Faking Perfect Read online

  Teresa narrowed her eyes, which were light brown like Nolan’s. “Is she drinking?”

  “No. The bills again.”

  Teresa sighed and went back to hunting for discarded wrappers and cans. Nolan kept drawing, barely paying attention. He’d heard conversations like this between me and his parents more times than either of us could count. It started when I was six, the first time Mom passed out from drinking too much wine and didn’t hear me when I called out in the middle of the night with one of my nightmares. When I went to her room and found her sprawled on her bed, fully dressed and unresponsive, I panicked and ran—in my bare feet at two in the morning—across the street to the Bruces’ house. That was back when Nolan’s mother and mine were still best friends.

  “Let me know if you need anything, okay?” Teresa told me before going back upstairs. I assured her I would. “And Nolan, sweetie . . . could you please not get pencil smudges all over the couch?”

  Nolan smoothed another line, blurring it, before nodding in his absent, preoccupied way.

  I peeked over at his drawing and came face-to-face with Mr. Teng, our physics teacher. “That’s incredible, Nolan.” It blew me away that he could recreate facial features just from memory. I was barely able to draw a straight line.

  “Eh,” he said, shrugging and closing his sketch pad. “It’s not done yet.” He threw the pad and pencil on the coffee table and stretched out his hand. His fingertips, as usual, were stained black with graphite. “Let’s play Call of Duty.”

  I glanced at my watch. Seven-fifteen. I still had plenty of time. “Okay.”

  He set up the game and handed me a controller. “Want some pretzels?”

  “Sure.” Just as I uttered the word, my stomach let out a thunderous growl. My body felt empty. Concave. When Nolan was halfway up the stairs, I called, “Bring down some cookies too, would you?”

  “Oreos or chocolate chip?” he called back from the top of the stairs.

  “Oreos!” I replied at the same volume. One of my favorite things about this house was the constant, good-natured yelling back and forth, disembodied voices communicating from different rooms of the house. Always loud and chaotic, but rarely angry. At home, I’d never even think to bellow a question to my mother in the kitchen while I was using the toilet or something. But here, I did it just as easily as Teresa called me “sweetie,” the same term of endearment she used for her husband and her sons. And the dog and cat, too.

  While Nolan was up in the kitchen, I sent a text to Emily, letting her know I had the car and could pick everyone up for the movie later. Then, as quick as I dared, I pulled up the message Tyler had sent me an hour ago—can I c u tonite—and tapped out a response.

  Yes. 1:00.

  “Sorry, all we have left is stale gingersnaps.”

  I startled at Nolan’s voice and shoved my phone back into the pocket of my sweater. “Yum,” I said as he dumped the box in my lap and settled in next to me with a giant mixing bowl of pretzels. I dug into the box and grabbed a handful of cookies, even though I knew no matter how much I tried to relieve the hollow ache in my stomach, I’d never truly feel full.

  Chapter Four

  My mother’s date with Latte Guy must have gone well because she was up bright and early on Sunday, hangover-free and blasting Green Day on the stereo as she vacuumed the living room. For the rest of the day, she cleaned the bathrooms and organized our finances and made a chicken pot pie for dinner. I liked my mother’s New Man phase the best. It was when she most resembled a normal parent. Too bad it never lasted.

  She stayed in maternal mode all day and then went to bed at the reasonable hour of eleven o’clock, where she watched the news instead of Wheel of Fortune. Man, I thought, this new guy must be something special.

  Her good mood still hadn’t waned by Monday morning. When I strode into the kitchen, dressed and ready for school, I discovered half a bagel sitting on a plate in the middle of the counter, a small piece of paper beside it. A note. Have a good day! it said in my mother’s girly script. Two days ago she was screaming at me, and now she was wishing me a good day. I munched on the bagel and shook my head. She was certifiable.

  Like clockwork, Ben’s Acura appeared at my curb at eight-fifteen on the dot. I was standing in the driveway, waiting. As I walked toward the car, I realized something was off. Emily was sitting next to Ben in the front, and Kyla was nowhere to be seen. She could be sick today, I reasoned. But no. When I climbed into the backseat, the crackle of tension in the air told me otherwise.

