No Such Thing as Perfect (13 page)

“Where were you?”

“It was in a motel. It was a sleazy motel. Does that make you feel better? That it was as awful as it should have been?” he asked.

“How old is she? Who is she? Where did you find her?”

“She’s an intern at work. But I promise... it’s over.”

“Answer my question,” she said. “How old is she?”

“She just finished her freshman year in college. Nineteen, I think.”

“You disgust me.”

“Maureen, it was stupid, I know. She was-”

“No. I never want to hear about it again. I’m going to bed.”

She got up from the table, her tears dried and her entire body free of emotion. She looked at me and spoke. “Lily, remember this. I want you to remember this always. You will never be good enough. Sooner or later, there is always a nineteen-year-old who is better. Anyone you trust will betray you because someone is always better.”

“Maureen,” my dad pleaded, but my mom pushed in her chair and went upstairs. I was left alone with him in the kitchen. I couldn’t see him; the shadows were too thick, but I was glad I couldn’t. It became easier to remember him that way as I got older, to remember all men that way. There was a distance between us because no matter how hard you tried, someone was always going to be better than you and loyalty didn’t exist. Even my father was a disappointment.

T
en days before my birthday – and almost exactly two months since college started – I’m sitting in Jack’s room, reading, while he plays video games. To be fair, he’s playing for a class and he has to take notes and write a paper about the experience. Besides, I suppose reading is my entertainment, so neither of us can complain exactly about the workload.

“Do you have a highlighter? Mine’s dying,” I tell him.

“In the drawer. Top one,” he says without looking away from the seven-headed green eagle-cow monster he’s being incinerated by on the TV.

I stick my finger between the pages and reach into his dresser for a highlighter. Looking over, I try to find the highlighter, but the drawer is full – with handcuffs, a blindfold, and other things I’ve mostly only heard about in my travels. I’ve never seen them in person, that’s for sure. “Uh...”

Jack pauses the game and turns around. “Shit. I meant top drawer of the desk.”

“Okay,” I say and I close the drawer, not sure if we’re going to talk about these things and definitely not sure it’s my business. I get the highlighter out of the desk and open my book to start reading again. Jack can fill me in if he chooses.

“It’s a long story,” he says. “Well, I guess it’s not that long. But it’s a complicated story.”

“We’re not dating,” I remind him. “This is nothing like that. You’re my friend. I don’t need to know about what you do in your private time.”

“It’s not that, Lily. Please look at me.”

“Jack, it is seriously none of my business. It just took me aback.”

He sits beside me. “Look, I’ve said before that Alana’s story is hers to tell, and it is, but she’s had it bad, too. When we met, everyone was already saying terrible things about her.”

“Things like what?”

“She slept with teachers. There were naked pictures of her on the internet. She would suck your dick for ten bucks. But she wasn’t like that, okay? She wasn’t. She was the only person in that shit school who didn’t judge me and she was my best friend. When we started dating, she was confused. Things had happened in her life. She can tell you if she chooses. But we were both in need of someone. Of course, we were also both young. There were temptations and we were curious. It was something that grew between us naturally, but she was the only girl I’d ever been with and I was the only guy she trusted.”

“So she
is
your girlfriend?” I ask. It doesn’t matter, but I don’t want to make things weird between them.

“No. She was. But life isn’t that easy. There’s still... we aren’t good together. She needs someone stronger than me and I can’t stand who I am with her. It isn’t her fault. Please understand that. But some relationships are stronger when they have a foundation based on friendship. For us, though, the foundation is already weak for several reasons and we can’t be more than we are.”

“You still sleep with her, though, right?” I ask.

“I do.
We
do. For years, we’ve hung on to that part of our relationship. I love her, Lily. I just don’t love her in the right way. Physically, though, I’m an idiot.”

“I’ve only been with one guy. I don’t really know much about all that,” I admit, “but I kind of know what you mean. There’s a big difference between what happens on a physical level and then everything else.”

