Faking Perfect

by Rebecca Phillips

  “Hey,” I said, drinking him in. When my gaze reached his face, I raised my eyebrows and added, “Where’s your math book?”

  He opened his mouth as if to answer me, then shut it again and stepped closer, weaving his fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck. Warmth pooled in my stomach and I swallowed, my eyes glued to his, expectant. After what felt like an eternity, he finally put me out of my misery and kissed me, hard. Hands still twisted in my hair, he backed me out of the laundry room, through the family room, and straight toward my bedroom, lips never leaving mine.

  Once in my room, Tyler kicked the door shut and backed me up against it, our bodies colliding with enough force to rattle the door frame. His hand slid down to grip the back of my thigh, lifting my leg until it hooked around his hip. I dug my fingers into his lower back and pressed him even closer. I wasn’t sure if it was because we were completely alone in the house, or if it was because we hadn’t been together in a while, but I was frantic, almost crazed, to feel him against me. Inside me.

  Tyler obviously felt the same. He positioned my other leg until they both circled his waist and carried me over to the bed. We sank into the quilt together, tangled and breathless. By this point, I’d forgotten all about his lack of study material.

  Afterward, we didn’t get dressed right away. We just lay under my sheets, not touching. I felt vaguely ashamed, especially when I caught the expression on his face. He glowered at the ceiling, disgusted with himself. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had trouble making clean breaks. One weak person was bad enough . . . two weak people meant a never-ending cycle, always leading back to the same bad habits.

  Several minutes passed without either of us speaking. The longer he stayed quiet, the angrier and more self-conscious I felt. The anger mounted in me, rising up my body to my throat until finally, it escaped through my mouth. “Why are you even here? It’s obvious you don’t want to be.”

  He didn’t look at me, just continued his staring contest with my ceiling. “Beats me.”

  “Then do me a favor and leave. God.” I turned on my side, yanking the sheet up over my shoulder.

  Once again, silence yawned between us. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t even acknowledge that I was a mere six inches away from him, seething.

  I flopped onto my back again and blinked into the darkness. I would not cry in front of him. Or over him. I would not. “You are such a hypocrite,” I hissed at his profile.

  That brought him to life. “What?” he said, turning his head toward me.

  “Friday after school, I saw you and Skyler Thomas in the parking lot next to your car, practically feeling each other up. And you get pissy at me for letting Dustin Sweeney kiss my neck while we’re both drunk at a party? You’re a total hypocrite, Tyler.”

  “I’m a hypocrite? You’re in love with that Ben guy.”

  Damn. How I wished I’d never admitted my crush when Tyler had accused me of liking Ben months ago. I sat up, dragging the sheet with me, and glared. “Yeah, well, at least I’m not sleeping with him.”

  “Who says I’m sleeping with Skyler? Who says I’ve slept with anyone since we started doing whatever the hell it is we’re doing?”

  I barked out a laugh. “Yeah, sure. Tyler Flynn engaging in a monogamous relationship? Tell me another one.”

  Roughly, he flung the sheet aside and sat up, reaching down to the floor for his clothes. In the dark, his grim reaper tattoo looked like an amorphous stain against his skin. “Face it, Lexi,” he said as he pulled on his boxers and then his jeans. “You don’t really know me at all.”

  He gathered the rest of his clothes and, before I had time to hurl a comeback at him, he was gone. A few seconds later, the walls shuddered as the basement door slammed shut.

  Sighing, I fell back on the mattress. This marked the third time in the span of nine days that he’d stormed away from me. What the hell was his problem? What happened to cocky, easygoing Tyler, the one who’d sneaked happily through my window for the first time back in September? When did things get so complicated?

  I don’t need this, I thought as I got up and threw on a pair of pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt. I don’t need him.

  But Tyler’s recent fondness for temper tantrums was something I’d have to deal with later. It was time to take advantage of my mother’s absence and finish the email I’d been agonizing over for the past three days.

