MY FULL NAME is Jessica Jung Sooyeon.

          I live in Burlington, Vermont, with my Mummy and three dogs. 

          I am nearly eighteen.

          I own a well-used library card and not much else, though it is true I live in a grand house full of expensive, useless objects.

          I used to have blonde hair, but now I am a brunette.

          I used to be strong, but now I am weak.

          I used to be pretty, but now I look sick.

          It is true I suffer migraines since my accident.

          It is true I do not suffer fools.

          I like a twist of meaning. You see? Suffer migraines. Do not suffer fools. The word means almost the same as it did in the previous sentence, but not quite.

         Suffer.

         You could say it means endure, but that's not exactly right either.

MY STORY STARTS before the accident. June of the summer I was fifteen, my father, Sam Easton, he ran off with some woman he loved more than us. I never took his last name.

          Dad was a middling-successful professor of military history. Back then I adored him. He wore tweed jackets. He was gaunt. He drank milk tea. He was fond of board games and he'd let me win. He was fond of boats and taught me to kayak, fond of bicycles, books, and art museums.

          He was never fond of dogs, and it was a sign of how much he loved my mother that he let our golden retrievers sleep on the sofas and walked them three miles every morning. He was never fond of my grandparents, either, and it was a sign of how much he loved me and Mummy that he spent every summer in Windemere on Beechwood Island, writing articles on wars fought long ago and putting on a smile for the relatives at every meal.

          That June, summer fifteen, Dad announced he was leaving and departed two days later. He told my mother he wasn't a Jung, and couldn't try to be one, any longer. He couldn't smile, couldn't lie, couldn't be a part of that beautiful family in those beautiful houses.

          Couldn't. Couldn't. Wouldn't.

          He had hired moving vans already. He'd rented a house, too. My father put a last suitcase into the backseat of the Mercedes (he was leaving Mummy with only the Saab), and started the engine.

          Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell.  The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rythmically from my open wound, then from my eyes, my ears,my mouth.

         It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.

          Mummy snapped. She said to get hold of myself.

          Be normal, now, she said. Right now, she said.

          Because you are. Because you can, she said again.

          Don't cause a scene, she told me. Breathe and sit up.

          I did what she asked.

          She was all I had left.

         Mummy and I tilted our well-sculptured chins high as Dad drove down the hill. Then we went indoors and trashed the gifts he'd given us: jewelry, clothes, books, anything. Everything. In the days that followed, we got rid of the couch and armchairs my parents had bought together. Tossed the wedding china, the silver, the photographs.

          We purchased new furnitures. Hired a decorator. Placed an order for Tiffany silverware. Spent a day walking through art galleries and bought paintings to cover the empty spaces on our walls.

          We asked Grandad's lawyers to secure Mummy's assets. Then we packed our bags and went to Beechwood Island.

Slow progress. I know. But wait a little bit more.