Faking Perfect

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Faking Perfect Page 11

by Rebecca Phillips


  “Or he could just be denying my existence, like usual.”

  Teresa deposited her empty mug on the coffee table. “You know, I didn’t really know your father when I lived in Alton, but I knew of him. When your mom called to tell me she was dating him, I wasn’t surprised. She always had a thing for those tattooed, wild types.”

  I squirmed on the couch. Why, out of all the traits I could have inherited from my mother, did I have to get stuck with that one?

  “Anyway,” she went on. “He seemed nice, you know? Your mom was happy, really happy, for a long time.”

  “Then the drugs,” I cut in.

  She gave me a cautious look. “Stacey . . . did some drugs, too. With him. But she stopped when she got pregnant with you.”

  “And he didn’t.” I’d heard all this before, my whole life. She was stronger than he was, she grew up, she made sacrifices, she was a better parent, a better person. She saved me from him and for that, I should be grateful.

  “He didn’t,” Teresa agreed, idly sliding another picture from the box. A Bruce family picture, circa about fourteen years ago when Landon was a tiny baby. Rocking a shoulder-length, layered hairstyle, she held baby Landon in her arms while four-year-old Nolan stood in front of his father, both of them dressed in suits. Malcolm’s meaty hand rested on his son’s small shoulder. All four of them smiled for the camera, a nice, normal family captured for posterity.

  “My point is,” she continued, putting the picture back, “he wasn’t a horrible person, even then. Troubled, yes, but not totally incorrigible. He had good qualities, too, and I’m sure they eventually resurfaced. That’s why I decided to tell you what I knew about him. It’s also why I think he’ll do the right thing and email you back. If he’s as brave as his daughter.”

  My eyes felt damp. Like her son, Teresa always knew the right thing to say. I might have inherited the worst of my mother, but Nolan had gotten the best of his.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the end, like so many other things, the email arrived only after I’d stopped thinking about it.

  I definitely wasn’t thinking about it Saturday night, when a bunch of us went out to dinner to celebrate our college acceptance letters, which we’d begun receiving in the past week. I’d gotten into my first choice, Benton, a small college about a six-hour drive from home. Student loans would cover tuition, books, and residence, the last of which I was extremely excited about. Rooming with a perfect stranger would surely be an improvement over living with my mother.

  I wasn’t thinking about it Sunday morning either, when I stayed in bed past noon, alternately dozing and thinking about Ben. He’d been accepted into Avery, a prestigious college located several hundred miles away from mine. If I was ever going to gather the courage to let him know how I felt about him, it would have to happen within the next five months. This deadline made me feel even more desperate to get close to him. Tori must have sensed it, the way sharks sense weakness, because she’d been acting incredibly bitchy lately.

  I still wasn’t thinking about it on Sunday afternoon—exactly a week to the day since I’d sent the email—when I sat down at the computer and typed in my password like I’d done a million times since then—which was why it took me a few seconds to register that it was there, finally. An answer.

  Dear Lexi,

  I can’t even put into words how stunned I felt when I read your email yesterday. It was very unexpected.

  My wife Renee read it first and called me. I was an hour away, securing a deal on a new cat (the excavating kind, not the furry kind), and I came back as fast as I could. A letter from you was the last thing we were expecting to see in the three pages of emails we’d missed since our emailing system crapped out two weeks ago. We just got back online yesterday, so I apologize for the delay.

  Renee is helping me write this email because honestly, I’m finding it hard to express in words how happy I am to hear from you. I’m not much of a writer. Like you, I’m more of a numbers person, which makes me wonder what else we have in common. I knew you had my eyes and blond, curly hair just like your mother’s. She always hated her curls, too.

  A lot has changed for me in the past thirteen years. I don’t know what you’ve been told about my past, from your mother or from this Josie person (who for the life of me I can’t place, though Renee tells me she works at our bank), but I spent most of my twenties putting every cent I earned into my arms, up my nose, and down my throat. At present, I am twelve years sober. It hasn’t been easy. Ten years ago I married Renee, who somehow still puts up with me. We have two kids, Willow (8) and Jonah (6).

