I Am Not Jessica Chen(53)
“Go away,” I mumble, hiding my face in the couch cushions. I know it’s not his fault, but I still blame him. “But thank you for your help.”
“Polite as ever,” he says dryly.
I ignore him.
“Are you really going to act like—”
Before he can go on, Auntie comes back with a glass of water.
“Drink up,” she says.
I take a sip and choke. It’s ice cold. Back at home, the only acceptable water temperatures are warm and scalding hot.
“Zen me le?” Auntie says, frowning at me. “Didn’t you ask for water? Or do you want mineral water instead? There should still be some in the cabinet.”
“No, no, it’s good.” I force myself to drink the rest of it, even though it hurts my stomach on its way down. “This is exactly how I like it.”
Twelve
It’s dangerously easy to make a habit of something.
Every night now, I read Jessica’s journal before I sleep, hoping there’ll be answers hidden between the lines, waiting for me to find. And that means going all the way back to the beginning.
Okay, so this past week has been absolutely wild and amazing. I was invited to this super fancy scholars’ conference and apparently I’ll be the youngest person there—the others attending are basically all seniors and even college students. And guess what? I get to fly business class and bring my parents with me—and we’ll all be staying in a five-star hotel. It’s so cool!
Most of the early entries are written this way: giddy, wide-eyed, her excitement palpable in the wild loops of her letters and the smudged ink, as if she was impatient to jot down her next thought before her previous one had even dried on the page. But as I read on, her enthusiasm levels out into the indifference of someone who was already expecting every good thing that’s happened.
I guess that checks out.
Jessica has never been one of those people who need to compare their current selves with their past selves, to show how much they’ve transformed for the better. She’s never really experienced failure—her successes have simply kept growing. She went from being the best in her class, to the best in Chinese school, to the best in our entire high school—and now she’ll go on to become the best in all of Harvard, and then the best in the world. Her life is one of exponential growth, the type you can graph out perfectly with a calculator.
My life has never been like that. The only discernible pattern, really, is inconsistency: the second I improve in certain areas, I regress in others. My skin becomes clearer, but my hair becomes thinner. My grades in English rise, but my grades in math fall. I start exercising more in the mornings, but stop doing my laundry over the weekends. One step forward and one step back, and repeat, until in the end, it looks like I’ve been standing in the same spot for years.
There’s another shift in her journal entries starting from around two years ago.
She doesn’t sound excited or coolly nonchalant, satisfied or superior to everybody. She just sounds angry.
Like in this one:
Sometimes I really hate this school. I hate what it stands for, what it chooses not to stand for. I hate that it splashes out ads in Chinese newspapers and recruits students from overseas just so they can pay the more expensive international fees and boost the end-of-year scores, while it only celebrates its legacies and rowing club heirs. This place has made me miserable, and some of my worst days have been spent trapped inside its halls.
But I also know that when there’s a high school reunion three, five, ten years from now, I’ll still attend. And not only will I attend, but I’ll spend the week beforehand planning out my outfit, mining my life for things I can brag about, just to give the impression that I’m doing well.
I hate this school so much, but I can’t stop myself from caring about all the people who go here, from wanting the school to love me, even if I know it’s impossible.
And this:
There’s a story the teachers like to tell about me. Two years ago I’d come down with a horrible fever the night before our final exams; I was so dizzy I couldn’t stand up properly. Eating hurt. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt. And yet I’d insisted on pushing through it; I’d forced my mother to drive me to school and I’d stumbled into the exam halls on my own, gripping the backs of chairs for support, steadying myself against the walls. I don’t remember anything I wrote that day, but I ended up with the highest score in the class across all my subjects. And the moral of the story was that sometimes you have to be a little cruel to yourself, that sometimes pain is necessary if you want to succeed.
That’s what we do, isn’t it? We turn pain into a story, because then it has a purpose. Then, we reason, there was a point to it all along. But sometimes pain is just pain, and there’s nothing particularly noble about clinging to it. Perhaps I would have done much better still if I were healthy; perhaps I was lucky I didn’t end up damaging my body permanently or fainting halfway through the exam, and the moral is that I should have stayed at home and let myself rest. Only I guess that’s not as inspiring.
The ruined skin on my arm has only just started to scab over when another note appears in my bag after school, folded beneath the cover of my textbook.