I Am Not Jessica Chen(26)
My teeth won’t stop chattering.
A chair squeaks in the back. Somebody sneezes, and Leela immediately whispers, “Bless you,” even though we shouldn’t be talking. Ms. Lewis glares but says nothing. From outside, you can still hear students laughing, dragging their feet to their next class, the sound rippling like water, distant and indistinct.
“You may begin,” Ms. Lewis says.
Six
An hour later, we spill out into the corridors, everyone waving their hands about and talking all at once.
“Oh my god,” Leela says, yanking out her unraveling ponytail, then retying it with a velvet scrunchie. Her forehead is jeweled with sweat, as though from physical rather than mental exertion. “That was terrible. I mean, I was already prepared for the worst, but that was just inhumanely difficult. At several separate points throughout that test, I contemplated punching a hole through the window and escaping through it.”
Celine slumps back against the closest wall, one ankle crossed over another. “No joke. Question six was a bitch.”
“What did you write for that one?” Leela asks. “About the lasting consequences of—”
“No, no. We’re not doing this again.” Celine cuts in firmly, holding up a hand. “No comparing answers after tests, remember?”
Leela sighs and turns to me. “How did you find it, Jessica?”
I try to think back to the questions, to what I wrote, but already the test is a blur in my memory. The most I can recall is the feeling—the awful sense of time running out, the cramp in my fingers from gripping the pen too tightly, the pressure at the sides of my skull as I pushed my mind harder than ever before. But before I can say anything, Cathy Liu strides over to join us, her heart-shaped silver earrings bouncing as she walks.
“I’m sure it was easy for Jessica,” Cathy says, flashing me a wide smile. “She’s going to top the class. As always.”
“Of course she will,” Leela agrees.
“Not necessarily,” I say, my chest constricting. “We don’t know that. There’s literally no way to know that.”
Celine and Leela exchange a pointed exasperated look: it’s a familiar one, an old routine, done so many times as to be an inside joke.
“Yeah, but it’s you,” Leela tells me.
Except that it’s not. At the end of the day, I took the test alone. Even when I’ve tricked everyone into thinking that I really am Jessica, the most I can do is maintain the illusion. There is the idea of Jessica Chen people hold in their minds, and then there’s me.
“Perfect Jessica,” Cathy says with an adoring sigh, her eyes wide and fixed on me. It’s probably how I used to look at my cousin when I was younger. “Sometimes I wish I were you.”
“Don’t we all,” Leela says.
I release a silent sigh of relief when the bell rings, sending everyone scattering down the hall.
We have back-to-back classes for the rest of the day, and of course Jessica’s picked out the most complex, content-heavy subjects possible. So instead of heading to the art classroom, losing myself in the familiar smell of paints and charcoal and dried flowers, focusing on how to capture the shape of water, the color of light, I’m dropped headfirst into an accelerated physics class I’ve never taken before. It’s like finding yourself in a country where you don’t speak the language at all, but you’re expected to get around just fine on your own.
I’ve already filled in three pages of Jessica’s notebook when I stare at my notes on torque and angular acceleration, then up at the board, and arrive at the terrible, inevitable conclusion that I have no idea what the teacher’s saying. Around me, my classmates are all taking notes too, comparing formulas and whispering. None of them appear to be struggling.
I’m meant to be the smartest person in the room, I think hysterically, but everyone here is so much smarter than I am.
“. . . your answer, Jessica Chen?” the teacher calls.
I jolt in my seat. “Sorry?”
“Your answer for question nine,” the teacher says. Ms. Gonzalez, I think her name was. She’s never taught me before, but I know that she’s as young as she looks, just a few years out of college, and once went on a research trip to Antarctica, which she brings up at every possible opportunity.
“Oh, I . . . let me look. . . .” I fumble around for my notes, as if the answer might have magically appeared on its own. All the tiny equations and numbers and graphs swim before me, senseless, dense, impossible to comprehend. I can feel people starting to stare, the natural silence stretching out into tension as the moment drags on. My throat closes. They’re all going to find out. Any second now, they’re going to realize that I’m not meant to be here, that I’m not actually Jessica Chen, that I’m not like them.
“It’s a fairly straightforward question,” Ms. Gonzalez says with a light frown. “Really, this is the kind of question we’d do for fun while we were in Antarctica. . . .” As she goes on a tangent about her trip, the class listening with polite but increasingly strained interest, I sneak a desperate glance at the notebook of the boy sitting in front of me. He’d received some kind of prestigious physics award just last year, and he’s on track to study physics at MIT; if anyone were a reliable source, it would be him.