Five
I go to sleep that night in someone else’s body, in someone else’s bed. When I open my eyes again, nothing’s changed. The
sun is streaming in thick through the curtains. I reach out, stretch, and my hands brush over Jessica’s silk blankets, her
clothes, her bedside lamp.
“Oh my god,” I whisper.
It definitely wasn’t a dream, then.
I leap to my feet, and instead of horror, I feel nothing but wild, heady relief—then a twist of guilt at just how deep my
relief is, how glad I am to still be Jessica. It’s only temporary, I remind myself sternly. It’s only until you manage to find your cousin again.
But even that can’t ruin my mood.
Everything is more familiar the second time around. I zip up her plaid skirt, smooth out her blazer, tug on her white ankle socks, and this time I even think to brush my hair back in Jessica’s signature high ponytail. I find the expensive facial toner she keeps on her bathroom shelf and smear on her pink lip tint. Then I look into the mirror, and recall all those fleeting moments when I was myself and I’d catch my own reflection in the dark window of a store or a passing bus, and think, I could be beautiful, I could be everything I ever wanted. I could be like Jessica Chen. I’d even imagine my features smoothing out into Jessica’s, my lashes lengthening, my skin softening, my lips curving up.
But then the moment would pass, and the light would shift, and I would be left with nothing once again.
This time, though, the mirage doesn’t break.
When I smile, Jessica’s reflection smiles too, showing off her perfect teeth. It’s going to be a good day, I promise myself, and for once I’m certain of it. It’s going to be a good life.
“Wow, someone’s happy today,” Leela comments from the driver’s seat twenty minutes later.
I help myself in, shutting the car door behind me, and accept the warm apple cinnamon roll Celine’s bought, even though my
stomach is almost full from breakfast and Auntie had insisted on giving me another five hundred dollars to “buy myself a snack”
at school.
The bills rustle in my skirt pockets now as I fasten my seat belt, leaning against the cool leather seats. It must have rained
last night. The air has that crisp, earthy scent to it, and there are still droplets of water clinging to the windowpanes,
glistening like fragmented glass. All the colors in the roads and trees look deeper: fossil grays and juniper greens. It would
be lovely as a painting.
Celine unravels her own cinnamon roll from the middle, so the inside of the car is soon suffused with the fragrance of baked
apple and fresh butter. “I’m guessing you , unlike us, feel perfectly prepared for the test today. Very typical. Very annoying, but expected.”
“Huh?” The smile slips off my face. “What test?”
Leela twists back in her seat to laugh at me. “Who do you think you’re kidding? I bet you’ve been studying for weeks by now. Don’t pretend otherwise.”
Dimly, I recall something about there being a test on the Cold War unit. But that was meant to be ages away. It had been scheduled
for—
Today. The realization pins me to the seat. Of course. Between all the bizarre events and crushing disappointments that have occurred
in the past two days, my sense of time has been completely distorted.
“Yeah, I figured,” Celine says, misinterpreting my expression for admission. “Well, Leela and I are screwed.”
“Oh no, I’m not just screwed—I’m majorly screwed,” Leela protests, shifting the gear to reverse. The wet gravel crunches noisily beneath the wheels. “I was so desperate
that I spent, like, fifty dollars on these crash course notes, but I didn’t even understand those . At this rate, I’m going to graduate both broke and at the bottom of my class.”
I try not to look too skeptical. Like many people at our school, Leela has a habit of complaining about tests right before
and after she takes them. She’ll make it sound like she’s about to fail, like the school will expel her for sheer incompetence,
only to come back around with a ninety-five percent and a sheepish grin.
The same goes for most claims of being broke . Just last week, I witnessed a group of friends loudly lamenting their meager savings as they sipped their twelve-dollar lattes and swung their designer bags. It’s all a performance of relatability, without having to experience any of the actual struggles of the true working class.
“You have to help us, Jessica,” Leela’s saying, gazing at me through the rearview mirror with her famous puppy-dog eyes. “We
all have spares for the first two periods before politics, don’t we? Let’s hit the library.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, injecting perhaps a little too much fake enthusiasm into my voice in my attempt to sound like Jessica:
generous, upbeat, definitely not intimidated by the idea of a politics test. “I would love to. Can’t imagine anything better.”
