Eleven
When it has been made very clear that I will not die, the question becomes: How will I get home?
“We’re over two miles away from Lakesville Road,” Leela offers, tightening the reins as she stares out at our surroundings.
It’s all tall, swaying grass and aureolin-yellow wildflowers, the early evening sky; the kind of scenery that would be clichéd
as a backdrop for a painting. “Maybe we can ride back together.”
Aaron speaks up before I do. “I wouldn’t advise that she ride with her arm in its current state. Even if nothing’s broken,
it’s still not a good idea for her to use it.”
“What if one of us rides with her?” Celine says. “Or Aaron—you can.”
He frowns slightly, then turns to me in consideration, and I feel a blaze of heat travel up my neck.
“No,” I blurt out, stepping in between them. “No, I’ll walk.”
Leela snaps on her riding gloves and blinks at me. “For two whole miles? And what about the horses? We can’t leave them here.”
“I can walk alone,” I say.
“It’ll be much faster if we ride,” Celine points out.
“Yes, but contrary to the popular saying, I don’t think I should get back in the saddle,” I tell her. “I’d be quite happy to not get back in the saddle for the foreseeable future.”
The corners of Aaron’s lips twitch, and to my surprise, he steps over to my side. “I’ll walk her back,” he says. “Don’t worry,
I’ll see that she’s safe and cared for.”
Leela hesitates, one foot in the stirrups, her head turned back and tilted in question. “You’re sure?”
“It’s no problem.” He makes it sound so easy, so natural. But everything is easy for him.
“We’re trusting you with this,” Celine says, her eyes narrowed at him. “You better keep your word.”
“I promise.”
“It’s okay, Celine,” I say quietly, as if my heart isn’t throwing itself against my rib cage at the mere thought of walking
two miles alone with Aaron. “I’ll be fine.”
Only then does Celine swing herself back onto the horse with perfect posture. The animals stamp their hooves, snorting, their
coats gleaming beneath the light. With one last glance back at me, Celine clicks her tongue and nudges the horse forward with
her heels.
“We’ll wait for you,” Leela calls over her shoulder, urging her horse forward as well.
I nod and wave and watch as the two of them disappear across the meadow, Aaron’s horse and mine trailing after them. My head won’t stop spinning. Before today, I would have been willing to bet that Celine wanted something from my cousin—to scare her, or to sabotage her, even. But Celine’s concern for me just now had felt too real to be an act.
“Something on your mind?” Aaron asks.
I startle, and shake my head, even though part of me wants to tell him everything. He’s the only person I could trust to help
me figure out who the anonymous sender is. But then I remember the way he looked at me on the banks of the lake, his disbelief,
how his voice had hardened at the mention of my name.
My arm throbs. My fingers itch toward it, to hold it or squeeze out the pain.
“Leave it,” Aaron says. “You need to give it time to heal.”
I force my hand to flatten by my side again and start walking very slowly, very gingerly through the grass, my body protesting
every step. Aaron follows behind me, his presence steady and quiet as a shadow.
“So what happened?” he asks a few moments later.
“What happened?” I repeat. “I fell.”
“Yes, evidently.” He picks up his pace, so I can make out the outline of his profile in my peripheral vision, the curiosity
edging his sharp features. “But you’re so careful all the time. I guess I’m just surprised.”
“Well, I didn’t fall on purpose,” I say flatly, to avoid the truth. I heard your name. All it took was your name, and I forgot myself.
“I would be very concerned if you did.”
I turn to glare at him, then remember that Jessica would never be so thankless, so hostile. So instead I clamp my jaw shut
and keep trudging forward, my arm stiff in its bandage, my skin stinging.
As the sun sinks lower, a mist starts to roll in, the white haze washing over the oaks and turning the mountain slopes and wilderness in the background into blurry silver-blue shapes, the shades deepening layer by layer. Everything looks softer this way, like a dreamscape. Even the soil has that musky scent of the woods after a summer rainstorm.
