Faking Perfect

by Rebecca Phillips

  A flicker of disbelief crossed Nolan’s face and then his eyes went flat. “Please tell me you’re not implying what I think you’re implying.”

  I didn’t answer. He continued to watch me, unwavering, until I finally looked away.

  “Wow,” he said dully. “I thought it would take at least six months for Ben to turn you into a pretentious asshole like him, but it’s only been what? A little over a month? Impressive.”

  I wasn’t sure what it was that surged through me then, anger or guilt or a bit of both, but it propelled me off the couch and toward the basement door. Just as I touched the doorknob, I retraced my steps and grabbed the sketch pad off the coffee table. I found the drawing of Tyler and tore it out, the sound of the paper ripping loud in my ears. Once it was free, I folded it up until it was small enough to fit into my pocket.

  “Don’t draw him again,” I said firmly to Nolan, who was looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure who I was. Or what I’d become. “Or me,” I added for good measure, and then I left his house and went home.

  Like the note Teresa had given me so many weeks ago, I was so sure I’d destroy that sketch the first chance I got. But somehow, it too ended up in Corn Snakes: An Owner’s Guide, which was so full of my secrets by now, I could barely get it to stay closed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Due to her obsession with Disney princesses, Grace was adamant about seeing me in my prom dress before I took off for the prom.

  “You wook wike Pwincess Awowa in Sweeping Beauty!” she exclaimed when she and her mom reached our front yard, where Ben and I stood in front of the lilac bush, posing for pictures.

  “Thanks,” I said, smoothing my dress—a long, pink, shimmering halter-style with an empire waist and open back.

  “And Ben looks like Prince Philip, huh?” Rachel prompted.

  Grace frowned. “No. Pwince Phiwip has bwown hair.”

  We all laughed, even Mom. She always acted cheerful and friendly around Rachel, who was a bubbly, proficient Supermom type. As if they had enough in common to be friends. “Okay, just a couple more,” Mom said, holding up the digital camera.

  I gritted my teeth and smiled. It was brutally hot outside and my dress, despite appearing light and airy, actually made me feel like a tightly encased sausage. A sausage that was currently being fried. I needed shade or air-conditioning before my makeup melted or my hair frizzed up, ruining an hour’s worth of torture with the straightener. Somehow, Ben seemed completely cool and unaffected in his tux as if he was immune to sweat. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

  It still amazed me, even as we stood there all dressed up, that I was going to the senior prom with Ben Dorsey. I’d fantasized about that moment for years, played it out in my head as I lay in bed or sat in class, never expecting it to actually happen. In my fantasies, he would pick me up in a limo, present me with a gorgeous corsage, all the while gazing at me lovingly. Then we would dance all night, kiss under the stars, spend the entire summer together before going off to college—also together—and get married in our mid-twenties and have a litter of kids. That was my frivolous fifteen-year-old-girl dream. As a newly-minted eighteen-year-old adult, my dreams for the future were more realistic. Unlike Princess Aurora, I probably wouldn’t get a spell-breaking kiss and a happily ever after with my prince.

  Ben and I had spent most of June fighting. Not screaming, storm-away-from-each-other fighting, but long, drawn-out disagreements that left me teary-eyed and frustrated. At some point, fantasy had turned into reality and the shine began to fade. Shelby was right about some things. Ben was inflexible in his opinions. Unforgiving of mistakes, his own and other people’s. He wasn’t as perfect as he appeared from afar. In fact, he was almost as flawed as I was, a realization that consistently surprised me. The only difference was, I accepted his faults while he barely tolerated mine.

  Any other girl would have walked away a long time ago, but I couldn’t seem to let go of the idea that this was where I was supposed to be, who I was supposed to be, and who I was supposed to be with. As for Ben, he seemed to thrive on that kind of unbalanced relationship. He was happiest when he was winning, and with me it was easy. I rarely challenged him, even when it came to Nolan.

  “He’s not coming over here, is he?” Ben asked in an undertone after the photo shoot was done and my mother was busy showing the various shots to Rachel and Grace.

