I Am Not Jessica Chen

by Ann Liang

For anyone who’s ever wished they could be someone else

I’ve always had this theory that if I want something badly enough, the universe will make sure to keep it just out of my reach—either out of boredom or cruelty, like an invisible hand dangling stars on a string.

But I still can’t stop myself from hoping it’ll be different this time around. Maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe the universe will be kind for once, and when I reach up, the stars will fall into my palms.

I’m simply not that good. Not in academics. Not in extracurriculars. Not as a student, or a daughter, or a human. It doesn’t matter if I crammed my brain to the point of breaking with formulas and dates, threw myself into my classes, painted until the skin on my hands blistered and split open. Here is incontrovertible proof. Something in me is missing. Lacking.

It’s such a suffocating thought—that everything I will ever feel and know and accomplish must begin and end with my own mind.

When you’re so widely known and loved, so soaked in glory you’re swimming in it, all you have to worry about is maintenance, not metamorphosis.

From then on, every time he had to leave for a competition or debating camp or a school excursion, he would come back with a new pen just for me.

It’s cruel, really, how the world tends to present its most beautiful parts to you when you’re so profoundly sad. Like a crush who comes up to you in the moonlight and smiles at you each time you insist on moving on—just enough to keep you lingering, to make you wonder how good things could be. If only, if only.

It’s so easy to be generous when you lack nothing. To be nice when you’re not in pain. It doesn’t matter if people are cheering for someone else, because they’re already cheering for me.

“The system’s fucked,” Celine concludes, recovering from her shock. “Meritocracy is a myth, academia is corrupt, and grades are irrelevant.”

Of course the members of the other team are able to rationalize and intellectualize their way through this argument; they can express their opinions clearly, succinctly, without any personal feelings on the matter, without having to sift through their trauma for evidence, and they’ll be rewarded for it. But here I am, trying to verbalize my own pain, to justify my own existence, breaking it down into digestible points. Every word comes out a double-edged knife. This isn’t just a debate for me. This is my history, my life.

I can’t muster a response, so I just nod and turn back to my desk. As I do, a terrible thought dawns on me: that failure is permanent, but success is always fleeting, it always happens in the past tense.

You have to prove yourself over and over, and when the glory for your most recent achievement expires, as it must, as it always will, you have to start again, but with more eyes trained on you, more people waiting for the day when your talent withers, and your discipline weakens, and your charm wears away. Success is only meant to be rented out, borrowed in small doses at a time, never to be owned completely, no matter what price you’re willing to pay for it.

Suddenly I feel suffocated, as though I really am trapped beneath mountains, struck down by the gods. I want to escape this classroom, this school. I want to leave this town behind me in the dust and run for miles and miles.

Sometimes I forget that in the bigger scheme of things, it’s okay to not be the best at everything.

Beautiful, distant, infuriating Aaron. The boy I would refuse to lend a pencil to, but who I would give up the world for, even after all this time. Even after all this.

I wanted him the only way I knew how to want anything—obsessively, fervently.

“Do you always have to tease me?” I grumbled, tearing my gaze away. “You couldn’t just be nice?” The rain fell harder, drowning out the rest of the world. “It’s hard to resist,” he said, and he sounded honest. “I don’t know why I do it, really. It’s only with you.”

“Maybe it’s because you don’t like me,” I said, seized by a terrible boldness, my heart racing ahead of itself. “Because you hate me.” His brows drew together. “No,” he said firmly, despite his confusion. “I could never hate you.” “Really?” “I swear it.” “Not even if I did this?” And before I could lose my nerve, before I could think about why this was a horrible idea, I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him closer, leaving only a hair’s breadth of distance between us. I watched him breathe, or struggle to, his chest rising and falling erratically, eyes wide, lips parted, half his face cast in the silver dappled shadow of the petals overhead. I had never kissed a boy before, yet now it seemed so simple. Just one movement, and I’d have him, the way I wanted.

I heard your name. All it took was your name, and I forgot myself.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

Jessica has never been one of those people who need to compare their current selves with their past selves, to show how much they’ve transformed for the better. She’s never really experienced failure—her successes have simply kept growing. She went from being the best in her class, to the best in Chinese school, to the best in our entire high school—and now she’ll go on to become the best in all of Harvard, and then the best in the world. Her life is one of exponential growth, the type you can graph out perfectly with a calculator.

One step forward and one step back, and repeat, until in the end, it looks like I’ve been standing in the same spot for years.

I hate this school so much, but I can’t stop myself from caring about all the people who go here, from wanting the school to love me, even if I know it’s impossible.

We turn pain into a story, because then it has a purpose. Then, we reason, there was a point to it all along. But sometimes pain is just pain, and there’s nothing particularly noble about clinging to it. Perhaps I would have done much better still if I were healthy;

Success is such a beautiful thing. It’s so intimate, so heartachingly personal, I can feel it in my very blood. It’s the closest you’ll ever fly to the sun. The closest you’ll ever get to immortality. Who cares about a bit of pain and sacrifice when you could—if only for a few fleeting days in your already short life—know what it’s like to be a god?

He stops too, standing directly beneath a faint trickle of sunlight through the trees, and turns back to glance at me, his grin quick and beautiful as a lightning strike.

That old saying floats across my mind again. To dream of becoming a butterfly. I’ve been busy deliberating why the dream started, but I’m not so sure if I’m ready for the dream to end. Would the butterfly be relieved to turn back into a human? Or would the butterfly miss being able to fly too much?

