I Am Not Jessica Chen(70)

A faint smile. “For later, yes.”

I throw the brush aside and bury my face in my hands, rubbing my palms into my eyes until my vision goes fuzzy. “Aaron?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know what to do,” I admit.

“I know,” he says quietly.

Silence settles between us like sediment. There’s only the faraway sound of cars rolling through the suburbs and this room I didn’t grow up in, this house that isn’t my own, this boy who can’t be mine.

Suddenly Aaron stands up—to leave, or to comfort me, I can’t tell. But before he can do anything, he knocks the leather journal off the corner of the desk, the pages falling open with a loud flapping sound. The sound startles us both.

I pick it up first, the blue paint on my fingers smearing the page.

“This is Jessica’s,” I tell him, meaning to close it, but my eyes land on a few lines written in the margins, now half smudged with oil color. I must have missed it before; it’s so short it hardly qualifies as its own entry. But it’s dated to the night Jessica received her Harvard acceptance. The night of the gathering. The night where everything changed.

And this too will change everything. I realize it as I read over the words, my whole body frozen, my blood churning faster and faster, a building roar in my ears.

“Sometimes I get so tired,” she’d written, her usually neat handwriting almost illegible in her haste.

Everything gets so heavy. I wish somebody else would just come and take over my life. Live it for me. Please. If the universe is listening; if the stars could grant me any impossible wish, then all I ask for is this:

I don’t want to be Jessica Chen anymore.





Seventeen




When I enter the library the next day, everyone is glued to their laptops, faces pinched tight with apprehension. The air is unusually hushed. Only Leela glances up when I drag myself over to the seat she’s saved between her and Celine.

“Wow, someone didn’t rest well,” she remarks.

I grimace. I hadn’t slept at all last night, even after Aaron left the house. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jessica’s journal entry.

“Who can blame her?” Celine says without lifting her eyes from the screen. She stabs the refresh button in her inbox with one manicured nail. Hits it again and again and again. “Though there’s not much suspense for Jessica.”

Leela snorts. “There’s not much suspense for you, either.”

“Of course there isn’t,” Celine says, even as she continues refreshing her inbox with the fervor of someone possessed. “If the teachers don’t choose me, I’ll riot.”

“You can’t threaten teachers into choosing you.”

“We can’t all flatter them the way you do,” Celine says, reaching behind my chair to give her a shove. In a voice that sounds remarkably like Leela’s, she mimics, “Oh hello Ms. Lewis, oh you look absolutely stunning today, is that a new shade of lipstick? I found yesterday’s lesson so very fascinating. If you had any extra questions for us to do—”

“Shut up,” Leela says, laughing—maybe louder than she normally would. “As if you don’t charm people.”

“I reserve my charms for people I want to make out with,” she says.

“Is that how you ended up with the model last summer? What was her name again?”

“Juniper,” Celine says distractedly. “Yeah, she was nice. It might have worked out if she wasn’t always trying to push me into doing a liberal arts degree.”

“You mean a degree in your area of passion and expertise?”

Celine shoots Leela a look. “I mean a degree that can’t bring me any stability. She didn’t understand that—she thinks people only head to university for the experience and the memories you’ll make and learning doesn’t require any practical application. Easy to think that when your parents are billionaires.” Each word is punctuated by the sound of Celine’s nails tapping the keys. “Like I said—she didn’t understand, but you must.”

Leela heaves a sigh. “Unfortunately. Yes.”

“Damn it,” Celine mutters, pulling her laptop screen closer. “Where is that email? Or—” The faintest quiver creeps into her voice. “Or has it come in? Have you gotten anything?”

“Don’t worry, I haven’t gotten it either,” Leela says.

It takes me a beat to identify the source of tension. Awards. They should be announced this morning. If I weren’t so preoccupied with my more pressing supernatural-existential situation, I would be just as nervous.

Academic awards are a big deal at Havenwood. Fewer than ten awards are given out to the best students in each year for their performance across every subject. Winning one doesn’t really promise you anything except praise and a free outdated encyclopedia, but losing an academic award is a humiliating ordeal that can wear away at your confidence for a whole year. The only remedy is to win the academic award the following school year.

I’ve received it just twice before, in seventh and ninth grades, when most people weren’t quite as intense about their studies. Both times, I had the overwhelming suspicion I’d barely made the cut.

Jessica’s won it every year, though. Of course.