Pushing Perfect

by Michelle Falkoff

  We went back to talking some more about what colleges I was planning on applying to, and how things were going at school, which was easier than thinking about my whole skin thing. I supposed I really did feel better having told her, though—she didn’t seem shocked or grossed out or any of the things I was worried about, though she hadn’t actually seen the horror for herself.

  “I hope you’re going to celebrate tonight,” she said. “You’ve worked really hard for this.”

  “I’m going over to a friend’s house,” I said.

  “Have a great time. You deserve it.”

  “Thanks again,” I said. “For everything. See you in class next week.”

  “Count on it,” she said, with a wink.

  Next stop was Alex’s, but first I texted Mom. Made it through this time. Feeling optimistic. See you at home tonight.

  Alex’s mom answered the door when I arrived. “She’s been holed up in there all day. Get her to stop looking at all those screens, would you? She’s going to need to change her contacts prescription again if she keeps this up.”

  I knocked on Alex’s door and she called for me to come in. Her mom was right; all three screens were on, and they were covered with images of green tables with a mixture of people and animals sitting around them, cards and chips on the table. “Gimme a few minutes,” she said, and I watched as she clicked furiously, moving from screen to screen.

  “Which one is you?” I pointed at the players, not seeing the boy avatar she’d shown me before.

  “Bottom center,” she said without looking away.

  I laughed when I saw that she’d changed her avatar to a scanned-in picture of a screaming baby with a Mohawk. My phone buzzed. I figured it was Mom texting me back, but when I looked down, I saw three new messages from a blocked number. Odd.

  I opened the messages and realized they were all photos. The first was a picture of Raj and me from that fancy party. It looked like we were talking. How could anyone have even taken pictures, with all that smoke? Then I remembered the flashes of light, the dust in the air that looked almost like glitter. I’d thought they were strobe lights, but maybe they weren’t.

  My heart started to pound. I guessed the Novalert was wearing off.

  I scrolled down to the next picture. Raj was holding the baggie of Novalert.

  Uh-oh.

  And then the final picture. Me, with money in my hand. This wasn’t good.

  My phone buzzed again.

  Want me to erase these?

  I’ll need a favor. Or two.

  11.

  This can’t be real, I thought. I looked at the pictures again and tried to clear my head. I must have been having a negative reaction to the Novalert. Maybe there was a side effect Alex hadn’t mentioned: paranoid hallucination. I closed my eyes as tight as I could and then opened them again, sure that the pictures would be gone.

  They weren’t.

  I had the strangest feeling—my stomach wanted to churn, and my head wanted to pound, and my heart wanted to thump, but I still had some Novalert in my system. I wanted to panic, but physically, I couldn’t.

  My rational self could, though. Strange how I’d taken Novalert to keep irrational anxiety away, and now it was making it hard for me to freak out when I legitimately had something to freak out about. I’d spent so much time imagining all the downsides of taking Novalert—having a bad reaction, liking it too much, finding out that it didn’t work and passing out in the SAT again, even getting caught buying it—but once I’d actually tried it and then gotten some myself, I’d thought the danger had passed.

  It hadn’t.

  Now I had to think about a whole other set of terrible options, including the possibility of getting arrested. If the idea of people seeing my skin was the worst thing I could imagine, then the thoughts swirling around my head now were the second worst, and getting close to catching up.

  “Your phone’s blowing up over there,” Alex said. “Just give me a minute. I’m almost done.”

  “Just my mom checking in,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. I didn’t know what to do, but my first instinct was to keep the pictures a secret. Apparently that was always my first instinct. Which didn’t necessarily make it a good one.

  After a couple of minutes of me silently spiraling, Alex turned around in her chair. “Finished!”

  “Did you win?” I asked.

  “Did I win?” She snorted. “Please.”

  I couldn’t imagine ever sounding as confident as Alex did. And I couldn’t imagine her getting into this kind of mess. She could handle anything—she had lots of secret lives, but I got the sense that she kept her secrets to make herself feel powerful. My secrets did the opposite.

