We Are the Perfect Girl

by Ariel Kaplan

  “I think the fact that Delia has low self-esteem is what helps her to recognize the same issue in you.”

  I picked up the puppet from the table and said, in my highest falsetto, “Elmo says bullshit!”

  “Aphra, you met a boy you liked. You developed a friendship with him, and then you handed him over to your best friend. Why did you do that?”

  “Because it was the right thing to do?”

  “For whom?”

  “I love that you say whom,” I said. “So many people don’t.”

  She glared at me. I said, “For them.”

  “For them. And what about for you?”

  “For me, too!”

  “Hmm. Now, that’s interesting. How was it best for you?”

  But then the little alarm she keeps on her desk went ding, meaning it was time for me to skedaddle because her next patient was waiting. For the first time, she actually looked annoyed that our time had run out.

  “I want you to think about that,” she said. “Maybe write something down. I want you to think about why you did it, and why you think it was the best thing for you, and that’s what we’ll start off with next time.”

  I put Dr. Pascal’s words out of my mind after that. The thing was, I knew exactly why I’d done it, and that I was right. It was the best thing for everyone. Bethany was happy. Greg was happy. And I was happy because they were happy. Really, I was.

  Greg was not at crew that day, not that I’d expected him to be. He seemed to show up when he had time for it, and I didn’t know if that meant he was definitely going to be on the team next year or if he was still deciding. It was cold and drizzly, which is my second-least favorite rowing condition after snowing, which doesn’t happen all that often in the spring around here. Usually I get so hot rowing that I actually enjoy the cooler temperatures, but today I couldn’t seem to stop shivering, maybe because my hair was wet. I should have worn a hat, I realized, but that would have been wet, too, so I’m not sure it would have helped much. Afterward, the coach handed out hot cider from a big thermos, and I wrapped my hands around it and tried to get the feeling back in my fingers.

  “Are we going to your house?” Bethany asked, breathing the steam from her drink. Her fingers were pink, and so was her nose. “I found this math website I think Kit would like.”

  I frowned a little, because I kind of didn’t want to have Bethany over with Delia there, not right after what she’d said last night. “Can we do your house?” I asked. “Delia’s there with her boyfriend.”

  She smirked. “You’d rather hang out with Colin?”

  That was actually an easy question, because Colin was generally only awful to his own relatives, not to me, and whatever snide comments he lobbed in my direction were easily parried. I’d been insulted worse. Recently, in fact. “Yeah, actually, I would.”

  She whistled. “He’s that bad?”

  I bobbled my head side to side. “It’s not him as much as the two of them together.”

  “Got it,” she said, even though she didn’t. But Bethany is very good at taking my word for things. I really appreciate that about her. Like, I don’t have to be bleeding to convince her something’s a problem.

  * * *

  —

  We got to Bethany’s house and dropped our backpacks in the kitchen, and I stopped short because the door to the basement was standing open, with Colin nowhere in sight.

  I inclined my head toward the door. “Bethany,” I hissed.

  She’d been getting a banana from the fruit bowl, but when she turned around and saw me pointing to the open door, she stopped peeling and dropped it on the counter.

  “Is he gone?” she whispered.

  I shrugged. I didn’t hear anything down there. “Mom?” Bethany called. “Where’s Colin?”

  There was some splashing upstairs, like maybe she was in the tub. She called back, “Dentist. He just left.”

  Dentist. He’d be gone at least an hour. Bethany and I exchanged a wicked smile and bolted down the stairs, running shoulder to shoulder. “I’m picking the game!” I said.

  “You picked last time!”

  “That was six months ago!”

  But since Bethany did have to live with the slug, I didn’t complain when she ran over to Colin’s very involved game filing system. “Do you think he still has that pony game?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “Ugh,” she said, flipping through the games. “First-person shooter, first-person shooter, Grand Theft Auto…There’s got to be at least, like, an adventure game or something….Ah. Zombie Air.” She read, “ ‘Your plane crashes in the mountains, and you have to survive freezing temperatures, zombies, and even a yeti to get off the mountain and find rescue.’ It has a two-player mode.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Let’s fight some zombies.”

  She stuck the cartridge in, and we watched the intro video, which involved a harrowing plane crash scene.

  “Ugh,” she said. “Maybe this is too graphic.”

  There was a sonic boom, because Colin has this whole setup hooked to a pair of surround-sound speakers, and we both jumped.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Here goes.”

  “I’m stuck in my seat belt,” Bethany said. “I can’t get out.”

  “Use a piece of broken glass,” I said, having already cut myself free. “We should see what we can salvage from the plane before we look for cover….It’s already getting dark.”

  “Should we check the cockpit?”

  I followed her in there. The pilot was slumped over the controls.

  “Is he dead?” Bethany asked.

  I used my controller to poke him a few times, Pygmalion-style. “He’s definitely dead.”

