No Such Thing as Perfect (17 page)

“What did you see?” I ask.

“Nothing. There was no white light. There was no sudden regret, no moment when I would have given it all for more time to appreciate the little things. There was just more misery, more sadness, and more darkness that stretched on endlessly. Until the darkness was all.” He pauses and closes his eyes before speaking again. “Then I woke up in a hospital bed, with a bunch of assholes standing around me, trying to label what was in my head. They had their go-to list of chemicals that would make me normal, their scientific names of disorders to explain why, when I pictured life, I saw nothing. I was there for months. When I left, I wasn’t any different. They just titled me chronic and told me to keep telling someone my problems and popping my pills.”

I unbuckle my seatbelt and lean over, not hugging him, but tightening my grip on his arm and resting my head against his shoulder.

“We’re both a mess,” he says, tilting his head down against mine. “I’m sorry. You don’t need this, too.”

Looking up at him, I know it’s going to happen. I know it’s a terrible idea, but I can’t help it. The thought of his absence aches too much and I want to know he’s real. I take my hand away from his arm and reach into his hair, pulling his head closer to mine until it’s too late to change my mind. He freezes, though, before he meets my lips, and whispers, “Are you sure?”

I’m not sure. I’m terrified. I don’t think I can have a boyfriend, not right now. I don’t know what I want and I feel guilty because I want to kiss him so badly but I don’t want to promise him things that aren’t true. But with his warm breath so close to my face and the chill of the car at my back, I nod.

“W
e should get going,” he says. We’ve been sitting in the car for more than an hour. There was a lot of kissing, but that was it. It was
really
good kissing, which is messing with my brain too much. I’ve been with one guy – from kissing to everything else – and none of it was like the way Jack kisses me.

“We could.”

He laughs. “You’re never going to believe me, Lily, but I really didn’t bring you out tonight for your birthday to sit on the side of the road and make out. Not that it’s a bad thing.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It’s not much further,” he tells me and I settle back in on my side of the car, watching him. He’s smiling. For a guy with so much pain in his life, it amazes me how happy he is right now. Of course, I catch myself smiling, too.

It’s only about ten minutes down the road from where we were, but the place we stop is just a dirt lot and a faded wooden sign. Jack opens the door and this time, he runs around to get mine before I finish getting my seatbelt off.

“You don’t need to open it,” I say.

“You’re right. I don’t.” He brings me against him and kisses me again. This time our bodies are close and I can feel the swirling in every part of me. He makes it hard to remember why I’m scared.

We head down the winding path and there’s a loud cry from an owl. It’s like I pictured on that one afternoon in the woods behind my house – and then I see it. The lake, with the sliver of the moon rippling on the water’s surface. The trees, dead, but surrounding us. The owl cries again and I understand. I understand so much in this moment.

“This is...” I can’t explain. I can’t say it, because it was a stupid story. It meant nothing. I’ve told Jack pieces of my life and about Derek and my mom, although not in full, and the story of the trees was just a random story. A quiet night when I was babbling and there were no big or important issues surrounding us. It wasn’t about fear or death or loss. It was just a story about hope – but he listened. And more, he made it come true.

“When I was growing up,” he says, “I used to go outside in my yard, and eventually in my grandmother’s yard, and I’d look up to space. The stars always intrigued me. Some of the light that we see when we look to the heavens has already died. That fact sort of inspired me when I was a kid, both before and after my mom’s death. The idea that, millions of years after the light dies, it’s just now being seen by someone? That’s crazy.”

I nod, but don’t add anything. He continues.

“For eight years, I asked for a telescope for my birthday. Even after my mom was gone. I was young enough to still not understand. I just wanted to see the stars. I never got the telescope, of course. We couldn’t afford it, and really, there were more important things than staring at dead light.”

“There aren’t, though,” I say. “This is the most important, Jack. This...” But words minimize it. He knows and I know. I don’t need to tell him everything about Derek, about my past or my fears, because it’s not important to him. He cares about me despite those things. I’ve lived so deluded about what caring looks like, but there’s no question that this is what people do when they care.

