No Such Thing as Perfect (8 page)

W
hen Derek returned to school after my birthday, we didn’t talk about Jodie. She was a fleeting idea at dinner and then she was gone. I didn’t know if they had fought, if she’d already known about me, or if he made up another reason, but when I asked if we were dating, he said yes and I didn’t want to dig deeper. So when her name came up in the spring, it felt ominous.

“Jodie and I were up all night trying to figure this out,” he said. “I am never going to pass this class.”

It was American History I – Revolution to Civil War, and I didn’t understand what was so hard about it for him. We all had to take almost two years of the same content in high school. I wasn’t even sure how he had gotten into college if he’d been this bad of a student. But when he said her name, I forgot all about Crispus Attucks. With apologies that his death was secondary to Derek and Jodie, I took a deep breath and asked the question I had been afraid to ask for nearly six months.

“You and Jodie still hang out?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it, Lily. I’m with you. She knows that and it’s fine.”

“You were up all night? At the library?” I asked.

“You aren’t serious right now, are you? I’m going to fail and you’re worried about there being a girl in my room? The whole world isn’t like high school, you know. Don’t be that girl.”

So I wasn’t that girl. I helped him learn about the Boston Massacre and he talked and I listened and I was good. I did the things he wanted from me, and that made me happy because I had always wanted Derek and love was about sacrifice and it was about trust and it was all the things I’d been told. But when I told Abby about the conversation and my fears and doubts over lunch the following week, it scared me when she voiced things I didn’t know how to put words to by myself.

“You think he’s cheating?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, he’s right, I guess. It’s just so high school of me to ask. So there was a girl. And so they dated before-”

“You mean they used to fuck. Don’t play innocent. He fucks girls and he throws them away and you refuse to see anything but some guy you liked when you were fourteen. He’s an asshole and he probably is fucking her. But he likes the idea of owning you, so he keeps you distant from it,” she said.

“But he loves me. He wouldn’t do that. He loves me. And he’s right. I’m his girlfriend. I need to act like it and stop worrying,” I argued.

“Is that what you’re majoring in? Girlfriendship? I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“It’s not like you’re single. You’re never single,” I reminded her.

“So? I like the guys I date, but they’re not who I am, Lily. When are you going to be Lily, and not Mrs. Drummond’s daughter or Jon’s sister or Derek’s girlfriend or my friend? Who is Lily? Do you even know?”

I’d been picking at my lunch, but the conversation was too big for the cafeteria and it was too bright and too loud and I needed to talk about something normal. I needed life to be as easy to make sense of as things in packets and books and on the classroom walls. I felt like I was preparing for this obscene pop quiz and I had nightmares of showing up with only a giant green marker and I couldn’t fill in the bubbles – not the right way – and I was going to fail. This quiz was my life and I was failing and that’s too much to think about when someone is sitting next to you making a bong out of a Hawaiian Punch can and your tuna salad sandwich is soggy and the plastic circle seat of the table under your ass feels like it’s going to spin off into space any minute.

“I have to go,” I said and I nearly fell from the seat, my balance off kilter.

Abby said something, and it sounded meaningful, but the cafeteria was so loud. I couldn’t make sense of anything except that she was right and I didn’t have an answer for why I didn’t do a thing about it. Nothing scared me more than not knowing the answer.

T
he rest of the weekend is unbearable. My mother glares at me as if she knows, but I didn’t mention anything about Derek. Let her think she’ll live her golden dream of us populating the world with perfect babies. I don’t have the stomach or mind for telling her otherwise. But she glares and my dad tries to smooth it over, but he’s lost so much of himself, too, in the last few years and the whole weekend is this incredibly odd distant reality. In a few weeks essentially, I can’t make sense of anything. School felt alien but expectedly so, but home was supposed to remain the same. Consistent. Normal. And now I’m in this spiral where I can’t remember when I am.

My mother angrily passes me a bowl of salad during lunch before we all head back to school and I almost feel like I should be asking about the school play again, because all of my memories and flaws are flooding the now with their insistent pleas that I find myself. I didn’t even know I was lost until suddenly I was.

