No Such Thing as Perfect (14 page)

A
lana is the most intimidating person I’ve ever met. She’s beautiful and honest and she looks at me like she can read every secret, but she doesn’t want to rush to judge. I don’t know how to understand a person who doesn’t judge, who looks at you fully and tries to see the whole picture.

I don’t know where Jack went. I came over and he was here and Alana was here and now he’s gone. I don’t know how to talk to her.

“I think you scare me,” she says.

“Why?”

“I’m pretty sure Jack has never met anyone like you. He usually goes for people as fucked up as he is and he doesn’t do relationships. But he talks about you a lot.”

“We’re just friends,” I say. “I have – or had – a boyfriend. I don’t really need to think about that right now.”

“He’s a good guy. Don’t hurt him.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. We’re just friends.”

“There’s no such thing,” she argues. “He and I tried just friends. Then we tried something serious. And now, well, I don’t know anymore. But for a while we had everything.”

“Are you in love with him?” I ask.

“Yes, but not in the way you’re asking.”

“I don’t know any other way.”

So far, college hasn’t been much different than high school, as far as the people. My classes are mostly made up of other freshman and the only people I really know, besides Jack, are freshman or I don’t talk to them past a superficial level. But Alana is less than two years older than me – and I feel like she’s from a distant planet. I always viewed Abby as contrary, because she had opinions and wasn’t afraid of them, but Alana is the kind of girl I admire. In quiet, because I’m too scared to live the way she does.

“Guys like to fuck me,” she tries to explain. When she says it, it doesn’t sound crass, at least not in the way one would expect. She says it the same way she would give directions. “Always have. I don’t think I bring a lot to the table, you know, otherwise. But with Jack... the thing is, when he fucks you, he makes you feel like you are the only girl in the world.”

“I’m not sleeping with him. It’s not like that,” I repeat.

“Has he told you about us?”

“Not exactly. He said it’s mostly your story to tell. I mean, I saw the things in the drawer-”

She laughs. “Look. I like you. It makes me nervous how much Jack likes you, because you’re too much of an anomaly. If you were some kind of conquest for him, I could understand it. If you were a challenge, maybe, but I don’t know what you are.”

“That makes two of us.”

“We’re not still a thing,” she tells me. “If that’s your hang up. We haven’t... not since that day you walked in. What was it – a few weeks ago?”

“Almost. But it’s not that long. I mean, people don’t change that fast. Feelings don’t change that fast.”

“No, they don’t. But the feelings aren’t what you think they are. Has he told you about all of us? Me and Dave and him? How things went?”

“Not really.”

“Do you want the short or the shorter version?” she asks.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just curious.”

She takes off her coat and hands it to me without explanation and then lifts off her long-sleeved black shirt. Wearing only her bra, she holds out her arms. The skin is pale, making the scar tissue – both ghostly white and an angry red – stand out more against her flesh. Each arm, from wrist to elbow, is a patchwork of lines.

“I lost my virginity at eleven. To my dad. I thought it was a fluke, until my mom remarried and my stepdad did the same and worse. They made me ugly, but only on the inside, and I needed to remind myself how ugly I really was. I needed men to see what they made me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“You didn’t do it.”

“I know. But God. I don’t know what to say. I’ve been so concerned about my problems, when you and Jack have lived through things I never would have survived.”

Alana puts her shirt back on. “That’s dumb. We all have problems. That’s the point. I have problems. Jack has problems. And our friend, Dave, who’s gone now, he had problems, too. But they were the only two guys who could see the scars and face them. Out there are people who have it worse than any of the three of us do, but the point is that once you can see yourself through the eyes of someone who thinks even your scars are beautiful, the things that matter change.”

“And that’s your relationship?” I ask.

“It is. It
was
. We’re bad for each other. We have been through so much damage, both together and apart, that it’s hard to disassociate that with the person. I love him, but it’s just not the way it should be. And then there’s Dave.”

“Did you date him?”

