I Am Not Jessica Chen(77)
My parents both stare at me, startled, but they don’t stop me as I sprint up the stairs and burst into my old bedroom—
I freeze, my gut sinking.
No.
The bedroom is empty. There’s just the single bed, stripped down to the mattress. My clothes have been thrown out, my photos taken down from the walls, my books and bags and brushes missing. The night-light isn’t plugged in anymore. The faint pencil marks on my closet—the ones that my mom used to keep track of my growth spurt, the wobbly lines she’d draw out as she chided me to stay still and stop cheating by standing on my tiptoes—have been erased as well. My paints are gone. My self-portrait is gone.
It’s all gone.
“What did you do?” I demand, running downstairs. I don’t keep my voice down. I can’t control my panic, which feels like it’s something alive and clawed, thrashing around inside me. “Where did you throw everything?”
My mom gives me a blank look. “Throw what?”
“The things in the . . . in the room upstairs,” I choke out. “Where is it?”
“The guest room, you mean?” Dad asks with a frown. “There was a bunch of stuff cluttering it up. We think it might have been left behind by the old tenant or something. It’s all lying around in the garage; the town should be sending someone to collect—”
I’m already out the door. We never use the garage; at best, we treat it like a storage space. Dust tickles my nose when I step inside, coughing and blinking hard to adjust to the dim light. The air has that old, stagnant smell of an abandoned house. There are cobwebs sticking to the ceiling corners, and dark spots stain the carpet beneath my feet. All my stuff is here, stacked unceremoniously in a pile. I do not know what to feel first: grief, or relief. I do not have time for either. I drop down to my knees and rummage through the shirts and half-used oils and sketchbooks until I find the rough texture of canvas.
The self-portrait is hardly a self-portrait at all now.
It’s the vaguest impression of a person, a mess of smeared paints, unrecognizable to anybody except for me. The face is almost completely covered, save the corner of my mouth. It’s enough. It has to be enough.
I fold it under my arm and pocket a spare brush and oil tube, then kick the garage door open. But I don’t leave right away. I linger outside my house, unable to resist glancing at my parents one last time through the windows. They seem to have forgotten about my sudden appearance already. In the kitchen, my mom is marinating the ground meat, my dad washing the plates and pots from lunch.
As I watch them move around the room, I’m seized by a memory so sudden and vivid it freezes me in place. The strangest thing is that there’s nothing special about it at all. No tests, no awards, no results. It was years ago; we were all in the living room, me and my parents and Aaron, who’d come over for dinner. We were making dumplings together, the ground meat prepared in a metal bowl, the dough soft and smooth and rolled out into flat, round pieces and dusted with white flour.
My mom had been attempting to teach me how to wrap the meat properly. “You have to pinch the corners together, like this,” she’d said, demonstrating, then glanced over at me and frowned. “No, no, Jenna—that dumpling looks so sad.”
“It looks like it’s dying,” Aaron remarked helpfully from the other side of the table. Smiling, he’d then held up the dumpling he made. Of course it was perfect, like something you would see featured in a food magazine.
I’d glared at him while my mom gushed.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re really good at everything, aren’t you?”
And even my dad, with his usual stern expression, had nodded in approval. “Do you practice often?”
“Not really,” Aaron said with a shrug, the very image of humility. But the second my parents looked away, he’d flashed a grin at me. I chewed my tongue, a flush of heat racing up my neck.
“Jenna has always been a little clumsy,” Mom said. “Not like Aaron—you have such steady hands. You’ll make an excellent doctor.”
“I don’t think my dumplings are that bad,” I grumbled, picking up another piece of dough.
My parents had exchanged a look, while Aaron’s grin widened.
“You’re right,” Mom said in the voice you would use to coax a child, her lips twitching. “Your dumplings are so . . .”
“Unique,” Dad offered.
“Artistic,” Aaron said.
“Exactly,” Mom finished, and by that point the three of them were visibly trying not to laugh, and the kettle was boiling in the kitchen, the air warm with steam, and the dusky, roseate light was shifting through the translucent curtains, and everything was ordinary, familiar, serene, and everyone I loved was in the room with me.
Nineteen
The sun is falling behind me.
The dying light drapes shadows over the mountain path, the air burning the back of my neck. I push my feet faster, tearing through the wild twigs, letting them scrape and snag at my clothes, my cheeks, my hair, not slowing even when I bleed. I have to outrun the darkness. I have to reach the peak of the mountain before night arrives, catch the meteor before it leaves.
My breath rattles in my throat. The painting knocks clumsily against my stomach, slipping against my clammy fingers, but I don’t dare loosen my grip.