Faking Perfect

by Rebecca Phillips

  I shot Nolan a look. He knew Ben was particular about his car, but that never stopped him from testing boundaries.

  “Oops.” Nolan made a big show of stowing his backpack on the floor and wiping at the wet leather with his equally wet sleeve. “There, good as new.”

  Ben grunted and hit the gas. We drove to school in total silence, which wasn’t an unusual phenomenon whenever Nolan hitched a ride with us. Because he was my friend, Ben and Emily and my other friends tolerated him, but just barely. They didn’t get our relationship, couldn’t understand why I spent so much time with “that weirdo across the street.” They assumed we were involved in some sort of clandestine romance, which was ridiculous. For one, Nolan and I had grown up together and interacted like siblings, and for another, Nolan wasn’t hot, at least not by their standards. He was slightly overweight and a little geeky in an intellectual, artistic, oddball sort of way.

  Basically, Ben and Nolan’s personalities just didn’t mesh. Nolan called Ben “Pretty Boy” behind his back and often commented that he looked like he belonged on a ski hill in Vermont (true) and Ben was convinced that Nolan deliberately antagonized him just for fun (also true). Being stuck in a car with the two of them at the same time made me want another cigarette.

  By the time we got to school, it had stopped snowing and Ben seemed more relaxed. He held Kyla’s hand as we all crossed the parking lot, Nolan trailing a few feet behind us. Ben paused for a moment at the trash can near the main doors and chucked in my pack of cigarettes. I glanced over my shoulder to say a mental farewell to my cancer sticks and saw Nolan cautiously dip a hand into the trash can. A second later, his hand reappeared, clutching my undamaged pack. He grinned at me and slid it into his pocket. I pressed my lips together to avoid laughing, but a snort slipped out.

  Ben turned to me and smiled, oblivious to the cigarette rescue. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said as I walked through the door he held open for us. Always the gentleman. “Nothing at all.”

  Inside, the five of us split up into groups and went our separate ways. Emily and me to math, Ben and Kyla to whatever classes they had, and Nolan to the stairs that led to the bottom floor, where he’d undoubtedly sneak out and have a smoke before—or during—first class.

  “Are you ready?” Emily asked once we’d settled at our table in math class. The teacher hadn’t arrived yet.

  “For what?” I said, still obsessing about last night with Tyler, the feel of his hands on my hips, guiding me toward him, the triumphant look in his eyes when I finally surrendered. What had come over me?

  “For the zombie apocalypse. What do you think?” She snapped her fingers in front of my face. “The test. Are you ready for the test?”

  “Oh. Sure.” Emily was always extra cranky in math class because it was her least favorite subject. “Are you?”

  “I hope so,” she said, biting her lip as she glanced over the notes in front of her. “If I don’t get at least a ninety-five, my final grade will drop.”

  “Em, we’ve already applied to colleges. They probably won’t even look at our final grades.”

  “Yeah, but my parents will,” she muttered as if a slight dip in her average was grounds for hysteria.

  I didn’t get that about Emily and Ben’s family, the focus on excellence. I may have hung around with the school brains, but I wasn’t one myself. The only subject I really excelled in was math which, coincidentally, was the one and only class I shared with Emily. In fact, math was the reason we’d first become friends back in sophomore year.

  Emily, like Ben, took mostly honors classes, churned out an impressive grade-point average, and cleaned up at the academic awards ceremony at the end of each year. But unlike Ben, one thing kept her from intellectual perfection: math. She was simply good at it, not great at it (which in her world translated to “I suck at it”). After trying honors math for a semester in tenth grade, she grudgingly accepted that she wasn’t a well-rounded genius and transferred to the regular, less daunting math class, where she chose the seat next to me and stayed for the next two years.

  I’d seen her around school before that, walking through the halls with the same dark-haired girl and sometimes a blond boy who I’d assumed was her brother because they were so similar in looks. I knew her name; everyone in school did. She was everywhere—on the girls’ basketball and volleyball teams, yearbook committee, school newspaper. Almost every day her name blared over morning announcements as the go-to coordinator for such-and-such club or event. And with her long, sleek blond hair, sprightly walk, and funky black-framed glasses, she was hard to miss.