  “Hey,” I said, storing my backpack next to my feet and buckling my seat belt.

  “Hey,” Emily said, tossing a smile over her shoulder.

  Ben said nothing. Just put the car into drive and hit the gas.

  “Uh,” I said after a minute of silence. “Where’s Kyla?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” he replied with an apathetic shrug.

  Emily glanced back at me, her glasses glinting in the sun, and quickly rolled her eyes. She never had much patience with Ben when he was acting quiet and sulky, which happened every time one of his girlfriends did something to piss him off. Okay, so he and Kyla were definitely done. I could barely wait to get to school.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to talk to Emily until after math class. My stomach fluttered in anticipation as we gathered our books. As much as I wanted to demand details, it was important that I wait for her to bring it up. She had no idea I had a crush on Ben.

  Ben didn’t even know I had a crush on Ben. I hid it well. He liked peppy, cheerleader-type girls who laughed easily, drew hearts on everything, and wore their hair in smooth ponytails. And no matter how hard I tried to tailor myself into what he wanted, he seemed to sense it was all an act. That he was too good for me. I’d never be anything more than his friend, and any romantic feelings I felt for him had to stay locked up inside, along with so many other things.

  It was a shame. He had more in common with me than he did with those cheerleader girls. We’d both been raised by single parents. Only with him, it was his father. His mother died in a car accident when Ben was four, a tragedy that made him even more endearing to the girls around school (“Poor baby, he needs mothering!”). As for me, I only pretended my other parent was dead. It sounded better than “he was an addict who abandoned me when I was four.” All I’d told my friends was that my father was gone, which was the truth. He hadn’t been in my life for over thirteen years and I barely even remembered him. My mother said he was most likely dead of a drug overdose by now, but that was just speculation. I often wondered what it felt like to know your parent was dead, to never have to wonder if he was out there somewhere, ignoring your existence.

  “Stupid geometry,” Emily grumbled as we left the classroom together. We’d gotten our math tests back and she hadn’t done as well as she’d hoped. “Why do I even have to take this class? When does a journalist ever need to do math? It’s not like I dream of being an accountant or something.” She cut her eyes toward me.

  I’d mentioned to her months ago that I might want to study accounting in college. I liked numbers. They were steady and reliable. Not like letters and words, which could be misread and twisted and designed to hurt.

  “Three more months until graduation and then you’ll never have to think about it again,” I said, wishing she’d spill about Ben and Kyla already. “You eating lunch with us today?” I asked her. Emily pretty much ran the school newspaper, which meant she spent a lot of her lunch hours editing instead of eating.

  “Yeah. Shelby’s coming, too. She said to wait for her.”

  We rounded the corner to the hallway that contained our lockers. I dumped my books, extracted my lunch, and waited with Emily for Shelby to arrive. The three of us preferred to steer clear of the cafeteria—and its soggy cuisine—and eat our brown-bag lunches downstairs in Ms. Hollis’s history classroom, which we’d gotten permission to use at lunchtime. Ms. Hollis liked us and had no problem leaving us unattended while she went
off to eat her salad and gossip in the teacher’s lounge.

  “She must be in the bathroom again,” Emily commented when Shelby failed to show up after five minutes.

  “Uh-huh,” I said vaguely. I was distracted by the sight of tousled dark hair and broad shoulders. Tyler was heading down the hallway with a few of his stoner friends, all of them looking like they’d just rolled out of bed. As they passed us, a couple guys turned to check us out, but Tyler kept moving like I wasn’t even there. Just like I’d instructed him to do.

  I looked over at Emily to find her inspecting my face as if it was one of those giant frogs we’d dissected last semester in biology. Damn it. She’d noticed me noticing Tyler. Time to backpedal.

  “They smell like weed,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

  She continued to study me, her pale eyebrows lifting toward her hairline. It was true; they did give off the sweet, pungent scent of weed when they walked by. The same scent that clung to Tyler’s skin some nights, and my hair when we smoked it together.