She sighs. “I fell for Jack right away,” she confesses. “Immediately. The first time I saw him, I knew. He had no friends and when I talked to him in our math class, we just clicked, you know? I was a loser, too, and everyone made up stories about me. But he didn’t see that. He just talked to me and even though we were both nothing, together we were something special. All of the places in me that were empty fit with all the places he wasn’t. I felt like I’d found the only friend I’d ever need.”

“But?”

“But we were fourteen. And the things that happened with my stepdad happened before I could be okay, and it was always a part of me and Jack. It’s a long story and it’s not one I want to go into, but we can say that we never had a chance. And then we met Dave and I cared for him and he cared for me, but Jack was first. It’s not always that simple, of course, and we fought about it, but then high school ended and Dave went to the Army and he said it was best if he just let us go. I’ve spent three years missing him. I recently got back in touch, but it’s all kinds of complicated, and basically, it just leaves a big mess. But Jack and I are both ready to accept what we are for each other and try to let it go. I’ll never live a life without him, but I’m not going to be in your way.”

“There’s no way,” I argue.

“There might be. Someday. And given Jack’s history-”

She’s about to continue when Jack comes back. He’s carrying a bag of food and I watch him while he unpacks it. I’ve been so wrapped up in myself that all I’ve noticed really were his eyes. He carries so much emotional weight on him and it affects the way he moves, like every memory is pushing him down. It hurts to look at him, because I see so much kindness in him but now I can also see his pain. When he smiles at me, though, he’s hard to look away from – and I know what Alana means about seeing the beauty in a person’s scars.

“What did you talk about?” he asks. He brought Chinese food and my stomach growls when I see it, but then I feel like throwing up. It’s greasy when he scoops it onto a plate and I take it, grateful, but I know I won’t be able to eat it.

“Oh, you know,” Alana says. “Stuff.”

She takes a bite of her chicken. I can smell it, both the sauce and the grease, and I need to vomit. I need to get out of this warm room where people have it worse than I do and can still be okay. I need to run back to my room and hide and lose myself in memories again, a place where I didn’t see things for what they were.

W
hen we were little, my brother was my best friend. This all came before Derek, before Abby, before my mom began to hold us to different standards.

All summer, we lived in our own imagined world. The woods were our kingdom, and the stumps of old trees our castle. We were supposed to come inside when it got dark and we usually did. We loved the woods, but they were still scary for us at that age and at night, we believed the monsters came out.

Earlier in the day, my father had bought us plastic swords from Wal-Mart during his morning errands and Jon and I were fighting a battle with a massive troll. The troll was a gnarled tree, with moss that crawled along its trunk, and the roots were digging their way upwards out of the dirt.

“Give me your sister, so she can be my troll queen,” Jon said in his best troll voice.

“Never,” he replied as himself. He brandished his sword and swung at the mossy bark. A caterpillar went sailing into the forest behind us. “Lily is the princess and I will protect her.”

My ankle was itchy from cutting it on a briar on our way into the woods and I hopped back and forth, trying to balance on one foot while scratching it with my sword. “You won’t take me alive,” I taunted the troll tree.

“Very well,” said troll-Jon. “I will send my minions to capture you and then cook you in a stew. You could have been a queen.”

“Why are my choices troll queen or stew?” I asked.

Jon broke character for a moment. “Because that’s how villains are, Lily. You do what they say or they send out minions.”

“It seems dumb. I think he should try to convince me. I mean, all he did was tell you to give me to him. Shouldn’t he negotiate?”

“What’s negotiate?” Jon asked.

“I don’t know. Dad told Mom he had to negotiate so they would give him more money at work if she wanted to go on vacation next week.”

“I’ll ask.” Pulling down his Halloween costume helmet, Jon approached the tree again. “Your evilness, the Troll King. We would like to negotiate.”

“I see. I suppose we can do that,” the troll agreed.

Jon turned around and lifted his helmet again, whisper-shouting, “Now what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it means. Maybe it’s like a bargain?”

“I’ll ask,” he said again and returned to the troll.

“We would like to bargain with you for Lily as your queen.”