“I’m sorry,” I say when enough time has passed for the silence to feel pointed, too uncomfortable to maintain. “I know I’m
slowing us down. It’ll probably be dark by the time we reach the road.”
“It’s okay,” he says at once. “All the more reason I should go with you, don’t you think? And besides,” he adds, turning his
eyes to the horizon, all the blue rising against blue, “I don’t usually ride so far out. It’s much prettier here than I imagined.”
I gaze over at Aaron and feel my chest ache with everything unspoken between us. “It’s beautiful,” I agree. “When I was a
little kid, I actually used to dream of living in a place like this. Somewhere deep in the countryside, or by the ocean, or
the forests, where you could wake up to the most gorgeous views of the grass and the waters and the morning mist....”
He tilts his head. “Really? You did?”
“Yeah. I mean, it was more just a daydream than anything,” I say. “But it was nice to think about. I’d have a dog to live there with me and keep me company—a husky, because that’s the closest you can get to owning a wolf without owning a wolf. And I’d grow strawberries and apples in my garden and bake pies for lunch and share them with my parents when they came to visit. And then I’d spend entire afternoons just lying on the couch or the front porch, reading in the sun; I wouldn’t need to worry about running out of books, because I’d have a whole library to myself. And when night fell, I would stare at the stars and paint and paint....” I trail off when I realize he’s come to an abrupt halt amid the wildflowers, his shoulders tense, his black eyes ablaze with some fierce emotion I can’t understand, his lower lip quivering. He’s staring at me like I might not be real, like I’m someone he might have invented.
“Jenna,” he says, and all the blood exits my heart.
I freeze.
“It’s really you, isn’t it?” he asks. It’s a threadbare whisper, a question and a confirmation. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t
want to believe it,” he continues, filling up my silence, “but there’s no other explanation for this. I know you too well.”
The words chafe at something inside me.
I know you.
“Jenna,” he repeats. “Say something. Tell me... tell me I haven’t lost my mind.”
“No,” I whisper. “You haven’t lost your mind.” Then, because I can’t push down my curiosity, “What convinced you in the end?”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says, walking ahead again, and I make myself catch up. “After that day at the lake... I wanted to assume you were joking, but then—it wasn’t logical. Why would you joke about that? It would require a truly terrible, warped sense of humor. And then everything started to make sense. I started to comb through all my memories from before I left for Paris and comparing them to the after. I thought at first it was because I’d been gone for so long. People can change, right? But people can’t transform so drastically. I couldn’t sleep,” he continues, shaking his head. “I just kept replaying our conversations, searching for the differences. Of course, there’s also the fact that I haven’t seen you... Jenna... I mean, the person you were—” He breaks off. “God, this is absolutely bizarre.”
“I know,” I say with a weak little laugh. “Kind of breaks your brain, doesn’t it?”
“Is this a nightmare?” he asks. He looks almost desperate. “Is there any way this is all made up inside my head?”
I grimace. Kick at the grass beneath my feet. “If this is a nightmare, we’re dreaming the same dream. You know what? Maybe
that’s what it means,” I say, recalling the proverb slowly. “To dream of becoming a butterfly. I didn’t understand it when
we were studying it in Chinese school, but I think I do now. Maybe it’s impossible to tell which is the dream and which is
reality.”
There is something dreamlike about the view, the yellow flowers lucent against the grass, the mountains dark against the night.
“I tried to look up peer-reviewed journal articles to prove it,” he admits after a moment.
This elicits a burst of genuine laughter from me. “Oh yeah, no, I’m afraid this isn’t a popular topic for scientific studies.”
“But it goes against everything I know about modern medicine,” he says. “What separates the body from the soul, the physical
from the metaphysical. What can be transferred and what can be kept. It just... it opens up thousands of possibilities.
Thousands of questions. It could fundamentally reshape our understanding of physics.”
