Impractically Perfect: A Romantic Comedy

by Genevieve Lerner

  “That’s not what you were talking about?” I continued, rambling even louder. “OOH! You meant the MOVIE The Proposal! How was it, you ask? It was a wonderful movie, you all should see it! Okay, just kidding, you shouldn’t see it, it’s really the worst. Did you know that Sandra Bullock is in her fifties now? Can you believe that?” I didn’t even know what I was saying anymore, just that disaster would strike if I stopped talking.

  “Did I completely misunderstand you? Did you mean ‘Pro Po Sal’? But the real question is, who is Sal? And what does it mean to be a Pro Po?” Shut up, Penny. Seriously, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut—

  “Penny, shut up!” Cam was looking at me as if I had just grown an extra ear in the middle of my forehead. Which, to be honest, probably would have been less embarrassing than what I was doing right now. “Stop being…weird.”

  My brother looked and acted like your run-of-the-mill typical teen. He wore clothes that didn’t fit him, would do just about anything to avoid dressing up, and exclusively ate pizza for dinner. But I was convinced, as I had been for the past eight or so years, that Cam only did that to hide his ingeniousness.

  Because my brother was pretty damn smart.

  Cam had tested out of just about every class that his high school had, and was taking college-level classes—during which, according to Mom, he was still bored out of his mind. He didn’t exactly apply himself, but he had never had to. Cam was just…good at everything without trying. Sometimes, I was a little jealous that everything came so easily to my little brother, and that he obviously had an incredibly bright future ahead of him.

  But not that jealous. My life was pretty perfect as it was.

  “I’m not being weird, what are you talking about?”

  My mother butted in. “She’s just excited, hun, there’s nothing wrong with that! Oh, I really can’t wait!”

  Sven had scarfed down his breakfast as quickly as he could, and was now clearly trying to figure out an escape route.

  “This has been lovely, Ms. Partridge, but I really need to get to the office…” Jesus, Sven. It’s Saturday, my mom isn’t stupid.

  I really wished that Mom was the kind of person who would give him shit for leaving, but she would never do that. She just nodded and smiled, refused his cash towards the bill, and Sven slipped out. Jerk.

  “I’m just going to go out…for a smoke?” I had never smoked a cigarette in my life, and Mom knew it. “Just, um, you know, recently started, and now, oh man! I’m super hooked.” For emphasis, I mimed taking a long drag from an invisible cigarette in my duly shaped fingers.

  Abandoning my jacket and purse with my dumbstruck mom and brother, I raced out the door, catching up to Sven just before he crossed the street. I tugged on his jacket, and he turned around.

  “Look,” I said, “I know that was weird, but—”

  “What the hell, Penny?” he interrupted furiously. “What is wrong with you?”

  That hurt. “Nothing, I just…”

  “You told your mother that we’re ENGAGED?”

  “Well, no, not exactly, she just kind of, thought we were, and…”

  “…And you didn’t bother to correct her.”

  I nodded, biting my lip.

  “Now, my question is…why would she ‘just kind of think’ we were engaged? It seems kind of weird for that to come out of thin air. Sooooo…?” He put his hands on his hips and stared me down, reminding me strongly of virtually every character in Gossip Girl.

  This was it. This was my moment to tell Sven exactly what happened that stupid night two weeks ago when I had been totally sure he was going to get down on one knee, reaffirm his unending love for me, and ask me to be his wife. This was my moment to ask him if this relationship was going anywhere. This was my moment of confrontation.

  “Oh, well, I just kinda thought that maybe possibly you were gonna propose sometime soon…but clearly I was wrong and it’s no big deal, really, I was just being silly. I mean,” I continued wildly, “who even wants to get married anyway?”

  Sven looked at me, wide-eyed. “Well, I mean, I’d like to, someday.”

  Oh. OH.

  He swallowed.

  “I was going to wait for the right time to say this, but I guess now is as good a time as any.”

  WAIT. HOLD UP. Oh my god. Was this happening right now? Was Sven about to…?