  “So how did it go? Did the Novalert help?”

  “It went great,” I said, relaxing even as I said the words. The test was what was important, after all. I decided not to think about the pictures right now, though in my mind they were all I could see. “It was like the polar opposite of last time. I was focused and calm and everything made sense. And I didn’t pass out.”

  “That’s a win,” she said. “Want to let loose tonight? There’s another one of those crazy parties. The boys are going. And Raj asked specifically if I’d bring you. I think he’s actually into you, which is just so great. You guys would be perfect for each other.”

  “I told you, he’s not my type.” Except he totally was. He was smart and funny and sweet and so, so cute. Except for the whole drug thing, which I had to keep reminding myself was a very good reason to stay away. Still, I’d found myself thinking about him a lot, no matter how much I tried not to. And now I had another reason to think about him—he was in those pictures with me, after all. I wondered whether I should tell him or whether that would just make him as panicked as I was.

  Or maybe he already knew.

  He couldn’t have taken them, obviously, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t set me up. I felt my brain spinning again, but the Novalert in my system kept shutting down my body’s desire to react.

  “I think you’re being ridiculous,” Alex said, oblivious to my internal freakout. “You guys totally get along, and I know you think he’s hot. You could have a little fling and see how it goes, just for fun.”

  “I can’t get past the drug thing,” I said.

  “You got past it with me,” she said.

  I stared at her.

  “I’m the one who told you about it in the first place. And I gave you some, and I think we both know I didn’t get it from the doctor. But we’re still friends. Why hold the fact that Raj hooked you up against him? Besides, maybe he’s got good reasons for doing it, just like you had a good reason for taking it.”

  She didn’t have to say that I was just as guilty as Raj; her tone and the photos I’d just received did the job. “I see what you’re saying. But I just can’t right now.”

  “Someone else, then,” she said. “There are going to be a ton of cute guys at this party.”

  “Not tonight. Tonight I’m staying in.”

  “All right, I’ll stop pushing. I don’t know what you’re waiting for, though.”

  “College,” I said.

  “You’re waiting for college to date?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  I couldn’t help it—my brain went right to that last night out with Becca and Isabel, the house they’d dragged me to, and how awful it was. Sometimes I felt like I spent more energy trying to block it out than it would take to just think about it for even a minute. But I still didn’t want to. “In college the guys will be more like me. Everyone will. I can start over. I’ve screwed up so many things here, and spent so much time thinking about what other people want from me. In college I’ll figure out what I want for myself.”

  “What did you screw up? And what exactly do you think is going to be different?”

  It was hard to explain. “I won’t have to deal with my parents, o
r this school and all the crazy pressure. I’ll be able to relax.”

  “That’s about way more than just the guys,” she said. “That pretty much covers everything. Are you really waiting for college for everything?”

  “Maybe.” I hadn’t really thought about it that way before.

  “Kind of sounds like it. Look, I don’t know what you think is going to magically happen when you get to Harvard or wherever you end up, but I can tell you this much: those schools are full of kids just like us. And when you get there, you’re still going to be you. Why not just live now?”

  It was a fair question. But living now hadn’t exactly made things better for me. I’d thought I was having fun at that party she’d taken me to, and look how that was turning out. “I’ll think about it, I promise,” I said. “But tonight I’m staying in because I’m wiped out from the SAT, not because I don’t want to have fun. I’ll go to the next thing, I promise.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that. I’ve got energy to burn, though, so I’m still going. Help me pick out an outfit?”

  That much I could do.

  My parents were still at work when I got home, no surprise there, but I was glad—I wanted to be alone. I needed to think. I needed to treat this like a logic problem and reason it out. I went up to my desk and got out a notebook and pen—I didn’t want anything on the computer, where someone could find it.

