Better Than Perfect Read online

  “Seriously?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “Because, I mean, he’s not my favorite guy in the world, but he’s clearly harmless.”

  “That’s why we want you to sing in the band,” Sinead said with excitement.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”

  “Four out of five girls do not find Sean harmless,” Sinead explained. “Believe me.”

  The warning bell rang. “Sinead, I’m really sorry. I’d like to help you guys out, and I’m totally flattered. But I’ve got the SATs coming up and my life’s kind of . . . insane right now. To put it mildly. I just don’t have time to sing in a band.”

  “Will you think about it?” she pleaded. “Just overnight?”

  I shook my head. “I know what my answer is going to be. The SATs will still be there tomorrow. And then I might have to take them again if I don’t do well, and I have applications and homework and . . . I just can’t.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “I know you’ll find someone awesome. Everyone loves you guys.”

  “Thanks.” But Sinead didn’t look comforted.

  “See you around.” I turned and headed into English.

  “Yeah,” Sinead said quietly. “See you around.”

  Aunt Kathy flew into New York the night before my SATs. I’d had some idea that it would be good to sleep in my own bed before taking the test, but when I pulled into my driveway after picking her up at the airport, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t slept at home in weeks, not since Kathy’s last visit. As Kathy and I walked across the front lawn and I felt the weight of her bag on my shoulder, I remembered walking across Jason’s lawn with my own bag. It was like existing in the kind of split screen they have in the movies; pushing open the front door, I was half sure I’d find myself standing in Jason’s foyer instead of my own and that it would suddenly be August instead of October.

  Oliver arrived about an hour after we did. He came into the kitchen where Kathy and I were making dinner, and he hugged her so hard he lifted her off her feet, then gave me a slightly gentler hug, probably because I was stirring tomato sauce on the stove.

  “It smells good in here.”

  “Thanks,” I said, turning around to look at him. “Hey! You grew a beard.”

  He touched his chin, as if he wasn’t quite sure it would still be there. “Yeah. It’s easier not to shave when you’re camping and then . . . I don’t know. After the summer I just kept it.”

  “It looks good,” I told him. “You look older.” He did, too, and somehow that made me sad, like even more time had passed since I’d last seen him than actually had. I remembered my premonition the last time we’d talked, when I’d had the feeling I’d never see him again. And here I was, seeing him, but he looked so different it was almost as if he were someone else.

  “I don’t get carded as much,” he acknowledged.

  “Not that you’d ever order alcohol, given that you’re not twenty-one,” said Kathy, laughing.

  “Of course not,” Oliver assured her. He hopped up on the counter. “Dad’s growing a beard too. His is lamer than mine, though.”

  Hearing that my father had decided to grow a beard was even stranger than my brother having grown one. College guys were supposed to experiment with facial hair. But dads weren’t.

  “When did you see Dad?” I asked. “Because he was clean shaven the last time I saw him.” I tried not to think too much about sitting across the table from my father at Mario’s, attempting to make conversation with him as if he were a complete stranger.

  “He came up to New Haven last weekend.” Oliver said it like it was no big deal.

  “He did?” I dropped the spoon into the sauce and spun around.

  “He did,” echoed Oliver, making his voice whiny and high-pitched and nothing like mine. “Why is that so outrageous to you?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to give the real reason I was so shocked that my dad had spent the weekend with my brother. Instead, I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “Frankly, I can’t picture him making the time.”

  “According to Dad, you’re the one who’s too busy to see him.” Oliver leaned back on his hands.

  “Wait, he said that?” I couldn’t believe my father was talking about me behind my back.

  Something about my voice must have warned Oliver that he’d gone too far, because he corrected himself. “He just said you’re really busy. You know, working hard and stuff.”

  “Well, I am,” I snapped. “Maybe you’ve noticed that Mom’s not around to work as my personal assistant during the college application process.”

  “Okay, okay,” Kathy said, literally stepping between us. “That’s enough, you two. We’re making dinner. Juliet, stir that sauce. Oliver, wash your hands and start slicing cucumbers.”