He holds me against him, his body warm but tense. I know he has something to say and I feel like I know what it is. I don’t want him to say it. Not yet. I want to hear it, but not now. Not until other things fall into place, because I need to get that right to make this what it should be.

“Lily... Elinor... the girl who has a plan for everything.”

“Don’t say it,” I plead. “Not tonight, Jack. I’m not ready. I want to be ready, but I don’t want to lie to you.”

“Okay. I won’t,” he agrees. “Not until you’re ready.”

The cold doesn’t bother me while we sit by the lake, arms wrapped around our knees and talking. The conversation isn’t important – school, favorite movies, things that are transient, but the night is massive overhead. The sky is full of nothing but stars and light and the water spills onto the shore, inching closer to us as we speak. I remember the rainy day with Derek, but in this moment, I recognize what he was for me. You can’t love an idea. When you do, you love that vague concept more than the person. Derek was the only one who stayed in the rain, the one who didn’t tell me I had to come inside. He was the idea of freedom, but he also fit into the plan. It was safe rebellion, a sort of hallucinatory imprisonment. He represented what I wanted, but he still kept me locked away. Like that afternoon camping, I believed I was out in the rain, but we never left the tent. We were still protected from anything outside of us.

Jack is none of these things. He’s dangerous because he doesn’t care about rules. But if Derek was the idea of rain, Jack is the rain itself. He’s the risk of failure and hurt, but I trust him. I believe in this boy.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I tell him. “But I’m scared and I think I need to get other things worked out. I think I need to do certain things – alone.”

“I know. I figured. I just wanted you to have a happy birthday. Even if it’s late.”

When we leave, we don’t touch, walking distant to avoid the kind of stupid moves we made earlier. I care for him, but I need to be whole, to be separate from another person, to define myself without someone else’s standards as a guide. I hate walking away from him when we get back to school and I don’t know if it’s a terrible mistake.

“I’ll see you around,” he says by the elevators. There’s no kiss, no hug, no affection, but it’s not cruel. I know it hurts him, too, and I want to tell him I changed my mind, but I can’t. I can’t make this what it was with Derek – an idea that never had time to manifest into what it really was, but existed like a photograph’s negative of what I had imagined. Jack deserves more than that.
I
deserve more than that.

In the room, I turn on my desk light and in the dim space, I find the card and box he gave me; I’d forgotten about them in the immensity of the night.
He just literally gave you the world you had imagined, a world you mentioned in one casual conversation, and you walked away.
But when I think of changing my mind, of running to his room, I know what comes next and my body grows weak at the thought of it. I catch the bile as it rises, thinking about someone touching me intimately, the effects of being used, of how much things change once you open yourself to someone in that way. No matter how much I want to believe it might be different, I’m not ready.

The card is a simple black and white photograph of a moon. It’s blank on the inside, except for the note from Jack.

Happy Birthday, dear Lily. Go believe in your moon.

Inside the box is a bracelet – a simple silver band with one charm – a silver leaf. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s personal, like the card, like the whole night, and I start to cry. The tears rush out as I try to shut it all out, every memory of my mom, of Derek, of all my failures and mistakes, but once it begins, it’s like living your entire life in high velocity and you know the inevitable crash is probably going to kill you. 

K
risten’s surprised when she gets back and my side of the room is fully decorated. I spent all day cleaning and putting up some posters that were sitting in the lounge. One is a motivational quote with a mountain on it and the other is from a movie that came out years earlier, but they’re something. And I ate a granola bar, so she’s even more excited when she sees the wrapper in the trash.

“What happened this weekend?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying. But okay.”

“Really. It was nothing. It was just a lot of things at once and a lot of thinking and I can’t keep letting the wrong things matter. I need to stop this. I can’t change what happened and I’m angry and hurt and it’s not okay, but I’m not letting it ruin the future, too. If my past is all a lie, at least I can write my own future, right?” I ask.

She closes the door and opens her bag, pulling out a Milky Way bar. “Here. Eat this. We’ll split it. And tell me everything.”