  It wasn’t one specific thing that provoked my decision to email my father. Rather, it was a combination of things. The sky-blue eyes identical to mine, peering out from the pictures in my snake book. The draw of those little half-siblings. The promise of a whole new family, a family I didn’t know but was connected to, irrevocably, by blood. And, underneath all that, a powerful sense of good old-fashioned curiosity. I needed to reach out to this man, to connect, even if it turned out horribly. I had to know.

  In the spare room office, I sat down in the computer chair and brought up my email account. The letter I’d spent so long creating was waiting for me in the drafts folder.

  Dear Eric,

  No way would I ever call him Dad.

  I know this email will probably come as a shock to you. It shocks me, too, and I’m the one writing it. But I feel like it’s about time we got in touch.

  When my mother and I left, fourteen years ago this August, everyone (including you, I assume) called me Lexi Claire. Now I’m just Lexi. I’m seventeen, turning eighteen in June, and I’m a senior in high school. Mom and I are still living in Oakfield. She works as a massage therapist and has never married. It’s always been just us.

  I’m not sure what, if anything, you might want to know about me. I like math. I have your blue eyes and curly hair that I hate. My best friend is my neighbor, Nolan Bruce. His mother, Teresa, was the one who told me about you. She found out about you through her friend Josie, who lives in Alton. I was very surprised to hear about your life there. To be honest, all these years I thought you were dead.

  That was as far as I’d gotten. I reread my words three times, searching my brain for an appropriate ending. What did you say to a man who ignored the fact that you’d been born? Who might read your words and instantly hit DELETE, pretending they were never there? I took a deep breath and touched my fingertips to the keys.

  If you don’t email me back, I’ll understand. Please know that I’m not writing to you because I need something from you or because I want to disrupt your life. All I want is an explanation, maybe, for why, at age seventeen, I have no idea who my father is or why he let me go. Then I can move on with my life and you can move on with yours, and it’ll end there. If I don’t get an answer from you, I’ll know you want things to stay the same. If that’s the case, I’ll never bug you again.

  I hope this email reaches you, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

  Thanks,

  Lexi Shaw

  I scanned the email a few more times, but my attention kept getting stuck on that last line. I look forward to hearing from you. Like I was closing out a cover letter to a prospective employer or something. What a crock. When it came to me and my father, looking forward was as pointless as looking back. We didn’t have much of a past and it was probably too late for a future.

  I clicked to that line, intending to change it to something less misleading. Instead, I sat there and watched the cursor blink over and over until the text surrounding it grew distorted. Then, with my heart hammering in my ears and the scent of Tyler still on my skin, I shifted the mouse forward and pressed SEND.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Well, I did it,” I told Nolan at the end of physics class the next day. “I emailed him. Last night.”

  He paused with his textbook halfway into his backpack and gaped at me. “Really? Holy shit. What did you say to him?”

  I gave him a brief overview as we walked out of the classroom together. “What do you think? Too much? Not enough? Just enough?”

  “Sounds good for an introductory email. I
think you said everything that needed to be said. When do you think you’ll hear back from him?”

  We darted toward the stairs leading to the main floor and my locker. “Who knows? It’s a business email, so he probably won’t even see it until today. And there’s a three hour time difference between us.”

  “Oh right.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s only nine a.m. in Alton right now. Maybe he’s reading it right this second. Or his receptionist is.”

  Imagining that, my heart rate accelerated. “Do you think he’ll, like, freak out?”

  He shrugged. “I think it would be quite the mindfuck, hearing from you after all these years.”

  Mindfuck. Nolan always knew the perfect term to use.

  Emily and Shelby were at their lockers when we rounded the corner. As we approached, Emily looked at Nolan and wrinkled her nose like she’d caught a whiff of rotten meat. I looked over at him, too, taking in today’s outfit of old frayed jeans and a Super Mario T-shirt with holes in the collar. Sloppy, my friends liked to call him behind his back. But to me, he just looked comfortable. Like Nolan.