Celine snorts. “Did you have too much caffeine this morning?”
“This isn’t caffeine talking,” I tell her, placing a hand over my heart. “This is my love for learning. We can study together
and... and ace that test. We’ve got this.”
At least I hope so.
No matter how you feel about Havenwood, nobody can deny that the library is beautiful.
It looks like something that could have been constructed a few centuries ago, during the age of myths and castles. Really, it’s every scholar’s dream: three levels of rich, dark wood panels and ornate spiral staircases, desks stretching out from the center of the room in the shape of a perfect diamond, the sunlight wobbling gold over the glass displays and white marble pillars. Tall shelves lined with thick bound volumes of books, the most obscure titles, original texts dating back to the eighteenth century, sprayed edges and hard covers with silver foil stampings. The scent of old paper and ink and mahogany. The cool, dark air, stretching up to the domed ceiling, the high windows staring out at the emerald lawns.
Celine pushes the next set of doors open with her elbow, her arms full of textbooks, her steps sharp with purpose. It’s never
completely silent inside, but it’s always hushed, the kind of reverent quiet you might expect to find in a chapel or any other
place of worship. Even though it’s early, more than half the seats have been taken already, groups of friends hogging the
best tables, laptops and notepads laid out between them. We pass a familiar plaque nailed to the wall , the library’s dedication written in embossed gold letters.
In loving memory of Katie-Louise Williams, October 3, 1902 to February 13, 1971.
Every time I see it, I’m struck by this sense of unreality. One of the girls in our class is Katie’s great-granddaughter.
I can’t even imagine how it feels, to have history so close to you, to have all that wealth and power passed down from generation
to generation, accumulated for you by your ancestors so you need only reap the rewards of what they’ve sowed. At the start
of the twentieth century, my great-grandparents were working as merchants in the Qing dynasty. And with every decade since, we’ve had to start over,
try harder, reinvent ourselves again and again and again.
“Let’s go here,” Celine whispers, plopping her stuff down on a desk by the window.
A girl is studying alone next to us, half her hair falling out of her messy braid, her glasses sliding down her nose. As I settle into my seat and gaze around, she scribbles a formula down into her notes. Consults something in her textbook. Then promptly bursts into tears.
Leela follows my gaze and makes a soft, sympathetic sound with her teeth. “Oh, poor thing. I bet she’s doing calculus.”
“It’s always the calculus kids,” Celine says matter-of-factly. “But don’t just pity her —pity us. World politics isn’t much better.”
Leela grimaces down at her study notes. She’s brought an entire stack of flash cards, each filled in with her pretty, curly
handwriting and highlighted with pastel blues and pinks and sunflower yellows. Next to the title Global Nuclear Tensions,
she’s drawn a little heart and what may be a doodle of the world exploding. “True,” she says with a sigh. “I can’t remember
these dates for the life of me.”
“Should we do something about her?” I ask, staring at the girl just as she slams her head against her textbook with enough
force to produce a distinct thudding sound. No one else in the library looks up.
Celine surveys her for a moment, then shrugs. “Nah, she’ll be fine. Look, she’s already over it.”
As she speaks, the girl darts a quick, panicked look at the old grandfather clock in the corner, startles, and like magic,
abruptly stops crying. Her tears seem to freeze halfway down her cheeks. She sniffles one last time, dabs her swollen eyes
with her blazer sleeve, and resumes studying with remarkable calm. It’s as if nothing’s happened.
“Smart,” Leela comments, spreading her notes out like a fan, her previous question forgotten. “I always schedule in ten minutes
a day to cry, so it doesn’t interfere with my productivity.”
“Damn, only ten?” Celine raises her brows. “When my sister was in her final year, she would cry at least half an hour every day.”
“It helps if I scream really loudly in the beginning. Gets most of the energy out that way.”
“Ah.” Celine nods like this makes perfect sense. “That’s a good trick.”
“Would definitely recommend.”
As Leela leans back in her seat, going over the dates on her cards one by one with a look of pained concentration, my eyes
snag on the novel lying underneath her pencil case. The title printed across the spine in block letters is familiar: Blue Crescent Blade .