“I’m not hungry,” I say and I pass the salad on to my father and Jon talks about some class he’s taking that he probably doesn’t even attend and I hate him. I hate my brother for the first time in almost nineteen years.

“Is there a girl in the picture?” my mom asks him.

“I’m keeping my options open,” he replies.
You’re keeping their legs open
, I want to retort, but it makes me feel bad about myself. It feels judgmental and petty, like it’s their fault and I certainly don’t want to fill my mom’s head with this idea that any girl Jon brings home might be a slut. Because even if she is, it’s not like she’s being a slut all by her damn self, that’s for sure.

By the time Derek shows up, I’m not prepared for the charade. He kisses me while I’m sitting at the table, brushing his lips over the top of my head and resting his hands on my shoulders. While he chats with my mom, the touch radiates in my blood. All of the intimacy, all of the memories are mocking shards of mistakes inside my body. He’s been inside my body so many times and it doesn’t matter. It was supposed to be special and I was supposed to be special, but special’s a lie we tell girls to make them feel better about having to be broken just to grow up.

“Are you guys ready to head back?” he asks.

“We’re still eating,” I point out, although I haven’t touched my food.

“I have practice,” he says.

“Well, maybe the world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“Lily,” my mom says, before turning to Derek to apologize. “She’s been moody all weekend. I’m sure it’s her hormones from all that weight she’s gained.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Drummond. I’m used to it. Besides, girls don’t care about sports, so I’m sure she doesn’t understand.” I ran track for four years, but I’ve given up on explaining to Derek that running is a sport. I don’t bring it up now, either.

“Fine. Let’s go,” I say, getting up and grabbing my bag. “Wouldn’t want you to be late.”

Jon, oblivious, gets into the backseat as he’s done for the last year when it was the three of us and I’m left debating between sitting next to him and letting Derek act like our driver or sitting next to Derek and pretending it doesn’t hurt to see how easy it all is for him. It’s still a toss-up when he wraps his arms around my waist and kisses my ear.

“I told you it was only a break. I just need to get things in order. Don’t go forgetting all about me. I still care and I still want to see you,” he says. “I’m going to make big plans for the weekend after your birthday. That’s less than a month away. You’ll see – it will be better this way.”

“It will be better to put everything on hold while you decide if I’m good enough?” I ask, turning to face him.

“College is hard. I’m doing this for you,” he says.

“No.” I push him away, angry at the condescension in his voice. He might be older, but it’s been a year. One. Fucking. Year. It’s not like he’s the world’s leading expert on college life transitions.

“Okay, but you’ll see. I’ll be up in a month and I promise you’ll be happier with this arrangement.”

“Whatever,” I say. I choose the passenger seat, mostly because Derek is on the other side of me and it’s easier to walk away in that direction. Maybe I’m being childish, but I don’t care. I can go back to school and work on my paper about Elinor and none of this is important. He’s just a guy. It doesn’t matter that he was always the only one. It doesn’t matter that everything I’ve ever told myself is one giant, glaring lie.

****

Y
our analysis is shallow. It feels like you only understand emotion or humanity on a superficial level. Maybe try something that challenges your foundations, rather than grasping at them.

“She’s gotta be kidding,” I repeat to Kristen. She’s been listening to me for the better part of an hour. “I’m not shallow.
She’s
shallow. God, half the kids in the class didn’t even read the book and I could recite the stupid thing.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t have any lit classes, but it could be good for you. She’s right. Try something new. You do have a tendency to expect the future to look exactly like the past.”

“You’ve known me for a month.”

“Technically almost two, but I live with you, Lily. You don’t like to be challenged, but maybe your professor is right. It’s only a paper, so what’s the worst that happens if you try something a little out there and it’s a disaster?”

“Um, I fail,” I say.

“One paper?”

“Okay, well, maybe not
fail
, but I won’t be able to be get an A.”