  There’s so much I want to say to you, Lexi, but I’m not sure how much I can get across to you in a letter. Just know that I’m so incredibly pleased that you contacted me. I’d like us to try, if you’re willing, to start building a relationship. I’ll understand if you don’t want to. It’s been almost fourteen years since I’ve been any kind of father to you. Every day, I regret those lost years. I think of you often and I hope it’s not too late for another chance.

  The ball is in your court now. I’ll leave you with my home phone number, just in case you ever want to talk. No expectations, no pressure.

  Eric

  P.S. I’d love to see a current picture of you.

  My first reaction was relief. An email system failure, not a lack of interest, was the reason for his week-long delay. He was happy, not dismayed, to hear from me. Great.

  My second reaction was rage. I’m not much of a writer? This was his excuse as to why he didn’t mention once, not once in his entire email, why he’d failed to reach out to me all my life? Start building a relationship? Why? So he could drop out of my life all over again whenever it suited him? How could I build a relationship with someone who’d basically abandoned me and let me grow up with a crazy woman? How was I supposed to get past that? How did he expect me to ever trust him again?

  I let myself fume for a few minutes, then forced myself to calm down and read the email again. Different things popped out: My siblings now had names and ages to go with the images I’d concocted in my head. He was kind of funny, like when he said “the excavating kind, not the furry kind” about the new cat he’d bought. He’d acknowledged his nonexistent parenting and expressed feelings of regret. He hoped for another chance. Okay. So maybe, like Teresa said, he wasn’t all bad.

  I moved the mouse until the arrow hovered over REPLY. The ball was in my court. No expectations, no pressure. Click.

  My answering email was brief. Partly because I could hear my mother on the other side of the door, banging around the bathroom, and partly because one sentence was all I was able to give him.

  Eric,

  No promises, but I’m willing to try.

  Lexi

  When I walked into math class the next morning, Tyler wasn’t in his usual seat at the back of the room. For a second, I wondered if his suspension had been extended, but as I sat down I noticed him sitting at one of the tables in front. The one right beside mine and Emily’s, in fact. Terrific. Cranston must have moved him. Skyler Thomas, still at the back of the room, looked disappointed with the change. It was hard to stare at or flirt with someone who was three tables ahead with his back to you.

  Several feet—and Emily—separated us, but it was like Tyler and I were connected by invisible strings. Each time he moved, I noticed. He never so much as glanced at me, as far as I knew, but I still felt warm and self-conscious, like he was aware of my every move, too. I must have been acting weird because Emily shot me a couple confused looks, and at the end of class she asked if I’d had one too many chai lattes this morning.

  “You keep fidgeting,” she said, beaming again at her graded test paper. For once, she’d beaten my score.

  It was no surprise to me; it was the test we’d written last Monday, the morning after my spur-of-the-moment “study session” with Tyler, minus the books. Between the sex and the fighting, I hadn’t exactly gotten much studying done. “Yeah, caffe
ine overdose,” I lied as we left the classroom together.

  At lunch, we convened in Ms. Hollis’s room, even Emily, who chose to eat instead of douse fires in the newspaper office like she did most days. The April issue was done and ready to go to print. It was the one time of the month she allowed herself to partially relax, if only for a day or two. I wasn’t sure why she still bothered to overachieve. It was senior year, and we’d already been accepted to college. She was going to Avery, like Ben. Apparently, they had a great journalism program there. I could picture her conducting interviews and covering breaking news stories just as easily as I pictured him in politics. The two of them radiated competence.