“Hey, why are you reading this?” I ask, pulling the book toward me with two fingers. The cover is a vibrant abstract illustration
of blue splotches that form the shape of a doughnut when you squint, though I’m aware this is not a book about doughnuts.
“What do you mean? It’s a good book,” Leela says, blinking up at me. “I mean, I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s incredibly
thought-provoking. It makes such profound statements on... society. It’s a masterpiece, I would even say.”
I stare in disbelief. Only last week, Leela had called me to rant about the most “mind-numbingly boring book” she’d ever read. This was one of our favorite pastimes: either reading scathing reviews, or coming up with our own. You would think, for a book called Blue Crescent Blade , there would at least be blades involved, right? But no. The closest thing to a blade I’ve seen so far is a butter knife,
which is described at length for seven pages. Seven pages about a butter knife, Jenna, she’d complained, while I doubled over, cackling into the speaker.
“It’s a masterpiece,” I repeat, my eyebrows rising. “You’re telling me you genuinely enjoyed this.”
She nods fast. “Yeah. And I think it’s something you’d enjoy as well.”
If I weren’t pretending to be Jessica, I’d burst out laughing at the blatant lie. Leela has always had a habit of reshaping
herself to fit the people she’s around; she doesn’t find common ground—she creates it. I’ve watched her slip smoothly between
claiming to hate cheesecake, to declaring it her favorite dessert, to denouncing anything containing cheese as a show of sympathy for someone
lactose intolerant, all within a week. It’s why I would feel honored whenever she was honest with me, no matter how unpopular
or outlandish her real opinions were.
I would have thought she’d be honest with my cousin too. Then again, anyone would feel self-conscious about their reading
tastes around Jessica Chen, whose idea of a beach read is The Art of War .
“You’ll have to let me read it sometime, then,” I say brightly, playing along, before turning my focus to Jessica’s notes.
They’re the neatest notes I’ve ever seen, everything organized by theme, then again by chronological order, and divided into
three points of significance and main scholarly debates. Keywords have been highlighted and color coded according to a strict
system: green for dates, blue for people, red for statistics, orange for quotes. Leela was right, to an extent. Jessica was definitely prepared for today’s test. She was prepared for everything.
But it’s been occurring to me that I might not be, even in her body. I might not have her memory, or her intelligence, or her ideas. What if I walk into the exam and fail? Jessica’s standards for success are so unbearably high, and her standards for failure so terrifyingly low; all it’d take is one wrong answer, and her winning streak would be ruined. This is my one chance to live my cousin’s perfect life, to get everything right. I have to do well—as well she would, if she were here.
I spend the rest of the free period trying to sort through the notes and qualm my fears, while Leela mumbles feverishly to
herself and Celine sprawls sideways across the desk, her textbook held up in the air with one hand. They get up only to stretch,
or to use the bathroom, or to worry out loud about how hard the test is going to be.
More students file into the library and out again, doors swinging, leather shoes squeaking over the hardwood floors. At some
point it starts drizzling again, the sound of the rain against the glass strangely soothing, muted and musiclike, the sky
outside a sinking, somber gray. And always in the background: the dry rustle of flipping pages, the rapid click-clack of the keyboard, the clink of a thermos, someone furiously hushing a group of whispering friends, the brief pause before
the conversation picks up again.
“That’s it, I give up,” Leela says, setting down her books to massage her neck. “I’m just going to accept my fate. I’ll simply
fail the test. It’s whatever.”
Celine shrugs. “It doesn’t really make a difference. The test doesn’t count for much.”
“Yeah, exactly ,” Leela says, now rubbing her shoulders. “Why are we even getting worked up over this anyway? It literally does not matter. At all. Grades aren’t even an accurate marker of intelligence—there have been, like, numerous studies to prove it.”
“And we all know grades alone aren’t going to help us get the best jobs,” I point out before I can stop myself, glancing up
from Jessica’s notes.
They both pause, their expressions frozen in matching disbelief. Leela is wearing the look of someone unsure whether they’ve
stepped into an alternate reality. Celine simply stares, as if one of the library’s statues of some ancient British lord has
sprung to life and started tap dancing right on our table.