  The first thing I did whenever I started a new logic problem was to make separate lists for all the categories. I arranged the clues by category, and then I started to unpack them. A clue might seem to be about one thing, but it could unlock the secret to something else.

  First list: Who knew about me and Raj and the Novalert? That was easy: me, Raj, Alex, and whoever took the pictures. Unless that was Alex, but she would have had to ditch Bryan. Or else Bryan would have to have been with her. That was all too convoluted, not to mention that Alex just didn’t make sense as an option. Which meant the person who took the pictures was someone at the party.

  Second list: Who was at the party? That one was harder. There were a ton of kids there, and I didn’t know all of them—some of them didn’t seem to be from my school, and some of them I just hadn’t met. So I made a list of everyone I knew: Raj, Alex, Justin, Bryan, Isabel, and some other kids I recognized.

  Third list: Who would want to blackmail me? I stared at the page for a while. I had no idea. But maybe I’d phrased the issue wrong. Who would want to hurt me? I knew I was kind of naive, but I still couldn’t imagine who’d fall in that category. I had to try again.

  Who had I hurt?

  This list, unfortunately, was a little easier to start. I’d hurt Becca and Isabel. Sure, they’d hurt me too, but they’d hurt me through honesty, and I’d hurt them by lying. That was worse.

  The doorbell rang before I could make myself even more miserable. I checked my phone—no one had called, and it was already after eight and dark outside. Who would come over at this hour? Could it be Blocked Sender?

  I ran downstairs and looked out the windows that ran along each side of the door. Pacing on my doorstep was Raj, wearing the same suit he’d worn to the last fancy party and holding a big paper bag. I opened the door.

  “Surprise!” he said.

  “No kidding. What are you doing here?” I tried to sound more curious than rude, but he’d kind of scared me. Or I’d scared myself, thinking Blocked Sender would just come here.

  Unless Raj was Blocked Sender.

  It was possible, if he’d had someone else take the pictures. But he was just as implicated as I was, if not more—he’d have to really trust the person he was working with. I couldn’t imagine him taking that kind of risk; he wasn’t stupid, after all. Still, I’d have to be careful, just in case.

  “Alex told me she hadn’t managed to convince you to come to the party. I’d been counting on seeing you.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “Did I hear you say ‘Come in’? I’d be happy to.” He walked past me into the living room. “Lovely place you’ve got here. Very . . . beige.”

  That was accurate. The living room was basically all beige, with gold accents on the coffee table and throw pillows and gold frames on the pictures hanging on the walls. “It’s just this room,” I said, not sure whether he was being judgmental. And not sure what to think about him basically barging into my house. Though it was nice to have been interrupted from making that list.

  “Tasteful,” he said. “You should see my house—colors everywhere. It’s dizzying, really. Can I sit? I need to empty this out.” He gestured to the bag.

  “Um, sure.” I sat in an armchair and left him the couch. No need to encourage the flirting by sitting too close.

  He reached into the bag; I heard a clinking noise, and then he pulled out two bottles of soda. “Ginger ale. Reed’s extra spicy.” Fancy soda—no Quik-Stop cans here. “You were drinking ginger ale at the party, weren’t you?”

  “You remember that?”

  “I’ve been paying attention,” he said, and dipped his hand back into the bag, emerging with a handful of candy bars I’d never seen before. “I trust you like chocolate?”

  “You are correct. But what are those?”

  “I’m here to introduce you to the wonders of British chocolate. Cadbury, in particular.”

  “We have Cadbury here.”

  “Not anymore, you don’t. Hershey has banned it. You have but a poor imitation in a Cadbury wrapper. Trust me when I tell you it’s not remotely the same.”

  I looked at the candy bars. They all had names like Flake and Wispa. “What’s the difference between all of these?”

  “Mostly texture,” he said. “Flake is kind of hard to describe—it’s like they took one long super-thin layer of chocolate and then kind of rolled it up and smooshed it together. Wispa is airier, like someone took a regular chocolate bar and then hollowed some of it out. The texture is almost like a malt ball in the middle, but it still tastes like chocolate. And Wispa Gold is the same thing but with caramel too.”

