Pushing Perfect

by Michelle Falkoff

  “Don’t bring me into this,” I said. I didn’t want to fight with friends even over little stupid things. You never knew when those small arguments could turn into bigger problems before you’d realized it was happening.

  We sat in silence for a while, watching the video.

  Until.

  “Check it out.” I pointed to the screen, where a dark figure had entered the frame. The person was wearing all black clothes and a black baseball hat, kind of like the outfit I’d worn to Walmart. It wasn’t clear right away whether it was a boy or a girl, let alone who the person actually was. The figure walked right up to Dickens and, head still bowed, pulled back the copy of Edwin Drood, and reached for the pills.

  “This is a disaster,” I said. “All this work and we’re not going to be able to tell who it is.”

  “Patience,” Alex said. “This is definitely someone who’s trying to be stealthy, but they don’t seem to know there’s a camera—they’re not avoiding it specifically. We just need to wait.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but I kept watching anyway. The person looked at the bottle of pills, then opened it and took one out to inspect it. The person put the pill back and replaced the lid on the bottle, then straightened up. We couldn’t see the whole face, but we could see the bottom half, and a slight smile.

  “Well, that’s not going to be enough,” Raj said.

  “Actually,” I said, my voice cracking, “it is.”

  I knew that face.

  “That’s Isabel,” I said.

  “The one who’s in all the plays with Justin?” Alex asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “She was on your list.”

  “What list?” Raj asked.

  “Early on, we tried thinking about who might be involved,” I said.

  “How did you come up with her?”

  “We used to be friends. A while back.”

  Alex started singing the Veronica Mars theme, that old Dandy Warhols song.

  “Now is not the time, Alex,” Raj said.

  She stopped singing. “She knows Justin. There could be a connection there.”

  “Like they could be Blocked Sender together?” I asked. “I thought we wrote him off.”

  “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have. They could be working as a team. We’ve been assuming this was one person, but maybe it isn’t.”

  “Do you really think Justin would do that? To you, especially?” Raj asked.

  Alex looked uncomfortable. She’d had the same expression on her face when we’d first realized Justin was involved. And there were all those cryptic comments she’d made about how well she knew him. Alex and Justin clearly had more of a history than I knew. But why wouldn’t she have just told me? “I don’t know about the whole Justin thing,” I said, “but Isabel and I are not on good terms. I can’t imagine her being Blocked Sender, but maybe she knows who is. I have to talk to her.”

  “I don’t think ambushing her is such a good idea,” Raj said. “It didn’t work so well with Justin.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do, then?” I asked.

  “I say we keep playing detective,” Alex said. “If she’s not Blocked Sender, then she’s got to be bringing the pills to someone. We should follow her and see where she goes.”

  “That’s crazy. We have no idea when she would do it, and we can’t just tail her every day. I need to confront her.”

  “What are you going to do, just wait for her outside rehearsal and start screaming? It’s not the best strategy.”

  Alex was right. I had to make a plan. “Can we get screen shots from that video?”

  She nodded, smiling. “Of course. That’s a good start.” She turned to the computer and started going through the video, clicking away.

  “Should we go talk to her together?” Raj asked. “Like we did with Justin?”

  “That didn’t go so great. I should do this alone.” Besides, I wasn’t sure what she would say, and not just about Blocked Sender. I was better off on my own.

  He looked at his watch. “You guys can handle things from here? I have to get home.”

  “No problem,” Alex said. “You go. We’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  Raj left as Alex was putting together an online folder of pictures. We’d stopped watching as soon as I recognized Isabel, but the camera had still been playing, and there were some great shots that made it very clear who we were looking at. Alex had arranged the screen shots like a narrative: Isabel coming up to the bookshelf, getting the pills, inspecting one, putting the bottle in her pocket, checking to make sure no one was watching her, and then heading out. The story was pretty clear, at least to me.

  “I’m emailing these to you. Do you want the video too?”

  “This should be enough.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  That I hadn’t thought through yet. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s worth thinking about,” she said. “I should have strategized better when you told me about Justin, but there wasn’t enough time.”

  “You did seem really surprised about him,” I said. “And maybe I was reading things wrong, but . . . you seemed pretty angry, too. I mean, we’re all pissed off about everything, but it felt different with you guys.”

  “It was. We’ve known each other for a long time.” She paused, and I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.

  I guess we all still had our secrets.

  19.

  I decided I’d wait for Isabel after rehearsal the next day and find her before she left. She’d be exhausted, I was sure, and maybe it would be better to catch her off guard. I wasn’t optimistic that it would be easy to get her to open up to me; it had been so long since we’d talked. I didn’t know how long rehearsal would go, though, so I sat on the linoleum floor outside the entrance to the auditorium and waited. Which gave me a little too much time to think. And of course, since I was waiting for Isabel, I thought about her and Becca. Mostly Becca, though.

