I Am Not Jessica Chen(6)
I feel, more than see, the effect of his words. The invisible dots connecting in my parents’ heads. The sudden pressure in the atmosphere. The weight of their expectations thrust onto my shoulders. I lick my dry lips, stare at my chopsticks, and feel a kind of crushing inferiority that’s like being buried under stone. I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t speak.
“Jenna?” Mom peers at me, and the hope in her eyes makes everything so much worse. She still believes in me. “Did you check your emails today?”
“You should check it now,” Auntie says, mistaking my silence for a no. “While we’re all here to celebrate. Oh my god, can you imagine? Jenna and Jessica both going to Harvard . . .”
My heart squeezes. I can’t stand this. Not their faith, not my shame.
“You heard your aunt. Check your emails now,” my dad tells me, rising from his seat so enthusiastically he bumps his leg against the edge of the table. He looks like he’s one moment away from grabbing my phone and checking my inbox himself. I can see the future he wants for me projected vividly across his face.
I clench my fingers together in my lap, so overwhelmed I can’t even think of a way out. I’m trapped.
“Oh, someone should film this!” Auntie says, while Jessica smiles encouragingly. I’m scared to even glance in Aaron’s direction, to guess what he’s thinking. “Let me get the camera—we’d forgotten to film Jessica’s reaction earlier, but we can do it for Jenna. . . . It’s such a special memory—”
“Aiya, save the trouble,” Uncle interrupts. “I’m sure they’re more eager to know the results. Jenna, go ahead. Read what Harvard said.”
“Go on,” my mom urges.
But I don’t reach for my phone. My hands are frozen.
Dad frowns. “Why aren’t you—”
“I, um, already checked my emails,” I croak out.
“And?” my aunt prompts, the way people do when they’re prepared to celebrate good news but want to give you the opportunity to announce it.
The words won’t leave my tongue. I can’t bring myself to say it, to physically voice my failures, so I just shake my head.
Silence.
Everyone stares at me; nobody speaks. There’s only the water boiling in the pot between us, all the white foam and ginger bits and spring onions bubbling up to the surface. I watch as the sliced lamb turns from a raw, tender pink to brown. It’ll be overcooked soon, grow too hard to swallow, but no one fetches it out.
“Are you sure?” Dad asks, looking more disoriented than anything, as if convinced I’ve made a silly mistake. In an alternative universe where I had gotten in, he would’ve been the first person I told. My father, who never got a chance to complete his degree in China, who’s always fantasized about sending me off to an Ivy League. Who’s already told all his friends and colleagues I was applying to Harvard. Who would glance over at me when my mom was pressing another heated herbal pack to his aching back and sigh and say, So long as you study hard, you’ll be able to find a comfortable job that doesn’t take such a toll on your body, do you understand? He sets his chopsticks down. “You didn’t get in? You were rejected?”
I manage to nod.
Another silence, even heavier this time. I catch Aaron’s eye across the table—an old habit, muscle memory—and instantly regret it. His gaze is dark, somber, a knife to the throat. It’s been a year since he looked at me like that.
“Well.” Auntie is the first to recover. She even smiles at me, though maybe I’m giving her too much credit. Maybe it’s a genuine smile, just one of relief: Thank god Jessica is my daughter, and not Jenna. “That’s all right. It’s just a school.”
“Yes, yes,” Uncle adds quickly. “The meat should be ready now. Hurry up and eat.”
The second all the platters have been emptied, I slip out quietly through the back door.
Outside, in Jessica’s backyard, a cool breeze whips my cheeks, the petal-arched blackness creeping over the edges, blurring the boundary between the trimmed grass and the wilderness of the woods farther up ahead. When we were much younger, we used to imagine monsters living there. I would kill them, Aaron had said without hesitation. I would help them, Jessica had offered. I would learn from them, I had thought to myself. Even then, I felt I lacked something: claws, speed, a hunter’s instinct. Now I breathe in, tasting the subdued sweetness of lavender, tipping my head to the dark sky. A few stray clouds drift over the full moon, the light scattering across the city. The stars are visible tonight, sharp as needlepoints and so lovely I’m tempted to paint them, despite knowing I could never get the colors right.
It’s cruel, really, how the world tends to present its most beautiful parts to you when you’re so profoundly sad. Like a crush who comes up to you in the moonlight and smiles at you each time you insist on moving on—just enough to keep you lingering, to make you wonder how good things could be. If only, if only.
The door creaks open again. I turn around as Aaron and Jessica walk over to join me.
“Hey, are you okay?” Jessica asks, sitting down on the back porch and swinging her legs over the side, her silky hair blowing across her face.
After a pause, I lower myself onto the cold wooden planks too, aware of Aaron stopping on my left. For the thousandth time, I wish he wasn’t here. I wish he had never come back. But that’s half a lie, because I’ve missed him too. Sometimes I missed him so much it’s embarrassing.