  “Who? Nolan?” I knew very well who Ben meant; he must have caught me sneaking peeks over at the Bruces’ house between poses. “No. Why would he? I was already over there earlier, before you got here.”

  The moment those last few words vacated my mouth, I felt like kicking myself with one of my high-heeled sandals. Ben had been so pleased, so smugly vindicated, when Nolan and I quit speaking to each other after our fight a couple weeks ago. I couldn’t tell Ben why we’d fought, of course, but he didn’t really care about details, anyway. All that mattered was that Nolan and I weren’t spending time together anymore, either alone or in public. He didn’t seem bothered that I was completely miserable over it. Nolan and I had argued before, and even stopped speaking to each other once or twice, but never for this long and never over something so significant. Our fighting upset Teresa too; she was the one who’d insisted I come over earlier, using her desire to see me in my dress as an excuse. I knew Nolan would be around, but I swallowed my stupid pride and went anyway. It wasn’t fair to punish Teresa just because her son and I were on the outs.

  But Ben didn’t see it that way. He saw only my defiance. “You went over there?” Telltale blotches emerged on his skin.

  “His parents wanted to see me in my dress,” I explained. God, it was hot in the sun. I shifted to the right, trying to find relief in the patchy shade of the lilac bush. The night hadn’t even started and already I wanted to go inside and stick my head in the freezer.

  “I bet he wanted to see you in that dress, too,” Ben muttered, his gaze traveling over my curves. “He’s not—”

  “No,” I cut him off, already knowing exactly what he was going to ask. “He’s not going tonight. I told you that.” Nolan and Amber were both anti-prom, anti-formal wear, anti-anything to do with school tradition. They’d probably spend the whole night watching movies and eating popcorn in the family room. For a moment, I envied them.

  Ben’s face relaxed slightly and the blotches disappeared. He reached out and took my hand, easing me back over to his side. “You look so beautiful,” he murmured against my hair.

  I turned my face toward him, touching my lips to his the way he expected me to do. The scent of summer was all around me, on Ben’s skin and in the air, genuine mixed with synthetic. It reminded me of before our relationship changed, before I knew the different sides to him. Back when we were just friends, my vision was tunneled, blurred, never seeing beyond surface-deep. Now, my eyes were clear and wide open.

  “Wexi?” Grace tugged on my hand as Ben and I got ready to leave. “Don’t forget my birfday party, okay?”

  As if I could forget. Grace had spoken of little else for the past month. For her fourth birthday, she was having a fancy princess party at her house, complete with tiaras and gowns and a giant pink princess cake. It was tomorrow afternoon and I’d promised her I’d go.

  Bending down to her level, I whispered, “I’ll be there with a big present for the birthday girl.”

  She grinned. “What is it?”

  “It’s a secret. You’ll have to wait and see.” I straightened up and watched her skip over to her mom, who was still chatting with mine. Grace threw her arms around her mother’s waist and Rachel’s hand came down to stroke her hair. The easy, unconscious way she did it, like a mother cat nuzzling her kittens, set off a familiar twinge in my chest. Longing. Family.

  “Ready?” Ben asked.

  His voice snapped me out of my trance and I turned to him, a shiver rippling through me in spite of the heat. When I nodded, he reclaimed my hand and led me away.

  Ben waited until after ten o’clock
, just when the prom itself was wrapping up, to spring his big plan on me. “I got us a room upstairs,” he said in my ear as we slow-danced to the last ballad of the night.

  “What?” I pulled back to look at him.

  He was smiling, proud of his ingenuity. Our prom was being held in the ballroom of a huge hotel, and a few other seniors had gotten the bright idea to reserve rooms for partying afterward. But this wasn’t our plan. Our plan was to head directly to Leila Acker’s party, which was taking place at her family’s summer cottage on the lake. I barely knew Leila, but the lure of bonfires, barbecue, and a couple jumbo-sized kegs guaranteed that most of the graduating class would end up there.

