I Am Not Jessica Chen(36)

“None of us can be her,” Leela echoes. “You’re right. How could I forget?”

“Leela,” I try. “That’s not—”

“No, no, it’s true,” she says, and my gut sinks further. She doesn’t sound angry. It’s hard to detect any emotion in her voice at all. “I’ll meet you inside, Jessica. I actually did have to go to the bathroom, so.”

“I . . . okay.”

I let her go and walk back to the classroom alone, in a daze. Everyone is still obsessing over their test papers, comparing answers, and for a few seconds, standing there in the doorway, the whole thing strikes me as entirely ridiculous. Nonsensical. All this trouble, all this scheming and grieving and competing, for what? A number that will shed its meaning in less than a year?

But when I glance over at my desk, my blood skips in my veins. My test paper has been flipped around, the score exposed. When I go to pick it up, a handwritten note falls out from inside the pages, fluttering onto the desk like the severed wing of a moth.

Not so perfect, are you?





Eight




“How was school?” Auntie asks across the dining table.

Both of Jessica’s parents are home today. That’s still the only way I can think of them—as Jessica’s parents, not my own. Because my mom and dad would never be seated so formally for a small family dinner, with their designer blazers and ironed shirts still on, the television turned off in the background, the only sound the light scrape of their chopsticks against the plates. They would never come home with boxes of takeaway from the most famous—and expensive—Chinese restaurant in town. I would always have to beg my mom to let us order food, and more often than not all I ended up with was a stern lecture on how we already had everything we needed at home. And besides, her cooking was better than anything a chef could put together, and didn’t I know her friend’s uncle’s coworker would eat takeout once a week and ended up divorced at twenty-eight, even if the two matters seemed entirely unrelated, and did I want to end up divorced at twenty-eight?

I scoop up a piece of sweet-and-sour chicken and pop it into my mouth, the rich flavor bursting on my tongue. “School was . . . okay,” I lie through my teeth. My thoughts leave the table and creep into Jessica’s bedroom, where her schoolbag sits, the anonymous note folded and hidden inside her pencil case. The mere reminder of it sends dread scuttling down my spine. “I got my test back. For politics.”

“Oh?” Uncle glances up. “What did you get?”

“Ninety-one percent.”

A very brief silence moves over the room, so subtle I almost don’t notice it. I doubt I would have, if I were here as a guest. If the silence weren’t directed at me.

“Ninety-one,” Auntie repeats. Her tone is light, but there’s a quizzical look in her eyes. “Was it a particularly difficult test?”

“No,” I say. I feel like this is another test, and it’s proving very difficult to pass. “I mean, a lot of people did worse.”

“But a few people did better than you?” Auntie asks, her tone sharpening.

Uncle shoots her a look. “It’s only a score for a humanities subject. It doesn’t matter—”

“I don’t care about the score,” Auntie says, shaking him away. “I care about how Jessica is reacting to the score. She doesn’t even look upset. How can she improve if she’s not reflecting on what she’s done?”

I take another bite of the chicken. It’s a little too salty, and I’m uncomfortably aware of how dry my tongue feels, but I don’t dare stand up for a glass of water—not with Auntie staring me down.

“I’m sorry?” I try.

“No, no, I don’t need you to be sorry to me.” Auntie stabs her chopsticks into the middle of her rice. Bad luck, my mom would say. It looks like incense; it is associated with death in the family. “I told you, I don’t care about your studies. I’m not like one of those tiger parents. I don’t have to care about you at all. Soon you’ll be an adult living all on your own and whether you succeed or not will have nothing to do with me. If you fail, then you only have to be sorry to yourself.”

I stare. There are a number of things Auntie likes to brag about on a regular basis, and one of them is how she isn’t invested in Jessica’s studies at all. She would always speak with faint derision of those parents who signed their children up for intensive tutoring in chemistry and math and Chinese, who stayed up to help their children with homework, who closely monitored their children’s grades. According to her, Jessica just happened to have perfect grades. Jessica just happened to be the perfect daughter. Jessica was simply blessed with perfect genes.

But maybe she’s never worried about Jessica’s grades before because Jessica never gave her a reason to worry.

Because Jessica must have learned at some point that at the first sign of anything less than perfect, her mother would react like this.

“How did your friends do?” Uncle asks. He probably means to help, but my mouth only dries further.

“Yes, good question,” Auntie says. “That Leela is a good student, isn’t she? Did she do better than you? And what about Celine? You’re always telling me she’s a genius at those humanities subjects.” This time it’s clear what the correct answer should be. It won’t matter as much if I’m not perfect, so long as I’m superior in some sense.