I Am Not Jessica Chen(51)

The words chafe at something inside me.

I know you.

“Jenna,” he repeats. “Say something. Tell me . . . tell me I haven’t lost my mind.”

“No,” I whisper. “You haven’t lost your mind.” Then, because I can’t push down my curiosity, “What convinced you in the end?”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says, walking ahead again, and I make myself catch up. “After that day at the lake . . . I wanted to assume you were joking, but then—it wasn’t logical. Why would you joke about that? It would require a truly terrible, warped sense of humor. And then everything started to make sense. I started to comb through all my memories from before I left for Paris and comparing them to the after. I thought at first it was because I’d been gone for so long. People can change, right? But people can’t transform so drastically. I couldn’t sleep,” he continues, shaking his head. “I just kept replaying our conversations, searching for the differences. Of course, there’s also the fact that I haven’t seen you . . . Jenna . . . I mean, the person you were—” He breaks off. “God, this is absolutely bizarre.”

“I know,” I say with a weak little laugh. “Kind of breaks your brain, doesn’t it?”

“Is this a nightmare?” he asks. He looks almost desperate. “Is there any way this is all made up inside my head?”

I grimace. Kick at the grass beneath my feet. “If this is a nightmare, we’re dreaming the same dream. You know what? Maybe that’s what it means,” I say, recalling the proverb slowly. “To dream of becoming a butterfly. I didn’t understand it when we were studying it in Chinese school, but I think I do now. Maybe it’s impossible to tell which is the dream and which is reality.”

There is something dreamlike about the view, the yellow flowers lucent against the grass, the mountains dark against the night.

“I tried to look up peer-reviewed journal articles to prove it,” he admits after a moment.

This elicits a burst of genuine laughter from me. “Oh yeah, no, I’m afraid this isn’t a popular topic for scientific studies.”

“But it goes against everything I know about modern medicine,” he says. “What separates the body from the soul, the physical from the metaphysical. What can be transferred and what can be kept. It just . . . it opens up thousands of possibilities. Thousands of questions. It could fundamentally reshape our understanding of physics.”

I shrug. “I guess.”

“Wow,” he says, much more like his usual self. “Invigorating response.”

“Maybe some things can’t be explained by science,” I say. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

“Anything can be explained by science,” he insists. “Everything must come with an answer.”

“You’re so naive sometimes,” I murmur under my breath, hating how tender I feel toward him, even at a time like this.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He runs a distracted hand through his hair. “So where’s the real Jessica Chen? Have you found anything? Is she okay?” Then, almost in the same breath, as if his brain is leaping ahead of itself, working faster than any ordinary person could keep up with, “Is that why you were borrowing those old fairy tales? You think they could lead you to her?” His skepticism is obvious.

“Well, why not?” I challenge. “You haven’t had any luck using the scientific approach. Can’t you consider the possibility that there might be other, more relevant methodologies? Things outside math and physics?”

“So you’ve had luck with fables and folklore?”

“No,” I ground out. “Not yet. I don’t know.” Frustration leaks into my voice. “Sometimes I’ll think I’m close, but then I’ll hit a dead end. Like, there was this ancient tale about how a man successfully summoned the soul of his long-lost lover, but he had to perform some kind of spell using the soil of her hometown. If I were to try that, I wouldn’t even know what soil to use—the soil from her backyard? Or from Tianjin?” I shake my head. “Sometimes it feels impossible. But then, my wish should have been impossible in the first place, and it still came true—”

“Why, though?” he demands, his voice strained, like it hurts him just to say it. “Why would you . . . why would you even make that wish in the first place?”

My breath freezes in my throat. This isn’t where I’d anticipated the conversation would go. I don’t reply right away, don’t know how or where to begin, but the answer flashes like a film reel inside my head.

Every time I walked into an examination hall, handed in a paper, signed up for a club, participated in a contest . . . the mad rush of hope in my blood, only for my optimism to sour into disappointment. Every failure that felt like the apocalypse and has stayed with me since. Every move I made premeditated, but still always miscalculating, offering up the wrong comment or opinion or idea. Days when I was too exhausted to sleep while someone else lived the life I dreamed of. Witnessing everything I’d ever wanted happen for Jessica, knowing it would never happen for me. The report card statements, always the same sentiment rephrased: “Not quite there yet, but has potential,” which was what people said as consolation in the absence of true competence. And me learning over time that potential was in itself such an abstract term, tossed around recklessly, that more often than not it simply meant you didn’t live up to the idea somebody else had of you.