I Am Not Jessica Chen(23)
“Let’s go here,” Celine whispers, plopping her stuff down on a desk by the window.
A girl is studying alone next to us, half her hair falling out of her messy braid, her glasses sliding down her nose. As I settle into my seat and gaze around, she scribbles a formula down into her notes. Consults something in her textbook. Then promptly bursts into tears.
Leela follows my gaze and makes a soft, sympathetic sound with her teeth. “Oh, poor thing. I bet she’s doing calculus.”
“It’s always the calculus kids,” Celine says matter-of-factly. “But don’t just pity her—pity us. World politics isn’t much better.”
Leela grimaces down at her study notes. She’s brought an entire stack of flash cards, each filled in with her pretty, curly handwriting and highlighted with pastel blues and pinks and sunflower yellows. Next to the title Global Nuclear Tensions, she’s drawn a little heart and what may be a doodle of the world exploding. “True,” she says with a sigh. “I can’t remember these dates for the life of me.”
“Should we do something about her?” I ask, staring at the girl just as she slams her head against her textbook with enough force to produce a distinct thudding sound. No one else in the library looks up.
Celine surveys her for a moment, then shrugs. “Nah, she’ll be fine. Look, she’s already over it.”
As she speaks, the girl darts a quick, panicked look at the old grandfather clock in the corner, startles, and like magic, abruptly stops crying. Her tears seem to freeze halfway down her cheeks. She sniffles one last time, dabs her swollen eyes with her blazer sleeve, and resumes studying with remarkable calm. It’s as if nothing’s happened.
“Smart,” Leela comments, spreading her notes out like a fan, her previous question forgotten. “I always schedule in ten minutes a day to cry, so it doesn’t interfere with my productivity.”
“Damn, only ten?” Celine raises her brows. “When my sister was in her final year, she would cry at least half an hour every day.”
“It helps if I scream really loudly in the beginning. Gets most of the energy out that way.”
“Ah.” Celine nods like this makes perfect sense. “That’s a good trick.”
“Would definitely recommend.”
As Leela leans back in her seat, going over the dates on her cards one by one with a look of pained concentration, my eyes snag on the novel lying underneath her pencil case. The title printed across the spine in block letters is familiar: Blue Crescent Blade.
“Hey, why are you reading this?” I ask, pulling the book toward me with two fingers. The cover is a vibrant abstract illustration of blue splotches that form the shape of a doughnut when you squint, though I’m aware this is not a book about doughnuts.
“What do you mean? It’s a good book,” Leela says, blinking up at me. “I mean, I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s incredibly thought-provoking. It makes such profound statements on . . . society. It’s a masterpiece, I would even say.”
I stare in disbelief. Only last week, Leela had called me to rant about the most “mind-numbingly boring book” she’d ever read. This was one of our favorite pastimes: either reading scathing reviews, or coming up with our own. You would think, for a book called Blue Crescent Blade, there would at least be blades involved, right? But no. The closest thing to a blade I’ve seen so far is a butter knife, which is described at length for seven pages. Seven pages about a butter knife, Jenna, she’d complained, while I doubled over, cackling into the speaker.
“It’s a masterpiece,” I repeat, my eyebrows rising. “You’re telling me you genuinely enjoyed this.”
She nods fast. “Yeah. And I think it’s something you’d enjoy as well.”
If I weren’t pretending to be Jessica, I’d burst out laughing at the blatant lie. Leela has always had a habit of reshaping herself to fit the people she’s around; she doesn’t find common ground—she creates it. I’ve watched her slip smoothly between claiming to hate cheesecake, to declaring it her favorite dessert, to denouncing anything containing cheese as a show of sympathy for someone lactose intolerant, all within a week. It’s why I would feel honored whenever she was honest with me, no matter how unpopular or outlandish her real opinions were.
I would have thought she’d be honest with my cousin too. Then again, anyone would feel self-conscious about their reading tastes around Jessica Chen, whose idea of a beach read is The Art of War.
“You’ll have to let me read it sometime, then,” I say brightly, playing along, before turning my focus to Jessica’s notes.
They’re the neatest notes I’ve ever seen, everything organized by theme, then again by chronological order, and divided into three points of significance and main scholarly debates. Keywords have been highlighted and color coded according to a strict system: green for dates, blue for people, red for statistics, orange for quotes. Leela was right, to an extent. Jessica was definitely prepared for today’s test. She was prepared for everything.
But it’s been occurring to me that I might not be, even in her body. I might not have her memory, or her intelligence, or her ideas. What if I walk into the exam and fail? Jessica’s standards for success are so unbearably high, and her standards for failure so terrifyingly low; all it’d take is one wrong answer, and her winning streak would be ruined. This is my one chance to live my cousin’s perfect life, to get everything right. I have to do well—as well she would, if she were here.