  We made dinner together, and Oliver and I managed not to bicker. The three of us were supposed to go visit my mom the next day, after I took the SAT, and as we ate, Oliver and Kathy debated whether he should try to meet his old squash coach for breakfast or if the timing wouldn’t work out. I was too distracted by my own calculations about the next day to register what they decided. But just before bed, I told my aunt what I’d decided.

  “I’m not going to go with you and Ollie to see Mom tomorrow.” I didn’t explain that over dinner I’d realized that there was no way I’d be able to focus on the SAT if I was planning to visit my catatonic mother as soon as it was over.

  “I understand,” said Aunt Kathy. She was sitting on the bed in the guest room. It wasn’t a very comfortable room—before my dad left, my mother had been planning on redecorating it, and it was one of the only rooms in the house that still looked the way it had when we’d first moved in ten years ago. There was no overhead lighting, and Kathy and I sat in the dim glow of a small desk lamp. The bed she was sitting on was narrow and uncomfortable; I knew because I’d slept on it last year when my room was being painted.

  There was no reason my aunt shouldn’t have just slept in my mother’s bedroom, but neither of us had suggested it. The door to her room remained closed, though Kathy assured me the cleaning woman had dealt with the bathroom.

  “But just so you know, she really is better,” Aunt Kathy promised, touching my forearm lightly. “The doctors think they’ve gotten her medication right. She’s much more alert and focused now.”

  “Does that mean they’re going to send her home?”

  I knew what the answer would be even before Kathy said it. After more than a month of dealing with doctors, I found their decisions much less mysterious than they’d once been.

  “They’re hoping to send her home soon, but they can’t say exactly when,” said Aunt Kathy. “It’s—

  “I know, it’s an art, not a science,” I interrupted her.

  She smiled and reached over to tousle my hair. “You should get some sleep. Tomorrow’s the big day. Got your pencils and your ID?”

  I nodded.

  “Sleep tight,” she said.

  “Sleep tight,” I echoed.

  Oliver wished me luck before going into his room and closing the door. When I thanked him, it felt like a truce, and as I listened to him puttering around next door, I found there was something comforting and familiar about being in my own bed in my own room in my own house. Still, I couldn’t sleep. And it wasn’t because of having the SATs the next morning. In some ways it seemed unreal to me that the actual test was really here, that tomorrow wasn’t one more of the millions of practice tests I’d taken since last January, when I’d started getting tutored.

  As I lay in my bed, watching the hour on my digital clock change from ten to eleven to twelve, what kept me awake was that I couldn’t stop thinking about my dad going up to New Haven for the weekend.

  I pictured my father and brother at the restaurant my parents and Oliver and I had eaten at parents’ weekend of his freshman year, but instead of the awkward silence that had characterized my dinner with our father, Oliver and my dad were happily chatting and laugh
ing. They raised their glasses and toasted to how close they were, how untouched their relationship was by everything else that had happened in their lives.

  When my dad and I had had dinner, the two empty chairs where my brother and my mother should have been sitting had felt like ugly, gaping wounds. When Oliver and my dad were together, I couldn’t imagine them caring that they were alone.

  19

  My SAT tutor called me right after the test.

  “Soooo, how’d it go? Did you kick ass and take names?”

  I liked Glen, and he’d brought my scores up hundreds of points on all the practice tests I’d taken, but he was still the kind of guy who said things like, Did you kick ass and take names?

  “I did, Glen,” I said. “I kicked ass and took names.”

  Sofia snorted. She was driving us to Bookers, where we’d agreed to go for a post-SAT celebratory latte.

  “Seriously,” said Glen. “Tell me how it went.”

  “I think it went okay. You know I can never tell.” Glen had been trying to help me evaluate my performances more accurately, but on my last practice test I’d still had a section that I thought I’d aced and I’d actually done poorly on, and I’d aced two sections I was sure I’d bombed. I tried to think carefully about today’s test and how it had gone. “It was weird. The whole time I kept feeling like I’d been there before.”

