Pushing Perfect

by Michelle Falkoff

  “What changed?” I asked.

  “We became friends,” he said. “I didn’t confide in her right away, not during the externship, but when it was over we got to talking about our personal lives. She’d just gone through a really horrifyingly messy divorce, and I was in love—it was all I could talk about.”

  “You told her about me?” Justin practically jumped out of the booth, but Raj held him back.

  “Not right away,” Mark said. “She just knew there was someone; she didn’t know who. But time passed, and you and I were still together, and she and I had become so close—I knew all about her ex, and problems she was having with her family. Her grandmother had raised her but now she was sick, in a nursing home, and Samantha was going to have to start paying for it when Medicare ran out. Her ex was supposed to be sending her checks but he’d stopped, and there was a whole bunch of drama with her mother about selling her grandmother’s house.”

  I looked over at Alex, and she gave me a little nod. We’d found the right Nora Sinclair, then.

  “And she was so frustrated with the school system, how little the teachers were paid in relation to how much money there was in the community. She was so open and honest with me, even her issues with the school, with students, that it didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t safe to be open and honest with her. About anything.”

  “So much for keeping things secret,” Justin said.

  “Obviously that was a mistake, in hindsight. But it didn’t seem like it at the time. At the time she was a perfect confidante—she was sympathetic and helpful. We stayed in touch after fall semester when my externship ended, and she wrote me the recommendation that got me my current teaching job. She was basically the best friend I could imagine.”

  “Because she was imaginary,” I said, starting to understand. “None of it was real.” Ms. Davenport had made Mark think they were friends, and he’d poured his heart out to her. Just like she’d made me think she was just trying to be a good teacher and counselor for the rest of us, convincing us—convincing me—to tell her things I wouldn’t have told anyone else.

  It was all a lie.

  “Well, maybe some of it was real,” Mark said. “I think the stuff about her mother and her ex-husband was. And her money troubles, and how frustrated she was getting with school. The best liars keep their falsehoods to a minimum; it makes them more convincing. And she was probably the best liar I’d ever met.”

  “When did you figure it out?” Raj asked.

  “Not for a while. I don’t know whether she’d had plans all along, or whether she finally just lost it when her grandmother’s Medicare ran out and she started missing mortgage payments on her grandmother’s house to pay the nursing home bill. Either way, she called me one day and said she had an idea for how to make things better and she needed my help. She was my friend—I’d have done anything to help her. Or so I thought.”

  “She told you everything?” I asked, getting excited. Now maybe we’d really have something we could use.

  Mark gave a harsh laugh. Almost not really a laugh at all. “Hardly. I just got the barest outline. She had a scheme, she said, and the less I knew the better. The spoiled students would support her, she said, and they’d get what they deserved.”

  I was having trouble reconciling the bitter woman Mark was describing with the teacher who’d helped me so much. The person who helped Mark with his career, mentored him, guided him—that person I recognized. But this one?

  “I told her I thought she was being too harsh. The students I’d met at Marbella were great—thoughtful and focused on their work, not too mean to someone who was a sub as far as they were concerned. ‘Sure, you like them,’ she said. ‘You’re sleeping with one of them.’ I hadn’t expected that. She’d always been so cool and understanding about Justin before. She sounded like a different person, someone I didn’t really want to know. ‘Whatever your plan is, I’m not interested,’ I told her. ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said.”

  “That sounds kind of terrifying,” Alex said. She sounded less cold and more forgiving toward him than she had toward Justin.

  “It was,” Mark said. “I told her I understood she was going through hard times, but it wasn’t the students’ fault. And she could call me if she wanted to talk, if she’d stop whatever she was planning. All she said was that she’d see me around, and that was the last time we ever hung out.”

  “But that’s not the end of the story,” Justin said. He didn’t sound any warmer than he had before. I wondered whether it was that he didn’t believe him or that it didn’t matter what Mark said.

  “I didn’t hear from her for a long time.” Mark was deep into the story now, and he seemed to get that this wasn’t only about Justin anymore. “I hoped that meant she’d dropped whatever it was she’d been planning, but I knew her well enough to know she didn’t just drop things. I figured radio silence meant she wasn’t going to include me in it, which was exactly what I wanted. I missed my friend, but that’s how things go sometimes. Sometimes we lose friends, and we miss them, but we have no way to get them back.”

  I hoped that wasn’t true.

  “Samantha called me a few months after I told her not to,” Mark said. “She told me her plan was off to a good start but she needed some help. I reminded her that I wasn’t interested, but she said that wasn’t an option. And then she reminded me of everything she knew about me and Justin. I’d had no idea she was willing to sink that low. She told me she’d done some research into California’s statutory rape laws, and I knew I’d do whatever she said.”

  “To protect yourself,” Justin said.

  “Yes, to protect myself,” Mark said. “And you—I didn’t want you to get involved in a scandal, but yes, I also didn’t want to go to jail. It’s a pretty big risk I take, being with you, and I’d rather still be with you than be an unemployed registered sex offender when they let me out of prison. Does that make me such a horrible person?”

