Better Than Perfect Read online

  Or were they? As we walked by the open door of Mark’s study, it occurred to me that while he was sitting at his computer, none of us had any idea what he was actually doing. Maybe he was in a chat room picking up fourteen-year-old girls. Maybe he was online, gambling away the family’s every last dime. Maybe twelve hours from now he’d be arrested for insider trading while Jason was at soccer practice and Grace and Bella were at Roosevelt Field Mall buying Bella’s school clothes.

  I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. As Bella and Jason bickered about what we were going to watch and who would hold the remote and whether Bella, Jason, or I got to sit in the middle, I pictured Grace discovering Mark’s secret, their screaming fight, Mark loading his belongings into the trunk of the Lexus and driving off to his new home. I imagined Grace’s perfect hair with the roots showing, her spin-class-thin frame blowing up on Oreos and takeout.

  The thought was awful. It really was. But it also felt strangely good, like finding out a test you’d been dreading had been canceled.

  “You okay?” Jason’s arm was around me, and Bella was squeezed up on my other side.

  “Me? Yeah.” I made myself stop thinking about what Mark might or might not be doing on his computer. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Jason’s family. I loved Jason’s family. And they loved me.

  Jason and Bella had settled on a channel, and we watched a commercial featuring a line of dancing tissues that conga’d across the screen. I snuggled up to Jason, and he squeezed my shoulder more tightly. Bella laughed when one of the tissues sneezed.

  “This is so romantic,” said Jason.

  “We’re living the dream.”

  Bella wanted me to come upstairs while she washed her face and brushed her teeth, and by the time she went to sleep, Mark and Grace were already in their room.

  “Sneak out,” Jason whispered, hugging me. “Sneak out once they’re in bed.”

  “I can’t,” I whispered back. Bella was supposedly asleep, but I had the bad feeling she was listening to every word we said. “I don’t want to make your parents mad.” I felt very conscious of being a guest in the Robinsons’ house.

  “Okay, I know when I’m beaten,” said Jason sadly, and he kissed me on the lips. I kissed him back, but I was distracted. I needed to tell him what my dad and my aunt had told me about my mom and her drinking. And the medication. I always told Jason everything, but somehow this felt different. When you got right down to it, divorce was mundane. An accidental overdose was careless. A suicide attempt was tragic.

  A problem with drugs and alcohol felt gross to me. And even if it was stupid, I couldn’t help feeling like Jason would accept all the other scenarios more easily than he would accept that one.

  A door closed. It was probably just a closet, but both Jason and I tensed. “I should go,” he said.

  “You should go.”

  We kissed one last time, and he headed down the hall.

  I crawled under the covers, making a mental list of what I had to do tomorrow. Preseason. Then Bookers with Sofia to do some SAT prep. I had to call Glen to see if he could tutor me later on Thursdays like he had in the spring, because once school started, I’d have debate on Thursdays, and that went later than swim practice.

  As the list formed in my mind, I thought about my mother and how she’d always helped me juggle my life. For years, she’d kept a big whiteboard calendar in the kitchen with my schedule and Oliver’s. It had our whole lives: lessons and tutors and vacations and finals, what time a performance started and what time we had to arrive if we were performing. When Oliver left for college, the calendar just had my activities, and sometimes stuff that my parents were doing. Dinner with the Chapmans. Tennis, court reserved.

  She was so together. That was the most impossible thing about all of this. Except for Grace Robinson, my mom was possibly the most together mom in my whole school. Okay, she wasn’t, like, the president of the PTA. But that was because she thought the PTA was idiotic. The point was: she was a great mom. When it was time for me and Oliver to go to sleepaway camp, she interviewed camp directors. When it was time to redo my room, she hired a decorator. When it was time for me to look at colleges, even though she assured me every second that I’d get into Harvard, she also drove me all over the Northeast so I could tour every college in New England and have a dozen backup schools on the off off off chance (as she kept putting it) that I got rejected.

  Lying on Bella’s trundle bed, I missed my mother so much I could taste it—something hard and metallic on the back of my tongue. My perfect beautiful mother with her soft sweaters and her gentle hands and her fresh flowers on the kitchen counter and her whiteboard with my life on it that I’d been looking at for so long I couldn’t plan something without it appearing in my brain written out in dry-erase marker in my mother’s clear, blocky letters.

  I missed her so much, but what I missed wasn’t even real. It hadn’t even existed. That woman I’d loved and counted on had been miserable and drunk, her beautiful face hiding a brain full of rot and worms.

  Just think about something that’s not your mom, I said to myself. Just think about something that’s not your mom.

  And out of nowhere I thought of Declan.

  The thing that hadn’t happened even though it had, the thing I’d tried to turn into something else, the thing I hadn’t let myself think about since I’d told myself never to think about it again came back at me, faster and bigger than the sun. I could feel his lips on mine, could feel his muscular body heavy and hot and pressing against mine and mine pressing back against his, as if all the energy I’d put into forgetting what had happened had only served to distill the experience, making the memory of it even more potent than the thing itself. As if the memory were stronger than I could ever be.

  I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, willing myself not to think about anything but to think about nothing.