I shrug. “I guess.”
“Wow,” he says, much more like his usual self. “Invigorating response.”
“Maybe some things can’t be explained by science,” I say. “Maybe it’s better that way.”
“Anything can be explained by science,” he insists. “Everything must come with an answer.”
“You’re so naive sometimes,” I murmur under my breath, hating how tender I feel toward him, even at a time like this.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He runs a distracted hand through his hair. “So where’s the real Jessica Chen? Have you found anything? Is she okay?” Then,
almost in the same breath, as if his brain is leaping ahead of itself, working faster than any ordinary person could keep
up with, “Is that why you were borrowing those old fairy tales? You think they could lead you to her?” His skepticism is obvious.
“Well, why not?” I challenge. “You haven’t had any luck using the scientific approach. Can’t you consider the possibility that there might be other, more relevant methodologies? Things outside math
and physics?”
“So you’ve had luck with fables and folklore?”
“No,” I ground out. “Not yet . I don’t know.” Frustration leaks into my voice. “Sometimes I’ll think I’m close, but then I’ll hit a dead end. Like, there was this ancient tale about how a man successfully summoned the soul of his long-lost lover, but he had to perform some kind of spell using the soil of her hometown. If I were to try that, I wouldn’t even know what soil to use—the soil from her backyard? Or from Tianjin?” I shake my head. “Sometimes it feels impossible. But then, my wish should have been impossible in the first place, and it still came true—”
“Why, though?” he demands, his voice strained, like it hurts him just to say it. “Why would you... why would you even make
that wish in the first place?”
My breath freezes in my throat. This isn’t where I’d anticipated the conversation would go. I don’t reply right away, don’t
know how or where to begin, but the answer flashes like a film reel inside my head.
Every time I walked into an examination hall, handed in a paper, signed up for a club, participated in a contest... the
mad rush of hope in my blood, only for my optimism to sour into disappointment. Every failure that felt like the apocalypse
and has stayed with me since. Every move I made premeditated, but still always miscalculating, offering up the wrong comment
or opinion or idea. Days when I was too exhausted to sleep while someone else lived the life I dreamed of. Witnessing everything
I’d ever wanted happen for Jessica, knowing it would never happen for me. The report card statements, always the same sentiment rephrased: “Not quite there yet, but has potential,” which was what people said as consolation in the absence of true competence . And me learning over time that potential was in itself such an abstract term, tossed around recklessly, that more often than not it simply meant you didn’t live up
to the idea somebody else had of you.
Like the speech night my Chinese teacher had insisted that I would shine in, standing up on that cold, dark stage and trembling, feeling my own lack of presence, my inability to keep anyone’s eyes on my face, and not even qualifying for the next round. Sobbing afterward at home until I couldn’t breathe, too embarrassed to even tell my parents, my blankets pulled up over my head. Watching from the shadows as Jessica shook hands with beaming teachers, friends running over to gush, the circle that formed around her an impenetrable thing, a private room with windows but no doors, listening to the boasts disguised as self-deprecating jokes and half-hearted complaints.
But somehow trying anyway, believing even when there was nothing left to believe in. Dragging around the terrible knowledge
that anything I did could change my life in an instant, but everything I did was futile.
“Because I don’t want a quiet life, I want a brilliant one,” I say at last. “Because I need to know what it’s like to win.
To be the best.”
“But you don’t have to—”
I shoot him a warning glare. “If you give me bullshit along the lines of, ‘Oh, everyone is on their own journey, we can all
be the best,’ I will actually throw a fit. That’s nice for a card, but completely untrue in real life.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” he protests. Then, more carefully, he asks, “Is this because of Harvard? Because you didn’t
get in?”
I flinch. The rejection still stings. “That’s part of it.”
“Harvard doesn’t matter,” he says. “Getting into Harvard doesn’t mean you’re better than everyone, and not getting in doesn’t mean you’re worse.”