  Justin didn’t say anything to that, just drank his coffee and avoided eye contact with Mark.

  The waitress came over with the food and unloaded big platters in front of us. We all stared at them. Our anger-fueled hunger had faded; I knew I couldn’t manage a bite of the pancakes I’d ordered.

  “Anyway, I didn’t see what else I could do but what she said. I told her everything I knew about everyone I’d heard about.”

  “Including me,” Alex said.

  “Justin talked about you all the time,” Mark said. “You sounded so fascinating—I was dying to meet you, when the time was right. But Samantha became obsessed with you once I told her about the money. I might have pushed Justin for more about you in particular, and I’m sorry about that.”

  So it was Justin’s fault that Ms. Davenport had gone after Alex, but not for the reasons Alex had thought. I wondered whether that would make a difference to her. Justin clearly didn’t care, though. “You don’t seem to feel too bad about setting me up. She made me tell her about all the other kids at the high school.”

  “I didn’t know what she was going to do,” he said. “And I did it for you. Maybe if you’d told me what she was asking, I could have done something, but you never did. Even when you got that stupid Walmart job, and I was sure it was because of her, you never told me why. Just said you were trying to get in character, some method acting kind of thing.”

  I almost laughed. That wasn’t a bad story.

  “That’s everything I’ve got, okay?” He turned to face Justin. “Can we go somewhere and talk now, please? Can we not hash out our whole relationship in front of your friends?”

  Justin finished his coffee with a slurp. “I have some thinking to do,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  “So I’m dismissed, then,” Mark said.

  This time I couldn’t help it—I giggled at the irony of a teacher saying that to a bunch of students. I immediately regretted it, though, when I saw how sad Mark was. “Before you go, do you have any ideas about what we shoul
d do now?” I asked. He was an adult, after all. Maybe he’d come up with something better than we could.

  “I don’t really know what you can do,” he said. “I tried to think of ways out myself—she’s smart enough to know she’s walking a real tightrope here, and I’d thought it would be easy to push her off. But then I went through the options, and they all involved getting myself in trouble too. I’m not sure how much she even cares about getting caught; if she got arrested she’d be off the hook for the bills, and there’s always a chance she could turn on all of you to get a lighter sentence. You guys care a lot more about your futures than she does.”

  He made it sound so hopeless, and I said so.

  “I wish it weren’t the case, but I think that’s where we are,” he said. “Justin, I hope when the dust settles we can talk. We went through a lot to be together—don’t let Samantha ruin it.” He waited to see if Justin would say anything, but when there was nothing but crickets, he left.

  “You sure you don’t want to go after him?” Raj asked, ever the romantic.

  “He can wait,” Justin said. “It’s more important for us to talk about what’s next.”

  Alex got out her phone and pulled up a still of Ms. Davenport and Mark and the pills. It was a pretty good picture, really—Mark’s face was in shadow, but Ms. Davenport’s was clear as day, and the streetlights glinted off the orange bottle. “We’ve got her, and she’s got us,” she said. “So what do we do now?”

  25.

  I knew what I wanted to do now, which was to have a complete meltdown. But I wasn’t about to do it in front of everyone. I excused myself and went to the restroom.

  I almost turned around and walked out as soon as I opened the door. The ladies’ room had three stalls, all with broken locks, and two were clogged. I got that this wasn’t the most popular place, but did they not even think it was worth cleaning the bathrooms at all? It made me furious.

  Except of course that wasn’t why I was furious. I wanted to scream or run or hit something, but if I punched the concrete bathroom wall I’d probably break my hand, and someone had already taken a shot at the paper towel holder—its metal had a fist-shaped dent in it. I had so much anger and nowhere to put it, and it made me so frustrated that I finally started crying.

  I hated crying.

  It wasn’t just the snot and the sniffles and the smeared makeup that I’d have to fix before I went back out to the group; it was the embarrassment of knowing that something had broken me. Or, in this case, someone.

  Ms. Davenport was everyone’s favorite teacher. She was so young, so supportive, so good at explaining even the hardest concepts. She’d been counseling me ever since freshman year. She was the only teacher I’d ever exchanged cell phone numbers with. I’d told her about my skin, about my panic attacks. I’d told her everything.

  And what I hadn’t told her, Justin had.

  She was Blocked Sender.

  I choked back another sob. How could she do this to me? I’d trusted her. She was an adult; she was one of the people who were supposed to be looking after us. And I wanted her to pay.

  The door opened behind me, slowly. I was still facing the dented paper towel holder, so I grabbed a towel and dotted my face with it before I turned around, hoping my waterproof foundation had held up.

  It was Alex, of course.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. She hesitated before taking another step toward me, then stretched out her arms as if to give me a hug.

  I pulled back a little. “I’ll manage,” I said. “This all just kind of threw me.”

  “Kind of?” She moved back too, but I couldn’t tell if she was hurt. “That’s quite an understatement. But I know you guys are close, so I get that this would hit you pretty hard.”