  “I do want to get married, Penny…but there’s a reason I haven’t asked you to marry me yet.”

  Whelp. Not exactly what I had been expecting.

  “Oh?”

  “ You’re just…you’re too immature for me, sweetie. And no, stop, don’t look at me that way. Babe, do you really expect me to live with, you know, an ant farm?” He whispered that last part, as if he was scared that a stranger on the street would overhear. “And you have roommates, for crying out loud! What self-respecting woman in her late 20’s still has roommates?”

  What the hell? “Um…lots of them? I didn’t know it was such an issue for you. I just thought it was sensible, with all the money I save and everything. But if it’s such a big deal, I can—”

  Sven shook his head and began backing away from me. “You won’t even get rid of that stupid instrument…what, clarinet, or whatever? That’s been collecting dust for ages.”

  “Oboe,” I whispered under my breath.

  “I think I need a little bit of time to think things over,” he said, face redder than a really red mango I saw one time on a Jamaican cruise. And then he was gone, and I was standing in the swirling snow, coatless, alone in the cold.

  Back to the diner I trudged, trying to distract myself from the bubbling emotions trying to sneak their way out of my eyes by focusing on how goddamn empty my stomach was. I felt like one of the plastic Hungry Hungry Hippos, except there were no marbles in sight.

  Mom looked up as I slid back into my empty seat. It was cold now.

  “Everything okay, hun?”

  No. Everything wasn’t okay. I was a juvenile mess who couldn’t even tell her mother that her boyfriend hadn’t proposed to her.

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  Eyeing me somberly, Cam emptied the rest of his bacon onto the napkin in front of me. At least I wouldn’t starve.

  After breakfast, Mom and Cam walked me back to my apartment.

  “You’re not yourself,” Cam said to me quietly, as we walked side-by-side. He was wearing a plaid lumberjack hat with earflaps, nearly identical to one he had as a toddler. The photo was framed on my nightstand, although I would never tell him that.

  “I’m great, Cam, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But he was way too astute to fall for my unconvincing lies.

  “I guess I just wanted to make sure you knew that like, things don’t always go as planned. And that’s okay. Look, like I got diabetes, right? And I’m fine. And it’s like…I’m actually kind of glad that this happened to me. Not glad glad, but it helps me to appreciate things more. It’s part of who I am now. And I’m not perfect—”

  “Shut up, you’re incredible and perfect and smart and funny and—”

  “Seriously, Penny. I’m not perfect, but I’m happy. I’m sick, sometimes, and sometimes there’s things I can’t eat, but I’m also really lucky. Medicine allows me to eat and do most of what I want, and things could be so so much worse for me. It’s kind of, I don’t know, made me appreciate what I do have. I guess my point is…plans change.”

  I held back a laugh. “Yeah, I guess you almost dying wasn’t exactly in the books.”

  “No. Or Dad.”

  Mom was walking ahead of us, in her own little world, far enough away that she couldn’t hear us.

  “Cam, you don’t even remember Dad—”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But I remember what you’ve told me about him. I remember what Mom’s told me about him. And I know that he wouldn’t want you to be unhappy. And I know that he loved you—all of us—no matter what, and would never want any of us to change for anybody.�
�

  Sometimes, I really wished Cam could just be like, a normal kid, and not so damn insightful.

  When we got back to the apartment, I escaped from my family by saying that the Bloody Marys had made me feel a little sick, and hid out in my bedroom. I lay on my back in my bed, a bed outfitted in My Little Pony sheets that Mom had donated to me for my first apartment. I had always loved My Little Pony growing up, and the sheets made me feel more at home, closer to Mom.

  From behind my bedroom door, I could hear Mom and Cam were packing up to go home; their train was in a couple hours. As much as I wanted to be alone right now, I also didn’t want them ever to leave.

  I closed my eyes and vainly listened as hard as I could for ant farm noises. In their little plastic container, they were silent.

  Did my ants realize that they were trapped in a tiny cage? Did they ever feel sad that they couldn’t leave and explore the great wide somewhere? Did they know how meaningless their lives were?

