Impractically Perfect: A Romantic Comedy

by Genevieve Lerner

  “Hey Gill!” I said, oddly brightly. “Guess what?”

  She didn’t sound particularly enthused, but she wasn’t yelling at me either, so that was a start. “Um, let’s see. You finally got that raise? Oooh, or you accidentally ate a strawberry and had to go to the ER?”

  “I feel like if I was in the ER having an anaphylactic reaction, my tongue would be a bit too swollen to talk normally to you,” I said, grinning at the sound of her voice. God, I missed her. “I just found a pair of panties hanging on the door of Sven’s bathroom! Panties that aren’t mine.”

  “Jesus, Penny, you know I hate that word, can you please use something else? Like, what’s wrong with just ‘underwear’? Anyway, don’t jump to any conclusions just yet. It doesn’t necessarily mean something bad. Maybe…maybe they’re his!”

  I shook my head. “I think I would know if he wore…that sort of thing.”

  “Men can surprise you.” Wasn’t that the truth. “Anyway, maybe it’s not even what you think. Are you even sure that it’s underwear? Maybe it’s like…a towel or something.

  Unlikely, but possible. I gingerly approached the lacy fabric. There was no doubt about it: definitely panties. Or whatever, underwear.

  When I told Gillian this, she “hmmm”ed for a moment. “Unless they’re his mom’s or something, which would be weird, it might be time to think about getting mad at him for your first time ever!” She had a point. I was physically incapable of yelling at Sven. Whenever he did something to upset me, I convinced myself that it wasn’t that big of a deal. Like that one time that he deliberately stepped on a perfectly friendly caterpillar. I wanted to scream at him, because it really wasn’t necessary at all…but I didn’t. I shot him a little smile and a laugh, and kept walking down the sidewalk with him. It was just so much easier than saying anything.

  But now that I was in this place where Sven had actually done something WRONG for once…I felt, I don’t know. Vindicated. Everything was weirdly okay now. There was nothing wrong with me. I was in the right.

  I almost turned away to march out of the bathroom, but then something caught my eye on those stupid panties. A tag.

  They were from Francis’s, which was my favorite underwear store, that I had never splurged on until I started dating Sven. This store was fancy, and comfortable, and made me feel like a goddess. And then it dawned on me—I had lost one of my favorite pairs of underwear a few months ago, and never thought I would get them back. And…(I felt my face redden, even though there was no one else who realized what was happening)…I was looking at my very own, very lacy, very expensive pair of panties. Fuck.

  “Uh, Penny? Is everything okay? You’ve been quiet for like, thirty seconds. Kinda unlike you.”

  Physically incapable of explaining to Gillian what I had just realized, I said a quick “Gotta go!” and hung up my phone.

  Not only was I an asshole, I was an idiot. Sven could be a pain in the ass sometimes, but he would never cheat on me, not in a million years. He was a man of his word, a man with principles. Even if he wanted to cheat on me, he wouldn’t do it.

  But that was the thing. I hadn’t felt lately that he really wanted to be in a relationship with me. We were just kind of…there…going through the motions. Maybe the real reason he hadn’t proposed to me was that he didn’t really ever see himself with me longterm.

  There was absolutely, 100%, definitely something seriously wrong with me.

  I gathered up my purse and left Sven a sticky note on his mirror, telling him that I loved him and shit. It was all true. Not wanting to be reminded of this day, I left my expensive-ass underwear hanging behind the bathroom door.

  “Jesus, Kylie, can you please TRY to keep your mouth open?” I was working on my least favorite patient I’d ever had, and my patience was wearing as thin as that nightgown I had worn until it had holes all the way through it. This girl kept biting down on my hands as I tried to work on her, gnawing away like she was a little rabbit or naked mole rat or something.

  “I - don’t - like - this -” she managed to gasp out as I wrenched her mouth open for at least the eighteenth time.

  I stuck a giant wad of gauze between her jaws. “I don’t really care if you don’t like it, you’re going to do what I tell you.” I was not in the mood to have little kids thinking they could boss me around.

  Kylie just huffed and bit down on the gauze—thankfully, it held, and I didn’t end up with the giant bite marks on my fingers that she normally left me.

