A schizophrenic girl from Skye's school, Jessica's problems are not apparent at first, though Skye senses that she has a dark history. Jessica's activities, such as capturing the dead bird, taking Skye to buy beautiful old boots, and talking about traveling the world, seem delicate and vulnerable to Skye, appealing to her sense of the beautiful and needy. At the same time, Jessica quickly begins to show signs of mental illness: during Skye's first visit to Jessica's room, for example, Jessica talks about the bats flying around her ceiling when, of course, there are none. Jessica's true personality only becomes clear when Mol and Skye read her online chats, and see that she had been sexually abused by her older brother and his friends as a child, which she deals with in the present by cutting herself. This cutting can be read as a symbol of the interior made external, as both Jessica and Anna struggle with the differences between inside and outside (see "Themes," below). Jessica's mother finally gets her help, though this means that Skye and Mol are not allowed to see her any more as Jessica receives treatment. Her vulnerability in fact masked deeper issues beyond the capacity of other teenage girls to solve.
