Jessa Remembers Everything

When I first met Jessa, she told me she could remember everything that ever happened to her. She could remember being swaddled in a hospital blanket by a nurse after her birth, the watery darkness just beforehand, the forceps reaching inside her mother, that first gasp of foreign air in the delivery room.

Jessa was lying, of course. I knew this. I allowed her to lie to me because she was charismatic, gorgeous in an interesting way, like Edie Sedgwick, and slightly older than me. I wanted to be friends with her and bathe in her light. I flattered her, told her that’s all very impressive and that I never met anyone who can do that. Later, I pretended to be casual when she invited me to drinks with her friends that night.

At the bar, Jessa’s three interchangeable blonde friends – all, like me, college girls one-year younger than her than majoring in psychology or nursing or journalism – surrounded her the way insects encircle a dim porch light. Jessa put a hand on her hip mid-conversation and the three mirrored her exactly, lined up against the bar counter like some modern art installation. I soon learned their names – Julie, Sylvia, Muriel – and their distinctness surprised me, as if I’d expected them to share one single identity, one single being, in order to serve Jessa more efficiently. I would later claim I joined them against my will, compelled by a force like gravity. But, in truth, I wanted nothing more than to be like them, lined up alongside her, in her orbit. The desire to annihilate myself for Jessa was like that fleeting need you feel, while holding a kitchen knife, to plunge the knife into your own gut.

I ordered a beer because I didn’t know what I liked yet, and Muriel looked at me, up and down, eyes narrowed. “You actually like beer?”. She laughed, shooting a glance at Jessa to make sure it was funny. The three were all drinking something pink and foamy in sugar-rimmed glasses, cocktails ordered before I arrived that I didn’t know the name of.

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes watering from the taste, “I do.”

Jessa withdrew her smile and turned to Muriel. “Whatever, Muriel. Don’t be such a cunt to her.” Muriel scowled. Jessa had disciplined her with a quick, sharp jab, like misbehaving puppy.

I was aware, then, Muriel hated me. She told me later that night that she liked my dress, but I knew what I represented to her -- I was an unwelcome addition to their group, and whatever currency they had with Jessa now had to be split four ways.

In the month that followed, something fundamental about my place in the world changed. Whenever I’d walk to classes with Jessa and the three, for the first time in my life I was aware of people actively forming an impression of me in their mind. One June morning, we watched a postgrad tutor in our lit class stop Jessa in the quad to provide glowing feedback of her recent essay on Beowulf (Sylvia, the essay’s actual author, stood stiff-postured and silent as Jessa accepted his praise). As he walked away, the tutor glanced at me - at my body - and momentarily reduced me to something inanimate for him behold. He held out a hand to introduce himself. “I’m John. I don’t think we’ve met.” I’d been in the class all semester.

Because Muriel, Sylvia, Julie, and I never interacted outside the bounds set by Jessa, like the group-chat she controlled, or brunches she convened, everything I knew about Jessa was filtered through the group’s orthodoxy.  It’s why the phone call I received that August felt so unsettling, like I was breaking the rules. The woman on the other line knew my name and she asked me if I’ve seen Jessa lately. The group text had been unusually quiet – Jessa wasn’t answering us, and we know not to dare talk to one another outside the chat’s confines – and I realised it’d been a few days. “No, not since last week, I think”.

“Hm,” the woman said, “I’m starting to get worried.”

“Who is this?”.

It was Jessa’s mother. This filled me with dread. This was some sort of betrayal. This was outside the unspoken parameters of our relationship, convening with family members. I desperately wanted to hang up.

“Would you mind checking in on her for me?”

There was something needful in her voice, like an infant’s cry, so I agreed.  I never figured out how she got my number.

I hadn’t been inside Jessa’s house.  That was a power-play on her behalf, to let us all debate who’d been invited, and who’d not, and to fret why they weren’t. Jessa seemed to love effortlessly causing tension. She fed on it.

I knocked three times before hearing Jessa groan from inside. “What?”, she shouted. “Just fucking come in.”