  “I got us a room,” Ben repeated, running his palms over my hips. He’d been covertly exploring my pelvic area all night, delighting in the fact that the taut, smooth fit of my dress required me to go commando.

  “What about the party?”

  “Who cares about the stupid party?”

  “But . . .” My mind was whirling. Sex with Ben. I’d fantasized about that too, of course. A lot. And I knew it would be nice, just like making out with him was nice. The problem was, he still thought I was sexually inexperienced. Naive. I could fake a lot of things, but I wasn’t quite talented enough to fake virginity.

  “But what?” he said with a trace of impatience. “You don’t want to?”

  “I just . . .” My hands felt sweaty against the heavy fabric of his tux. Turning him down would definitely widen the already gaping rift between us, but for once I didn’t care. Just the thought of spending the entire night with him, sustaining the charade for hours, exhausted me to my core. “I really want to go to the party,” I finished lamely.

  “Fine.” His hands slid back to my waist. “We’ll go to the party.”

  I knew from experience that I wasn’t forgiven, not really. The latest offense would simply join the ones before it, piling up like Nolan’s Jenga blocks, towering and wobbly, always threatening to fall.

  Leila Acker’s cottage was tiny and rundown, but the massive back deck overlooking the lake made up for any shortcomings. By the time we arrived at eleven-thirty, the grill was hot, the kegs were tapped, and several people were already well on their way to smashed.

  “Beer?” I suggested the minute we emerged into the clearing where the cottage stood, quaint and cozy-looking in the darkness. A line-up of around two dozen people trickled up the yard and onto the deck, where I assumed the kegs were located.

  “Who owns this cottage again?” Emily asked as she threaded her arm through Dustin Sweeney’s and started in the direction of the beer line. Ever since Dustin had asked her to the prom last month, Emily kept insisting they were going as friends, but I’d caught them holding hands several times. Colin Hewitt and his girlfriend Mara followed closely behind them, and Ben and I brought up the rear, neither speaking nor touching, the gloomy finish to an otherwise cheerful convoy.

  A lot of people had changed out of their formal clothes and into shorts and T-shirts at some point between the prom and the cabin, but the three of us still wore our dresses. Mara, stunning in a long, ice blue strapless gown and Emily in the short white dress with the sweetheart neckline that Shelby and I had helped her pick out last winter. I wished Shelby could see her in it, but she’d skipped the prom for several reasons—she couldn’t find a dress to fit, Evan was still being an ass, and her due date was less than two weeks away and she didn’t want to risk having the baby at the prom. How cliché, she’d exclaimed.

  “Leila Acker,” I answered Emily as we got in line. “You know, the girl with the curly brown hair who hangs out with Bianca Sykes.”

  Her nose wrinkled. Bianca Sykes had a reputation for being—in Emily’s words—“a total skank.” Meaning, she went through guys like Kleenex and shamelessly slept around. She was the female version of Tyler, who, predictably, she’d gone out with a few times last year.

  When it was my turn at the keg, I filled my red plastic cup to the brim and immediately started downing it. When it was gone, I got back in line for another. I knew Ben would disapprove, but he was already pissed at me so I thought what the hell, I’d have two beers. Maybe even three. It was prom night, after all, and he was off somewhere anyway, probably practicing his valedictorian speech for an audience of unsuspecting squirrels in the woods.

  The second beer shot straight to my bladder, so I went inside in search of a bathroom. Of course there was only one, and of course there was a line for that too, even longer than the keg line. When I was finally done in the washroom, I made sure my dress was positioned properly on my hips and returned to the kitchen, hoping for a glass of water. But instead of water, I got something else I’d been thirsting for: Tyler Flynn.

  You have got to be kidding me, I thought when I turned the corner and saw him leaning against the ancient yellow-gold stove and talking to some guy with a lip ring I’d seen around but didn’t know. They both glanced up as I entered the room, and then the guy turned back to Tyler and continued talking, oblivious to the abrupt shift in atmosphere. Tyler regarded me with the same deer-in-headlights look he’d worn in the convenience store parking lot a couple months ago.

