Jessica

Jessica Brooks is the current identity of a person who stayed at the Inn in the late 1990's.

She was born Conrad Mancini. He was a 40-year-old police detective in approximately 1999, when he came to the inn on a case, in search of a missing person named Brad Crowley.

Transformation
At the time of transformation, The original Jessica was a mere 10 years old. Jessica's parents had not accompanied her to the Inn - she had stayed there with a friend's family, the Cahills (initially referred to as the Andersons) who became a family called the Costellos, with Jessica becoming their son, Dana, who was roughly 9 at the time.

A family called the Wrights became the Cahills, and the new Jessica had to return to a family who thought she was their natural daughter, which caused difficulties adjusting to her new lifestyle.

The new Jessica became friends with 17-year-old Dina Wright, who had turned into Jessica's 10-year-old friend Mindy Cahill. The Wrights preferred not to treat Conrad as a grown man, and so Dina and Jessica were forced to rely on each other for emotional support. Though Dina attended a private school, the two spent much of their free time together, doing "little girl" things like riding bikes and writing in diaries. On one occasion they stole beer from a parent, only to be made sick. The Cahills later moved away when "Mr. Cahill" got a new job in Chicago. The two friends didn't speak again for eight years.

Despite not being naturally physically gifted, she played sports in high school, partly as a way of keeping in touch with her former masculinity, as she empathized with "Parker Costello" when they met in late 2007.

Blog
By the time she had contacted Jake in late 2006, she had long-since assumed the identity of Jessica. By this point, she was 17 years old and preparing to graduate high school in the spring. She also revealed one of her findings about the curse, that after spending about two years with Jessica's mother she eventually managed to convince her about the Inn's curse, thus showing a limit to the nature of the curse's secrecy aspect. This occurred when Jessica's maternal grandfather died, and she and her mother fought over Jessica's assertion that the man wasn't really her relative, seeming to indicate that as time goes by, combined with moments of extreme emotional sensitivity, the curse relaxes. (Mrs. Brooks later said she did not sense the same curse at work in Ashlyn and Liz.)

In March 2007, Jessica came to visit Ashlyn and Art in Boston, after having contacted them via e-mail to share her story. She worked on the case of Ashlyn's secret admirer as well as providing some whereabouts of some of the victims who had been to the Inn at the same time as them.

Road Trip
In August, she and Louisa embarked on a roat trip to track down as many known visitors to the Inn as possible. Their first stop was in New York City, where they met Mark Lange and Vinessa Lopez, as well as Darren Bridger and the new Vinny DeSantis. En route to Washington, they also stopped in Baltimore to visit the gravesite of "Conrad Mancini" - the man who had become Conrad, an accountant named Bill Danvers, was killed in the line of duty due to a lack of training, a fact that Jessica had been reluctant to share with her new friends.

The road trip took her and Louisa through Nashville and New Orleans, where they met the original Penelope Lincoln, the current Josiah Johnson, and the new Louisa before they wound up in Texas, where she used subterfuge to acquire information from Stephen Jefferies. They also visited Trip in Iowa on the way to Chicago, where Jess attempted to find leads to track down the Cahill/Wrights, and Michigan, where they met Jeff Miller. Jeff introduced them to the new Brianna, whom he had befriended, and who expressed some level of attraction to him. The new Bree revealed her background to Jess and Louisa, but asked that it not be recorded on the blog, as Jeff was not fully informed yet. New-Bree also revealed that although Brianna had received a breast augmentation, her breasts were natural tissue, indicating that the Inn's curse had simply filled in the blanks rather than recreate inorganic matter. Louisa supposed this explained other differences between Inn victims and their originals, such as Trip's narcolepsy as Kat, and Darren's peanut allergy as Jamie.

Jessica also gathered the necessary information to find Dina, who by this time was studying at Northwestern University not far from where her parents lived. She expressed frustration at her parents' domineering style, especially once she learned they had intercepted her letters to Jessica, and she admitted to a fear that if she "screwed up" she would be sent back to the Inn to become a 10-year-old again. The two agreed to stay in touch.

Personality
Jessica was described as being "whip-smart," with a maturity that clearly marked her advanced years. She was also well-adapted to her identity as Jessica by the age of 18, telling Louisa that after eight years, she had "[grown] up a second time; talk to Ashlyn if you want to hear about things being weird."

Appearance
In her original male form as Conrad, she described herself as nearly 6' tall and 235 lbs. In 2007, at age 17, she was described as being 5'5, about 120 lbs, with a "cute nerd" look that made it hard to believe she had been a male police officer. She had shoulder-length brown hair, blue eyes and glasses.

Quotes
"I made a promise to myself. I wasn’t going to claim this life as my own until my 18th birthday. Until then I would keep looking for a way to give Jessica life back to her, and to live as good of a life as I could."