“You didn’t need to because I didn’t have any friends to go out with,” I said. “I thought you wanted me to be more social.”
“We want you to go hang out at the mall with your girl friends on a Saturday afternoon,” Mom said. “We don’t want you going who knows where all night on a Wednesday.”
“I told you, I was at Alex’s,” I said. “Studying.” Even though I was in the wrong, even though I was lying, I found myself wanting them to feel guilty. The truth was that I’d never have gotten into this mess if I hadn’t felt so much pressure, and some of that pressure came from them.
Mom frowned. “I know you’re anxious about keeping up your GPA, but we’re worried about you. The SATs are over and you did a wonderful job. Can’t you relax a little before you have to start turning your attention to college applications? You’re a lock for Stanford with that score and your grades. You’ll be fine.”
Funny how even when she was supposedly taking the pressure off she added just a little bit more. How could I explain that to get into Harvard, I needed to be better than fine? How could I make them see how badly I needed to be as far away from Marbella as possible? “I thought that’s what you wanted. Perfect Kara and her perfect GPA.”
“We never expected you to be perfect,” Dad said. “Where did you get that idea?”
“Are you kidding? You’ve been pushing me to be perfect since I was a little kid. Ever since Mom started bringing home those logic problem books, it’s been all you-can-do-better-Kara and you-just-need-to-work-a-little-harder-Kara. I wish I’d never seen one of those books in my life.” Logically, I recognized that it was not my parents I was mad at. But logic wasn’t ruling the day anymore. And I was beyond mad, and they were here.
Dad was starting to sound mad too. “Don’t talk to us like that,” he yelled. He almost looked like he wanted to stand up.
Mom didn’t seem angry, though. She put her hand on Dad’s knee as if to keep him sitting down. Her voice was quiet, all the more noticeable because of Dad’s yelling. “Evan, calm down. Kara, I’m sorry you feel that way about the logic problems. I bought those books because I thought you enjoyed working on them with me. I remember those times as some of our happiest, and I thought you felt the same way.”
Great, now I had to feel guilty on top of everything else. “I do. I’m sorry. I was upset. I get such mixed messages from you guys. You want me to study hard and be smart and do well, but you also want me to have friends and be social and not worry so much. You don’t want me to have panic attacks, but you don’t want me to take medication for them, either. You want me to go to college and be happy, but only the college you want, because the only happiness that matters is the kind that you have. And even if I’m not happy, I should act like I am so people don’t figure it out. God forbid anyone realize that we’re not perfect.” I’d been talking so fast I was out of breath.
They both stared at me for a minute, their mouths hanging open a bit. I understood why, too—I never spoke to them like that. Sure, once in a while I’d get what Mom called “a little snippy,” but I never just laid out how I was feeling.
I’d never, it turned out, been fully honest with them.
It felt great.
“I didn’t realize we’d been doing that,” Dad said. He wasn’t yelling anymore, and he’d clasped his hands together, placed his elbows on his knees, and rested his head on his hands. Mom reached over and rubbed his back. She was in her nightgown, not her work-Mom clothes or her Marbella-yoga-Mom uniform, with no makeup and her hair loose from its usual updo. She looked softer, but also older, than when I pictured her in my mind. They both did.
I hadn’t meant to make them so upset, but it was my fault. I could only imagine what learning about the Novalert would do to them. Alex, Justin, and Raj were right. The police were not an option. No one could ever find out.
“I didn’t mean it to sound so harsh. I love you guys, you know that. But sometimes it’s just kind of hard to be me around here.”
“We thought we were doing what you wanted,” Mom said, leaning back into the sofa. Almost like she was giving up. “We thought we were pushing you to do the things you wanted for yourself. If that wasn’t true, I wish you’d said something. We would have stopped. I hope you know that.”
It was all so confusing. They weren’t wrong—I did want to be valedictorian, and I did want to work hard and excel and go to a great college. Everything they wanted for me, I wanted too. But I’d thought they’d wanted it first, and they’d thought I had. Did it matter, ultimately? “It was true. It is true,” I said, finally. “I think maybe I didn’t see that before. Can we talk more about this later? I’m really, really tired. I swear I didn’t mean to stay out this late.”
“We were just worried,” Dad said.
“Are you going to give me a curfew?”
They exchanged a glance. Mom raised an eyebrow; Dad gave a little head tilt. It was fascinating—they were totally communicating and I had no idea what they were saying.
“No curfew,” Mom said. “But we want a better idea of where you are, so we want texts or notes when you’re out at night, and if you’re not going to be home by midnight, you need to check in. Fair enough?”
“Totally.” I went over to the couch and kissed them both good night, then went upstairs. I couldn’t believe I had to get up for school in just a few hours. I was going to be exhausted. School would be horrible.
But sitting through math class would be worse.
26.
Math class was at least as awful as I’d imagined it would be. At first I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. I kept my head down, staring at my desk, sure that if I made eye contact with Ms. Davenport, she’d instantly know that I knew, and something terrible would happen. I couldn’t even imagine what, but it would be bad.