  In sophomore math, the two of us bonded over trigonometry and the distracting sight of our young male teacher’s cute ass. Within weeks I’d been introduced to her best friend, Shelby Meyer, and the blond boy who turned out to be her first cousin, Ben. Right from the start they all took me under their collective wing, like I was a poor, underprivileged child they felt the urge to protect. And at that point in my life, I needed it. I needed them. They were the right kind of friends, respectable people I could reinvent myself with and hide behind.

  Yes, I thought the first time I’d walked down the hall with the acclaimed Emily Manning and her friends. I have arrived. This is where I belong.

  And through a lot of hard work on my part, it was where I still stood today. Somehow, despite several pitfalls and many secrets, I held my position at the top of the Oakfield High food chain. But there was no getting comfortable, not when I knew that at any moment I could either lose my grip or be shoved off completely.

  “Okay, folks, everything off the tables,” Mrs. Cranston—our middle-aged, female, non-distracting, senior year math teacher—ordered as she sailed into the room. Right on her heels was Tyler, hair still damp from his morning shower. He sauntered toward the back of the room, avoiding not just my eyes but everyone else’s, too. He looked tired. When I thought about why, I felt my face go warm.

  “Still asleep this morning, folks? I said everything off the tables.” Mrs. Cranston plunked her extra-large coffee on her desk and began to pass out the test papers. “All I want to see is a pencil, a calculator, and a great big smile.”

  As I passed the stack of tests to the table behind us, I caught another glimpse of Tyler, slouched in his chair and yawning. He ran his hands through his hair and glanced around the room. His eyes skipped over mine and landed squarely on Skyler Thomas, who was watching him, smiling, the end of her pencil resting on her plump bottom lip.

  “Begin,” said Mrs. Cranston, collapsing into her chair with her jumbo coffee.

  I faced forward and got to work.

  Chapter Three

  “Lexi?” My mother poked her head into my room and then, when she saw what I was doing, immediately retreated. “Are you almost done?”

  “Yes,” I said, rolling my eyes. She acted like Trevor was going to leap out of my hands and close his mouth around her jugular. As if. I’d told her numerous times that corn snakes were not aggressive, but her fear was so bone-deep that it made her irrational. “You can come in, you know. He’s back in his tank.” I’d just finished giving him fresh water, exchanging the piece of Astroturf at the bottom of his tank for a clean one, and now I was dangling a dead, defrosted mouse in front of his face.

  Mom peered around the door frame again and let out a strangled yelp. “I can’t watch it eat.”

  I dropped the mouse and secured the lid on the tank. Trevor lay still, head up, as if checking his dinner for signs of life. I watched him fondly for a moment, enjoying the sinuous beauty in his movements, the vibrant oranges and reds in his skin. For as long as I could remember, I’d loved snakes. Emily, whose mother taught psychology at a high school in the city, often joked that I liked them because they were phallic-looking and I had penis envy. But that was hardly the reason. They just appealed to me. Who needed puppies and kittens when you could own something unusual, something exotic, something that stayed with you for decades.

&nbs
p; “When are you going to get rid of that slimy thing?” Mom asked as I emerged from my room and shut the door behind me.

  “I could ask you the same,” I said lightly.

  A tinge of pink leaked through her fake-and-bake tan. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  I walked past her to the stairs. She knew exactly what it meant. Her latest boyfriend, Pete something, was a forty-five-year-old unemployed construction worker with an ex-wife and four kids he didn’t support. He also stole all our food, spent Mom’s money, and called her names whenever she forgot to buy beer. He was the definition of slimy.

  Then again . . . considering who I entertained in my bedroom on a regular basis, it wasn’t like I had much room to judge.

  “Anyway”—she followed me to the kitchen, where I washed my hands at the sink—“I went downstairs to tell you . . . shit, I forgot what I was gonna tell you.” She kneaded her forehead for a second. “Oh yeah. You can use the car tonight. I don’t need it after all.”

