Eighteen
The second I step outside, I start running.
I don’t know where I’m running to, or what I’m running from. I don’t care. All I know is that I want to get out of here. I
have to escape; I have to put as much distance between myself and the campus and the memory as possible. My feet pound over
polished wood, then steep cement steps, then faded cobblestones. The cold air hits my face, stings my throat when I swallow.
My breaths come out in sharp, frantic bursts. My blazer flies behind me, my skirt rippling in the wind. I tear the buttons
loose, freeing up space for my arms to move.
I’m already at the gates when somebody calls me by the wrong name.
“Jessica.”
It’s the voice, rather than the name, that makes me freeze. It’s the only voice I care about now, the only thing that could
stop me mid-step, that could stop the whole world in its tracks.
Aaron strides up to me calmly, as if this is our usual way of greeting each other. Only his brows are faintly furrowed. “Where are you going?” he asks in a light voice. “I heard that you—” He pauses to make exaggerated air quotes. “Got into a violent fight with Lachlan?”
“I didn’t even touch him,” I snap. My anger is misguided, but I can’t control myself. “And he was the one who came up to me.”
Aaron doesn’t react with shock or disapproval. He just nods, like he’d been expecting as much. “A sore loser, isn’t he?”
“Y-yes,” I say, overcome by a sudden, bursting feeling in my chest, like my own emotions might overflow and drown me. “Yes.
You could say that.”
“So why are you trying to run away from class?” he asks, tilting his head now.
“I’m not,” I tell him. “Not from class .”
“Then? If I’m going to cover for you, I need to at least have a few details.”
“I... I want to undo it.” It’s not until the words surface in the air between us that I realize what my intention has been
all along. More firmly, I continue, “I have to go back to myself—my own body, my life, whatever it is. You were right. I really,
truly believe it this time. They were never going to accept me. I can’t live for the recognition or the applause or the illusion
of a dream life. I—I have to live for myself. I want to live for myself.”
His frown deepens. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you’re still mad at me,” I say. Try to smile. Try to ignore the gnawing, sick sensation in my gut. “And I’m really
sorry. I’m sorry about everything—”
“Why would I be mad at you?” He doesn’t sound like he’s taunting me. The truly horrifying thing is that he sounds serious.
“Because of... because of what I said,” I stammer. “Yesterday, in the car. You wanted me to undo it and I couldn’t and—”
“Undo what?”
I feel as if I’ve been shoved. My ears ring. “The wish,” I repeat slowly, because maybe he hadn’t heard me. Maybe I’d spoken
too fast. That’s all. “ The wish. About being Jessica Chen.”
I wait for understanding to wash over his face. But he merely stares at me as if I might be joking. Suspicion sneaks under
my skin, grabs hold of me. I don’t want to even consider it. Please. Anything but this. Anyone but him.
“Aaron,” I say. It sounds like I’m begging. “Aaron. Who am I?”
“What kind of question is that?” He lets out a breath of laughter.
“Tell me,” I insist. “You have to tell me. Who do you... think I am?”
“You’re Jessica Chen, of course.”
No.
No.
The moment seems to crawl to a standstill. There’s Aaron, gazing at me without really seeing me, confusion growing over his
features. The sun, close to disappearing behind the clouds. The eastern wing of the school building looms behind him, turrets
touching the sky, ivy spreading over smooth white walls, the bronze hand of the clock tower suspended in place. Everything
like a dream from another life, a memory from a nightmare.
“Aaron, please,” I choke out. I really am begging him now, desperate. Dread threatens to strangle me. “You can’t do this.
You can’t forget.”
“Can’t forget what?”
“I’m Jenna,” I say. “I’m Jenna Chen.”
For the barest second, the mist in his eyes seems to clear. He stiffens. Opens his mouth. “Je—” But then the clarity is gone,
as if his mind has been wiped clean of it by a violent hand. “Jessica,” he says instead.
“No.” I stamp my foot hard in frustration. “You have to... you have to remember. We went to school together every single day
for years. You would walk home with me. You’d open any bottle for me without asking and then hide it behind your back to annoy
me.” I’m shaking; I can barely keep track of what I’m saying. I just need to keep talking. I need him to come back to me,
I need him to help me.
“Please. It’s me. I’m Jenna. I—I’m not the best student, but I’m a good painter and I’m a good friend and I’m my parents’ only daughter and there’s nothing
I wouldn’t do for the ones I love. I’m messy and disorganized and I can’t memorize all the dates in history class but I’ve
never forgotten a birthday before. I keep a jewelry box of every card anyone has given me, and I hand-paint every single card
I send out. When I set my mind to something, I always go through with it. I would get into heated debates with you over the
most ridiculous topics, like... like whether a vampire apocalypse was more deadly than a zombie one, or whether death from
heartbreak was a real phenomenon. I’ve always wanted to visit Tianjin because I love the sea and you said there was a steamed
bun restaurant you went to as a kid....” I trail off at the look on his face.
His expression is carefully controlled, a deliberate mask of neutrality. He only looks like that when he’s assessing something, deciding his next move. He doesn’t remember me.
Pain of a sort I’d never imagined before, never experienced—not even when he left without warning—wrenches its way through
my heart. It feels like someone’s prying my ribs apart.
“I’m sorry,” he says at last. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Jessica.”