  And somehow, somewhere in between the remembering and the trying not to, I managed to fall asleep.

  11

  At preseason, I didn’t tell anyone on the swim team about my mom. I knew Sofia and Jason wouldn’t say anything either, but I had the feeling word was going to get out—gossip at Milltown was a varsity sport. Every day when I walked into the locker room, I looked at my teammates’ faces, and every day that they casually waved hello to me was one more day I knew that they hadn’t heard. I wasn’t exactly relieved, though. Once they found out I was staying at the Robinsons’, people were going to want to know why. I thought about Elise and Margaret, my closest friends besides Sofia, whispering theories about my parents. I thought about all the people in my grade who I knew but didn’t really know. Sofia wasn’t the only one of my friends who had been jealous of my family. People were always saying how good-looking my parents were, how smart and successful my brother was, how lucky I was.

  Now were they going to pity me instead of envying me?

  There was a surprising amount of back-and-forth about whether what my mom needed was a psychiatric facility or rehab, but apparently everyone decided that given the possibility that she’d made a suicide attempt, what she needed was a psychiatric facility. Jason, still holding out hope that the whole thing had been a dosing error on my mom’s part, couldn’t believe that they were really going to put her in the hospital for weeks just because she’d accidentally swallowed a few too many painkillers. When I told him that any day now she’d be going from Long Island Hospital to a mental hospital, he put his arms around me and kissed my neck. “It’s crazy, J,” he said quietly.

  “You mean she’s crazy,” I whispered.

  “Shh,” he said, gently rubbing my shoulders. “Don’t say that.”

  “You’re right, I shouldn’t say that,” I agreed. I let my head drop down as he rubbed the back of my neck, then kissed it. “She might just be a drunk.”

  “Hmmm?” asked Jason, sliding my shirt collar down and kissing my shoulder blade.

  “Nothing,” I answered quickly. He kisse
d me again, and I turned around and kissed him back, relieved he was too distracted to follow up on what I’d said. I still hadn’t told him what Aunt Kathy and my dad had told me about my mom’s drinking and pill popping, but I knew now wasn’t the right time.

  Taking skeletons out of the family closet isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of foreplay.

  Aunt Kathy called me the night before the first day of school to tell me that my mom’s transfer to a long-term facility had been approved by her health insurance company and that she’d be moving to a place called Roaring Brook the next morning. She said she’d email my dad and keep him updated on what was going on and that she’d call my brother and tell him, also.

  I was alone in Bella’s room. Bella had insisted on picking out what I’d wear for the first day of school, and now she was downstairs watching TV while I folded up the outfits she’d considered and then rejected.

  “They won’t let your mother have visitors for the first two weeks,” said Aunt Kathy. “It can be hard for patients. To see their families.”

  “Oh.” Starting when we were in middle school, my parents had constantly given me and my brother some variation on an identical theme. We never see you anymore. You’re always with your friends. We miss you. Sometimes, when my mom was frustrated with how little one of us was around, she’d say, This isn’t a hotel, it’s your home, and we want some time with you.

  And now it would be “hard” for her to see me?

  Through the phone, I heard a teakettle whistle and then abruptly shut off. I pictured Aunt Kathy in her bright yellow kitchen, the flowers in the window boxes bobbing in the breeze. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s difficult for you not seeing your mom. . . . Juliet? Are you there?”

  I’d been hearing my mom’s voice in my head. “Sorry,” I said, tuning back into my conversation with Kathy. “I’m here. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “You doing okay with the Robinsons?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around the room. Bella had given me two drawers in her dresser and had vowed to use my staying with her as motivation to be a neater person. The Robinsons kept saying Our home is your home and telling me to have my friends over, but except for Sofia, nobody knew I was living with them. “They’re being really nice,” I said truthfully.

  “But . . . ,” Kathy started.

  I shrugged. “But it’s not my home.” I felt my eyes well up. It was weird how talking to Aunt Kathy almost always made me want to cry.

  “This is all going to be okay,” Aunt Kathy said softly. “I promise.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I swallowed my tears down. “I know.”

  There was a pause. “It’s not too late to get in touch with Dr. Bennet.”

  “Her number’s at the house,” I said, adding, in case she didn’t understand what I meant, “At my house.”

  “Oh,” said Kathy. “And you couldn’t possibly go back to your house and get it, could you?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  From downstairs, Bella called, “Juliet, come watch with us!”

  “I should go,” I said. “Bella’s calling me to watch TV with her and her mom.”

  “Well, I’m glad they’re treating you like family,” said Aunt Kathy. “That must help a lot.”

  “It does,” I said. “It really does.”

  “Can I ask you to call Nana and Papa when you have a minute?” she asked. “They’re worried about you and Ollie.”