  “I thought you and . . .” I refused to say the jerk’s name. “I thought you were going to the casino tonight.”

  “Nah.” She caught her reflection in the microwave door and started picking at her hair, smoothing it down. Mom and I shared the same kind of hair, but hers had been chemically straightened into submission and bleached light blond. Like Barbie. “I have a date, actually,” she said, a sly smile curling her lips.

  I dried my hands on a dish towel and raised my brows at her. “What happened to . . . ?”

  “Pete?” She stopped playing with her hair and sighed. “He’s history.”

  Whew, I thought. We’d have food in the house again.

  “This guy,” she said, fanning herself with her hand, “is freaking gorgeous.”

  That was how my mom talked, like a teenager sharing secret crushes with her besties. She even looked the part, with her diminutive figure and heavy makeup and short skirts. At thirty-nine, she was edging very close to the “too old to pull off that look” category. My friends thought she was fun and cool, but they didn’t see her makeup-free and sullen in front of the TV late at night, or smudged and wrinkled and smelling like a stale tavern on Sunday afternoons.

  “He’s not a client, is he?” I asked, suspicious. Because she worked at a day spa, most of her massage therapy clients were women, but the occasional straight man showed up. She’d dated a client once, years ago, even though it was unprofessional and possibly even against the rules. He must have really enjoyed her massages.

  “No. I met him at Starbucks a couple days ago when I was out on my lunch break. There was this big mix-up and he accidentally grabbed my hazelnut latte.” She giggled. “Anyway, everything got straightened out and we just started talking.”

  Moving over to the table, I idly started thumbing through yesterday’s mail. Flyers, coupons, bank statements, and an innocent-looking letter from the cable company. I ripped it open.

  “His name is Jesse,” my mother babbled on, her voice honey-sweet and lilting like it did when she was in a good mood. Her I-met-a-new-man voice, full of promise. “He works in one of those huge office buildings on the waterfront. He’s really smart and he must make good money because—”

  “Mom,” I said, not taking my eyes off the paper I was reading, the one from the cable company that claimed our bill was well overdue. Usually she hid this kind of mail from me, knowing I’d nag her about it. I didn’t even have a key to our mailbox. “This payment was due weeks ago. They’re cutting off our cable on Monday.”

  She finally shut up about the latte guy and stared at me, open-mouthed. “The cable?” Panic seeped in as it dawned on her that she’d soon be without The Game Show Network.

  “Yes, the cable.” The paper crackled as my fingers tightened around it. “What else didn’t you pay?”

  She closed her mouth and started gnawing on her bottom lip. “I’m sure I paid the electric bill this month.”

  I took one look at the uncertainty on her face and rushed down the hall to the spare bedroom where we kept the computer. She followed close behind. I brought up online banking and gestured for her to enter her username and password, information she refused to divulge to me no matter how much I begged. “I’m the mother and you’re the child. I pay the bills around here,” she’d say, even though it was only half true. Sometimes she paid them, sometimes she didn’t, and we never knew which one it was until an overdue notice appeared in the mail or, in extreme cases, we lost the cable, phone, lights. We’d lived a few days in complete darkness more than once.

  “Okay,” she said slowly as she looked over her account. “So I didn’t pay it. I will right now, don’t worry.” She sat down in the computer chair and started typing.

  “My God, Mom,” I growled. She was a child. I lived with a bleached, tanned, almost-forty-year-old child. “I set reminders for you on your phone and everything.”

  “Yeah, well . . . “ She shut down the browser and spun around in the chair, her expression a mix of apology and belligerence. “They always get paid eventually, don’t they?”

  “No! That’s the problem.”

  Her face turned pink again. “Get off my back, Lexi,” she shouted. “So a bill gets paid a little late sometimes. Who cares? I’m sick of you constantly nagging at me. Nag, nag, nag. I’m the mother and you’re the—”

  “Right,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m the child. And that dynamic has always worked so well around here, hasn’t it?”