“Stop calling me that.” Tears scald my eyes. I wipe them angrily with my blazer sleeve. “You can’t do this to me. You can’t, you can’t....” I’m
a child throwing a tantrum, crying incoherently just to be heard. I’m a person drowning, waving my hand in the air, right
before the currents drag me under again.
He looks mildly alarmed. “Don’t cry. Whatever it is, I’m sure somebody can help you....”
But that’s how I know. It’s too late; the damage is irreversible. He never would have spoken to me like that if he knew I
was Jenna. I draw in a harsh, rattling breath that sounds like my body is cracking from the inside out, and think back to
the afternoon after our final exam scores had come out. I’d been crying then as well, almost as hard as I am now. I had stuffed
the test in my bag and run out of class to hide in the back of the parking lot, but Aaron had sensed something was wrong.
He’d followed me, and when he found me, he didn’t ask what had happened, didn’t tell me to stop. He’d merely covered my eyes
with his hands—gentle, always so gentle—and said, You can cry as much as you want. Nobody else will see you.
“I’ll bring her back,” I say, stepping away from him. “I—I’ll make you remember again.”
“Remember what ?”
I don’t answer him. I just spin on my heel and keep running.
I go home.
My real home, not Jessica’s house.
The front door is unlocked. It swings open when I push it, and the smell of chrysanthemum tea and fresh mangoes envelops me
at once. The news is playing in the background, a soft hum of sound, the volume dialed low enough to allow for conversation.
The afternoon light leaks through the windows and turns the rugs canary yellow. It’s all so achingly familiar that I start
to cry again, muffling the tears with the heel of my hand.
But as I walk deeper inside, I realize that something’s different. The furniture has been rearranged. My study desk is no
longer sitting in the corner of the living room—the desk my mom and dad had carried down the stairs for me, because I once
made an offhand remark about how my bedroom was too cold to study in during the winter. The cards I’d hand-painted for my
mom’s past five birthdays have been taken down from the refrigerator door. My section of the bookshelf has been emptied out
and filled with encyclopedias and travel guides instead.
A new fear races through my veins. I trace my fingers over the wall behind the kitchen door, searching for the crack in the plaster from when I’d slammed the door too hard in a fit of anger. We’d been talking about how Jessica was chosen for the school’s academic extension program, and I wasn’t.
You have to pay for it, my mom had yelled when she saw the damage later. Do you have any idea how expensive it’ll be to repair this? The entire house value will drop. I didn’t know anything about real estate values, but I’d made the unfounded calculation that it would probably cost a million
dollars. I’d run up to my room sobbing and searched frantically online for the fastest way to make that kind of money without
having to donate any vital organs. The next morning, I’d devised a grand plan that involved teaching abstract art to young
heirs, but my parents never mentioned the incident again. They didn’t end up fixing the crack, either.
Except now the surface is completely smooth, unnervingly cold against my skin. It’s as if I was never here.
As if I’d never even existed.
My eyes close. I wish I was myself again. I scream the words into my mind. I wish I could reverse my wish from before. It should work—I’ve never meant anything more. But nothing changes.
“Jessica?” My mom comes downstairs to find me weeping over a random spot on the wall. I can understand why she looks so concerned.
“Tian ya, what are you doing here? Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”
I shake my head, the tears falling faster.
She pauses, then cleans her hands on the towel draped over the oven and rests them on my shoulders. “Where’s your mom? Does
she know you’re here?”
I mean to keep quiet. I’d come here for answers, not comfort, but—
“Mom,” I sob. “ Mama. It’s me.”
She blinks. “I...”
“I’m your daughter.” I look up at her, willing with every single cell and nerve in my body that I can somehow make her remember. “I’m your only daughter.”
No recognition surfaces. Just bewilderment. “You... have always been like a daughter to me, yes,” she says politely.
“That’s not what I’m saying. Listen. You have to listen to me—”
Her hands fall from my shoulders. “I’m going to call your parents,” she says, and starts to turn away, her alarm growing visibly
by the second.
“No, Mom.” My throat is hoarse. “Bie bu li wo ya.” Don’t ignore me. Don’t neglect me. Don’t forget about me.
The door swings open behind us, the sound making me jump. Then I see who it is. My dad is home.
“What’s happening?” he asks, staring at me.
My mom makes a helpless gesture with her hands. “Buzhidao zhe haizi shou shenme ciji le.” I don’t know what’s gotten into this child.
“Shouldn’t she still be in school right now?” Dad asks over my head. I’m a guest to him. An outsider.
“Well, she won’t say anything. She just keeps crying.... I’ve never seen her so distraught before.”
“Should we call someone?”
“I was just about to...” Mom grabs her phone from the kitchen counter. The news is still playing from the speakers.
“. . . rare meteor sighting expected tonight. Viewing conditions are favorable. Stargazers should travel to a dark location to get away from light pollution...”
My blood freezes. Everything seems to slow, to sharpen. Nothing feels real except this.
Rare meteor sighting...
A shooting star.
That was what Aaron had been talking about. Could it be that? The moment that cleaved my life in half, the moment after which
everything went wrong?
No, not just that, I remind myself. I had headed home that night as well, and I’d smeared paint all over my self-portrait. That could be another
factor. Maybe I just need to retrace every step I took.
“I have to get something,” I decide out loud, straightening. For the first time today, I feel hopeful. My head is clearer,
my thoughts reshaping themselves around my new plan. I have a course of action. A path forward.
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.