  Emily nodded and backed off, even though she was obviously still suspicious. Shelby was unobservant and constantly distracted, but this girl missed nothing.

  I took a deep breath and let it out through my nose, wondering as always what my friends would do if they knew the real me, the me who sneaked the school bad boy in through her bedroom window at night. The me who reverted to her old bad girl ways, on occasion. They’d be shocked, of course, and disappointed, and probably mad enough to ostracize me forever. Like most of the school—staff included—they thought Tyler was a loser. A troublemaker. I’d learned this in the spring of sophomore year, when I laid eyes on him for the first time. I’d been walking with Emily and she’d noticed me doing a double take as we passed him in the halls. He was hot even then, tall and lean with deep brown eyes and dark brown hair that always looked like he’d just run his fingers through it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Emily had told me. “That’s Tyler Flynn. He might be nice to look at but he’s a total douchebag. He got suspended once for shoving Mr. Quinn, the shop teacher, into a filing cabinet. And he’s been arrested for breaking and entering and apparently he’s gotten, like, three girls pregnant. I hear he deals drugs, too. Believe me, you are way too good for him.”

  It wasn’t until almost two years later, after he’d been in my bed a few times, that I got the real story from Tyler himself. He’d pushed Mr. Quinn, yes, but not into a filing cabinet and only because Quinn grabbed the front of Tyler’s shirt during a disagreement. It was true he’d been arrested for B and E, but the pregnancy rumors were false. (“I cover my junk,” he’d said—a claim I could attest to.)

  As for the drugs, well, it was only marijuana, and he sold only to his friends.

  “Finally,” Emily said when Shelby joined us a few minutes later. Actually, Shelby’s stomach arrived first and then Shelby herself.

  “Sorry,” she said, her cheeks pink with the exertion of walking. “I had to pee. Piper spent all of French class stomping on my bladder.”

  I glanced down at her stomach, which seemed to expand by the second like one of those time lapse movies with the flower growing from seed to bloom. Shelby wasn’t the only pregnant girl this school had ever seen, but she was certainly the most memorable. For one, she was a straight-A honors student and (formerly) one of the most popular girls in school. And two, she wasn’t one of those women who barely looked pregnant at six months along. No, Shelby looked thirty months pregnant at six months along. My mother said she was “all baby,” meaning she was thin everywhere else, making her torpedo belly stick out even more. Every time I looked at that bulge, I wanted to run home and swallow my entire birth control pill prescription.

  The three of us headed downstairs to Ms. Hollis’s classroom, dodging several freshman girls on the stairs who stopped to gape at Shelby’s middle. Shelby didn’t even bother giving them dirty looks; she was already used to stares and snickering and rude remarks.

  “I feel like a zoo exhibit,” she said as we settled in the classroom with our lunches. Emily and I sat in desks in the front row while Shelby lowered her body into the teacher’s chair. She couldn’t sit comfortably anywhere else. “And here we have a pregnant teenager of the human species,” she added in a dead-on Australian accent. “See how she moves, arching her back so she won’t lose her balance and fall on her face. She is an exotic creature, and very, very dangerous when provoked.”

  Emily and I cracked up. “Just ask Evan,” Emily added, and we all cracked up again.

  Shelby and Evan—her on-again-off-again boyfriend and the baby’s father—had been in one long, ongoing fight since she’d announced she was pregnant back in October. One minute he was there and they were planning a happily ever after with their little family. The next minute, he was gone and Shelby was crying, overwhelmed at the prospect of single motherhood. The tension between them had only increased when Evan skipped out on the eighteen-week ultrasound in January. It was Emily and I who stood by her side, holding her hand as she found out the baby’s gender. A little girl. Piper Olivia.

  “So,” I said a few minutes later, keeping my voice casual and just vaguely curious. Screw it, I thought. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to know. “What happened between Ben and Kyla?”

  “They broke up,” Emily said, watching me as she picked up an orange and started to peel it.

  I kept my face smooth. I swear, the girl could see right into my thoughts sometimes. She was going to make an excellent investigative journalist someday.