  “Why do you hate this so much, Kylie?” I asked her when she finally got tired of thrashing. “Am I really that scary?” I don’t now why, but I had a gift with little kids; they were usually more than willing to talk to me about their problems. And before I knew it, everything was pouring out of Kylie’s mouth.

  “Lucinda and Carrie both had to get braces, and now nobody will talk to them because they look funny,” she whined. “And my mom says I might need them too, but I don’t want them, I don’t.”

  Kylie’s teeth were definitely a bit crooked—there was a good chance she was going to need to get braces by the end of the year. I knew that she would be glad ten years down the line that she had gotten them, but how is a nine-year-old supposed to know that?

  “Listen,” I said, dabbing a tear from her cheek, “braces aren’t always bad. You know, you can get them in all kinds of colors. What’s your favorite color?”

  “Black,” she said definitively. Okay, maybe this would be harder than I thought. “Carrie has bright pink braces, and everyone calls her Flamingo Teeth. I don’t want flamingo teeth!” She looked seriously panicked.

  “Kylie, have you been calling Carrie ‘Flamingo Teeth’?” I asked her, and she swallowed.

  “I mean, everyone else is doing it. So sometimes, maybe, yeah.”

  She was so involved in her story that she didn’t even realize that I was scraping tartar from her teeth as we were talking. “Well, you seem like a smart young woman, Kylie, so I’m not going to tell you what to do. But maybe if you acted like a good friend to these girls, you’d be setting an example for all these other kids. And maybe if everyone was nicer, it wouldn’t be so terrible getting braces, would it?”

  “I dunno,” she said, but I could tell she was listening.

  “Well, you’re all done.” I took off her bib. “It was nice to see you again, Kylie.”

  Rolling her eyes, she walked to the waiting room.

  This. This was why I was good at my job. Anyone can clean teeth, but not anyone can make a kid feel better about having to get braces, or for peeing their pants because they were laughing too hard in gym class. Not anyone would sit with a 40-year-old dad while he cried because he had just found out that his kid had leukemia, and not everybody would listen while a Vietnam veteran told war story after war story.

  Because I had so many of my own struggles, I could relate. Needing constant perfection was pretty draining, and not everyone understood my panic attacks that I had about it. Hell, half the time I didn’t even understand them. But what I could understand was other people. And I actually wanted to listen to their stories.

  Chapter Ten

  Nobody’s Perfect

  “HOLY FUCKERONI!” I screamed, ripping Mrs. Purrpaws off my chest after she had decided to attack me for literally no reason. Okay, maybe not no reason. I had almost killed her with my bike. But that had been an accident.

  In what was very much the opposite of an accident, Mrs. Purrpaws had jumped onto my head from her perch on top of the kitchen cupboard, and in about six seconds, had managed to scratch off most of the skin from my upper body. She had also destroyed my new knit sweater from the Banana Republic clearance rack that I had saved my 40% off coupon for, and it was lying shredded against my body, soaking up the blood that was now pouring freely from my arms.

  “Mrs. Purrpaws, you are LITERALLY the worst cat in existence,” I said to her matter-of-factly, as she peacefully curled up on a kitchen chair and went to sleep. I had been looking forwar
d to a quiet Friday night—watching some Golden Girls DVDs on my laptop and splurging my daily calories on an entire box of Kraft mac and cheese, seeing as Sven still hadn’t “texted later” as he had promised. And now I was going to have to delay my perfect evening to clean up this mess.

  Camille (at least I think it was Camille) had run into the kitchen when she heard my screams, but stopped short when she saw how much blood was coming out of me. The twins hated blood.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked, wrinkling up her nose.

  I stopped myself from rolling my eyes at her, but only just. “No, this feels like a fucking Swedish massage.” Sticking both of my forearms under the faucet, I held my breath as the hot water rinsed the blood, and hopefully most of the nasty cat bacteria, off of me. Ow. The dishes in the sink had all turned so red that they looked like murder weapons.

  “I’ll just…be in my room…” Camille said, backing out of the kitchen. I heard her tiny little feet scampering up the stairs as fast as they could carry her.

  Okay, I thought to myself. Just need to finish bandaging myself up, and then my night can continue.