  Bethany scoured the cockpit and came up with a bottle of water, some wire, and a roll of duct tape. I said, “Do you think we should…eat him?”

  “What? Ew, Aphra, oh my God!”

  “What? That’s like the number one rule. Your plane crashes in the mountains, first thing you do is eat the pilot.”

  “That’s not the number one rule of anything! Where did you even hear that?”

  “I…I read it. In. In a book.”

  “What book?”

  “Uh. A big book. Big, fat book.”

  “You did not read that in a book.”

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “It is not true.”

  “You do recall that he’s just pixels, right?”

  “It’s the principle!”

  “Pshhh,” I scoffed. “I’m eating him. I’ll just”—I clicked a few things on my controller—“put him in my food inventory…there.”

  The screen was filled with gore and crunching sounds. I screamed and threw my hands up in front of my face.

  “I told you not to eat the pilot!” Bethany screamed.

  “I didn’t know it would do that! I just thought he’d end up in my food stores like a little steak or something!”

  “He’s not a steak!”

  “I see that now, thanks. Oh, hey! I got 200 bonus HP.”

  “Oh, well, that’s all okay, then, you’re a cannibal, but you got your bonus HP— Zombies!”

  “Shit! Shit!”

  We ran our little avatars down the mountain. Bethany was lagging significantly behind.

  “Why am I running so slow?” she demanded, jabbing her thumbs into the controller.

  I nodded toward her health indicator. “You’re hungry. ’Cause you didn’t—”

  “Oh, shut up. Wait. Wait!”

  But hungry e-Bethany was being consumed by zombies, with more gore and crunching and a flash on the screen that said, PLAYER ONE HAS DIED.

  “I can’t believe you left me behind!”

  “Oh, they would have just eaten me, too.”

 
“You suck.” She tossed her controller down on the couch and stretched her arms over her head. “So I applied for a job yesterday.”

  “What?” I said, because my character, unlike Bethany’s, wasn’t dead and I was still running from the zombies. Was I supposed to have a weapon? What weapon do you even use on the undead? They’re already dead, that’s the whole point. “Did you want to start over? I don’t really want to play this by myself.”

  But Bethany had gone extremely still. “Aphra,” she hissed, jerking her head toward the back of the couch, and I thought, Oh crap, now we’re going to have to listen to Colin throwing a tantrum because we’re sitting on his precious pleather couch. But I turned my head, and it was not Colin standing behind us, looking highly amused. It was Greg D’Agostino.

  I dropped my controller.

  Say something, I willed Bethany. Talk to him. Say anything.

  “She ate the pilot,” she said.

  Ugh.

  “I. I did. Do that.”

  “Your mom let me in,” he explained. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I’d be interrupting your…uh. What game is this?”

  “Zombie Air,” I said, getting up. “It’s okay, we didn’t even get to the part with the yeti yet. I need to head home anyway.”

  “Did you still want to get a cupcake?” he asked.

  “Oh,” Bethany said. “Yeah, that’s what we said, right? Cupcakes? And maybe sandwiches, because I kind of didn’t eat dinner yet.”

  “We were fighting zombies,” I explained.

  “I hear it makes the time get away from you,” Greg said.

  “I hear the same thing.” I started up the stairs. “See you guys later.”

  “You didn’t have dinner, either!” Bethany blurted out, getting up from the couch. “Because of the zombies!”

  I stopped on the bottom step. “Yeah, that’s why I’m going ho—”

  “You should come with us! And have a sandwich! With us!”

  Greg looked a little discombobulated, though I wasn’t sure if it was because Bethany was talking like she’d just taken a hit of meth or because she’d just invited me on their date.

  “Oh,” I said. “No, I really don’t think—”

  “If we go to Cake Baby, you can get one of those wraps you like! They have coffee, too, can we go there?”

  Greg’s forehead wrinkled; evidently torn between not wanting me there and wanting—badly, I expect—to make the new girlfriend happy. The latter won out. “Y-yeah, let’s go to Cake Baby.”

  “No,” I said. “I really don’t want to crash your date, I should—”

  But Bethany had crossed the room and taken my wrist in her hand and was doing the best Bethany eyes I’d ever seen. “Please?” she said. And then, “I mean, I think it’d be fun for all of us to hang out.”

  I looked over at Greg, who had obviously given himself over to this turn of events and said, “You should come, Aphra. It’s cool.”

  * * *

  —

  So we went out. I had a wrap, Bethany had a panini, and Greg had a cup of decaf and a devil’s food cupcake.

  At first, everything seemed pretty normal. I was trying to be inconspicuous because I didn’t want to get in the way of Bethany talking to Greg herself and also because I was starting to have trouble remembering what I knew about Greg from real life and what I knew from the Deanna app.