  While we ate, Emily and I discussed college and our plans, topics we’d been understandably stuck on lately. Shelby stayed quiet and focused on her sandwich, ripping the bread off in tiny pieces and popping them in her mouth. I knew she felt excluded whenever college came up. She’d applied with the rest of us back in the fall, when she still thought she and Evan were going to be a happy little family, but since then she’d decided to take a year off. Piper would need her, she reasoned, especially at the infant stage. College could wait. Clearly, listening to us talk about our futures made her all the more aware that hers would be entirely different. While we were surviving freshman orientation and sitting in class, she’d be enduring night feedings and changing poopy diapers. Most likely by herself.

  Emily, noticing Shelby’s uncharacteristic silence, changed the subject to something more universal—our contempt for Evan. Recently, he’d started giving Shelby the cold shoulder, ignoring her calls and avoiding her at school. He was like a soap bubble, fragile and erratic, liable to vanish completely with the slightest hint of pressure.

  “Did that boy come crawling back to you on his hands and knees yet?” Emily asked.

  Shelby tossed her mangled sandwich back into her lunch bag and shrugged. “He’ll come around. He has to, right? I mean, it’s his daughter.”

  Right. Like the title of daughter or son meant anything to some parents. Like the sharing of genes and chromosomes yielded instant connection and love. He might come around, but there was no guarantee he’d stay.

  I wasn’t about to deflate Shelby any further, so I agreed. “True.”

  “He’d better get his head out of his ass soon,” Emily said, stretching her legs out into the aisle. “Or he’ll miss out on his kid’s life and end up with a boatload of regrets.”

  Exactly, I thought, but I kept my firsthand experiences to myself and ate my chicken wrap.

  “He’s acting like Tyler Flynn,” Emily muttered. “Going around knocking girls up and then dodging responsibility.”

  I took another huge bite of wrap, knowing better than to refute that stupid rumor. Emily would believe what she wanted to believe.

  “Speaking of Tyler Flynn,” Shelby said, desperate for a topic that didn’t involve her flaky boyfriend.

  My heart leaped into my throat.

  “Did you hear why he and Brody Wilhelm got into that fight?”

  “I heard it was over drugs,” Emily said.

  I relaxed a little. I’d heard the same. Brody Wilhelm was Tyler’s competition, a fellow dealer who didn’t mind pushing heavier stuff in order to get an edge in the business. Tyler had had more than one run-in with him over the past two years.

  “No,” Shelby said, shaking her head. “It was over a girl. Apparently, Brody made a comment about some girl and Tyler didn’t like it. So he went nuts and punched Brody in the face.”

  “What girl?” Emily asked.

  “Don’t know. There were a few witnesses, but none of them heard a name. And Brody’s not talking.”

  Emily snorted. “Probably some slut he’s banging.”

  Luckily, I’d already swallowed the food in my mouth because my lungs constricted in an involuntary gasp. Before anyone noticed, I covered it up with a cough. Still, I could feel Emily’s eyes on me again, assessing. My skin felt hot, itchy. What if Brody had said something about me? I couldn’t imagine what he’d say. We barely knew each other. But a crack about, say, Skyler Thomas wouldn’t have set Tyler off like that. I’d made fun of her plenty when he and I were alone together and he never once got mad. He didn’t care about Skyler. At one point, I would have said he didn’t care about me. But his behavior over the past month or so suggested otherwise.

  Instead of missing him like before, I felt grateful that our relationship seemed to be fading out. Things were getting way too messy. I didn’t want to be the slut Tyler Flynn was banging. And I certainly didn’t want to be the one girl he cared enough about to defend.

  Chapter Fourteen

  My mother was so preoccupied with Jesse lately, she failed to notice the sudden frequency of my visits to the spare room. Or maybe she thought I was in there playing Solitaire or writing my memoirs for hours at a time. No way in hell would I ever tell her I was actually emailing back and forth with my father.

  In the four days since his reply, a total of nine emails had been exchanged between us. For me, it became easier after that second one. We didn’t talk about anything too heavy. Mostly, I wanted to know about Willow and Jonah.

  Do they know about me?

  I’d asked that in my third email. He said they did, and they knew about my recent contact, too. Apparently, they were as curious about me as I was about them. So, in my fourth email, I’d attached a current picture of myself. Eric answered an hour later with his own picture, a shot of the four of them posing in front of a Christmas tree.