  “Were close,” I said. “That’s over now. I want to take her down.”

  “I know you do. We all do. You ready to come back and talk about it?”

  I looked in the mirror. My mascara had run but I fixed it quickly; otherwise, I needed one more blot with those horrible stiff brown paper towels and I’d be good to go. “Okay,” I said.

  When we got back to the table, I didn’t waste any time. “I really think we should go to the police,” I said.

  “I thought we agreed—” Justin said.

  “Hear me out. It was one thing when we thought we were dealing with another high school kid. We’d all be in the same boat; some of us did worse things than others”—I avoided looking at Raj—“but basically we’re in a similar position, and we’re all minors, right?”

  They nodded. “Cutting it pretty close, though,” Raj said. “My birthday is coming up soon. Don’t forget it!” He didn’t have his usual jokey energy, though. It was getting late, and we were all kind of exhausted.

  “Mine’s coming up too,” I said. “But that’s not the point. Ms. Davenport is an adult. And not just any adult—she’s a teacher, one of the people responsible for helping us grow up, and yet she’s put us in this horrible position. She’s magnified the things we did wrong and taken advantage of us being young and weak compared to her. I don’t want to have to admit everything, and it will probably ruin my life, but maybe if we go in together we can get some kind of deal, and then we can be sure her life will be ruined worse.” I didn’t know if it was necessarily the best idea—I’d lose everything I’d ever wanted, after all—but I didn’t know what else to do. Besides, there wasn’t much chance they’d go for it, anyway.

  “No offense, Kara, but that sounds more like revenge than justice,” Alex said. “We have no idea how many people she has dirt on. If she decides to trade her story for something on everyone, wouldn’t the police be better off nailing a big group of us, rather than her?”

  “I’m with Alex,” Justin said. “Believe me, we’re talking about a sizeable crowd here. I think the cops would go for numbers over just one person, even if she is the ringleader.”

  I hadn’t thought this through. I always prided myself on being logical—Alex’s saying I was methodical was the best compliment I’d ever gotten—but being logical and being methodical weren’t always the same thing, and I was learning that sometimes I sacrificed one at the expense of the other. What was logical for me might not work for other people. And sometimes I got my logic wrong.

  “What if we came up with another strategy?” I asked. “We could call in an anonymous tip. One of those Crimestoppers-type things.”

  “Doesn’t solve the problem,” Justin said. “She could still use us as leverage for a better deal.”

  “We need to be completely on top of who knows. Telling the police means we have no control over how they might use what we’ve learned,” Raj said. “That’s a recipe for all of us landing in jail.”

  We kept throwing around ideas. I knew they’d reject anything that involved the police, but I appreciated that they were at least willing to talk it out. For a minute I sat back and watched while Alex and Raj debated the pros and cons of telling our parents, and Alex and Justin even managed to talk to each other without getting into an argument. Even as we were fighting about strategy, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time, at least not like this: I belonged. These were my friends. It was a strange time to acknowledge it, but in the moment, that’s how it felt.

  I remembered having a similar feeling back when I was hanging out with Becca and Isabel. We’d be in Becca’s room, fighting over what we should do over the weekend or which boys were the cutest, and in the midst of all the yelling, I’d feel this sense of warmth, this security in the knowledge that these were my friends, that we could argue and disagree and still have each other’s backs. It hadn’t turned out to be true, but that was at least partly my fault. I found myself wishing Isabel were here and remembered that I was supposed to tell her what happened, but it was really late. I’d call her in the morning, or find her at school.

  It was after midnight when Raj suggested an elaborate scheme involving burner cell phones and counterblackmail attempts, with packages of
documentary evidence ready to send to newspapers if Ms. Davenport didn’t do our bidding.

  “You’ve been watching too much TV,” I said. “I don’t think we’re going to figure this out tonight. Why don’t we all go home and get some sleep and think about it tomorrow, and we can meet up later on and decide what to do? There’s got to be something better than what we’ve come up with so far, and right now, none of us have any tasks scheduled for Blocked— I mean Ms. Davenport.” Hard to get used to saying her name in this context.

  We agreed it was time to go. I dropped Alex off last. “We have a lot more information than we had yesterday,” I said. “Do you think it might be worth doing more research? I could come over after school and help.”

  “It’s worth trying,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  It had been a bizarre and terrible day, but now it was finally over. Or so I thought.

  Mom and Dad were sitting in the living room when I came home. “Glad you decided to join us,” Dad said.

  Uh-oh—Dad sarcasm was always a bad sign.

  “We called you several times,” Mom said. “We texted, too. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I was studying, so I shut off my ringer. I’m exhausted, though.” I faked as big a yawn as I could manage, complete with the over-the-head arm stretching. “Can we talk tomorrow?”

  “We’re all here now,” Mom said. “Though we would have preferred to be sleeping. Do you realize what time it is?”

  “I don’t, actually. I kind of lost track of time.”

  “It’s nearly one in the morning,” Dad said. “You’re being very cavalier. I know we’ve never given you a curfew, but I didn’t think we needed to.”