  After I’d ditched swim tryouts freshman year and Isabel and Becca had started sitting with their new friends at lunch, I’d worried that I’d ruined everything. And for a while, it seemed like I had; though I’d called Becca a bunch of times to apologize, she was really mad. I pulled Isabel aside and asked what she thought I should do, but she said, “Just give her some time,” and so I did. I stopped calling every day and settled for sending text messages every so often, and I stuck to my lonely lunches with the Brain Trust.

  Finally, after a couple of weeks, I decided I needed to do something more drastic. I wasn’t about to let things end this way. So I showed up at Becca’s house when I knew her parents were out and she was home, gathered my courage, and knocked on the door.

  I wasn’t sure if she would answer, but she did. She opened the door and just looked at me. “Hi,” I said. Now that my plan had worked, I realized I didn’t actually have much of what I wanted to say figured out.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  She just turned around and went back in the house, but she hadn’t closed the door on me, so I figured I was supposed to follow her. She went back to her room and sat on one of her armchairs; it felt weird to sit in my normal spot, so I took Isabel’s usual place on the loveseat.

  “I’m really sorry about tryouts,” I said.

  She stayed silent, waiting for me to say something else. Something that would explain, that would make everything make sense.

  I had no idea what that was. Other than the truth, which somehow was wrong. I couldn’t make her understand how awful my skin problem made me feel, how I left the house every day terrified that something would happen and everyone would find out. If I told her that was the reason I couldn’t swim anymore, I worried she’d think it was petty. And maybe it was. But not to me.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you I didn’t want to try out,” I said. “Classes are already really hard, and swim team is superintense. I was afraid I wouldn’t have
enough time to study, and I don’t love swimming like you do. I’d have to work twice as hard as everyone else if I even made the team, and I didn’t think I could do both.”

  “I understand that,” she said, but her voice was hard. “I understand a lot of things.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t tell me. Why you’ve been hiding so many things. We’ve been friends for how many years now? Why didn’t you just say something? I was worried about you.”

  “You were?” I’d been so fixated on her being mad that it hadn’t occurred to me. And what else did she think I was hiding?

  “I thought something happened. I thought maybe you got into a car accident. It never for one hot second occurred to me that you would just blow off tryouts and not tell me. Do you have any idea how much that hurt, when I realized it? I seriously considered never speaking to you again.”

  “I bet Isabel was totally on board with that.” Everything that had happened since we’d started high school only served to confirm my sense that she’d be happier being a duo with Becca.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t put me in the middle of you guys. Yes, I’ve known her longer, and I get that you and I are closer than you are with her. But I’m sick of being the one in the middle. She’s not the problem here. You are.”

  Becca had always been direct; it was something I’d always admired about her. She wasn’t mean like Isabel could be; she just said what was on her mind. I envied her for it, really. Of course, at the moment, I wished she was a little less direct. I was the problem, but hearing her say it made me feel kind of sick.

  “I get that,” I said. “Can you forgive me, though?”

  “You realize this is the second time you’ve bailed on me,” she said. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the hair.”

  I stared at the floor, which made my hair hang in front of my face. Not the best move. “I know.”

  “You knew you weren’t going to try out then, didn’t you?”

  “I wasn’t sure,” I said, but I was getting tired of lying. “I’d started worrying about school, but we hadn’t started classes yet. I didn’t know for sure until later.” It was close enough. “I’m sorry about that too. You know I am.”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said, and she finally sounded like herself again. “But we can’t keep doing this. You not being honest with me, and then being all sad and apologetic and asking me to forgive you. We never used to be like this. I don’t want high school to change us.”

  I didn’t say that it already had, or that it wasn’t just high school, or any of the things I should have said. I just said I’d never do anything like that again; if I did, I knew I wouldn’t be able to come back from it.

  And for a while, we were fine. We weren’t great, or even good, but we were fine. I went to her swim meets when I could, and we met up to go to Isabel’s shows, and once in a while the three of us went out for coffee or even hung out at Becca’s house, like in the old days. But whenever the two of them wanted to go out at night, to parties or clubs in San Francisco, which was their new thing, I begged off. I wanted to hang out with just them, but they were more interested in meeting guys, which I knew was something I should want too. I even had a crush on a guy in my math elective, a junior named Drew who was totally out of my league. The thought of actually getting together with him, or anyone else, was terrifying. What if he found out what was under my makeup? It was one thing to walk the halls looking normal; it was a whole other thing for someone to come close enough to touch my face and feel the roughness underneath the smooth illusion.

  Becca kept trying to get me to go anyway. “It’s not like you have to get with anyone,” she’d say. “We’ll have fun no matter what.”

