I Am Not Jessica Chen(43)
He hesitates. “In a philosophical sense?”
“In a very literal sense,” I tell him, shaking my head. “This body . . . this life . . .” I gesture to myself with both hands. “I woke up one day as Jessica. I look like her and talk like her and everyone thinks I am her when I’m not. Not really.”
He stares, long enough for my nerves to fly into a frenzy. “That’s interesting,” he says at last. “You’re referring to yourself in third person.”
“Because it’s not me,” I say, frustrated. “Don’t you get it? I’m not Jessica Chen. I’m—I’m Jenna.” My mouth seems to be moving on its own accord, everything tumbling out into the cool air. “I made a wish to be her, and somehow it came true, and now I have no idea where my cousin really is—her soul, I mean, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve tried searching for her, but I don’t even know where to look and I—I just . . . I don’t know.”
I clamp my jaw shut, and the silence that follows is terrible. All the noise in the background is muted: the faint silver splashing of waves; students laughing and screaming at each other in the far distance; a teacher yelling at them all to be careful, the school isn’t responsible if they die, their parents signed that form stating so; the colored banners slamming against the wind. It’s just me and him and this uneasy quiet, stretching between us like a shadow.
After an eternity, he runs a hand through his hair, that familiar, agitated gesture he does whenever he’s trying to clear his head. “Wow,” he says, and it’s impossible to decipher the tone of his voice. “I’m not certain what the point of this joke is, but it’s definitely creative.”
My heart falls. “Aaron, I really mean it. . . .”
But his expression hardens. The sun disappears behind the clouds again, and when he looks at me in the purple darkness, his features are pinched tight, his eyes almost pained. “Look, you can joke about whatever you like, just not—just not her, okay?” He turns his head toward the lake. “Not Jenna.”
Before I can figure out what he means, he’s already walking away from me. And it’s strange, because up until this very moment, my worst fear was that someone would call me out for being an imposter. For faking everything, pretending to be somebody else; a sparrow dressing up as a phoenix. I should be relieved he doesn’t believe me. It means my act has been convincing enough. But as I watch Aaron leave, his last words echoing in my mind, the heaviness in my chest feels an awful lot like disappointment.
I spend the rest of the day furious at myself.
I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have avoided Aaron altogether. I’d spent the whole year brainwashing myself into hating him, convincing myself I didn’t harbor any feelings except resentment anymore, cutting my ties and cleaning my hands for good. And now this.
He still has so much power over me.
He always has.
I don’t even know how it happened. When. It came onto me gradually over the years, all the days flowing together, building into something more. There he was, sometimes walking past the window with his hands in his pockets, stopping by for dinner when we made our pork dumplings, standing in our living room with the top button of his collar undone and his black hair falling soft over his forehead.
Aaron Cai, the boy my mother always praised for his manners, the one my father called a prodigy, the student all the teachers fawned over. I was jealous of him—I can be certain of that, at least. His unmatched grace and his faint good-natured smiles and his calm, contemplative air. We were born the same year but he seemed older, somehow, like he understood the world better than I did or he had some kind of trick to navigating it that eluded me. I had this ridiculous idea every birthday that things would be different, and I would grow overnight to become just as mature, just as poised as he was, but my birthdays passed without any luck. Twelve years old. Thirteen. Fourteen.
I was always watching him. Maybe because I hoped to see if he would slip up, even though he never did. I remember studying him in class, his head low, flipping through the faded yellow pages of a textbook, a highlighter held casually between his fingers like a painter’s brush. The day in Chinese school, when we were meant to be analyzing the “Song of Divination” by Li Zhiyi, and he was very clearly gazing out the window, his mind on something else.
The teacher had asked me to call on a classmate to read out the poem and I said his name as a challenge, waiting for him to flush, to startle, to stumble over his words. But he had looked me straight in the eye and recited every line perfectly, until the whole class fell into silence, mesmerized. Impossible, I thought to myself, fuming. Once the teacher finished praising him, he’d flashed me a smug, crooked smile and turned right back to the window—yet his shoulders shook slightly, like he was trying to keep from laughing.
Then there was the school dance our teachers had insisted on holding in the ballroom, and the many rehearsals that preceded it, with the old woman with the croaky voice who looked like she’d been summoned from the Regency era just to teach us. I remember being paired up with Aaron, how his one hand had closed over mine and his other had rested lightly on my waist, and noticing how warm his skin was, how smooth. When I’d stumbled and stepped hard on his feet, not once but three times, he had merely rolled his eyes.
“If I didn’t know better, Jenna, I’d think you were doing it on purpose,” he murmured as he spun me, his voice dry.