And that’s what I’d try to tell myself at first. I would come up with a thousand reasons why I could succeed without the Ivy
League education. I might even be able to forget about it from time to time, but it would always linger in the back of my
mind. One day, ten years from now, I’ll be at a party and everyone will be chatting and someone will casually bring up their
classes at Harvard and someone else will gush over how smart they are, and in that moment I’ll feel so insignificant I’ll
want to vanish.
“I can tell you don’t believe me,” Aaron says. “But if you could just—”
“My arm hurts,” I declare, and I watch the way he softens instantly, the argument disappearing from his eyes. For now, at
least. I have no doubt he’ll bring it up again, but my arm really does ache, and the faint scent of blood is making my stomach
turn and my head spin and the last thing I want is to dissect my own inferiority like a text analysis, with point, evidence,
explain.
“We’ve already walked a mile,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
He’s wrong, though. We still have more than a mile to go.
“Tian ya,” my aunt says when I stagger in through the front door, Aaron close behind me. She must have just finished showering;
she’s wrapped in a fluffy pink bathrobe and she has a facial mask on, leaving very little room to move her mouth. Her next
words sound like they’ve been glued between her teeth. “What happened to you? What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Don’t worry,” Aaron says, helping me sit down on the couch. “She fell off a horse, but she should be fine. She just needs
rest.”
“You went riding again?” Auntie glares at me. It’s hard to take her too seriously with the mask. “How many times have I told you? It’s too dangerous. Just because your friends go doesn’t mean you should—”
“She won’t do it again,” Aaron says quickly. “Right, Jessica?”
I can only muster the energy to nod. My arm won’t stop throbbing, and through my exhaustion, I can’t help imagining what it
would be like to come home to my own parents. How much easier it would be, how much safer I would feel.
“Thank you for bringing her back,” Auntie says to Aaron. “You’re such a good kid. Always looking out for Jessica.”
“Of course.”
“I’m glad she has you.”
My eyes had been close to falling shut on their own, but they snap open at this. My aunt is smiling at Aaron.
“You two get along so well,” she continues. “I was just saying the other day, I think of you as my son-in-law. And it’s wonderful
that you’re back home. You should come around more often.”
A sour taste rises to my mouth, as if I’ve bitten into a raw lemon. I’m suddenly, irrationally furious. It’s not Aaron’s fault,
and it’s not Jessica’s either. But this has always been a deep fear of mine: that they’re perfect together, the golden boy
and the beloved angel. That Jessica is the main character, and I’m the villain waiting in the shadows, the backup behind the
curtains, the monster lurking beyond the village.
“I’m only doing what any friend would,” Aaron says, his expression impassive. “It doesn’t mean anything special.”
“You’re a great friend to Jessica,” Auntie says, eyes crinkling.
I want to throw something. I want to throw up. “Could I have some water, please?” I croak out.
“Mashang, mashang.” Auntie adjusts the facial mask that’s sliding down her chin and hurries off into the kitchen.
Aaron takes one small step toward me, and I hate how everything in me tightens to the point of pain. How my impulse is to
wrap my arms around his waist and press my cheek to his shirt and feel him hold me. I’m weak, I’m injured, I’m so desperate
for him it makes me sick.
“Go away,” I mumble, hiding my face in the couch cushions. I know it’s not his fault, but I still blame him. “But thank you
for your help.”
“Polite as ever,” he says dryly.
I ignore him.
“Are you really going to act like—”
Before he can go on, Auntie comes back with a glass of water.
“Drink up,” she says.
I take a sip and choke. It’s ice cold. Back at home, the only acceptable water temperatures are warm and scalding hot.
“Zen me le?” Auntie says, frowning at me. “Didn’t you ask for water? Or do you want mineral water instead? There should still
be some in the cabinet.”
“No, no, it’s good.” I force myself to drink the rest of it, even though it hurts my stomach on its way down. “This is exactly
how I like it.”