  I should have turned around and walked away right then, but dammit, I was thirsty. So I squared my shoulders, dug out a plastic cup from the bag on the counter, and filled it at the sink. The entire time I could feel Tyler just a couple of feet away, his eyes searing my skin. After another minute or so of one-sided conversation, Lip Ring Guy excused himself and departed through the sliding doors to the deck, leaving us alone in the kitchen.

  My water was lukewarm and slightly bitter, but I kept drinking, drinking, soothing my parched throat and filling my stomach with a sloshy heaviness. When my cup was completely drained, I suppressed a burp and looked over at Tyler, who was watching me with a mixture of amusement and apprehension.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, depositing my cup in the sink. “You weren’t even at the prom.”

  “I don’t do proms,” he said, moving closer to me. The base of my spine tingled when I caught his scent. The simple act of standing near him produced more of a reaction in my body than when I was full-on making out with Ben. “But I do do after-prom parties.”

  “Oh?” I crossed my arms over my chest and pretended not to notice when his eyes dropped to the swell of my breasts. “Someone told me you, uh . . . stopped being an entrepreneur.”

  His lips curled at the reminder of our rum-and-coke-fueled banter on my bed a while back. “I did stop,” he said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his shorts. He and Ben were a study in contrasts—Ben, stiff and formal in a tux, face clean-shaven, hair neatly combed, Tyler, relaxed and casual in a T-shirt and shorts, jaws bristly with stubble, hair tousled as usual. Light, dark; good, bad; summer, winter. Opposites in every way.

  “Why?” I asked. “Too many late nights? Long hours? Sucky benefits?”

  “Not exactly.” He leaned around me to flick an ant off the counter and for one dizzying moment I was surrounded by the familiar scents of smoke and beer and maleness. “I just thought, you know, unless I want to do another shitty year at that shitty school, I’d better get my act together and focus on graduating.”

  “And you are, right? Graduating on Tuesday?”

  He smirked. “Well, I’m not valedictorian or anything, but yeah, I managed to squeak by.”

  Teasing me about Ben, just like old times. I let myself smile. “Good.”

  We stood silently for a moment, our bodies angled toward the kitchen window, which faced out onto the lake. The moon was big and bright, reflecting on the calm, inky water below. A drunk, laughing couple, both stripped down to just their underwear, danced clumsily together on the edge of the wharf, prom clothes in a messy heap beside them. They looked happy. Free.

  “Lexi.”

  I tore my gaze away from the couple and focused on Tyler’s face. I miss kissing you, I thought. I miss the scuff of your cheek against mine and the delicious weight of your bod
y as you brace yourself above me. “What?” I said, the word squeezing past my throat.

  “I like your hair like this.” He reached up, captured a smooth, flat strand between his fingers.

  Heat bubbled in my stomach, the water inside rising to a boil.

  “But I like the curls better,” he said, burying his fingers deeper until they made contact with my scalp. I closed my eyes as my body slanted toward him, caught in his magnetic pull.

  Thwack. The screen door flew open and Emily stumbled in, drunk off her ass. I jerked away from Tyler, but not before my friend saw how close we’d been standing to each other, Tyler’s hand tangled in my hair.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God.” She slapped a hand over her mouth, her body swaying a little to the side. “I knew it,” she said, taking her hand away. She looked like she’d just walked in on her parents having sex. Horrified. “I freaking knew it. The way you always stare at him at school . . . I knew there was something going on between you two, just like I knew you had a crush on Ben since, like, forever. Oh my God.”

  “It’s not—” I started to explain, but the words had barely left my mouth before Emily straightened to her full height and strode purposefully to the door and outside, slamming the screen behind her. “Oh shit,” I muttered. I knew exactly what she was doing and exactly who she was getting. I slumped against the counter.

  “It’s okay,” Tyler told me just as the screen door slid open again and Emily marched back in, followed by an utterly perplexed Ben.