“Alana likes to... experiment. She needs something, I don’t know, something more. For a list of reasons that she would probably not want me sharing. But I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t normally expect that. I mean, God... I just don’t want you to think I’m an asshole.”

“I’m not a virgin, Jack. I don’t care that you like sex. You don’t need to protect me just because my experiences have been a lot less interesting in that area.”

I don’t want to say it, but with the drawer still slightly open and him this close, I’m tempted to ask him to show me. I have no interest in dating him. I don’t want to get back into a relationship. My birthday is still coming up and I’m supposed to call Derek or something, although I’ve kind of been letting that whole thing die, but I know exactly what Jack is talking about. All of the logic doesn’t stop the fact that he’s really close and he’s got nice eyes and his hands are soft and I wouldn’t mind seeing if it felt different with someone else. I just don’t want to damage this.

“Maybe you and Alana should meet. At least beyond that awkward moment,” he says. “I’ve told her about you.”

“You have? What did you tell her?”

“Nothing really. Just that we talked and I’ve been spending time with you. That we’re friends.”

He reaches over and closes the drawer. His arm brushes across my knees and I can’t deny the attraction, but I need more than that. I don’t want a boyfriend. I like being Jack’s friend. But when he leans back and his arm crosses a second time, I can’t stop from exhaling loudly.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

What’s wrong is that I was with the same guy – the only guy I thought I was attracted to – for almost a year and he never made me feel the way you just did. What’s wrong is that the last thing I need is a relationship, but if you’re already having a physical “friendship” with Alana, I can’t help but think of suggesting it for us. What’s wrong is that I want to kiss you and I don’t want to want to kiss you. I want to have a friend and not feel like this with you, because it complicates things and I don’t need that.

“Nothing,” I reply. I desperately need to get out of here, to talk to Kristen, to call Abby, to find someone to tell me what to do. The problem is that Kristen’s with Lyle and Abby’s in Europe and we only talk over the internet. Even if she could Skype, I am certainly not going to discuss my fantasies online while she’s sitting in some internet café in a random European city. I’m already confused about how I feel; I really don’t need Jacques or Pierre or some other French-sounding guy to be privy to it.

“Are you sure?”

“I think so. I didn’t realize how late it was. I should get going.”

He moves away from me and nods. I know he thinks I’m upset, that I think there’s something wrong with him, but the problem is that there’s something wrong with me.

“I want to meet Alana,” I say. “This weekend? Let’s do something this weekend, okay? I just need to finish this chapter and I’m sort of tired and I’ll probably just finish it in bed and go to sleep.”

Jack looks wary, but he agrees.

I can’t get out of there fast enough and I’m glad Kristen isn’t home when I get in, because I need to lie in the darkness and make sense of what I feel throughout my body. I’ve never enjoyed sex, but I enjoyed making Derek happy. Something about Jack, though, is changing everything.

W
hen you imagine the world working out the way you hope, you set up these unrealistic expectations for yourself, inevitably leading to disappointment. Throughout high school, I had watched Abby date and I’d heard stories about Derek and other kids in my classes and I’d never even kissed someone. During freshman year, Jake Johnson asked me to the winter semiformal and I went, but after one slow dance, he got bored with me and I ended up spending the night reading a book on the bleachers.

As the years passed, I made Derek into this person in my head who was going to solve everything. If only he would recognize me as something more than his friend’s sister... if only he would love me, everything would be perfect. So when I returned to school after my birthday weekend and everything had changed – I wasn’t a virgin and Derek was my boyfriend – I don’t know what I imagined would happen, but I expected someone to notice. I expected other people to sense the difference. I expected things to be somehow new, but not in the way that they were.

I told Abby first in study hall.

“You know how I’ve always said I wouldn’t date?” I asked her.

“Yeah, unless Derek comes to his senses, you’re going to be celibate forever. I know.”