“What?” I ask.
Leela shakes her head. “I just... never thought I would hear our model student say that grades aren’t everything.”
“Well, it’s true,” I tell them. “Even if you get perfect grades, that doesn’t guarantee a good future. Not when you’ve got
people like Lachlan Robertson already lined up to be an executive at his father’s law firm the second he graduates.”
“The system’s fucked,” Celine concludes, recovering from her shock. “Meritocracy is a myth, academia is corrupt, and grades
are irrelevant.”
“Agreed.” Leela nods hard, her ponytail swishing. “This test means nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing,” Celine echoes.
A beat passes.
Then we all put our heads down and continue studying.
Ten minutes before the test, Leela rises from her seat and stretches, arching her back like a cat.
“Okay,” she says, eyeing the clock. “Okay, oh god. I think it’s time to head down.”
Celine frowns at her textbook. “Are you serious? I’ve still got three more pages of content left to memorize—”
“But we can’t be late,” Leela says, looking visibly queasy at the very idea. “They’ll lock us out of the classroom. And you
can scan over your notes on the way there.”
“Fine, fine,” Celine grumbles, and starts to pack up her things. Well, thing . Singular. She’s only prepared a single ballpoint pen that looks like it might reach the end of its life halfway through
the exam. Leela, on the other hand, has brought an impressive array of four different pencils, all sharpened to a lethal point,
seven neon highlighters, two erasers, a pencil sharpener and a one-liter bottle of water filled to the very brim.
I glance down at my own equipment: the pens packed neatly in a translucent plastic pocket, Jessica’s ID card, and a pastel
pink watch. As I stare, the minute hand ticks.
Nine minutes left.
I swallow, try to calm myself. But I’m even more nervous than I used to be before a test. In a sense, I’m facing two tests now: whether I’ve retained enough information from our world politics classes, and whether I can live up to everyone’s expectations for Jessica, fool them all into believing that I’m really her. I can feel the tremors gathering just under my skin, my nerves stretching thinner and tighter than ever. It’s as if there’s a wild creature scrambling around inside me, desperate to escape, jolting my bones and throwing my heartbeat into disarray. I remember hearing somewhere that the body can’t tell the difference between fear and anticipation. All it knows is that something important is about to happen soon, so sit up, stay alert, pay attention.
We file out of the library, move across the vast halls, the Palladian windows throwing great swathes of light over the black-and-white
checkered tiles, and join the line of nervous students waiting outside the world politics classroom.
“Wow,” Celine remarks dryly. “Everyone sure looks like they’re having the time of their lives.”
Half of them are fidgeting or muttering to themselves, making desperate last-minute attempts to check their study sheets and
quiz themselves and their friends. The other half appear to have given up completely. One guy is busy folding notes into a
paper airplane.
“I’m, like, so over it already,” a girl is saying to her friend, her voice a bit too loud to be natural. “I didn’t start studying
until three hours ago. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s so bad.”
Celine snorts and turns her head to whisper to both of us. “Don’t buy it for a second. I saw her making flash cards for this
test last month.”
But even the kids pretending not to care immediately stiffen when the classroom door creaks open and Ms. Lewis steps out.
She’s probably been at Havenwood the longest of all the teachers—someone found a sepia-toned staff photo of her in the school
archives, back when there was still life in her eyes—and she’s always reminded me vaguely of a pencil, with her dyed black
hair and long, angular limbs and ankle-length skirts.
“Line up in alphabetical order, please,” she croaks, consulting the list in her hand. “First up: Hannah Anderson...” One by one, she goes through the names. “Audrey Brown. Aaron Cai...”
I feel my heartbeat stutter as Aaron brushes past me and strides up to the front of the line. He’s shrugged free of his blazer
and has on just the plain white collared shirt, his tie loose and askew, his sleeves rolled up casually to his elbows. His
expression is bored, his hands empty. He might be the only person here who’s actually calm about the test—but that’s because
he’s the kind of genius everyone at Havenwood is either aspiring or pretending to be. The kind of genius who has it easy,
who doesn’t even have to study to get a perfect score.