But today’s class was all about prepping for winter finals, and Ms. Davenport spent most of the time writing equations on the board, equations I had to look up to see so I could write them down in my notebook. She wasn’t paying any attention to me, which meant I could pay attention to her.
She wore her usual funky outfit, a vintage checkered dress with red cowboy boots that matched her lipstick, and I thought about how hard she tried to act young and cool like a teenager, even though as I studied her face more carefully than I ever had, I could see the beginnings of lines forming. She wasn’t quite as young as I’d always assumed she was, and now her outfit looked more like a costume. Or camouflage. She was dressed to attract the outsiders, the kids with problems, the ones who were most likely to be doing things they didn’t want other people to know about.
I’d thought she was hip; now I wondered if she was just manipulative. She used her look and her position to convince kids like me she was someone we could trust, and then took that knowledge and destroyed us with it. I got angrier and angrier as I thought about what a betrayal that was. I wanted to hurt her as bad as she was hurting me. I just didn’t know how.
I glanced over at Alex, sitting on the other side of the room. She, too, was staring at the board and frowning, like I knew I was. I bet she was thinking some of the same things, though she and Ms. Davenport didn’t have the same relationship we did. She felt betrayed too, though not on the same level.
It’s not like we both hadn’t been hurt by people before; despite the fact that what had happened with Becca and Isabel was mostly my fault, I still wished things had gone differently, that they’d somehow understood me better and stuck around even as I’d made things difficult. And Alex had to deal with Justin ditching her for a guy, and then sharing all her secrets with him, even if he hadn’t known how badly that would turn out.
But neither of those things was nearly as horrible as what was happening now.
“Ugh, the whole class I just wanted to go up and punch her in her stupid face,” Alex said after class, when we were a safe distance away.
“I know. I was like two seconds from going to the bathroom and never coming back.”
“It’s killing me to just sit here and do nothing,” she said.
“There has to be more we can do,” I said. “You know, we haven’t actually researched her yet. Maybe we can find some dirt.”
“Totally,” Alex said. “There must be something we can use. Then we can get some leverage.”
“That would be helpful.” I still wasn’t convinced going to the police was a bad idea, but if we could make this go away quietly, everyone would be happy.
“We should go now,” she said, pausing outside the door to our econ class.
“Now? We have two more classes left.”
“So we’ll ditch,” she said, like it was nothing.
But to me, it wasn’t nothing. I’d never skipped a class before. My attendance record was nearly flawless. But what was the worst that could happen? Absences didn’t affect grades until you’d been out a bunch of times, and since I’d never skipped before, no one would assume I was skipping now. I could tell my teachers tomorrow that I’d gotten sick and gone home, and they would believe me. Maybe they wouldn’t even ask for a note. The fact that I’d been honest before would make me a better liar now.
“I’m in,” I said.
We went to Alex’s house and got ourselves set up, her on the big computer screens, me on my laptop. Her room now felt as much like a second home to me as Becca’s had; I no longer superimposed Becca’s love seat and chairs into Alex’s workspace every time I came over. Being around Alex, I realized, made me miss Becca less. She wasn’t a replacement; it was more that I related to what Alex had said about thinking it was enough to have Justin as her only friend. It didn’t have to be that way. I’d been holding back with Alex as if us being truly close was some kind of betrayal of Becca, but there was no need to. That wasn’t how it worked.
“Where should we start?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said. “My brain is so full of rage I can’t think. You’re going to have to do the thinking for both of us.”
I was mad too, but it was making me feel focused. Maybe I didn’t need Novalert to get things done; maybe I just needed blind fury. “Well, I’ve got one idea—remember how Mark said that Ms. Davenport went through a divorce and then had to pay for her grandmother’s nursing home and mortgage? I think Mrs. Sinclair is her grandmother. Can you get into some legal databases and find out more about the lawsuit? And the divorce?”
“Definitely,” she said.
“Great. I’ll do the social media thing again and see if there’s anything there.”
“Bonus points for whoever finds the name of her ex first?”
“Yes!” A contest! I loved contests. I had the easier job, I was sure, so this one I could win. I started with Google just to see what I could come up with and found that Ms. Davenport was all over social media; she had accounts on all the major sites. But I quickly found that her privacy settings were locked down, and I could access almost nothing but the occasional photo.
“Brick wall,” I told Alex.
“That was fast.” She was typing as quickly as ever, and all three of her screens had documents on them, some of them with numbers down the left side.
I peered closer and saw that they were from courts. She’d found the lawsuit and the divorce decree, which was from just a couple of years ago. “‘It is therefore ordered that the marriage of Jonathan and Samantha Fisher be dissolved,’” I read. “Jonathan Fisher. He’s the ex. I win!”
“How do you win? I’m the one who found that doc,” Alex protested. “And we don’t even know for sure that it’s them.”
“You might have found it, but you haven’t read it yet.”
“That is totally not how this contest works. Proof first, then the win.”
“Okay, but what should I do about the social media stuff? Can you hack into her accounts?”
She frowned. “I could, but it would take forever, and there’s got to be a better way to find out what we need to know.”