  Jesus, what was wrong with me? I was supposed to be 28, not eight.

  Bursting out of my languid slumber, I ripped my sheets off of my bed, balled them up tightly, and vainly tried to stuff them into the tiny plastic dollar store trash can next to my bed. Not only did they not fit, but I immediately felt guilty for wasting so much perfectly good fabric, so I instead made a pile in the corner of my room.

  The Goodwill pile.

  Before I knew it, clothes, shoes, wall decor, even hair scrunchies were in the pile, and it was growing faster than I had ever imagined. Everything about me was wrong. I was nothing more than an overgrown child, incapable not only of having an adult room, but of having an adult relationship.

  The next half hour passed in a blur; nearly everything I owned was being thrown into the Goodwill pile. Childhood art projects that had once held significance were no longer important. Decorations and toys, anything that had ever comforted me or made me laugh or just held memories…none of it mattered. They were children’s playthings, nothing more.

  And then, my bedroom was empty, save for my bed, dresser, and laptop, which was sitting on a desk that I would have loved to dispose of but for which I knew I didn’t have the upper body strength. I threw everything into seven trash bags and called the Goodwill Pickup Hotline. They would fetch everything tomorrow morning

  My oboe was still under the bed, but there was no way I was going to just donate that. Those things were expensive—at least I could at least try to get some cash for it.

  Then, there was my ant farm. I had had this colony for months; they were not only my project, but my pets. Sven hated them, but I couldn’t just…abandon them. These ants wouldn’t survive in the real world. But…Sven and I were soulmates. I would do anything to make this relationship work. What was I supposed to do?

  Well, I thought to myself, I got rid of everything else. Surely that should be enough.

  I think part of me knew, deep down, that it wouldn’t be.

  Chapter Seven

  Life Is Always Surprising

  It was the second Tuesday of the month, which meant it was Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day. This was a holiday invented by Cyril and enforced by nobody. Dr. Booper had halfheartedly declared it was allowed, as long as we remained professional-looking and still wore all the stuff we were supposed to wear.

  Naturally, everyone but Cyril dressed perfectly normally in their perfectly-normal-people clothes. In all her epic glory, Cyril came in a Renaissance-style dress, complete with hoop skirt and impossibly tight bustier. Somehow, she had made her costume entirely out of recycled materials—paper bags, newspapers, fabric scraps, paper towel tubes. I had never before noticed quite how large-breasted Cyril was; neither, apparently had Dr. Booper or any of Cyril’s patients.

  Bernard had screamed and dropped his very large pile of mail when Cyril entered the office that morning. As always, he had forgotten that it was Dress Like Your Favorite Book Character Day, because why the hell would anyone remember that. Later, he told me that he had screamed because in her outfit, she looked exactly like a picture of his great-great-grandmother that had resided on his childhood piano—a picture that had always terrified him, and for a moment, he was sure it had come to life to devour him whole.

  Cyril, on the other hand, was more lively than I had seen her in ages. Somehow, despite her constant hinting, it didn’t occur to me to ask her exactly what character she was dressed as until after lunch.

  “I’m Plutonia from The Starry Night series by Wendell Loom,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m not so good at cleaning teeth while wearing an eye patch, so I had to leave it at home.” Of course.

  None of Cyril’s patients actually said anything about her outfit. None of them, that is, save for a sixteen-year-old girl named Hope. Apparently, she was also a big fan of Wendell Loom, and recognized Cyril’s character immediately.

  “It’s good,” the girl said, “but it really doesn’t work without the eye patch.” Poor embarrassed Cyril then proceeded in having a complete meltdown, during which she said that she regretted all her life choices and who did she think she was, thinking she could play a convincing Plutonia? She went home, mid-appointment, and I had to finish up with Hope.

  Hope, I quickly learned, was an outgoing girl who always spoke her mind. While I was cleaning her teeth, she told me all about her teachers, her dramatic love life, and her obsession with all historical fantasy books. She was the complete opposite of sixteen-year-old uptight, anxious, perfectionist me. I liked the kid.