“So? When you die, your tombstone isn’t going to say, ‘Lily Drummond. B in Lit Study.’ I feel like you’ll survive.”

“This is so ridiculous. I know everything about Elinor. Ask me. I don’t have time to rewrite this whole thing because she wants me to try something new. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing what’s familiar. Why does everyone want things to be different all the time anyway?”

Kristen reaches over and takes the paper out of my hand and tears it up. It’s a symbolic gesture; the original is saved on my laptop and I’ve memorized my professor’s comments. Still, I actually reach for the flickering scraps, ready to tape them back together only to be reminded of how shallow I am.

“Write something else,” she tells me.

“I can’t.”

“Then go for a walk. And when you come back, come back ready to start over. There’s nothing wrong with starting over. People do it all the time.”

Arguing with her is pointless, because people like her do. People like Kristen come away to college and make friends while grabbing a pizza menu in the lounge and shed who they used to be like another skin they’ve outgrown. But for people like me, the past is a guide to the future, a lesson in how many mistakes you’ve made and how to be better. Otherwise, it’s just a cycle of screwing up over and over again and that terrifies me.

R
ocks were complicated. I wouldn’t have thought so, but I’d studied for weeks because there were just too many kinds of rocks. I didn’t understand all the variations in rocks and how they were formed, but I kept making the flashcards. It didn’t stick, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I had never done poorly on anything. I was only ten, but rocks would be the death of me. 

‘Explain the difference between slate and shale.’ I’d stared at the question for half the exam. I had been almost certain one was sedimentary, but I didn’t know which – and the other could have been anything. I knew these had to have been in my notes and on my flashcards, but after a while, the words became little dancing letters on the page, as sensible as if the question had asked me about folk art of the indigenous people on Neptune. They were words – something that had always been reliable – but these words were going to ruin me and I couldn’t make sense of them.

It didn’t surprise me, of course, when Mr. Grunyan came to my desk with my test paper folded over. We all knew what that fold meant. When you did well, no one hid the results. They were displayed in massive red ink next to a sticker, but when you failed... well, the hidden number or letter didn’t matter because we all knew what the fold meant.

“You made a mistake,” I said when he handed it to me, his eyes sad because I tried hard. I wasn’t the kind of student a teacher wanted to see struggle, because I did my work and I paid attention and I never complained. But being polite doesn’t mean you know shit about rocks.

“I’m sorry,” he said and I believed him. The apology wasn’t going to fix it, though. There, under the dreaded crease, was something I only imagined from books I’d read. At ten-years-old, you don’t expect to see an F on a test, especially when you study. Three red scratches, but they were three scratches that screamed, ‘you’re not perfect.’ And that wasn’t an option.

“But-” I couldn’t argue, though. I had wasted the exam time on shale and slate and left a bunch of answers blank and even several of the ones I did fill out were wrong. I had failed.

Failure was an abstract concept. I knew to fear it. I knew it meant I wasn’t good enough and I knew that it would be some kind of record of that imperfection, but having never experienced it, I didn’t really understand it. You only failed if you didn’t try, if you didn’t work hard enough, but to fail when you had done everything you could was something you could feel in your soul. Every doubt inside your head was confirmed in that one letter, because you knew someday you wouldn’t be able to keep up and there it was, laid out like a bleeding injury on a white test page.

“I’m available after school this Thursday for retakes,” Mr. Grunyan said. I was young and there were retakes still, but even if no one else knew, even if my parents didn’t ask – although I knew they would – Mr. Grunyan and I would know.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Jon said on the bus ride home, and it wasn’t for him. He’d come home with bad grades, not to mention bruises from fighting and dirty clothes and once he had brought home a note from a teacher because he’d cursed in class. But in the second grade, I had asked my teacher for chocolate milk instead of white milk once and she’d called my mom to verify that it was okay; I’d been punished for three weeks. I wasn’t allowed snacks or to watch TV because “good girls don’t ask questions. Good girls behave and do what they’re told.” It was about milk, but I had upset the process. I had tried to think for myself.