  The young father from my pictures had turned into someone who looked like my friends’ dads. His hair was short now, and darker, and lines bracketed his eyes and smile. Long sleeves covered the tattoos I assumed were still there. He looked healthy and handsome and genuinely pleased with life. Renee had shoulder-length, honey blond hair (real blond, by the looks of it, not dyed like Mom’s) and a pleasant, heart-shaped face. The girl, Willow, was her clone. But the boy, he looked a lot like his father . . . and me. Different color hair, but the same sky-blue eyes, same pointy chin, same oval face with a dusting of freckles. Looking at them, my brother and sister, I felt a new kind of stirring in my chest. A kinship with people I’d never even met. A belonging. Family. Each time I studied their faces, my defenses weakened just a little bit more.

  When I couldn’t risk using the computer at home, I checked and sent email—slowly and laboriously—on my phone. I’d had to resort to this method on Thursday afternoon because my mother was at home with a horrible cold. Being sick bored her, so she’d probably be camped out at the computer when I got home, trolling Jesse’s Facebook page or searching his name to see if it popped up on any dating sites. I’d figured I’d better get my email-checking out of the way after school.

  A couple crotchety, anti-technology teachers known to confiscate phones and iPods—even outside of school hours—had been prowling around, so just to be on the safe side, I’d found a quiet little alcove near the service elevator and settled on the floor.

  Just as I turned my phone on, the sound of footsteps echoed through the empty hallway. I leaned sideways until my head was sticking slightly out of the alcove. When I saw the source of the footsteps, I yanked myself back into hiding. Ben and Tori stood several feet away from me in the middle of the hallway, facing each other and talking. Actually, it sounded more like fighting. Uh-oh. I pressed my back against the cinderblock wall behind me and kept perfectly still. Neither of them could see me.

  “ . . . so sick of this.” Tori’s words were sharp with anger. “You always make me feel so . . .”

  The next few words were too low to hear, but I did catch the deeper murmur of Ben’s voice, seemingly placating her.

  Then Tori’s voice came again, loud and clear, easily reaching my ears. “Stop telling me what to do, Ben. You aren’t my father, okay? God, you’re such a—”

  When her words broke off into a sob, I couldn’t stop myself from taking a peek. They were still in the same spot, facing each other. Ben’
s face was close to hers. He held her forearm and spoke to her softly, firmly, his expression stoic and controlled. Even from where I sat, I could plainly see Tori’s face darkening more and more with each of his words, until finally, she snapped.

  “Leave . . . me . . . alone!” she screamed, and quick as a flash, her hand flew up and connected with Ben’s nose.

  He yelped and jerked away from her, his hand moving up to his face, while she turned and stormed off down the hall, her back to both of us. I sat there on the floor, looking at him, looking at her, too stunned to even move.

  Tori is psycho, I thought when Ben took his hand away and gaped down at his palm, eyes wide with shock. Bright red blood covered his hand and the lower half of his face. I wondered if it was the first time someone had ever hit him.

  Without thinking, I threw my phone in my backpack and scrambled to my feet. Ben was still planted in the middle of the hallway, staring at his hand, as I approached him. When he heard me coming, he glanced up, on guard like he thought Tori had returned to finish him off. He relaxed slightly when he saw it was me.

  “Are you okay?” I asked stupidly. Clearly, he wasn’t. Blood was dripping onto his shirt, staining the white fabric with circular red dots.

  “I think she broke my nose,” he said, sounding amazed by the possibility.

  I slung my backpack over my shoulder and stepped closer to him. “Let me see.”

  He kept very still as I examined him, not even flinching when I pressed my fingers to his nose, feeling for anything abnormal. My nose had been broken during a game of volleyball in fifth grade, so I knew what one looked and felt like. Aside from some swelling that would surely get worse, Ben’s nose seemed intact.

 

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