  “Sure,” I said, putting that on my list of things to do. “I’ll call them tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  Almost the second I hung up with Aunt Kathy, my phone rang. It was my dad, and I was about to answer it, but then I decided to let it go to voice mail. There was something exhausting about talking to my father lately, and it wasn’t just that I couldn’t help blaming him for what had happened to my mom. It was partly that, but it was partly something else. He’d call and ask how I was doing, and I’d give him a list of everything I’d accomplished. If I had made good time at swimming, I told him about that. And if I’d done well on a practice SAT, I’d tell him about that. Then I’d ask him how he was doing, and he’d say he was okay but tired. Then we’d try to find a time when I didn’t have my SAT tutor and he wasn’t traveling and we could have dinner together. Then, when we couldn’t, we’d agree to talk again soon. The empty routine of our conversations was what made them so tiring, but it didn’t seem to bother my dad at all.

  The crazy thing was, if you’d asked me six months earlier, I probably would have said that my dad and I were close. That even though he worked a lot and we didn’t see each other all that much, we had a great relationship. That we knew each other really well. When I was younger, my grandfather—my mother’s father—had teased me about being a daddy’s girl, and even though I didn’t like being teased, I’d liked the idea. I was a daddy’s girl. My daddy and I were super close.

  But apparently it turned out that we were so close that when my mother had to go into a mental hospital, I decided to live with my boyfriend instead of with him, and when he called me, I didn’t pick up the phone.

  Some daddy’s girl.

  It was Grace’s idea that we tell people that I was living with the Robinsons while my mom explored job options out of town. On the drive to the first day of school, I prepared answers to their imaginary questions.

  Massachusetts.

  Not until after graduation.

  Wetland conservation—she was an environmental studies major in college.

  I imagined the small nonprofits where my mom was interviewing, the B and Bs where she would spend her nights on the road. In my head, I heard our conversations each night as she called me. They’re doing really interesting work, she’d say. I think I could be happy here. And if you get into Harvard, you’ll be really close.

  The alternate reality felt so good that I started to hope people would ask me about my mom so I could make the fantasy feel even more real by talking about it.

  None of our friends was interested in where my mom was, though. Everyone was too focused on it being the first day of senior year to ask me questions about my family. I got through homeroom, four classes, and morning break—more than half my first day—without anyone asking me anything that might necessitate my saying I was staying at Jason’s. And then, at the start of lunch, right after we decided to go to the deli and were all walking across the senior parking lot to our cars, Stefan asked where Jason’s car was. Jason said he’d driven to school with me, and Elise said, “Isn’t that kind of out of the way?”

  “I’m staying with Jason’s family,” I said, feeling my cheeks get hot. “My mom’s job searching. In New England.” Despite my practicing, the words were transparently a lie. I steeled myself for Elise to call me on it.

  “Excellent,” said George to Jason. “Sex on tap.”

  Elise turned around and slapped George—who was walking with Jason and Stefan a few feet behind us—on the arm. “You’re a pig, George.” Elise and George had been going out almost as long as Jason and me, but unlike me and Jason, they were always fighting and almost breaking up.

  “Ouch!” George objected, but Elise ignored him. She was looking at my schedule, which she’d grabbed from my hand as we exited the building. “Jesus. Your schedule is even busier than mine.”

  And just like that, my story stood. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed.

  Sofia and Margaret were waiting for us by my car, and I waved to them.

  “Do you have no free periods?” Elise asked, her finger tracing a line through my week. “Oh, wait, Thursday after lunch.”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to try and schedule a peer tutoring thing.”

  “Dude, you’re going to have a nervous breakdown,” said George.

  “No,” Jason corrected him. “She’s going to get into Harvard early action.” He closed the distance between us and hugged me from behind. “Then she can have a nervous breakdown.”

  “I’ll pencil it in,” I said
.

  “Come on, man,” said George. “Let’s grab some burgers.” He and Stefan turned off toward George’s car at the far end of the parking lot.

  Jason kissed me, then held out his pinky. “J power.”

  “I’m going to barf,” said Elise, who’d barely acknowledged George’s leaving. I ignored her and linked pinkies with Jason. “J power.”

  The line at Jaybo’s Deli was long, and by the time we got back in my car, it was going to be tight to make it to sixth period. As Elise and Margaret and Sofia talked about how much it sucked to be back and who’d done what over the summer and whether or not Elise should apply early to Princeton, I tried to follow the conversation, but every few minutes I realized I’d tuned out and had missed something. I glanced at the clock on my car’s dashboard. Twelve thirty-five. Had my aunt said my mom was being transferred to Roaring Brook in the afternoon or the morning? I couldn’t remember, and not being able to remember made me feel awful. I had one mother. She was being transferred from the psychiatric ward of a hospital to a long-term psychiatric facility. Was it so much to ask that I’d remember when that was happening?

  “Did you hear about the exchange student from China?” asked Margaret from the backseat. “He’s doing a year in America and apparently he is ha-awt!”

  “There’s an exchange student from China?” Sofia handed me a potato chip out of the bag on her lap. “I can’t believe we have exchange students now.”

  “Asian guys don’t do it for me,” Elise announced.

  “Oh my God, that is so racist,” cried Sofia. “And anyway, you have a boyfriend.”

  “It’s not racist if I’m Asian,” Elise corrected her. “Which I am.” She reached between the seats and took a chip out of Sofia’s bag. Sofia slapped her wrist and Elise jerked her hand away.