“I wanted to text you, but you were at the wedding and then... well, I spent the last two days with him while he was home and I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.”

“Tell me what?” she asked and then she began to understand. “Shit. Don’t even tell me. You didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it amazing? Was it everything you’d thought it be for years?”

It wasn’t, of course, but I didn’t want her to know that. I didn’t want to tell her, because I was afraid it was me. I was afraid Derek would get back to school and wonder what he’d been thinking and I believed if I pretended everything was as amazing as I had built it up to be that it would actually evolve into that.

“It was.” 

“I can’t believe you waited until now to tell me. Aunt Ethel’s corns really could have waited.”

“Is that what you did all weekend?”

She laughed. “Seriously, Lily.” She went on to tell me about the wedding, although I struggled to listen. My life was different now, but I guess by senior year of high school, it was no longer interesting to my best friend that I’d had sex. I didn’t think it was interesting to anyone, since most people had – or at least said they had – and I wasn’t unique or even the kind of person anyone noticed.

That should have been it. A confession to a friend in study hall that didn’t affect anyone beyond her, me, and Derek. If he was telling anyone, it was at school and I sincerely doubted college kids cared that he’d had sex over the weekend. From what he and Jon had said, it sounded like that was a lot of what happened in college.

I barely knew Miranda Elliot. She was popular, I guess, but we didn’t have classes together and none of my friends talked to hers. Abby was the only person I was close to, but my small group of acquaintances from track and Student Council and my lunch table were just not the same kinds of people Miranda Elliot hung around with. She wasn’t some stereotypical mean girl like in a bad movie; she was just a girl who played soccer and lived in another neighborhood.

So I certainly didn’t expect her to come stand over me while I was eating lunch. And I really didn’t expect her to lean down and demean my relationship. Her breath was against my ear as she said it. “I fucked him, too. You’re nothing special.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Everyone knows. Lacey heard you and Abby talking in study hall. You feel like you’re somehow special, right, because you fucked Derek LaGrange? You know that almost everyone here has fucked him, right?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s my business when some slut goes around bragging because she’s the only girl Derek loves.”

“Shut up, Miranda,” Abby said, but she wasn’t the target. She wasn’t the slut, as Miranda referred to me, although she had been with him, too. I sat there while they argued, while they insulted one another, and I sat there listening to Miranda talk about Derek and the weekends she’d spent hooking up with him over the summer. I had to listen to all the things he had told her, and I tried not to hear them, because they were the same things he had told me. I knew about him and all the other girls and I knew what I was getting into, but I still thought I was different. None of them had known him before. None of them knew him when they were kids and he was a dorky guy with braces. None of them had waited and saved every part of themselves for him.

“It’s not the same thing,” I whispered finally, but my voice was like tissue paper against a hurricane. Although I was shaking, I hated conflict and I just wanted her to go away. I wanted her to take her experiences and her memories of Derek and her cries of slut and I just wanted her to disappear. I didn’t want to argue or to change her mind, as long as she just left me alone.

“Really, Lily? How is it different? Do you really think he loves you?” Miranda asked.

“He does. He told me he loves me,” I said, and it was stupid. Abby shook her head, but she still thought that maybe Derek and I had a chance. It had only been a few days and at first, she believed it, too.

“He says that to everyone, you know. But enjoy. I was a virgin before Derek, too. I think that’s his favorite kind.”

Sex was supposed to be special. It was supposed to be at least pleasant. It wasn’t supposed to be the biggest story in my high school within days of it happening, especially when no one had noticed me at all for the first three years. It didn’t make sense that anyone cared about it except me, even though I’d been disappointed when they hadn’t noticed. I didn’t know much about it, really, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to make me feel guilty, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to call Derek to talk about it only to be told to stop acting like a child.

“Everyone does it, Lily. It’s just sex.”

None of these things were what happened in my imagined relationship with Derek, but as memories slowly drain themselves into my present, I wonder how I survived imagining for so long.