  But I went with them once or twice, and it wasn’t fun. I’d end up sitting by myself or dancing alone while they were off with the boys they liked; even worse was when guys I didn’t know would come up and talk to me, or try to get me to dance with them. It made me anxious—not as anxious as the thought of swim tryouts, but I wasn’t interested in learning how much more anxious I’d feel if I kept doing the kinds of things they wanted to do. I didn’t want to meet just anyone; if I was going to get over my fears, it would be for Drew and no one else.

  I started to remember how things got really bad sophomore year, but before I could dive back into those memories, people started coming out of rehearsal. I stood up quickly so Isabel wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing me, turning away when I saw Justin. He’d had no interest in being involved in the plan to find out who Blocked Sender was; I had no interest in explaining why I was hanging around outside the auditorium.

  Isabel was one of the last people to leave rehearsal. She was as glamorous as ever with her short skirt and high boots, hairdresser-enhanced blond hair falling in waves around her face. She was talking animatedly with a couple of other girls; I hated interrupting, but I had no choice. She wasn’t paying attention to me at all. “Isabel,” I called out just as she passed me by.

  She stopped walking and turned around to face me. “Look who we have here,” she said.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “Do we, now?” She gave me her old up-and-down look and then sniffed, as if I hadn’t met her standards.

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to let her scare me off.

  “Do you want us to wait for you?” one of the girls asked.

  “Nah, I got this,” Isabel said. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.” She waited until they’d walked away. “What’s up, Kara?”

  I got out my phone and opened the photo stream we’d pulled from the video camera, then handed the phone to Isabel. She frowned at me but took the camera and looked at the first photo.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  She scrolled through the pictures, her frown deepening.

  “Got anything you want to tell me?” I asked.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked, sounding more scared than angry.

  “It doesn’t matter where I got the pictures,” I said. “I just want to know why they exist.”

  “Not here,” she said. “Come on.”

  I followed her into the auditorium, up a small set of stairs onto the stage. She took a left back through the curtains. They smelled musty as I walked behind her. She wound her way down a hallway lined with gray concrete blocks until she reached a door, got out a set of keys, opened the door, turned on the lights, and motioned me in.

  She’d taken me to a dressing room in the depths of the theater. The walls were completely lined with posters from shows the school had done over the years, designed to look like Broadway playbills: The Wizard of Oz, Our Town, a whole bunch of Shakespeare, and lots of shows I’d never heard of. It was the first time I’d ever felt like Marbella High had a sense of history—the school had been completely renovated before we got there, and everything was so new and shiny and high-tech that I’d forgotten it had actually been around for decades.

  Isabel locked the door behind us and then pulled two chairs close together. “All right, talk.”

  “Me? I’m here to talk about you, not me.”

  “You already know something about me, if you’ve got those pictures. How did you get them?”

  “We set up a camera in the library.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I need more from you first.”

  “Fine. I was there to pick up whatever was behind those books. Pills, apparently.”

  “I know that already,” I said. “I’m the one who put them there.”

  “Perfect Kara? With drugs? How the mighty have fallen.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said. “Just tell me who told you to get them.”

  “You want me to share my secrets with you? That’s pretty ballsy, considering you’ve never been willing to share yours.”

  “I don’t have secrets,” I said. More lying. Would it ever stop?

  “Oh, please,” she
said. “You and your little transformation?” She motioned toward my face.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not the first person who ever had to cover up a zit. You think we didn’t figure out what was going on? We were your friends. We knew everything about each other. You might not have wanted to tell us why you started letting your mom give you makeovers, but it was totally obvious.”

  “Are you kidding me?” There was no way they could have known all along. It wasn’t possible.

  “You went from makeup-is-the-devil to being able to do a contouring video in like two point five seconds. And then no swimming? Come on. It might have taken us a while to figure it out, but that’s only because you never said anything. Did you think you were too good for us when you started getting all hot? Or were we just not smart enough for you?”

  “That’s not what happened,” I said. I couldn’t believe she and Becca had known about my skin but had read everything else so wrong.

  “We tried to understand,” she said. “And we tried to keep the threesome together. But you didn’t want to do anything we wanted to do. And then you flipped out the night we went to that guy’s house and wouldn’t tell us why.”

  It was the night I’d tried so hard not to think about anymore. It had been after the disastrous PSAT, when all Isabel and Becca wanted to do was go out and party. I still wasn’t over the panic attack I’d had, and even the thought of a party made me feel the nausea and headache that signaled something was wrong. I was afraid of what would happen if we went somewhere and things got bad.

  I was right to worry.

  It wasn’t even a party, really. It was just a night at Drew’s house, and a case of beer and some drinking games. It didn’t sound so bad. Better than the clubs, anyway. Becca and Isabel both had their eyes on some of Drew’s friends, and Drew was paying attention to me in exactly the way I’d always hoped he would. The beers were gross, but I drank them, and after a couple I understood why people drank; my whole body felt looser and a little tingly. I started to relax. My breathing came easier, and I even started to think I might have fun.

  “What do we have to do to get these ladies to dance?” one of the guys shouted.