  Shelby slurped up the last of her milk. “Why? Oh wait, let me guess. She got drunk at a party. Or . . . oh! I know! She forgot to use proper grammar in a text.”

  Emily stuffed a section of orange into her mouth. “She went back with her ex-boyfriend.”

  “Oh.” Shelby seemed disappointed that she couldn’t make fun of Ben’s high standards some more. “Is Ben all broken up about it or has he moved on to the next girl in line already?”

  I didn’t get why Kyla would choose someone else over him. “He seemed pretty upset this morning in the car.” I’ll console him. . . .

  Shelby made a psshht sound. “Yeah, he always gets upset when he finds out the girl he’s dating is an actual human being with flaws like everyone else. Making mistakes is an inexcusable offense, you know. Believe me, I’ve been there.”

  To hide my expression from Emily’s all-seeing eyes, I feigned a sudden interest in my sandwich. It still bothered me to be reminded that Ben and Shelby had dated once, back in junior year. For three agonizing months, I’d had to pretend not to care when I saw them together, holding hands in the hallways or kissing at parties. It didn’t help that they looked great together, too. Due to Shelby’s long dark hair and full lips and Ben’s blondness and commanding presence, people at school had nicknamed them “Brangelina,” as in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie—only without all the kids.

  Oakfield High’s version of Brangelina broke up when Shelby downed a few too many vodka shots at a party and ended up grinding on the makeshift dance floor with Evan Sharp, a friend of Ben’s from the track team. Seeing his girlfriend pressing her ass into another guy’s groin—and in front of everyone—proved to be too much for Ben. He dumped her later that night and Shelby started dating Evan soon after. Four months and one condom mishap later, she was pregnant.

  Emily eventually forgave her friend for humiliating her cousin, but Ben had barely glanced at her since.

  “Kyla was too ditzy anyway,” Emily said through a bite of orange wedge. “Ben needs someone who’s like him.”

  “Inflexible?” Shelby said. “Unforgiving?”

  “Perfect,” I blurted without thinking. They looked at me. My face started burning and I turned away to pack up the remnants of my lunch.

  “If that’s perfect,” Shelby said wryly, “then I’ll gladly take damaged.”

  I could feel Emily’s gaze on me again, sharp and speculating.

  No way could I ever let it show, this bone-deep l
onging I felt to be with Ben, to touch him and sit next to him and feel protected by the warmth of his shine. Showing it would lead to admitting it, and admitting it would only end in humiliation. Pining for a boy who was completely out of my league—not to mention totally uninterested—was just plain sad and pitiful. I’d worked too hard and come too far to be seen in that light again. I was a different person now. Better. Before I met Emily, I’d spent most of my time playing video games with Nolan or hanging around with kids like me, kids with no boundaries whose parents didn’t give a shit about them. Nolan had his art and his caring, nuclear family to keep him grounded, but what did I have? An immature mother, an absentee father, and no special talents or skills to distract me or set me apart. I had Nolan’s family, sure, but they weren’t really mine. I didn’t technically belong there.

  So I’d found somewhere else to belong. Integrated myself with the smartest and most admired clique in school, changed my image to align with theirs, tricked them into thinking I was confident and stable, and secured a spot within their privileged circle. With them, I felt like I’d finally overcome my past. I wasn’t some pathetic, fatherless girl who felt like trash inside; I was normal, at least on the outside, and I used this illusion to distance myself from who I really was.

  Nolan was the only one who knew the real Lexi Shaw, and that was exactly how I intended to keep it.

  Ben and Emily had various commitments to attend to after school, so I usually took the bus home with Nolan in the afternoons. Sometimes I’d go to his house and help him raid the cupboards until his parents got home, and other times, like today, I just wanted to be alone.

  In my room, I lifted Trevor out of his tank and let him coil around my fingers as I straightened the quilt on my bed with my free hand. When it was perfectly neat, I sat down, opened the drawer of my nightstand, and brought out my snake book. The title, Corn Snakes: An Owner’s Guide, hovered over a picture of a snake that looked a lot like Trevor.