Why Can't I Be You Read Online Free PDF Page B

scribbled underneath their name in round, balloon-like high school script: “attending,” “not attending,” “out of contact.”
    I found Myra on the first poster. Her last name was Aberly. “Attending! Yay!” was written under her name, along with a goofy smiley face with bangs like hers. There were four Heathers before I even got to the
G
s, so I had no idea who Myra called from my room.
    Morgan, I thought. That was the name Myra had said on the phone. Jessie Morgan. I followed the posters across the walls, through Collier and Finley, Kapovi and Linden. The pictures could have been from my high school. Flannel shirts and scrunchies, black choker necklaces. Every other girl had Rachel’s haircut from
Friends
, and only one or two of them actually had the hair for it.
    Finally, I found Jessica Elizabeth Morgan. And she did look like me. It was eerie. Her hair was lighter and slightly orange, and her eyes were a funny color—brown but with a weird greenish tinge. Fake contacts maybe, or bad color balance in the photo. But she had the same smile, the same apple cheeks I’d had in high school, which, thankfully, turned into actual cheekbones as I aged. She even shared the slightly too big ears that I never did quite grow into and had the same light freckles across her nose, which was larger than mine but absolutely adorable. Her nose gave her character, and I hoped, even though I had no idea who she was or where she was, this Jessie Morgan girl never got the nose job she’d so desperately wanted. I hoped, wherever she was, she was happy and had someone to love her and wouldn’t ever feel the humiliation of getting dumped at the airport.
    She was wearing a black top or dress with spaghetti straps. One of the straps had fallen off her shoulder, and I was thankful that the photo was cropped before it revealed exactly how much cleavage she was showing the camera. Underneath the picture, next to her name, was written “out of contact,” with a big pouty face next to it. Someone had crossed that out and written “ATTENDING!!!!” in bright red ink that was still fresh and smelled, indeed, like those big fat fruit markers. Myra must have just written it, and my heart broke for her when I thought about confessing that I wasn’t Jessie Morgan. I reached out and touched the picture of Jessie.
    “God! Remember us with the Sun-In?” Myra called from across the room as she walked over to me. “We were, like, addicted to that stuff.” She put her arm around my shoulder. “Of course, I was scared Grammie would find out, so I just had that one streak you could only see when I wore a ponytail.”
    I hadn’t been allowed to use Sun-In as a kid. My mother would have flipped. But I remembered when Angela Nathans spilled an entire bottle of it on the bus on our seventh-grade overnight trip to Philadelphia. Right at the beginning of the trip. When the bus got hot, it got worse, so every time we left—to see the Liberty Bell or Valley Forge—we came back to a bus full of baked Sun-In.
    “I’ll never forget that smell,” I said.
    “I know! Me either,” Myra said, laughing. “It still smells the same.” She stepped away to smooth down the corner of the poster. “You’re going to think I’m a freak, but every once in a while I take a whiff from the bottle when I see it at the drugstore.” She looked up and stared at my face. I was positive she would realize that I wasn’t Jessie Morgan, but she just smiled. “It reminds me of you and me and Karen.” She looked away for a second. “I never thought I’d see you again,” she said, and let out a little gasp or a sob or something—I couldn’t tell what because her head was turned.
    “I found your earring,” I said, holding out my hand to her. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I needed to get out of there. I couldn’t pretend to be someone Myra had been missing for thirteen years, or however long it had been since Jessie Morgan left.
    Myra reached up to