I Am Not Jessica Chen(69)

“Never heard of her,” she says mildly.

“Jenna Chen,” I repeat. “You must have seen her around the art classroom. She knows who you are.”

“You’re mistaken, my dear,” she tells me. “Now, I have to go check on the others. . . .”

“What will you do with them?” I blurt out. “If—if nobody comes to claim the paintings?”

“Throw them away, I suppose,” she says. “It would be a waste, but we certainly can’t keep them stored around forever.”

Ice creeps through my veins. It’s happening even faster than I thought—I’m disappearing. Every trace of me, every memory, everything I’ve made and left behind. And then something else dawns on me. Another way to check what’s going on, to confirm my worst fears. I’m trembling when I take out my phone and scroll through my photos and find the one I took of the painting in my bedroom, and my breathing stops. It’s changed, the same way the other portraits have. Most of my face has been covered, the smudge far bigger than it was before.

My eyes go back to the paintings on display before me, and I understand what Ms. Wilde meant about them being unsettling. They’re wrong, eerie in their anonymity, almost sinister looking.

This is all wrong.

“I need to go,” I tell Aaron, who’s been following close behind me this whole time, his eyes sharp, his mouth closed. “I—I need to see something at my aunt’s house. Can you drive again?”

He tilts his head a little, then holds out his hand. “Let’s go.”



“I’m not entirely sure what you’re planning,” Aaron says as he walks me up the stairs back at Jessica’s house, “but I just think we should talk it over.”

I kick the bedroom door open. “Sit down,” I tell him, pointing to the spare chair next to the desk.

“What?”

I take out my earrings and unclasp my necklace and run a rough hand through my hair to loosen it. My high heels are discarded by the closet. My heart is discarded in the corridor. “I said, sit down. I’m going to paint you.”

He looks bemused. “You’re going to—”

“Yes. Paint you,” I say impatiently, trying to calm my thudding pulse as I fumble around for brush and paint. Jessica barely has any art supplies, just a half-dried tube of dark blue paint, but it’ll have to do. “I haven’t drawn anyone in ages, and I need to prove that I still can.”

Somehow I am convinced that this is the answer to everything. That if I can still paint, if I can still hold a brush the same way, then I will still exist. I won’t have to give anything up.

Greedy, a voice whispers in the back of my head. I thought we’d established that a long time ago, I retort silently. That’s the problem. I’m not sad because I don’t love life enough, but because I love life too much. I always want more of it.

“How should I pose?” Aaron asks, lowering himself into the chair. He has one long leg stretched out in front of him, his arms crossed casually over his chest, his chin tipped up to look at me.

“Whatever makes you comfortable,” I say. I sit down as well, one of Jessica’s notebooks flipped open to a blank page and balanced against my knee, the brush in my hand. I’ve done this god knows how many times before. There’s no reason for me to feel so unsteady, so unsure of myself. “Just hold still.”

He obeys.

He goes so still he could be a sculpture, and I let myself study him like a painting. I take note of the orange glow of Jessica’s bedside lamp, how it softens the line of his lips and turns the ring of his irises warm brown, how it stretches across his collarbones and deepens the creases of his shirt. I collect with my eyes the bluish hues of the night sky beyond the curtains, the way a few strands of hair fall free over his forehead, the shadows draped over the rug beneath him.

But when I lower the brush to the paper, all of that is lost.

The difference is almost laughable. The beauty is gone. It’s nothing but a collection of messy, haphazard strokes. I hold the brush tighter, as tight as I can, the muscles in my fingers aching from it, but it doesn’t work.

“It’s not working,” I whisper out loud, gazing at the sketch in despair. It’s so ugly I have the violent urge to rip it apart. “I can’t get it right.”

Even though I know exactly what the painting should look like. I can picture it so clearly in my head it’s maddening. Why can’t I just transfer the image onto paper? It was never this hard.

“Have you tried painting something else?” Aaron asks. “Or someone else? Maybe—”

“No,” I tell him, certain of this, at least. “If I can’t paint you, I can’t paint at all.”

I don’t realize what I’ve said until his expression flickers. What I’ve just confessed to. Because I have all of Aaron’s features memorized; I could conjure up his face with my eyes closed and the curtains drawn and the sun down in the distance. I paint him privately, with just my mind, every time we’re together. I know him better than I know anyone.

He clears his throat but says nothing.

“You’re not rubbing it in?” I ask.

“Now’s not the time for that,” he says.

“Saving it for later then.”