  How wrong I was.

  I was in the process of squeezing an entire tube of Neosporin onto my arms when the front door opened, and Gillian barged in. Her hands were full of shopping bags and an oversized suitcase, her hair was full of product, and her face was full of smiles for me.

  Simultaneously I felt my heart jump in excitement of my best friend being home, and plummet in anticipation of her seeing her bandaged-up cat.

  “How was the retreat—?“ I began, but she wasn’t listening.

  “GUESS WHO I FOUND AT THE OUTLET MALL!” she screeched, dropping everything at the door and running up to me, completely oblivious to my mutilated arms. “No, okay, you’ll never guess. It was Tahira Jackson!”

  Having no idea who Tahira Jackson was, I just nodded vaguely. The scratches on my arms were beginning to swell, due to my cat allergies. Maybe I should find a Benadryl.

  “I almost said something to her, but I was scared she would hate me or something, you know? Or send her security team after me. So I spent the whole day following her around, store to store, just buying everything she did a minute after her. I spent soooo much money!”

  Okay, so maybe I was a tiny bit jealous of Gillian’s work situation. Most of her work was just retweeting politicians, and she rarely had to do anything other than check her phone several times a day. It was a weekday, and she had been shopping all day. While I had been at the office, cleaning teeth, making the world a better place, or whatever.

  Jesus. My arms were really starting to blow up. Where the hell was the Benadryl? Assuring Gillian that following Tahira Jackson around the mall was definitely the coolest thing that had ever happened to anyone ever, I ran down the hallway into the bathroom to raid the medicine cabinet.

  There were multiple bottles of ibuprofen, four packets of different birth control pills (all of us were on something different) and a baggie of tiny white pills that probably belonged to Candice and I really didn’t want to know what they were. And no Benadryl. Crap.

  I ran to my room, searched all my purses, and finally, finally, found a single sheet with three Benadryl capsules left. My arms were beginning to itch like crazy, so I swallowed them all. It was probably the placebo effect, but I immediately felt a sense of calm wash over my body. Oooooh. Sweatpants time.

  Moments later, Gillian followed me into my bedroom. She didn’t even notice that I had stripped down to my underwear. Not that I cared, or anything. “So after a few hours, I finally introduced myself to Tahira, and we TOTALLY HIT IT OFF. Can you believe it? She said she wants to have me on her channel! I’m going to be FAMOUS, Penny!”

  Oh, right. Tahira Jackson was one of those self-made YouTube stars that Gillian was obsessed with. She, like all of Gillian’s heroes, was either a hair, makeup, or fashion guru, and was probably, like all of Gillian’s heroes, more annoying than Cam when he started going on about calculus.

  “Also,” Gillian continued slyly, “she wants us to come out with her tonight!”

  “Gillian,” I said, pulling on my sweatpants, “I’m really not feeling great tonight. I don’t know if I want to go out.”

  “Come on, Penny, don’t make me go alone!” Not, Oh, no, you’re not feeling good? No Gosh, what’s wrong, Penny? Of course not. Gillian was always rather…self-involved. “Pleeeeeeeeeeese??”

  My bed looked awfully comfy. “I don’t think so. Sorry. Have fun though!”

  “But…she said that there would definitely be some sexy dudes there!”

  I sighed. “If you haven’t forgotten, I have a boyfriend that I’m very much in love with. Who is definitely going to be proposing to me soon!” Probably. Maybe. Possibly. Ish.

  It wasn’t as if this was the first time that Gillian had alluded that she thought maybe Sven and I shouldn’t be together. She would never come right out and say it, but she was constantly making comments about how she didn’t think he was totally right for me. Or that she didn’t like his haircuts. Or that he was a terrible dresser. None of which were even true, and Gillian knew it. She was just looking for something to be wrong with him. But nothing was. He was perfect.

  She was just jealous.

  The one thing that I had that she didn’t.

  “Come on. You owe me one.”

  I didn’t, actually. “Um, see my arms? That’s from your cat. I think you owe me one.”

  “What? What did you do to Mrs. Purrpaws?” asked Gillian, suddenly horrified. Frantically, she began searching for her stupid precious cat. “Did you hurt her?”