  “Déjà vu, dude,” said Glen, and I could picture him nodding his head approvingly. “That’s a good sign. Means you were in control of the moment.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Glen I was having that feeling a lot lately, not so much because I was in control of my life but because my life—school, swimming, homework, sleep, school, debate, homework, sleep—felt like a hamster’s wheel.

  Sofia pulled into the Bookers lot.

  “So you’ll call me as soon as you get your scores, right? Couple of weeks?”

  “Right,” I said, getting out of the car. “I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

  I hung up and walked over to where Sofia stood in the doorway of Bookers checking her phone. When she looked up at me, she had a confused expression on her face, as if she’d gotten a text in a foreign language. “Lucas Miller just texted to ask me how the test went.”

  “Really?” I said. “Let me see.” I took her phone from her and read the screen. how’d it go? lucas.

  I tapped her phone. “This is significant,” I told her. “Trust me. How does he even have your number?”

  “Science,” said Sofia, reading the text over my shoulder. “Dr. Pao made us all write down our cell numbers and then he xeroxed the list for the class so nobody could say they couldn’t get the homework if they were absent.”

  “Veddy interesting,” I said, handing her back her phone. “Ve must to analyze zis at great lengz.”

  “I don’t know.” Sofia shrugged, went to put her phone away, pulled it out of her bag at the last second, reread his text, slapped her hands (one of them still holding the phone) to her face, and gave a little scream. “I can’t deal!”

  I took her by the arm and guided her inside. “You gather your thoughts, and I will get us each a latte,” I said, gently placing her at one end of a sofa covered in a loud floral pattern. I’d turned to go up to the counter when I saw Sinead and Declan sitting at the table just around the pillar from where I’d sat Sofia. Their heads were close together, and they were talking quietly. My stomach tensed as it always did when I saw Declan, and I did a quick inventory of what I was wearing: faded jeans, hoodie, hair up in a messy ponytail. I wanted not to care that I looked completely blah. But I cared.

  I was about to slip past their table when Sinead saw me.

  “Hey, Jules,” she said. Declan nodded at me. I nodded at Declan.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to look like I hadn’t noticed them sitting there until now. “Hi. How are you?”

  On the other side of the pillar, Sofia was studying her phone.

  “Pretty bad, actually,” said Sinead. Declan didn’t say anything.

  “What’s up?” I asked. Sinead’s head was leaning heavily on her hands, and she shrugged.

  “Sean strikes again,” she explained.

  I was intrigued. “Meaning?”

  “We asked this sophomore, do you know her, Anika Dunbar?”

  The name wasn’t familiar, but I didn’t know many underclassmen. I shook my head.

  Sinead continued. “Yeah, well, she’s got an amazing voice, and we had a great rehearsal yesterday without Sean, and then today he showed up and he was just such a complete and total wanker that after about twenty minutes . . .”

  “She ran screaming from the house,” Declan finished.

  “She didn’t run screaming from the house,” Sinead corrected him. She looked up at me. “She was crying.”

  “I’m impressed.” I tried to think of what Sean could have said to make a girl cry. “Did he tell her her voice sucked? Or, wait, he said she was fat.”

  Sinead stared at me. “It’s too awful.”

  “Just say it,” said Declan impatiently, leaning back and crossing one ankle over the opposite knee.

  Sinead dropped her head into her hands. “I can’t,” she said from behind her fingers.

  “It’s no big deal,” Declan assured her. He looked directly at me for the first time in weeks. I had to work hard to focus on what he was saying. “It’s really no big deal.”

  “So then you say it,” snapped Sinead, her face still buried.

  Declan sighed, raised an eyebrow at me, and said, his voice matter-of-fact, “Sean told her that to sing punk rock, you have to look like you enjoy getting fucked.”

  I burst out laughing.

