I Am Not Jessica Chen(19)
Still no response. Not even a sound.
How else is one meant to locate a soul? Through candles? I still have a few scented ones lying around in my bedroom—all Christmas gifts from people I’m not close to. Or should I draw some kind of diagram? Write out her name? Should I hypnotize myself? Should I do drugs?
I don’t know what will work. I just know that I need to find my cousin.
So I try everything, except the drugs. I spend the next two hours going through every spiritual trick I’ve heard of. But the overpowering lavender scent from the candles only makes me cough, and the locket I swing before my eyes only makes me dizzy, and all of it succeeds only in making me feel ridiculous.
Defeated, I plop down on the floor and stare at the altered portrait again, a strange suspicion solidifying inside me. I take out Jessica’s phone and unlock it with my fingerprint, then hold the front camera up. The flash goes off, temporarily illuminating the painting in a ghost-white light.
Then I slide Jessica’s phone into my blazer pocket and head back down the stairs.
“Have you finished everything?” Mom asks, patting the couch. “Here, eat some fruit before you leave. I bought it from the market just this morning. Imported all the way from Sanya, you know—it’s very hard to find around here.”
The flesh of the dragon fruit has been cut into cubes, the thick purplish shell hollowed out and put to use as a bowl.
“That’s okay,” I start to say, but Mom’s already holding out a small silver fork with a delicate porcelain coating. It’s the guest fork. The pretty one she saves for special company. A hollowness forms in the pit of my stomach, the same feeling I would get on the third night of school camp, when the sleeping bags were too stuffy and my classmates were too loud and I started to miss home, or when my mom would drop me off at a gathering I didn’t really want to attend, or when I would have a bad dream and tiptoe into my parents’ bedroom, waiting for them to wake up and comfort me.
I do my best to ignore it as I take the guest fork and sit down slowly beside my mom. Since I’m here, I might as well test out my theory. If Jenna had appeared or disappeared in the past twenty-four hours in my body, then surely my mom would have seen her. “I haven’t had this in a while,” I tell her, lifting the fruit to my lips. It’s sweeter than I expected, with a faintly tropical, sour edge.
“Ah, yes, we don’t buy them often,” Mom says, smiling. “But it’s one of Jenna’s favorites.”
I blink at her, trying to recover from the shock of hearing my own mother speak my name like I’m not sitting right here. “Jenna,” I repeat, chewing the fruit as fast as I can and swallowing hard, the black seeds scraping my throat like tiny stones. “I was going to ask . . . is she around?”
For the briefest of seconds, Mom’s expression goes blank. Like someone’s wiped a canvas clean, smoothed out a drawing in sand. Her eyes remain on me, but they shift out of focus, as if staring ahead into a thick fog. Then she shakes her head, and everything about her—her straight posture, her hospitable air—is utterly normal again. So normal I’m not sure if I imagined that odd lapse. “No,” she says.
“No?” My heart thuds. “Then where is she?”
“Why, I thought you knew,” she tells me, and her voice is still her voice, but it sounds detached. There’s a floaty quality to it, sweetness without substance. “She has gone away on that trip.”
This isn’t right. “What trip?” I press, rifling through my memories. I can’t remember ever telling her about a trip, much less planning to go on one last night. “Where has she gone?”
“Away.”
Despite all my attempts at composure, I feel myself frown. “Away? How long will she be gone? When did she leave? This morning?”
She pauses, with the kind of confused look I’ve seen on my classmates when they’re working through an impossible math equation, and lets out a light laugh. “I must be getting old,” she says. “I’m sorry, Jessica, the details have slipped my mind. . . .”
My heart pounds faster. This is the same woman who memorized my class schedule every semester, who knew the exact minute my lunch breaks started and ended so she could come deliver hot food on time, who kept a mental catalog of all my exams. There’s no way she could have simply forgotten the details if I were to leave on a trip.
“Are you okay?” she asks suddenly, peering at my face with obvious concern. “You’re looking quite pale.”
I set my fork down on the table. “I’m fine,” I say, but my head is buzzing. “I just . . . remembered something urgent I have to do this evening.”
“Oh.” She stands up, wiping her hands on her long skirt. “Well, I won’t keep you—I know how busy you are, our Harvard star.”
I make myself smile, thank her for the fruit, and grab my things, the absolutely surreal exchange already replaying itself in my mind. The cold air hits my face as I shove the front door open. The sky is darker than ever, the clouds layered against each other, the air tinged ash-gray. I’m so absorbed in my own thoughts, the fresh memory of my mom’s face, that odd, blank confusion clouding her features, that I don’t notice Aaron until I’ve turned the corner and crashed headfirst into his chest.
“S-sorry,” I say, stepping back in a daze, rubbing my forehead.