Pushing Perfect

by Michelle Falkoff

  “Covered,” Alex said.

  “Okay, but then we have to agree on what to write.” I looked up. “Is that everything, do you think?”

  “Very thorough,” Raj said. “Most impressive.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “We have to meet her someplace public enough that she can’t make a scene, but not so public that people can overhear us,” Alex said.

  “Coffeehouse?” Raj asked.

  She shook her head. “A little too public, I think.”

  “What about somewhere else downtown?” I asked. “Those picnic tables near the park? They’re set a little bit back from the street but not too far, and people walk by there all the time.”

  “Won’t we be cold?” Alex asked.

  “Not if we’re doing it this weekend. It’s supposed to be in the low fifties, and we can always bundle up.”

  “Okay, I can manage that,” Alex said.

  “That brings us to the second item on your list,” Raj said. “The when.”

  “I think we should rip off the Band-Aid,” Alex said. “Do it tomorrow. Don’t give her a lot of time to think about it.”

  “Works for me,” Raj said.

  I nodded. The sooner the better. The stress was really getting to me, though despite it all I was having a good time, sitting with the two of them, planning how to make things better. I just wished we were talking about something else: where the next party was, or what we were all going to do after school, or whether going to prom was fun or stupid. Anything other than this.

  “I was thinking I’d send one of the Mark pictures, and then say ‘I’m going to need a favor. Await further instructions,’” Alex said. “You know, use her lingo.”

  “And then we wait until later to send the next one,” I said. “Make her stress out for a while.”

  “Getting a bit vindictive there, are we?” Raj asked, but he flashed me a big smile as he said it.

  “Believe me, I’d be happy to do worse,” I said.

  “Uh-oh, have we turned Perfect Kara into Carrie?” Alex asked. “That’s totally what we should watch tonight.”

  “We’ll do nothing of the sort,” Raj said. “I have control over Netflix, and we’re going to watch something charming and funny that will make us all forget our troubles.”

  “What did you pick?” I asked, forcing myself not to yell at Alex for bringing up Perfect Kara.

  “Not until we’re done,” Raj said. “We’re meeting tomorrow at the picnic tables, and Alex has the first text ready, but we haven’t settled on a time.”

  “How about seven?” Alex said. “It will be dark, and there will be lots of people coming in and out of restaurants.”

  Raj and I both said okay, and we waited as Alex set up her phone and sent the first message.

  “So anticlimactic,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not like she can write back,” Alex said. “Unless she sends a blast response to everyone involved, which doesn’t seem all that likely.”

  Raj picked up the remote and turned on the TV. “Time to move on to the more enjoyable part of the evening,” he said. “I present to you a movie about a girl who people think is perfect until she accidentally starts a rumor about herself that changes everyone’s mind.”

  “So basically you’re showing Kara her worst-case scenario,” Alex said.

  “Hardly. More like an alternate universe where the bad things happen without such terrible consequences. Come on, you’ll like it.”

  He pressed Play and the movie started.

  I was hyperaware of Raj next to me on the couch. We’d both stretched out with our feet on the coffee table; in the glow of the television I could see his socks, which did have the promised duckies and bunnies on them. Every so often our legs would brush up against each other, and it sent what felt like an electric shock all through my body. The sensation was even more exciting than that one kiss I’d had with Drew, way back when everything with Isabel and Becca had gone bad. For a minute I forgot about Ms. Davenport, forgot about the scariness of our impending confrontation, and I let myself daydream about how things might be different when this was all over.

  The next night, I picked up Raj and Alex and we headed downtown. “Let me do most of the talking,” Alex said. “Kara, you’re too close to her, and we might need to get into the financial stuff to convince her she has to stop. I promise I’ll keep the anger reined in.”

  “Works for me,” I said. The less talking I had to do, the better.

  “I trust you,” Raj said.

  Alex had brought along a folder with color copies of the photos and some documents that explained the whole banking thing, as well as papers from the lawsuit. “It’s not worth getting into,” she said. “But she should be able to tell that these documents are evidence that I could show the police how to find stuff on her computer that leads to the money. And she’ll see that we know about her family, too.”

  “Nice one,” Raj said. “Did you save the video as well?”

  Alex sniffed at him. “You think I’m some kind of rookie?”

  He laughed. “No, I just didn’t have you pegged for a reverse-blackmail expert. Sue me.”

  “Get serious, you guys,” I said. “She could be here any minute.”

  But she wasn’t. She didn’t come early, anyway, and seven o’clock rolled around with nothing. At ten minutes past she finally walked by the picnic tables. Strolled, really. She didn’t look scared, and I hadn’t realized until then that I’d wanted her to.

  “Interesting,” Alex muttered. “Late, but not super late. She’s a little worried, but she’s not terrified.”

  “You can’t know that for sure,” Raj said as he watched Ms. Davenport scan the row of tables before she saw us.

