I Am Not Jessica Chen(22)
This time, though, the mirage doesn’t break.
When I smile, Jessica’s reflection smiles too, showing off her perfect teeth. It’s going to be a good day, I promise myself, and for once I’m certain of it. It’s going to be a good life.
“Wow, someone’s happy today,” Leela comments from the driver’s seat twenty minutes later.
I help myself in, shutting the car door behind me, and accept the warm apple cinnamon roll Celine’s bought, even though my stomach is almost full from breakfast and Auntie had insisted on giving me another five hundred dollars to “buy myself a snack” at school.
The bills rustle in my skirt pockets now as I fasten my seat belt, leaning against the cool leather seats. It must have rained last night. The air has that crisp, earthy scent to it, and there are still droplets of water clinging to the windowpanes, glistening like fragmented glass. All the colors in the roads and trees look deeper: fossil grays and juniper greens. It would be lovely as a painting.
Celine unravels her own cinnamon roll from the middle, so the inside of the car is soon suffused with the fragrance of baked apple and fresh butter. “I’m guessing you, unlike us, feel perfectly prepared for the test today. Very typical. Very annoying, but expected.”
“Huh?” The smile slips off my face. “What test?”
Leela twists back in her seat to laugh at me. “Who do you think you’re kidding? I bet you’ve been studying for weeks by now. Don’t pretend otherwise.”
Dimly, I recall something about there being a test on the Cold War unit. But that was meant to be ages away. It had been scheduled for—
Today. The realization pins me to the seat. Of course. Between all the bizarre events and crushing disappointments that have occurred in the past two days, my sense of time has been completely distorted.
“Yeah, I figured,” Celine says, misinterpreting my expression for admission. “Well, Leela and I are screwed.”
“Oh no, I’m not just screwed—I’m majorly screwed,” Leela protests, shifting the gear to reverse. The wet gravel crunches noisily beneath the wheels. “I was so desperate that I spent, like, fifty dollars on these crash course notes, but I didn’t even understand those. At this rate, I’m going to graduate both broke and at the bottom of my class.”
I try not to look too skeptical. Like many people at our school, Leela has a habit of complaining about tests right before and after she takes them. She’ll make it sound like she’s about to fail, like the school will expel her for sheer incompetence, only to come back around with a ninety-five percent and a sheepish grin.
The same goes for most claims of being broke. Just last week, I witnessed a group of friends loudly lamenting their meager savings as they sipped their twelve-dollar lattes and swung their designer bags. It’s all a performance of relatability, without having to experience any of the actual struggles of the true working class.
“You have to help us, Jessica,” Leela’s saying, gazing at me through the rearview mirror with her famous puppy-dog eyes. “We all have spares for the first two periods before politics, don’t we? Let’s hit the library.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, injecting perhaps a little too much fake enthusiasm into my voice in my attempt to sound like Jessica: generous, upbeat, definitely not intimidated by the idea of a politics test. “I would love to. Can’t imagine anything better.”
Celine snorts. “Did you have too much caffeine this morning?”
“This isn’t caffeine talking,” I tell her, placing a hand over my heart. “This is my love for learning. We can study together and . . . and ace that test. We’ve got this.”
At least I hope so.
No matter how you feel about Havenwood, nobody can deny that the library is beautiful.
It looks like something that could have been constructed a few centuries ago, during the age of myths and castles. Really, it’s every scholar’s dream: three levels of rich, dark wood panels and ornate spiral staircases, desks stretching out from the center of the room in the shape of a perfect diamond, the sunlight wobbling gold over the glass displays and white marble pillars. Tall shelves lined with thick bound volumes of books, the most obscure titles, original texts dating back to the eighteenth century, sprayed edges and hard covers with silver foil stampings. The scent of old paper and ink and mahogany. The cool, dark air, stretching up to the domed ceiling, the high windows staring out at the emerald lawns.
Celine pushes the next set of doors open with her elbow, her arms full of textbooks, her steps sharp with purpose. It’s never completely silent inside, but it’s always hushed, the kind of reverent quiet you might expect to find in a chapel or any other place of worship. Even though it’s early, more than half the seats have been taken already, groups of friends hogging the best tables, laptops and notepads laid out between them. We pass a familiar plaque nailed to the wall, the library’s dedication written in embossed gold letters.
In loving memory of Katie-Louise Williams, October 3, 1902 to February 13, 1971.
Every time I see it, I’m struck by this sense of unreality. One of the girls in our class is Katie’s great-granddaughter. I can’t even imagine how it feels, to have history so close to you, to have all that wealth and power passed down from generation to generation, accumulated for you by your ancestors so you need only reap the rewards of what they’ve sowed. At the start of the twentieth century, my great-grandparents were working as merchants in the Qing dynasty. And with every decade since, we’ve had to start over, try harder, reinvent ourselves again and again and again.