“I have already declared her a stew,” troll-Jon replied. “And you swore to protect her.”

“That is my bargain. My sister, Lily, will be your queen, but you must keep her safe. And you must allow me to live in the same castle and make sure.”

“Also I want a puppy,” I said. “And cookies.” I decided if I was going to be forced to marry a tree troll, the least I could do was demand something for myself.

Jon leaned close to the tree, as if he and the troll were whispering and discussing the bargain. He turned around and faced me, his helmet still up.

“The troll cannot give you a puppy because he is stuck in the mud. But he says he’ll send his minions to force Mom to bake cookies for your wedding and it will be a cookie feast.”

I scratched my ankle again. “What about you?”

“He has agreed that I can live in the castle, too, and eat the cookies. He also promises to keep you safe from the ogres who come out at night.”

“That works.”

I easily resigned myself to my fate as the troll queen and Jon ran into the house to grab a box of Oreos, which were the closest thing we had to homemade cookies. I ate them and fed one into the hole inside the tree’s trunk, pretending it was like at weddings when couples shove cake in each other’s faces. Jon made me a garland for my head from some branches he found, but one had a spider on it and it fell into the Oreos.

“Ew, spiders,” I said, the Oreos now upside down in the dirt.

“You’re married to a troll, Lily. You can’t be afraid of spiders,” Jon argued.

“I can be afraid of whatever I want. You’re not doing a very good job protecting me. I think maybe I’ll turn you into a stew after all.”

“You can’t turn me into a stew. I saved you.”

We played that afternoon, pretending it was my troll wedding, and threatening to have each other turned into a stew. Eventually I got bored being a queen and had Jon help me assassinate the troll, because I wanted power, not to sit around and feed a tree cookies.

As it started to get dark, we picked up our Oreo bag and swords. “I’m going to have to fight the ogres now,” I told Jon. “One day, they’re going to come out before we get home and I killed the troll.”

“Well, if they dare to come after you, I’ll stop them. No one is going to hurt my sister,” he said. “I’ll always protect you, Lily, from ogres and trolls and anything else that comes out at night.”

“And spiders?”

“And spiders. That’s my job as your big brother.”

When Jon and I got older and it wasn’t normal anymore for us to play in the woods and fight trees we envisioned as trolls, I think I still imagined that the rest of it was true. That big brothers really did protect their sisters – from ogres and spiders and anything else that scared them. But sometimes imagination isn’t just about turning a tree into something scary. Sometimes, I guess, it’s about seeing something real as better than it is.

W
hat’s funny about believing a lie you tell yourself is that it’s easy to forget you ever believed it in the first place. When you don’t use all that energy building up a façade, you find you have a lot more time to focus on what’s real. Spending time with Jack and being at school has been buffering the memories and I’ve gotten used to the idea that this is the only life I’ve led. When I went home for Columbus Day, I felt like school was some sort of vacation, but now home feels distant, like it’s a movie I’ve seen too many times.

I finally finished my paper on Marianne and although I don’t know that it was an improvement, at least I did something different. Lit Study has moved on to
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and I’m pondering her complicated beginnings on my walk back to the dorm. I think nothing of the voices coming from my room until I get closer. Kristen is talking to a guy, but I expect it to be Lyle or maybe Don. I definitely don’t expect it to be Derek.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “You weren’t supposed to come up for a couple weeks.”

“I thought we should talk,” he says.

“Oh, okay.” I don’t know what to do or how to react. He shouldn’t feel like a stranger, but suddenly, Derek being here, in my room, feels invasive. Kristen looks at us both and excuses herself. I can’t imagine what she must be thinking.

As soon as she’s gone, Derek is all over me. His hands are in my shirt, his mouth is near mine, and he’s saying things, but I just want him to stop.

“Stop,” I tell him.

“Why?”

“Just stop.” I move away from him and sit on my bed. The heater is going, but it’s freezing in here. He sits beside me after taking off his shirt and he reaches for my belt loops, kissing my neck and telling me how much he’s missed me.