I Am Not Jessica Chen(79)

I miss it all. I miss my life, because even when I felt like I had nothing, I had everything. I just didn’t know it at the time. You never do, until it’s in hindsight.



The light disappears.

A cold wind whips through the trees, and nothing happens. It suddenly feels foolish—all of it. The self-portrait and the meteor and my own wretched hope. The stars are gone, and I’m just another girl, praying alone in the darkness for the impossible.



I don’t remember falling asleep. I only remember crying, tugging at my hair until my scalp burns, eaten alive by my regret.

“I get it now,” I scream at the sky. “I get it. You’ve made your point.”

The sky doesn’t reply.

And when my throat is hoarse and I can’t form another word, I sob into my hands, the horror of my situation truly registering. I will be trapped like this forever. I’ll have to act like Jessica Chen for the rest of my years. I’ll have to treat my own parents like strangers. My memories of my old life will haunt me like ghosts, visible to my eyes only.

I don’t remember falling asleep, the same way I wouldn’t remember my birth. I can’t tell when the nothingness begins or ends. But very briefly, in the moments between, there’s color: burning roses and sage, ceruleans and lavender, the soft canary yellow of my childhood, the viridian of the sea, the first flush of dawn.





Twenty




Sunlight.

The world sharpens in fragments. The musky scent of soil, the crisp green fragrance of pines. The hardness of pebbles against my skin. The sun dragging itself up over the horizon, painting the silhouette of the mountains gold. Birds singing from the trees.

I cough. Rub my eyes.

My whole body is stiff, and my mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with sand. I sit up very slowly, as though waking from a long, disorienting dream. Something feels different. Despite the pain in my joints and the dirt in my hair, I feel . . . lighter. Like I’ve finally taken off a soaked, oversized coat and slipped into my own shirt.

Then I see Jessica standing above me.

Jessica.

Shock spears through my chest. I’m blinking, blinking, my head spinning so fast it makes me dizzy. She’s wearing the same clothes I was in yesterday, her school blazer wrinkled at the sleeves, her fingers covered in blue paint. Her face is pale, her eyes wide.

“Jenna?” she says.

I lurch to my feet, more awake than I’ve ever been. My heart kicks against my ribs as I lift my hands to the air and inspect them. There are calluses on my palms and my index finger, marks from all the nights I spent painting alone in my room. My hands.

I exist again.

“Oh my god,” I say, and it’s the sound of my own voice. I could sob. “Oh my god.”

“What happened?” Jessica asks, looking as dazed as I feel. “I just woke up and we’re on a mountain and . . . what is this?”

I open my mouth, but I have no idea where to even begin. “I was you,” I manage at last. “I—I made a wish and I was you. I became you. I had your appearance, your life, your family. Can you remember anything? Do you know? I . . . I tried to look for you but . . .” I trail off, a sudden, overwhelming wave of guilt crushing the words in my throat. But I’ve failed, so many times.

“I kind of remember,” she says, massaging her temples, her brows drawing together. “It’s hard to describe. The last night I recall clearly is . . .” She closes her eyes. “The night of the Harvard acceptance. Aaron had come to visit—yes, and you were there too. Then you left and I went to bed and everything was normal and the next morning I woke up. . . .” Her eyes snap open again. “It was like I was watching a movie play out from far, far away. I had some vague impression of everything that was going on, but I wasn’t myself. I was . . . suspended in a place in the back of my own mind. Just hovering there, weightless, in a closed room. I couldn’t control my body. It was . . . freeing.”

“Wait. So you were there? This entire time?” Despite the warmth from the sun, my skin goes cold. “You were just . . . trapped?”

“Not trapped, exactly,” she says. “There were these few moments early on when it felt like the door in my mind wasn’t fully locked, when it seemed possible for me to break through, if I really wanted to. Like when you called my name. But I was—scared. I wanted to stay in that room and just . . . rest. And the longer I stayed there, the harder it became to remember why I needed to leave at all.”

There’s a certain kind of fear that comes not before or during, but after an event has passed. The same fear that comes after you’ve swerved the car out of the way a second before it crashed; of missing a step and catching yourself right as you’re falling; of noticing a mistake on your test and correcting it before the teacher collects it. The sharp, heart-pounding realization of what could have happened, of how fragile and arbitrary life itself is, of how one moment, one mistake, could have the power to change everything.

“I’m sorry,” I babble. “I’m really sorry. It was my wish that started it all . . . it should have never happened—”

She waves the apology away briskly, without resentment. I’d almost forgotten that about her. Jessica Chen doesn’t like to dwell on platitudes and well-wishes and empty sentiments. “It was my wish too,” she says. “And besides, I’m more curious how it happened. Have there been any . . . I don’t know, any conspiracy theories about this? Has this sort of phenomenon ever been reported before?”