  I wondered how many people she’d sent those horrible text messages to, how many people might have been in the position we were in. But as soon as Ms. Davenport saw us, she headed for our table. She was dressed more casually than she normally was for school: she had on a T-shirt under a leather jacket and skinny jeans with her cowboy boots, her hair in two pigtails. At first I was reminded again of how young she looked, but then I inspected her face more closely and saw the lines again, under the layers of powder. She was good at pretending, but she wasn’t that good. She wasn’t as good as me.

  She gave us an appraising look; I could see a hint of surprise when her eyes settled on me. How was she going to play this?

  “You guys taking advantage of the nice weather?” she asked.

  I wondered if she was hoping there was a chance this was some sort of coincidence. We just stared at her, waiting. Trying to look calm.

  “I suppose you’re expecting me,” she said, and sat down. The three of us were all sitting on one side of the table, so it was almost like an interview. “Clever move, using a blocked number to get me here,” Ms. Davenport said. “And in public, no less.”

  “We learned from the best,” Alex said.

  “How did you find me?”

  “We don’t need to explain ourselves to you,” Alex said. “That’s your job.”

  “Well, first perhaps you can tell me whether I should be expecting anyone else. Your compatriots? The police, perhaps?”

  “That depends on how this conversation goes,” Alex said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Ms. Davenport said. She was starting to look a little smug; I wondered if she thought we didn’t know all that much ourselves, yet.

  “Tell us about the drugs,” Alex said.

  “It sounds like you think you already know. What more do you need from me?”

  “Why are you doing this to us?” I blurted out. I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Alex glared at me.

  “I’m not doing anything to you,” Ms. Davenport said. “Nothing that you haven’t done to yourselves. This isn’t a big deal, and it’s not personal, you know.”

  “
It feels like a big deal to me,” I said. “And pretty personal, too.”

  “I can understand why you’d say that,” she said, and then her tone shifted. She leaned in toward us, nearly hissing. “You’re all too naive to realize it, but Marbella High is filled with rich kids who just want to have fun and would find a way to do it with or without me. This school used to have to cover up drug arrests and overdoses; now no one gets arrested, the supply is clean. Things are under control now, and it’s all because of me. This school needs me.”

  She was delusional. I could hear in her voice that she’d actually convinced herself she was doing a good thing. “Why get us involved, then? If you had everything under control,” I said.

  “Everyone needs a little help sometimes,” she said. She sounded less angry, as if she thought she’d convinced us. “And I only asked for help from those who’d already shown they were willing to bend or break the rules. Alex here, with her online gambling and offshore accounts; Raj, who’d been stupid enough to buy fake exam answers just so he wouldn’t have to study, and then was dumb enough to tell his friend about it. And you, Kara—I have to say I never expected it. I had such high hopes for you. I thought you were different. I’d lost faith in everyone else, but you—you were so sincere, so dedicated. You were the one student who made me think it wasn’t all pointless. To find out that you were just like the rest of them . . . I couldn’t help myself. You had to be part of everything too, if only to teach you a lesson.”

  “Oh, you were trying to be a good teacher? And this was your strategy? You’re a regular Good Samaritan,” Alex said.

  I appreciated her sticking up for me, but it didn’t change the fact that Ms. Davenport’s description of how things had played out made it sound like this was my fault, like I’d let her down. As if I didn’t already feel bad enough about everything, now I was a disappointment to Ms. Davenport too? Ms. Davenport, who it turned out was responsible for making my life hell? This was all so confusing.

  “You wanted to know everything. Did you want me to edit out the parts you don’t like?”

  “That’s not what we meant,” Alex said.

  We’d started the conversation feeling like we had control, but we’d quickly lost it. I wondered whether we’d ever had it in the first place. We had to try again, and Alex was losing confidence. I turned to Raj to see if he would jump in, but he didn’t seem to know what to do either.

  It was all on me, then.

  “Let’s get back on track here,” I said. “We would like you to stop doing what you’re doing. What we’d really like is for you to move away from Marbella and never come back, but we get that doing that might look worse than you just finishing out the year and then getting a new job somewhere else. So that’s what you’re going to do, and you’re going to wrap up all your little operations and never contact any of us again.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do?” Ms. Davenport asked, amused. “You want me to shut the whole thing down, not just the parts that involve you guys.”

  “How much more is there?” Raj asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No,” I said. “And yes, you’re going to shut it all down. And after the school year is over you’re going to stop working at Marbella High. If teaching has made you this awful, then maybe you should find something else to do. Go ask your rich ex-husband for money.”

  She frowned at this. Good—I’d finally said something that rattled her, even a little bit. “What do you know about that?” she asked.

  “I know about the new wife, and the baby. And you of all people should know that I can do math. The timeline doesn’t quite add up, right? Is that what made you such a horrible person, or were you always like this?”

  I was getting to her. “You have no idea what that kind of betrayal can do to someone,” she said. “And you have no idea what it’s like to be broke in Marbella, spending all your time dealing with lying, spoiled kids, or your senile grandmother with her nursing home that costs more than my apartment, and the mortgage she never paid off—”

  “You mean the one you took out after you tricked her into signing her life over to you?” Alex asked. “That one?”