  They all sounded weird but also mostly wonderful. “What’s your favorite?”

  “I like Flake bars myself,” he said. “The process for making them is a secret, kind of like the formula for Coke. Very mysterious and appealing.”

  He made it all sound so sexy and romantic. Which was totally not how I wanted to be thinking about him. I opened up the Flake bar and took a bite. He was right about it having an unusual texture; little pieces of it literally flaked off as I sank my teeth into it. “This is really good.”

  “Try the Wispa,” he said. “Same chocolate, but a very different experience.”

  I peeled off the wrapper and tried it. Right again—it was gritty, and the inside of it once I’d taken a bite looked like coral.

  “You like it?”

  “I think I like the Flake better.”

  “Is that why you saved some for later?” Raj tapped his upper lip, and I licked mine to find a crumb of the Flake bar there. So embarrassing. Except Raj hadn’t taken his eyes off me the whole time. Maybe Alex was right; maybe he really was into me. For a second my heart jumped at the idea of it—apparently the Novalert had finally worn off—but then I remembered the things that kept me away. The things about him, and the things about me.

  “Wispa Gold now,” he said.

  “I’ll pass on that one,” I said. “Too much going on. I like things simple. Plain.”

  “Unadulterated, you mean. Plain sounds boring, and I don’t think you’re boring.”

  “You don’t know me that well, though,” I said. “Maybe you’re giving me too much credit.”

  “I don’t think so. I like to think I’m a pretty good judge of character.”

  I felt my face turning red under the makeup. I hoped he couldn’t see. “This is all very nice, but I don’t understand—”

  “What I’m doing here?” He smiled. “We’re celebrating. I’d hoped to celebrate at the party, but you’re not at the party. You’re he
re, so we’re celebrating here. Alex told me about the SAT.”

  I was flattered that he’d given it—me—this much thought. I didn’t know what to say. “Thanks. I feel bad that you left the party, though.”

  “Don’t. Those parties get old quick. It was all lovely and novel when it started, but now it’s just an excuse for the ladies to buy formalwear. I keep suggesting they spice things up a bit, maybe have themes or secret passcodes or something more than just fancy drinks and fancy DJs and the like, but so far I’ve not been very convincing, I’m afraid.”

  I thought about Alex’s Closet of Wonders. He was probably right about the clothes, at least. I held up my bottle and tilted it toward his. “Well, cheers.”

  We clinked bottles and I took a sip of the ginger ale—I’d never tried that kind before, and I was surprised to find that it burned my mouth a little. It was like I finally understood what ginger ale was supposed to taste like. “You were right about the spicy,” I said.

  “Good, isn’t it? Let’s see if it goes with the chocolate.”

  It didn’t, really. Raj made a face. “Should have taste tested that one.”

  I took another drink. “It’s not that bad. It gets better after the first sip.”

  “So you weren’t crazy about it at first, but then you got used to it? Kind of an acquired taste?”

  He wasn’t the most subtle. And he’d gotten it all wrong. I decided to ignore it. “Thanks for the Novalert,” I said. “It really did help.” Which was true, at least with respect to the test. No need to get into anything else.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. “Did you have any problems? Any side effects? They’re not usually too bad, but it’s worth being aware.”

  “You sound like a doctor.”

  “I get that from my parents,” he said. “Along with the prescription pads, of course.”

  That explained some things, at least. “You seem to know a lot about this stuff. Have you been taking it long?”

  “Oh, I’ve never tried it,” he said.

  “No mixing business with pleasure, is that it?”

  “I wouldn’t really call this business. I just help my friends out on occasion.” He looked over at me; I was trying to hide my skepticism, but apparently I wasn’t doing a very good job. “I’m not some nefarious underworld figure, trying to hook all the children on drugs so they’ll be in hock to me forever. Is that what you thought?”