  The problems started after Bethany finished her sandwich and ran out of excuses to not say anything. She stared at the bean sprouts that had fallen out of my wrap and onto my plate. She stared at the table. She stared at the light fixture. Greg made one failed conversational attempt after another.

  “So,” he said. “How was crew today? I bet it was cold out there.”

  “It was freezing,” she said, and then nothing.

  “So,” he said. “Did you finish the lab write-up in chemistry? I had to redo all my math. It took me forever.”

  “Yeah, I finished that last week,” she said, and then nothing.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “So what were you doing while we were rowing on a freezing river?” I asked.

  He looked downright relieved. “Oh. Yeah. I had a meeting with a prof over at NOVA.”

  “Really? I thought you were done for the semester.”

  “I am, but I topped out of Russian classes there, so I’m doing an independent study over the summer.”

  “Can you take something over at Mason?” I asked. “The department’s a lot bigger.”

  “I looked into it, but the classes cost like three times as much. Anyway, I thought an independent study would be kind of fun.”

  “So it’s just you one-on-one with a professor? Who designs the curriculum?”

  “Me, mainly. I wrote up a syllabus for myself and cleared it with the professor there.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Russian poetry,” he said.

  I elbowed Bethany, hoping she’d make some reply to this. It wouldn’t have even been that hard. All she had to do was say that sounded cool. Instead, she said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and then she did.

  I sat staring at Greg, who said, “Is she okay?”

  “Panini,” I said, “in her teeth. Probably. I’ve got some dental floss in my bag. Let me just”—I got up—“make sure she’s good.”

  I went into the bathroom, where Bethany was in front of the sinks with her face in her hands.

  “What is with you?” I asked.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. “I just can’t.”

  “Can’t do what? You already went out with him yesterday!”

  “That was different! It was a movie!”

  “You must have talked to him at some point.”

  “Not,” she said. “Really.”

  “So what did you do after the movie?”

  She went very red.

  “Right, never mind. So you can wear a bikini in front of him, and you can sit next to him, and you can make out with him, but you can’t talk to him? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I can’t do this!”

  “Yes! You can! He already likes you. Just talk to him.”

  “I don’t know what to say! It’s like, I look at him and everything in my brain goes dead.”

  “It’s just because you’re not used to him,” I said. “You’ll get over it.”

  “Yeah, but by then he’ll be gone. He’s not going to wait around for me to, like, act like a normal person.”

  I frowned. She was probably right.

  Bethany was beautiful. That was obvious and indisputable. Bethany was smart, too, but that was less obvious, because she was hiding it. And the kind of boy who wanted to spend his summer reading Russian poetry—and was cute enough to get the attention of any number of other girls—was not going to settle for a pretty face. She needed to level up or he was going to get bored. And the thing was, she could level up. All she had to do was open her mouth and talk like she always did with me. Any kind of verbiage from her would be better than this.

  But she wasn’t used to him, and the Russian poetry thing was probably not helping, because now she’d be intimidated instead of just nervous.

  “I don’t even know how to go back out there,” she said.

  I felt, in that moment, really bad for her. She was so, so close to getting everything she wanted, and this one thing that was mostly out of her control, this fear, was snatching it away from her. I knew all about that. The worst part was she would probably get over her Greg-induced brain freeze eventually, but it was going to take too long. He wouldn’t wait.

  What Bethany needed was something to help her along. A crutch, so to speak. She’d been able to give an entire five-minute presentation in chemistry because she’d had cards to read. I would just have to be her cards, her temporary
crutch. It was totally selfless, really. I was going to subsume my own ego and become Bethany’s charm, just for half an hour.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to help you.”

  “I can’t just sit there and smile while you do all the talking,” she said. “I look like an idiot.”

  “No. No, you’re going to do the talking. I’m just going to…feed you some lines.”

  “Feed me lines?”

  I waved my phone in front of her face a little. “Listen! This is perfect. I’m just going to give you something to say until you get over…whatever this is. I’ll text you under the table. You’ll read the messages out loud.”

  “Won’t that be obvious?”

  “Not if we do it right. Look, he already likes you, like, a lot. All we have to do is get him to keep liking you until your voice starts working again. Right? And let’s admit it, between your face and my words, we’re basically the perfect girl.”

  “But…in this scenario, is he falling for me or for you?”

  “You,” I said. “Obviously.”

  “But—”

  “It’s just temporary, right? We both know how great you are.”

  “Aphra.”

  “It’s true! I’m just…getting you over the hump.”

  “Aphra!”

  “Poor choice of words. The point is, it’s just for today. Listen, he’s sitting out there all by himself, and he probably thinks we’re in here talking about him.”

  “Well, we are.”

  “Yeah, but that’s bad. Let’s go back out there and make conversation for twenty minutes, and then you guys can drop me off at my house and you can…Never mind.”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Yeah.”

  She took a deep breath. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Bethany and I were in the same class in second grade, and again in third grade, and then in fourth grade we were split up.