I entered and smelled the incense coalesce with thick cigarette smoke. Jessa laid on a white leather couch, her hair limp, face blotchy, holding a lit smoke in one hand. Her fake tan had left a streak on the sofa’s leather.  Without getting up, she questioned my presence. She stubbed the cigarette out as I explained her mother’s call. Jessa shook her head, as if I’d misunderstood, as if I’d gotten it all wrong. I hoped I had. I hoped I could leave immediately and pretend I’d never stumbled upon Jessa like this, all wounded, all melted.

 “Was my birthday the other day. Sunday,” she said, closing her eyes and leaning back on the couch. I stood over her, too anxious to sit down.

“Happy birthday.”

“I mean, no one knows.” She rolled over, facing away from me. I stared at her back. The fabric of the sweater she was wearing was so thin to be transparent, revealing the skin on her middle, bumps of her spine jutting out. “I’m ignoring my mother’s calls, obviously.”

I finally sat on a chair across the room. I didn’t want to be close to her. She could sense my distance and rolled back to face me. The air suddenly smelled stale, like a spent towel.

“Why?”

She scoffed, nearly smiling. “You really want to know?”.

I didn’t. I could feel my pulse in my throat. “If you wanna tell me; only if you want.”

“You’ll tell Muriel and Sylvia. Or Julia.”

“I won’t.”

She scoffed again. “Of course, you will!  What else could you possibly have to talk to them about?”

The truth of this stung me. I wanted nothing more than to share this with someone, someone who understood the significance of the nudity I sensed before me.

“She never wanted to have me,” Jessa sighed, “first time she held me ever, y’know, as a baby…it was like being held by some robot. She felt nothing. I knew that, even back then.”

“Your mother?” I asked. “She didn’t love you?”

“No, she did. That’s different,” she said, fidgeting with her hands. “Want is different from love. You want me -- you want to be around me, yeah? But you don’t love me.” I could sense she wasn’t saying this because she was fishing for refutation, for me to tell her that I do love her, like she normally would have been. This was a fact, like air. “She had to love me, and she obeyed. But she didn’t want me around. I was inconvenient to her life.”

“Okay.”

“When I was three months old, she was giving me a bath. We were in the tub together. And I went under for, like, a second, couldn’t hold my head up. And at first…she propped me back up, all panicked. But then, I dunno, she stopped trying to save me. I remember choking. The water was all soapy and I kept trying to...”

I nodded. She turned back again, guarding her face. I watched her spine move as she talked, re-adjusting herself. “And through the water, above me, I could see her watching it happen. Her mind, like, ticking over. Figuring this would solve the problem of having me, or whatever. It would’ve been convenient for her.” The final words she heaved out, all her feigned airiness gone. “She finally fished me out of the water, like, at the last minute.”

“You remember that? When you were a baby?”

Jessa turned her head to look at me, eye contact and all. Her eyes were glassy, criss-crossed with red.

“Honey, I remember everything.”

My hands were clammy the whole way home, like I was getting a flu. I settled on texting Jessa’s mother a brief confirmation that she continued to live.

##

Over the few days, Jessa reformed the group text without me. Within weeks, I’d see Jessa or Muriel or Sylvia in classes and they’d turned on me, either ignoring me entirely, or making faces behind my back. Text messages to Jessa went unanswered; delivered, but not read.

Whenever I saw Jessa on campus, I’d be shot through with a vague sense of shame. I still found it hard to believe her that she remembered everything that ever happened to her. It’s not possible. It couldn’t be. But then I’d remember her face, her mother’s desperately sad voice, and the fundamental ordinariness of her story. For the first time, I struggled to convince myself that she was lying to me.

I was excluded from the group because I’d seen something I wasn’t meant to - a plainness. My previous desire to be in her circle felt suddenly foreign to me. Jessa seemed so ordinary -- someone who has recollections she’d rather discard, like all of us do. And I was dangerous, now, like a sleeper agent, capable of exposing Muriel or Sylvia or Julie to Jessa’s mundanity at any time. 

I realised, then, that it was true.

Jessa remembered everything.