  “Alright,” I said, removing the gauze and machinery from her mouth. “You can rinse and spit. Dr. Booper will be here in a few minutes to finish your checkup. But I’m sure you have nothing to worry about—you clearly take great care of your teeth.”

  “I brush six times a day,” she announced proudly.

  “Okay, well, that’s probably a little too much. Stick with twice, keep up with that flossing, and I think you should be all set.”

  Hope was beaming her perfect, bright smile at me when I left the office to grab Dr. Booper and to spend a few minutes gossiping with Bernard. My workload for the rest of the day had essentially doubled with Cyril’s departure, and I would take my breaks wherever I could.

  Bernard was updating his Spotify playlist when I tapped him on the shoulder. He jumped almost completely out of his spinny chair, turned around to see that it was me, and collapsed with a sigh of relief.

  “Dr. Booper hates when I browse music on the clock,” he told me solemnly, closing the window and eyeing his pile of paperwork with disdain. I had noticed it growing steadily over the past week or so, and it occurred to me that he probably hadn’t been doing any of it. “If he ever sees me doing it…well, I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” I suppressed a laugh—one of these days, maybe he’d actually say an idiom correctly.

  “Anyway, did you notice how particularly glowy my skin looks today?” he asked, ignoring my immediate eye roll. “It’s Yourbonne’s new product, a sea scrub exfoliant that also detoxifies your pores. It is, hands-down, my new favorite. And you look like you could use something to, um…perk you up a bit.” Grinning, he reached below his desk and pulled out a tube labeled Salt of the Sea.

  Okay. Sure. Maybe I had been a little stressed lately…but I didn’t know anyone besides myself could see it. Dammit.

  And now that I looked, his face did look awfully radiant…would it kill me to humor him and at least try the stuff? Before I could change my mind, I grabbed the bottle and headed into the single-stall bathroom.

  I watched myself in the mirror as I massaged the surprisingly gentle scrub into my cheeks. The last few days hadn’t been my best. My hair, which I usually straightened and then pulled back into a neat ponytail, was thrown into a messy bun. Little curly wisps of hair framed my un-made-up face, and my nose was blotchy.

  I looked terrible.

  But everything was fine. Really. It had been good to see Mom and Cam, so good. Well, except
for when Mom quietly pulled me aside and asked me about all my Goodwill trash bags. I’d liked to have thought that she knew I hadn’t murdered several people and then bagged them up to be buried, but with Mom, you could never tell for sure.

  Otherwise, though, there was no excuse for my appearance. My job and my relationship were great. Everything was fine. I would just have to make more of an effort to make sure my face and hair and—I sniffed my armpits—body odor reflected that.

  Breathing as deeply as I could, I splashed the running water on my face to rinse off the scrub.

  I was blotting my face dry with the only tool at my disposal, scrunched-up toilet paper, when I heard Dr. Booper talking to a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize.

  “You know, I really hate to tell you this,” he was saying, “but it looks like there are several cavities that we are going to need to take care of.”

  The woman sighed. “It’s just so unfortunate. After all that brushing…”

  “It’s not always enough. We’re going to need to drill.”

  “I understand. We’ll see you next week. Hope, honey, let’s go.”

  Wait. Hold up. That was about Hope? How did she have cavities? Her teeth were…well, basically perfect. I hadn’t seen signs of any problems with her teeth, not even any tartar buildup. But then again, I wasn’t the doctor, here, and he often saw a lot of things I didn’t.

  I hid the bottle in my sleeve as I left the bathroom. Dr. Booper was pretty easygoing, and almost definitely wouldn’t care that I had been trying out a face wash and not just peeing, but I didn’t want Bernard to get in trouble for selling his products in the office.

  “How are you feeling, Penny?” Dr. Booper said warmly, the moment I opened the bathroom door. I hadn’t realized he was still standing right there.

  “Uhhh. I’m fine?” I mean, I was, after all.