  “Hey, Lexi,” Emily said, joining me at my locker.

  Instead of taking off to wherever he usually went at lunch, Nolan lingered for a few minutes, leaning against the locker next to mine like he enjoyed making my friends uncomfortable—which he did.

  “Hey,” I replied, exchanging my backpack for my lunch bag. “Going to lunch today?”

  “No. I have a deadline.” She shifted from one foot to the other, like she was nervous. “I was wondering,” she began, and suddenly I knew what was coming next. “Can you maybe give me a hand with some edits? I hate to ask, but I’m so swamped.”

  “Edits?” I said, and Nolan snickered softly beside me. I was about as talented at editing words as I was at printing them. “Um, I guess so?”

  She closed her eyes and let out a breath. “Thank you. You’re a true friend, Lexi.”

  “And what am I, an artificial one?” Shelby stopped in front of us, her hands pressed to the underside of her bulge, holding it up. “I’m pretty sure I helped you last time you asked.”

  “Yeah, after ten minutes of begging.”

  I shut my locker and glanced over at Nolan, who mouthed the word sucker at me.

  Shelby, catching the exchange, let out an amused snort. Then she gazed at Nolan’s shirt and started humming the Super Mario theme song under her breath, complete with the coin-collecting ding sounds. It made him smile. Of all my friends, Shelby was the one he tolerated best. And she, having learned over the past few months what it felt like to be ridiculed and judged, had grown more charitable toward people in general.

  “Let’s go,” Emily said, urging me forward.

  I waved good-bye to Shelby and Nolan and let Emily drag me through the halls to the newspaper office, which was just a small room off the main office area. As we passed the receptionist’s desk, the door behind her opened and I saw Mrs. Moncrief, the school vice-principal, her hand gripping the door knob as she spoke firmly to someone inside her office. A few seconds later, Tyler appeared in the doorway, his facial expression a mixture of pissed off and bored as he listened to the end of her lecture.

  “You’re running out of chances, Mr. Flynn,” I heard her say as Tyler turned to leave her office, his teeth clenched like he was struggling to keep from telling her to go to hell.

  Emily had paused to listen, too, and we watched as Tyler bolted toward the main doors and shoved them open with enough force to rattle the glass. Outside, he brushed past a cluster of onlookers and then disappeared from my line of sight.

  Beside me, Emily muttered, “He’s such a skeeze.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed as Mrs. Moncrief slipped back into her office and shut the door.

  By Friday of that week, Tyler and I were no longer speaking, let alone anything else, and I still hadn’t heard back from my father. I’d pretty much given up on the last one ever happening. Clearly, he didn’t want anything to do with me, but that was nothing new. Tyler’s silence, however, was.

  Not only were we no longer speaking, I also hadn’t seen him around school all week. Asking questions wasn’t an option, of course, so I kept my ears open. Soon, I started hearing the words week-long suspension and fight being uttered in conjunction with his name. He’d been suspended for hitting someone on school grounds. Wouldn’t be the first time. Finally, I knew what Mrs. Moncrief had meant when she’d told him he was almost out of chances. After so many suspensions, the next step was expulsion. To be expelled two months before graduation did not bode well for his future.

  I asked myself why I even cared about Tyler’s future. Like he’d said the last time I’d seen him, I didn’t really know him at all. Our relationship was based purely on a physical connection, not an emotional one, so we’d never had any revealing, heart-to-heart conversations about our lives. He didn’t know anything about my father, or what growing up with my mother was like, or how I feared every day that my friends would uncover the real me and throw me back into the dark, lonely pit of unpopularity.