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” she said, grudgingly impressed. “That lawsuit is a lie. But that doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Raj said. “None of this excuses anything you’ve done.”

  “We’ve got the pictures of you and Mark,” I said. “And we have Alex, who can explain to the police how you’re stashing the money. We have people who are willing to testify against you, and if we need to, we’ll find more.”

  “Testify?”

  “That’s what will happen if you don’t do what we tell you,” I said. “Meet our terms, or we go to the police.”

  “You’d never do that,” she said. “I’d tell them everything. I’ve got enough dirt on Marbella High to decimate the whole school. The DA would make a deal with me in a heartbeat.”

  “You really think so? You think it would look better for Marbella to go after its teenagers than to take down a teacher who blackmailed her own students?” Saying it out loud like that made me believe it more. Becca was right—we did have power.

  And Ms. Davenport could feel it. “You’re bluffing,” she said, but she shivered. And it wasn’t very cold.

  “We aren’t,” I said, trying to sound powerful still. We were kind of bluffing, though. I definitely was.

  “You all have bright futures ahead, sunny skies all the way.” The bitterness was palpable. “I might be a bigger catch for the police, but my life is ruined already. You all have way more to lose than I do.”

  There it was again—that little window of sympathy I felt for my favorite teacher. Even if she was older than I thought, her life wasn’t even close to half over, and she already thought it was ruined.

  Alex had learned to read me well, though. “Don’t even, Kara.”

  But I had to try. Making threats wasn’t really my thing anyway. “Ms. Davenport, your life isn’t over. Bad stuff happened, and you did terrible things in return. But if you do what we’re asking, no one ever needs to know. You can start over, pretend none of this ever happened. I know there was a time when you were a good person—you’re too good at playing one for it never to have been real. You can go back to that. We all can.”

  “Some things you can’t come back from,” she said, but she was starting to slouch down in her seat. To relax. It was almost over. I could feel it.

  “People start over all the time. That’s what I always thought college was—a place to become a new person. We talked about that, you and me. We talked about a lot of things. I trusted you then, and I have to be honest, right now I hate you for that. But you can make it better. You can make all this be over. Just promise us that you’ll stop, that you’ll go away and not do this to any more kids. Promise us that you’ll try harder next time, find a way to be better.”

  “I’m not sure I can promise to be better,” she said. “You don’t really know me, after all. This is who I am. It always has been, in some ways.”

  “Well, what about the other promises, then?”

  She pulled on one of her pigtails like a little kid. “How do I know you won’t turn on me?” she said. “How do I know you won’t make this deal with me and then go to the police anyway?”

  “You don’t,” Alex said.

  I shot her a look. I was making progress, and she was about to undo it. “She’s right that you can’t know for sure,” I said. “Just like we can’t know that you won’t go off and do this to another group of kids at another school somewhere else. But we have the file on you, and you have everything you have on us. We may be willing to go to the police, but that doesn’t mean we want to.”

  “You’re basically suggesting mutually assured destruction, then. I do what you say, or you’ll ruin me, but I’ll ruin you right back.”

  “Sounds about right,” Raj said. “Doing what we say is certainly better than the alt
ernative.”

  “You haven’t fully thought this through, though. Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to the drug trade in this town with me gone? Someone worse is going to step in.” She was sitting straighter again. I hoped that didn’t mean she was changing her mind. We’d been so close.

  “We’ll let the police take care of it,” I said. “Are you in or not?”

  “I have to shut down everything? And leave in June?”

  The three of us nodded.

  “No police involvement?”

  We nodded again.

  “How will I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “The same way you’ll know we’ve kept ours. We’ll just have to trust each other.”

  Trust. That word was nothing but trouble.

  “I suppose we’ve got a deal, then,” Ms. Davenport said.

  29.

  I didn’t know how to feel. Was I supposed to be relieved? My head was reeling from the mix of emotions I’d gone through, talking to her—I’d been so angry, but once she was in front of me I had trouble processing her as Blocked Sender and she went back to being my teacher, someone who was disappointed in me in a way that I still found meaningful. I’d had that brief sense of power, and I wanted it back, but I couldn’t find it. And there was still the problem of making it through nearly half the school year in her class, but I would find a way.

  “We did it!” Raj yelled.

  “Quiet,” I said. “We’re still in public.”

  “It’s finally over,” Alex said, and I could tell she was holding back from yelling too.

  But it didn’t feel over to me. “I hope so.”

  “We got what we wanted,” Raj said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mutually assured destruction. Which contains the words ‘assured’ and ‘destruction.’ The whole plan could go south at any time.”

  “But it won’t,” Alex said.

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “You know this is the best outcome we can manage. We went over this, like, a million times.”

  “I know.” And I did know; I was just having a hard time convincing myself that knowing was the same as it being true. “We should tell Justin and Isabel.”