“I left because I couldn’t bear it.” “What?” “You,” he says, and the air escapes my lungs. He runs an agitated hand through his hair. “What I . . . felt for you. How much I needed you. I thought I would lose my mind if I stayed any longer, if I . . . if we—” He cuts himself off, breathing hard. “What?” I repeat, but this time there’s no anger in my voice, only shock. I blink at him, uncomprehending. I’m scared to speak again, to make even the slightest sound, scared he’ll take the words back and tell me I imagined it. “Surely you must have sensed it,” he says, coming to an abrupt stop, his expression distressed, almost desperate. “Even just a little. I know . . . I know it took me too long to start looking at you the way you wanted. But near the end—once I did . . .” “All I know,” I say very slowly, to make sure we’re speaking the same language, “is that you pulled away from me. Don’t you remember?” Because I do, I want to add, though it’s hard to summon that old, humiliating rage when he’s looking at me this way. I remember every detail, even now. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since you left. “Because I was scared,” Aaron says,

“I thought . . . if we ever became something more, I was sure I was going to disappoint you.” “That’s—how would that even be possible?” I demand. “You’re perfect, and I’m me, and I—I fell for you first. I’ve liked you for almost half my life, and you basically just admitted that you only saw me as a friend for most of that time—” “No, you think I’m perfect. You think everyone’s so much better than they really are, and you think you’re so much worse than you really are. I was only a goal to you,” he tells me, swallowing. “I was a dream, someone unattainable, something you built up inside your head. You forget how well I know you, Jenna. There’s nothing you want more than to want—you’ll obsess over something, and convince yourself that so long as you get it, you’ll be happy, but then once you do, you’re immediately dissatisfied and want something else.” “That’s not true,” I start to protest, though I feel my tongue falter. “I’ve seen it happen,” he says.

if I’d let myself kiss you that day—” His breath hitches. I watch him try to steady himself against some invisible emotion. “Maybe you would’ve been glad at first. Maybe you would’ve agreed if I’d asked you out. But what would have happened after two days? Two weeks? After you discovered that I’m not perfect—that I’m a coward, that I’m awful at making decisions and regret half the things I’ve done, that it’s nearly impossible for me to warm up to new people, that sometimes I’m hit with grief so heavy I can’t do anything except lie down in silence? After you realized there was no point wanting me anymore, because you already had me?”

“If I’d kissed you,” he goes on, “you would have wanted me for an afternoon, and I would have wanted you for the rest of my life. But even though I knew it wouldn’t work, I also knew that if I stayed, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from kissing you anyway.” The bitter crack of a smile. “I only have so much self-control.”

“There I was in this new city, free to go anywhere I wanted, without anybody to tell me what to do, and I felt so—trapped. Almost claustrophobic. Every time I thought of you, of how far away you were, the last time we were together, the room seemed to shrink around me.” My voice catches over my next words. “What are you saying?” “The world just felt smaller without you,” he tells me. It’s the kind of sentiment most people would be afraid to say out loud, but he looks me straight in the eye when he speaks, his chin lifted a few degrees, as if in challenge. “Or maybe you have a way of making the world feel bigger. I missed you. I’d miss you everywhere I went:

So far, her life has felt like an escape from my own, but in this moment,

I track the movement in his throat, the way he attempts to hide his hurt. “Sure,” he says at last, reaching for the door behind him. His fingers fumble around the knob twice before he grips it, his knuckles white. “Anything you want. I’ll be here, always.”

“You have to choose one, Aaron,” I’d insisted. “This is important. They’re completely different styles.” “But they’re all still your handwriting. I’d be able to tell it’s yours even if you mixed it with a hundred other people’s.”

“It’s like how every artist has their own recognizable style, even when they’re painting a new piece,” he said, shrugging. “It’s impossible to really hide the person behind it, so long as you know where to look.”

Every artist has their own style, their way of holding the pen, of interpreting the world, capturing it in pieces.

shake me by the shoulders, sink her nails into my face. “What is it like to just go around knowing that everyone loves you, and believes in you, and wants to be you?”

Because to me, wanting has always been indistinguishable from pain.

It’s the mantra we’ve all been fed since we were kids: study hard, get into a good school, be better than everyone else, and you’ll have a better life. Because a school like Havenwood might be a cage, but at the end of the day, a cage is still a shelter, and we all want to be valued, to be protected, to be safe, to prove that we deserve to be here. Because the chances of success are so suffocatingly small, and the pressure to succeed is so overwhelmingly great, and there are only a handful of people, distant as deities from the rest of us, who hold all the power.

I get it, I really do. It’s so easy to fall into the assumption that anything someone else gains is something you lose. To think of success as some lavish party with only a limited number of invites. To convince yourself that if you could only make it to a certain point in the distance, you’ll finally find a place to rest. To feel like there’s always more that you can do. But I mean, look what’s being done to us—to our self-esteem, to our pride, to our bodies. We’re all exhausted and on the verge of breaking down at any second and somehow . . . somehow we’re expected to just keep going.

“Because if we don’t try to understand each other, then who will?”

“I’ll be there,” he replies right away, his gaze locking on mine. And I’m certain in this very moment that if I had to walk deep into the woods, into a burning house, down into the depths of hell itself, he would still accompany me, just to make sure I don’t leave his sight.

“That’s the one thing I’ve worked for my entire life—to be someone who matters. That’s why my parents moved to this country. That’s my purpose. If I can’t do it, then what’s the point of anything? What’s the point of me? What possible value could I provide?”

“There are far worse things to be than untalented.”

you act like the worst fate for a person is to be mediocre, to go about their lives without accomplishing anything significant enough to leave behind a lasting legacy. Do you even know—” He inhales.

“Because I hate myself too much.”