Ms. Lewis moves further down the list and pauses at the next name. “Jenna Chen.” It’s not a question. Without even glancing
around, she scribbles something down.
My pulse ticks faster. “Excuse me, Ms. Lewis?” I venture.
She lifts her head. “Yes?”
“Sorry, I just... is Jenna Chen not here?” Obviously she isn’t. But I have no idea what that means for the school.
“She’s absent,” she tells me.
“Absent? Do you know where she’s gone?”
And just like yesterday, with my mom, her eyes go hazy. Unfocused. Like someone has painted over her thoughts with a white
brush. “She’s away until further notice,” she says in a dreamy, distant voice. Then she focuses on the next name—Jessica’s
name—and it’s like nothing’s happened. Everything goes on as usual: the students stamping their feet, the after-rain chill
clinging to the air, some girl panicking in the back about forgetting to bring a highlighter.
But all the hairs on my neck stand up.
“I guess she’s really not coming to school anymore,” Aaron murmurs as I move into place behind him.
“No. Guess she’s not.”
His brows furrow slightly. Then he stares down at my hands; without meaning to, I’ve been shaking my pen between two fingers.
A nervous habit of mine, not Jessica’s. I force my hands to still, but he’s already seen it. “Stressed?” he asks.
“Only a little,” I lie.
In an even voice, he says, “Jenna was always doing that when she was stressed too.”
“W-what?”
“The thing with the pen.”
“Oh really?” I cough. “I must’ve picked it up from her then.”
A lie. I remember sitting in the desk behind Aaron all those years ago, watching him spin his pen with the tips of his fingers
while the teacher droned on and on at the whiteboard. You think it makes you look so cool, Cai Anran, I’d scoffed at him. To which he’d only grinned. You try it then, he challenged.
I did try, but to my great humiliation and his amusement, I could only manage a pathetic wobbling motion. He’d laughed so
hard the teacher had stopped midlecture and glared at us. I’d gone home that night and spent hours practicing, but in the
end I never did master it properly.
“Please take your seats,” Ms. Lewis instructs, snapping me back to the present. The test. Jessica’s life. “Keep quiet, and
don’t pick up your pens until I say so.”
As we shuffle inside in silence, Ms. Lewis offers me a special little smile, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. “Good luck, Jessica,” she whispers. “I know you’ll get one hundred percent, as always.”
It should be a compliment, but somehow it feels more like a heavy mallet to the chest, crushing all the air in my lungs. It’s
Jessica she has faith in—not me. I nod weakly and wipe my clammy palms against my skirt.
The classroom has already been rearranged, the test papers placed face down on each individual desk, a pitcher of water prepared
up front next to a box of tissues. The reading and writing times have all been copied out on the board, starting from now
and split up into ten-minute intervals.
I sit down. The air feels very cold and compact, and I’m sharply aware of everyone else around me. Celine, crossing one leg
over another and squinting at the paper as if to try and see through it, her dark hair falling against her cheeks. Leela,
pushing her thick ponytail from one shoulder to the other and back again. Aaron, leaning back in his chair, his eyes straight
ahead, the line of his mouth confident, bored, beautiful.
Focus.
I take off my blazer with its stiff fabric and shining badges and shift forward a few inches, like someone about to start
a race. All the names and key figures and dates fly around inside my head in a frenzy.
I am Jessica Chen, I remind myself, breathing in, even as doubt scratches the back of my mind. I am so smart it scares people. I am everything my parents hoped for, everything I used to envy. I am, I am, I am.
But I don’t feel like Jessica. I don’t feel smart or capable or even remotely confident. I feel more like I’m wearing a beautiful rented ballgown
that’s a few sizes too small. Beneath the pearls and the silk, it’s the same. It’s just me.
My teeth won’t stop chattering.
A chair squeaks in the back. Somebody sneezes, and Leela immediately whispers, “Bless you,” even though we shouldn’t be talking.
Ms. Lewis glares but says nothing. From outside, you can still hear students laughing, dragging their feet to their next class,
the sound rippling like water, distant and indistinct.
“You may begin,” Ms. Lewis says.