  And I knew nothing about his life, aside from the basics. Two parents who worked a lot and basically ignored him unless they were punishing him for one of his many transgressions. An older brother who’d made the Dean’s List at college three years in a row, a feat that drew constant comparisons between the two of them from their family and the teachers at Oakfield High who’d had the older Flynn brother in one of their classes. In a nutshell, all I knew about Tyler’s personal life was that he felt disregarded, angry, and severely lacking—which was why, I suppose, I’d been drawn to him. We’d sensed a deficiency in each other, an emptiness begging to be filled. In those moments together in my room, we’d found relief.

  But not anymore. Without Tyler, I’d had to find my relief in other ways, like by overeating and spending entirely too much time over at the Bruces’ house, being coddled by Teresa. Or both at the same time.

  Friday evening, I’d gone across the street to return a DVD Nolan had lent me weeks ago and found the family in the middle of their customary Friday night take-out pizza dinner. Feeling a little like a homeless person, I joined them at their request and proceeded to demolish three slices. Teresa was one of those moms who loved to see people eat (she was one-fourth Italian), so she didn’t mind my gluttony.

  After dinner, Nolan and Landon went out—Nolan to meet Amber for a movie and Landon to the middle school dance. It occurred to me that Teresa might like to enjoy the empty house, but always sensitive to my moods, she insisted that I stay. So I sat on the living room couch and sifted through the box of pictures that were kept in the antique chest they used as a coffee table. Looking at old pictures was something I did when I felt restless and adrift. Evoking happy memories anchored me.

  “This one’s blackmail material,” I said to Teresa, who’d settled next to me with a cup of tea.

  She leaned over to see the picture I was holding. Nolan and me, age four, were sitting in a kiddie pool in the Bruces’ backyard, both of us topless and grinning. She laughed. “You two were so cute. Your mom and I always used to joke that you guys would end up married someday.”

  Sometimes I thought Teresa still wished for that. She loved Amber, but she loved me more and couldn’t quite accept that a romance between us would never happen. Nolan and I knew it all too well, because our one and only try at being more than friends had been a complete and epic fail.

  Our families and friends had no idea we’d been each other’s first kiss. It was one of our many little secrets, stored away and never mentioned. We were twelve when it happened. We’d been lounging in his cool family room, hiding from a brutal summer heat wave and bored silly. The experimental kiss was my idea, an attempt to break up the monotony of another long, sweaty day. Plus, I was curious. Nolan apparently was, too, because he’d agreed readily enough. So, after a few false starts, we pressed our lips together like we’d seen people do on TV. The kiss lasted approximately five seconds, but it was long enough
to determine that the two of us kissing felt wrong. Almost incestuous.

  “It’s like I kissed my sister,” Nolan had said as he’d wiped his mouth afterward, and I’d known what he meant. We had zero romantic chemistry, then or now, and we liked it that way. Kept things simple.

  “Oh, I remember this day,” Teresa said, plucking another picture from the box. It showed the four of us at the beach—Nolan and me in the foreground, building sandcastles while our moms looked on from their lounge chairs. Mom and Teresa were laughing like they’d just shared a private joke. They looked so young. Happy.

  “Who took this?” I asked.

  “If I remember correctly, we asked some guy walking by to take it.” She placed the picture on her knee and ran a finger over it. After studying it for a few moments, she sighed and shook her head. Her eyes shone with tears. “I miss Stacey a lot,” she said when she noticed me watching her.

  “I know,” I said, taking the picture and replacing it in the box. “She misses you, too. But you know how she is. Stubborn. She doesn’t like to admit when she’s wrong.”

  “Yes,” Teresa said softly. “She’s always been proud, your mom.”

  “And pigheaded.”

  She didn’t disagree. It would be hard to. “Speaking of proud”—she set her hand, warm from the mug of tea, on my forearm—“did I mention how proud I am of you for sending that email to your father? Sweetie, that took guts.”

  I shrugged. “A lot of good it did me.”

  “Oh, don’t give up yet. There might be a very good reason why he hasn’t replied.” Teresa sounded like Shelby when she made excuses for her deadbeat baby daddy.