I thought about it for a minute. “I’ll look for pictures where she’s tagged. Everyone screws up their privacy stuff every once in a while, right? And then I’ll see if her ex is online too.”
“Worth a shot,” she said, and turned back to her screens.
I got back online and did a search for pictures, and I hit pay dirt fast: a whole bunch of photos from a couple of years ago and beyond, posted by her ex. And in one of them, Ms. Davenport was wearing a wedding dress.
“We found the right guy,” I said. “I win!”
“You couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t found the divorce stuff,” she said. “I’ll take the draw, though.”
As much as I liked winning, I liked how much fun it was working with her, as a team. “Okay, fine.”
“Excellent. Now let me see him.”
Alex looked over my shoulder and we went through the photos. Ms. Davenport’s husband was good-looking, though he was completely different than what I’d have expected. He had short, neatly styled brown hair and wore suits or business-casual clothes in all the photos. In a way, he kind of looked like my dad. “I’d have thought she’d be married to a hipster,” I said.
“Totally,” Alex said. “And he’s older than I thought.”
We looked at his profile, which was completely open. He was a banker who lived in San Francisco, thirty-five years old, and from what we could tell, he and Ms. Davenport had gotten married eight years ago. The big surprise, though, was seeing his most recent photos. Most of them were pictures of a baby. And not a newborn, either—the baby was a few months old.
“Whoa,” Alex said as we scrolled through his timeline. There was another wedding picture there, from just over a year ago. “So he got married less than a year after the divorce?”
“Looks that way,” I said. “And either the new wife was pregnant already or it happened pretty quick.”
“Ms. Davenport must have been furious. Unless this was some crazy whirlwind thing, this guy was cheating on her.”
“That sucks,” I said. For a minute, I tried to imagine what it might have been like, to be Ms. Davenport. To be married to a banker who clearly had a lot of money—his cover photo was of his house in San Francisco, and it was gorgeous—and then to have it all end, most likely in an awful way. With all those nursing home and mortgage payments, I bet she was broke, while her husband was living it up with a new young wife and baby. “She must be so angry. Maybe it made her crazy.”
“I’d say it’s understandable, except most people who are mad about getting divorced do things like sell their husband’s fancy cars on Craigslist for pocket change, or try to hook up with one of their husband’s friends. At least that’s what they do on TV. I don’t think they start crazy blackmail schemes.”
“I know. I’m not saying it makes sense. It’s more that she must have felt so betrayed. Someone she trusted, going behind her back like that.” I knew how she felt. Her betrayal had gutted me; ironic that the feelings of hurt and anger were helping me understand her better now.
“So she turned around and did the same thing to us? Don’t get soft on me now.”
“I’m not.” And I wasn’t, really. But there was this moment when I could see where someone could just lose it and do things they’d never thought they were capable of. Which didn’t make it okay. Just because I got how this could happen didn’t mean I was any less angry. I still wanted her to pay.
And I wanted to find a way to end this nightmare.
We plugged away, me searching through Jonathan Fisher’s timeline, Alex using his name to see if she could come up with a connection to the house. “I’ve got it,” Alex said. “It’s easy now that we know her married name—it looks like she used it for everything but work. The lawsuit was filed against her by her mom. Said she tricked her grandmother into signing everything over to her before she went into the home, and then took out a second mortgage on the house.”
“She’s being sued by her own mother?”
“Isn’t that the worst? Here we are thinking our paren
ts are going to have fits over the stupid things we’ve been doing, and Ms. Davenport’s actually in a lawsuit with hers.”
“It was pretty hard to find that, though, wasn’t it?”
“Once I had her married name, it wasn’t,” she said. “But yeah, there’s nothing here that would link it to her now.”
“I wonder if people know,” I said. “I wonder if the lawsuit is something she’d want to keep quiet.”
“We’ve found our leverage,” Alex said.
“Exactly. We just need to figure out what we want and how to use the leverage to get it.”
“We should tell everyone,” I said. “Let’s meet tonight. I want to get it over with.”
“Okay. You want to text them?”
“I don’t have Justin’s number. I can take care of the other two.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “Great. Fine.”
“We’re all in this together,” I reminded her. As if she needed reminding.
I got out my phone to text them and realized I hadn’t looked at it since I’d shut the ringer the day before. The signal was blocked in school, so I wasn’t in the habit of checking my phone during the day. Because if I had, I’d have seen that in addition to the missed calls from my parents, I had new text messages.
A lot of them.
My head started pounding as I wondered how many of them were from Ms. Davenport, what she could possibly want now. But none of them were from her. They were all from Isabel. I’d forgotten to call her.
She was not happy.
I started reading through each text.
Where are you guys?
Did you find out anything?
I’m staying up until I hear from you.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?!
Okay, now I’m getting scared.
Seriously, you’re freaking me out.
Just write even one word so I know you’re okay.
I can’t do this anymore.
And then the last one:
If you haven’t texted me by the time I wake up, I’m coming up with my own plan.
Pushing Perfect Page 20