  She stood up to her full five-foot-one height and glared at me. “And what is that supposed to mean, Lexi Claire?”

  Oh, I knew she was angry when she brought out my full name, the name I used to go by when I was little but shortened to just Lexi when I was twelve. Claire came from my paternal grandmother, a woman I didn’t even remember. I thought of her in the same way I thought of my father—a stranger who was probably dead by now.

  “Nothing, Mother,” I replied with false sweetness. She opened her mouth to yell at me some more but I didn’t give her the chance. I turned and walked out, not stopping until I reached the front door. I yanked it open and stepped out into the cold, forgetting about my jacket. Too pissed to even notice the biting March wind, I tramped across the street to Nolan’s house.

  “I’d offer you a shot of vodka,” Nolan said, smoothing his finger over a line in his pencil sketch, “but my parents put a lock on the liquor cabinet last weekend after they figured out that Landon had been into it. He and his friends were sneaking rum and then filling the bottle back up with water.”

  I laughed. We’d done the exact same thing at that age. Nolan’s little brother was fourteen and apparently following in our devious footsteps. “It’s okay,” I said, shivering. I’d been sitting on the couch in the Bruces’ basement family room, cocooned in a fuzzy blanket, for the past twenty minutes. The walk over here had taken forty-five seconds, just enough time to give me a lingering chill.

  “No plans this evening?” Nolan asked, his eyes glued to his sketch pad. “Don’t tell me the Preppy Posse is staying in on a Saturday night.”

  I shoved his leg with my foot, but even that didn’t break his concentration. He was in the zone. I’d realized Nolan was going to be an artist the day he got mad at me for going outside the lines as we colored a picture of the Teletubbies together. We were four.

  “We’re going to the movies. The late show.” With any luck, my mother would be long gone on her date before I ventured back over to get ready. “How about you? Any plans tonight? Amber?”

  He shook his head as he shaded a section of eyebrow in his drawing. People were his specialty. He drew family, friends, celebrities, total strangers. Under Nolan’s hand, faces came to life on paper. “Her grandmother died yesterday.”

  “Oh,” I said, frowning. Amber was Nolan’s girlfriend. They’d started dating this past summer. I liked her for several reasons—she was nice, she treated Nolan really well, and she didn’t bat an eye when she came over to find me hanging out with him. Most girls would
have been wary, but Amber was open-minded and trusting—necessary qualities for a girl who dated a guy whose best friend was me. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can come out with us tonight, if you want.”

  He laughed. “I think I’ll stay here.”

  I snuggled down into my blanket and contemplated doing the same. I loved being in Nolan’s family room. His house was almost identical to the one I lived in with Mom—split-level, four bedrooms (our house had three), two bathrooms, and a family room on the lower level. But while my family room at home was a graveyard of boxes and dusty exercise equipment, the Bruce family room lived up to its name with its comfortable furniture, wood stove, big-screen TV, and every video game system known to man. It was our favorite place to hang out, except when Landon was down here with his friends, polluting the room with potato chip crumbs and odors that made me glad I didn’t have a brother of my own.

  Teresa, Nolan’s mother, came down the stairs, a stack of folded towels in her arms. “Check the bottom drawer!” she hollered over her shoulder as she entered the room. Those words, I assumed, were directed upstairs toward her husband or younger son. She turned back around and spotted me curled up on the couch with just my face and a few strands of hair showing. “Oh, hi, sweetie,” she greeted me, continuing on to the bathroom. When she returned empty-handed, she started gathering up game controllers and empty soda cans. “You haven’t been over in a while,” she said, peering at me closely. It didn’t matter that the blanket hid ninety-nine percent of my body; she always knew when something was amiss with me.

  “I’ve been busy,” I told her. “Studying hard. You know me.” That’s the problem, I thought. She did know me, all too well. The entire family did. They knew when I arrived at their door, shivering and out of breath, my cheeks flushed with anger, I’d had enough of being in my own house and craved the normalcy and warmth of theirs.