the smart ones,” Celine corrects, then considers it for a beat. “But fair. The others don’t count.”
I bite my tongue. I’m one of the others they’re talking about; I sat for the scholarship test the same year Jessica did, and failed it by two and a half points. One stupid algebra question, the number six mistaken for a zero, a variable overlooked—and my life marred irrevocably because of it, my parents forced to take up extra shifts, work that much harder for years and years without complaint.
But then Leela catches my eye in the rearview mirror and heaves a theatric sigh. “Of course Jessica has the least right to complain, what with her full scholarship and all.”
“I didn’t even realize they gave out full scholarships before Jessica,” Celine says, in a tone caught between admiration and envy, her smile sharp as cut glass. Nobody’s ever spoken to me like this before. Nobody’s ever looked at me as a threat. It feels better than it should. Then she adds, “Guess they make exceptions for the best.”
I suck in a silent breath on the word, play it over in my head like an incantation, warmth expanding inside my chest, spreading all the way down to my fingertips. Is this what it’s like for Jessica all the time?
“You look so pretty today,” Leela remarks, and for five terrifying seconds, she spins around completely in the driver’s seat to study me. “Well, you always look pretty, but your hair is gorgeous like this. You should wear it down more. If you want,” she adds quickly, like she’s scared of saying the wrong thing. “You can pull off any hairstyle, really.”
I lift a hand to my hair, remembering suddenly how Jessica always ties it up in a high ponytail. “Really?” I ask.
They both nod along, with shocking enthusiasm.
“Oh yeah, for sure,” Celine says, tearing off the end of the croissant she’d offered me with her pearly white teeth. “You literally have the shiniest hair I’ve ever seen. What do you use to wash it again?”
Probably an expensive brand I couldn’t pronounce if I tried. “The tears of my admirers,” I reply. “It’s super organic.”
There’s a pause.
I tense, waiting for them to realize I’m not who they think I am, to scream “Imposter!” To demand that I bring the real Jessica Chen back. Maybe then this beautiful, unbelievable dream will end.
But they burst out laughing at a volume that feels kind of unwarranted.
“Oh my god,” Leela gasps, clutching her stomach. “You’re hilarious, Jessica.”
As the car speeds down the winding road at least five miles per hour over the limit, with Celine blasting some sad song I don’t know from her phone speakers and Leela singing along, my disorientation thickens. There are the familiar, gloomy gray trees spread out on either side of us, with their soft watercolor washes of brown and green, the wild vegetation crawling toward the nebulous horizon; the warmer gray of the concrete pressed beneath the tires; the pale sunlight smudged against the windscreen; the mist-wreathed mountains rising and falling together. There’s Frankie’s Bakery, famous among the locals for its warm lattes and glazed cinnamon rolls in the fall; the crumbling marble statue of some dead saint standing alone on the corner of Evermore Avenue; the brooding black lake Tracey Davis once tossed her ex-boyfriend’s phone into, where one of the boys in our class stayed under for so long on a dare that his friends called an ambulance.
This is the town I’ve spent my entire life in, its streets and valleys as intimate to me as the lines of my hand, but now everything’s different. Because I’m here as Jessica Chen, with her best friends, and for the very first time, I feel like I’m one of them. Someone pretty and smart and talented and full of promise; someone the world bends around, rather than someone who bends to the world.
It’s a dream, I remind myself, rolling down the window and letting the wind whip my hair from my face, the crisp air on my skin a counterpoint to what I keep repeating, over and over. It’s a dream.
It’s only a strange, vivid dream.
But I’m no longer sure I believe that.
Three