  Sinead jerked her head up. “Oh yes, it’s all very funny. Mind you, the girl learned to sing in the choir. At her church.”

  Sofia poked her head around the pillar, then slid over to a chair at Sinead and Declan’s table. “What’s up?” she asked.

  I filled her in on what had happened during the Clovers’ latest attempt to find an alternate lead singer. “What an asshole,” said Sofia.

  I shrugged. “He’s fine.”

  “No, to you he’s fine,” Sinead corrected me. “To everyone else, he’s a monster. That’s why you’ve got to take my place. Things are getting desperate.”

  “Wait, you want Juliet to sing with the Clovers?” asked Sofia. “Oh my God!” She put her hand on my arm. “Juliet, that would be the coolest thing ever. You’d be a rock star.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m getting us lattes.”

  When I came back carrying the drinks, Sinead and Declan were getting ready to go. Sofia was telling them something, but she got quiet as soon as she saw me. “Well, great chatting with you.” Her voice was fake casual. I put the latte down on the table in front of her.

  “Thanks, Sofia,” said Sinead. “You’re awesome.” She and Declan said good-bye, and the tinkling of the chimes on the door indicated they’d left.

  I stared across the table at Sofia. “Whatever you promised them, I’m not singing in the band.”

  “What?” She stirred her drink. “What makes you think I promised them anything?” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes. When I refused to say anything and just kept staring, she finally said, “Okay, fine. I told them I’d convince you. But you really should do it,” she continued quickly as soon as she saw me shaking my head. “You’ve had such a bad fall and it would be so much fun. They rehearse every Monday. And you’re free Monday nights. You’re free every night now that you’re not meeting with Glen twice a week.”

  “First of all, if my scores didn’t go up, I’ll still have to meet with Glen. Second of all, I’m getting a Latin tutor. So I’m not going to be free every night.”

  Sofia rolled her eyes. “The Clovers are so cool.”

  “If you think I’m joining a band so you can get with Declan Brennan, you have no idea how wrong you are.”

  “It’s not that. I know he’s with Willow now. It’s just
. . . they’re cool, Juliet. Seriously, really, no joke cool. And we’ve never done anything cool in our lives. Not really.”

  I took a sip of my drink, but it was too hot and I burned the roof of my mouth. I put down the cup. “Getting into Harvard early action is cool.”

  She stared at me over our drinks. “No it’s not. Getting into Harvard early action is a lot of things. But cool is not one of them.”

  Sunday afternoon, I dropped Kathy at the airport, promising her I believed what she kept saying about my mother having improved dramatically since her last visit. That night, as I was sitting at the desk in the Robinsons’ guest room, where I’d sequestered myself so I couldn’t avoid doing Latin, my phone rang. I was one hundred percent sure it was Sofia, and even though I’d sworn to myself that I was not going to avoid doing Latin by talking on the phone or going online, I couldn’t resist the siren song of its ring. I reached into my backpack and pulled it out, promising myself I wouldn’t talk for more than five minutes. I even checked the time on my computer and made a mental note to get off the call by ten fifteen, but then I looked at my phone and saw that it wasn’t Sofia who was calling.

  Dad (mobile).

  I traced the letters on the screen, the big fat D towering over the little a. When the phone finally stopped ringing and the word disappeared, I felt relieved but also a little empty. I waited to see if he’d leave a message. He didn’t, and I put the phone down.

  But it was hard to focus on Latin. For some reason, I kept thinking of him going to visit Oliver. What had they done? Had they gone to a movie? Had they talked?

  They’d probably played squash. My brother had started playing in elementary school, and he still played, though he’d stopped playing for Yale at the end of his freshman year. My dad had tried to teach me to play a couple of times when I was eight or nine, but I hadn’t been very good, and he’d gotten impatient and I’d thrown my racket down and he’d told me not to make a scene and I’d marched off the court in silence. Then he’d tried to get me to take lessons so we could play together, but I was already taking tennis. And piano. And swimming. And ballet.