“Do you just carry food in there all the time?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

It feels good to tell her, to explain it, to talk about the memories I’ve kept and hear from someone else that things weren’t what I believed them to be. It helps to have another person look at me and tell me that it wasn’t my fault. Although I don’t completely believe it and despite my fears about going home for Thanksgiving, the idea that there is a girl inside of me who could be what everyone else sees – everyone beyond my mom and Derek and the me of a year ago – keeps me hopeful.

“I really don’t want to go home, but I have to,” I admit. “I have to face it. But she’s going to want to talk about him and my brother isn’t going to listen and I’m sure he’ll have his own version and it will all be my fault.”

“Who cares?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you want to make it a big deal, I will be right there with you, but if you don’t and you want it to die, I’ll be there for that, too. But who cares at all about the people who won’t? If they can’t see through it, maybe you’re better off away from it.”

“She’s my mom,” I try to explain. “I know it’s stupid and I get how it looks to you, but she’s the only mom I have.” Hearing the words makes me think of Jack, of how much he misses a woman who didn’t care about him while she was alive, how angry he is at his father for taking her, even though she wasn’t perfect. He loved her although she was so far from perfect.

“Have you talked to them about classes?”

Most of my professors have been great, but I missed a lot and it’s unlikely I can finish the semester with anything higher than a 3.0. It’s only one semester and I’m on scholarship, but I have next semester to improve and bring it up overall. Plus a couple of the professors said they’d back me if it came down to academic probation. But my professors aren’t my mom – and a 3.0 might as well be failing everything.

“I haven’t. I don’t know what she’ll be most upset about – Derek, my grades, or how fat I’ve gotten.”

“Well, those are all stupid reasons, so whatever. If she’s awful, you can stay with me for winter break. And my mom loves food.”

Laughing, I take a bite of the Milky Way she gave me earlier, which is the second thing I’ve had today. I can’t express it to Kristen, but I love her, because she has never lectured me. She’s not stupid; she knows I’m not okay. But she hasn’t given me a speech about self-esteem or therapy or health or anything. She just comes back to the dorm with food when I’m not at meals – or she sends one of the guys with food. When I don’t eat it, she doesn’t say a word, but she never stops. Her faith in me makes me grateful we were randomly placed together.

“I’m glad our forms were matched,” I tell her.

“Right, because I carry chocolate in my purse.”

“Exactly. I could have ended up with a roommate who carried nothing but tampons.”

She laughs and opens her purse, taking out a roll of Mentos. “Worse, they could’ve carried, like, broccoli.”

“The logic in this hypothetical feels flawed,” I joke.

Popping half the Mentos into her mouth at once, she says around the mouthful of coated chewy candy, “Logic schmogic. Eat a Mento.”

People act like life is a series of big moments, of the things that shape you and when you’re sad or even when you’re happy, it’s all these huge and impactful memories that come to mind. But the best moments I’ve had since college started involved sitting on the frozen ground by the lake with Jack and this – eating Mentos with a girl who’s only part of my life because someone grabbed two pieces of paper at the right time.

****

J
ack keeps his word and I don’t see him at all before Thanksgiving. Every day I look for him, hoping I can blame fate for his presence, that I can excuse my joy at seeing him as an accident, but he’s never there. I know he works, that he has band practice, that his classes are on the other side of campus from mine usually, but if I tried a little harder, our paths would cross. It confuses me because I’m still not ready, but I miss him. I miss watching him try to smuggle soup in his coffee mug because he says sandwiches aren’t healthy. I miss the way he rolls his eyes when I try to remember the name of the game he’s playing. I miss the fact that talking to him feels comfortable and when I’m working on my homework, he’s usually nearby. I miss having him sit so close to me but still leaving me my space.

Going home is hard. Since the night with Derek, I’ve refused to let the past in, trying to think of nothing but who I want to be and what I need to let go. But I know the weekend will be a challenge. It’s only Tuesday night and while I’m waiting for my dad, I can’t stop worrying. Anxiety makes me chew on my pen and I end up biting down too hard, spraying ink across my teeth, mouth, and shirt.