I Am Not Jessica Chen(46)
I swallow, straighten in my seat. So maybe there is something I haven’t fully adjusted to yet. “Sorry,” I tell her, rolling the chair forward to shut my bedroom door with one foot. “I’ve been really busy.” I’m not lying, exactly. When I haven’t been watching crash courses on physics, I’ve been poring over the fables I borrowed from the library, rifling through Jessica’s wardrobe and textbooks for any other mysterious messages or hints as to what terrible thing she might’ve done, and brainstorming increasingly unrealistic solutions for how I might locate my cousin’s soul. My last idea had been to buy Jessica’s favorite food—roasted duck, dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce—and leave it on the back porch like an offering at a shrine. I had gone so far as to set the plate out on the wooden planks, then rapidly aborted the plan when the ants appeared.
“But I hear you’ve been replying to Leela,” Celine is saying, her voice too casual to be convincing. “So I guess you’re not that busy.”
Yes, well, that’s because I’m not concerned that Leela has been writing vaguely threatening notes to my cousin. But if Celine really is the one behind it all, then I shouldn’t rattle the grass and startle the snake, as my mom always says. She can’t know that I suspect her. Not yet. Not before I figure out my next steps. “I have time now,” I say brightly. “I promise I didn’t mean to be so, um, absent. I was just overwhelmed.”
“Well, in that case,” she says, “I take it you’re free to go horseback riding with me and Leela?”
“Like . . . on actual horses?” I ask, just to be clear. “Those animals people used as a primary form of transportation two hundred years ago?”
“Yes, Jessica,” she says. “I know it’s not your favorite sport in the world, but the horse needs exercise.”
“The horse?” I repeat.
“The horse,” Celine says. “My horse. Hello?”
“Oh. That horse,” I say. Three years ago, Charlotte Heathers had bought Celine a horse for her birthday. It was an incredibly nice, incredibly generous, and incredibly impractical gesture. Because Charlotte Heathers comes from a family where horses and twenty-thousand-dollar handbags and sports cars can be casually exchanged as gifts. Because Charlotte Heathers owns three villas and a vineyard and a literal castle that’s often rented out to be used as the set for period dramas. Because Charlotte Heathers, sweet as she is, probably doesn’t have an accurate grasp of how costly it is to own a horse.
I didn’t know either of them well enough to see how the whole thing played out, but I heard through the usual channels of gossip that Charlotte had led the horse straight into Celine’s backyard and handed the reins over.
There weren’t many updates after that, and so I’d naturally assumed that Celine—being the less nice and more practical person—had found a way to give the horse back or maybe donate it to whatever production team was renting Charlotte’s castle. Apparently not.
“So you’re coming, right?” Celine asks.
“Well, I don’t know—”
“I thought you said you had time,” she says, a question in her voice.
I hesitate. If I refuse, she’ll definitely realize I’ve been avoiding her on purpose. Besides, horseback riding is one of those upper-class hobbies I was desperate to try when I was a child, if only I had the money and the opportunity and the athletic ability—and now I have all three. “Okay,” I say slowly. “I mean, why not?”
The doors of the stables open up to a rolling meadow and saturated blue sky and cool afternoon air.
I sink into the saddle, my heels automatically dropping lower in the stirrups, my fingers curling around the reins. Then, mimicking Leela and Celine up ahead of me, I squeeze my horse a few times, my boots thudding dully against the great animal’s belly. With a snort, he breaks into a fast, bumpy stride that ought to bounce me right off, but my body—or Jessica’s body—adapts at once, rising and falling in a steady rhythm with every momentary loss of gravity.
Soon, without much effort it seems, I’ve caught up to the others.
“. . . did you hear that Cathy completely broke down during our chemistry test yesterday?” Celine is saying.
I turn to her in surprise. “Broke down? How?”
Celine shrugs. “Twenty minutes in, and she just started crying. Like, really bad, serious crying. The teacher had to lead her out of the room.”
“Damn,” Leela says. “You know, now that I think of it, she has seemed pretty stressed lately.”
“Who isn’t stressed?” Celine says briskly, leaning forward to pat her horse’s neck.
“She could be under a lot of pressure,” I point out, unable to stop myself from jumping to the girl’s defense. Just thinking about her panicking halfway through the test—her wide eyes swimming with tears, her round face splotched red and helpless—makes sympathy simmer low in my stomach. Or maybe not just sympathy; if I think long enough for it to hurt, I can picture my old face superimposed on hers, like soft charcoal lines mapped over tracing paper.
“I guess I do feel bad for Cathy and all that,” Celine allows. “It must be hard when you’re smart but not the smartest. I actually think it’s better to always come in tenth than to always be second-best in everything.”