  “I didn’t do anything! She just attacked me!”

  “Well, you probably scared the poor girl.” Or maybe…Are you okay, Penny?

  “Um. Okay,” I said. “Well…sorry.” Wait, why was I apologizing?

  “I’m not the one who got scared!” Gillian defiantly walked out of my bedroom and returned moments later, Mrs. Purrpaws over her shoulder. Her demeanor had completely changed: she was suddenly looking very, very angry.

  “Penny? What happened to Mrs. Purrpaws? Why is she all bandaged up?”

  “Um.”

  “Penny?”

  I had to come clean. I had to. Gillian was my best friend, after all. “Okay, okay, okay. She might have kind of gotten in the way of my bicycle while you were gone. I mean first she got out of the apartment, and then I hit her with my bike. I’m sorry, it was an accident, I just sorta spun out…but she’s totally okay, the vet looked at her and said there’s no internal injuries and she’ll be good as new in a week.” I squeezed my eyes shut, ready for the fist that I was sure was going to break my nose.

  “You took her to the vet?”

  “Yeah, just to be sure. If there was an emergency or something really wrong, I would’ve called you…I just didn’t want you to worry while you were on your retreat.”

  Gillian seemed to be weighing things in her head, but finally looked me in the eye. “Thanks, Penny. Thanks for taking care of her. And thank you for being honest with me.”

  Huh. Sometimes, people can surprise you.

  “But now, you need to apologize to Mrs. Purrpaws.”

  There it is.

  Gillian turned around so her back was to me, but Mrs. Purrpaws was facing me. It was like Quirrell and Voldemort all over again.

  Backing slightly away because I didn’t want a repeated incident, I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for scaring you, Mrs. Purrpaws.”

  “And?” said Gillian, still facing the wall.

  “And for almost running you over and killing you. I will never do it again.”

  Mrs. Purrpaws hissed at me.

  Gillian set her cat on the ground, and she leapt onto my pillow and curled up. Awesome. Not only was I now unable to go within a three-foot radius of my bed if I didn’t want to be scratched up again, but I would be up all night sneezing from whatever fur she left behind. My plans for the night were officially ruined.

  “Alr
ight, screw it, let’s get out of here,” I said to Gillian, and her face lit up. She barged into my closet and grabbed the sluttiest dress she could find (which was actually a hand-me-down from Gillian herself that I had never worn ever) and threw it at my face and skipped off to her own bedroom, presumably to find an even sluttier dress for herself.

  Half an hour later, we had taken a cab to a club I had never heard of, and I was awkwardly sitting alone in a corner in my too-short dress, hoping to stay out of the way of Tahira Jackson and her fans. Gillian had ditched me the moment we got inside to schmooze with all the famous people. I wasn’t surprised; this was pretty typical Gillian behavior.

  The club was packed with who I assumed to be Tahira Jackson’s posse and groupies, although I wasn’t entirely sure that “groupies” was the correct term for fans of a YouTube star. Whatever they were, they were loud. And shiny. And very much not the type of people I ever wanted to associate with.

  By this point, my three Benadryls were kicking in hardcore, and because I had chugged two Red Bulls in a bold attempt to counteract them, I was now not so much sleepy as I was very, very loopy.

  I was vaguely aware of a dude sitting down next to me; he seemed like he wanted to talk, but I wasn’t feeling the whole stringing-words-together-to-form-actual-sentences thing. Honestly, by this point I was mostly regretting coming here at all, and decided that I would have preferred risking anaphylactic shock from Mrs. Purrpaws’s fur in my pillow if it would mean I didn’t have to be here.

  “Penny? Penny Partridge?”

  The man next to me slowly came into focus. He was tall, even sitting down. His hair was wavy and had too much gel in it. He smelled like a combination of baby powder and clean sweat. Oh my god.

  “...Toby? Is thaaaat y-you?”

  How was he everywhere? And why was I always falling apart when he showed up? The Benadryl was making me barely coherent.

  “Penny, what are you doing here?” he said, leaning over to embrace me. I was very aware that the nub of his right arm was touching me. “What brings you to Bottoms Up, Tops Off?” Yep. That was the actual name of the club.