The Perfection Paradox (19 page)

This feels
wrong
, she thought, and as much as she
tried to shake it, the notion had been planted in her
head.

She nodded
and smiled her way through the meal. She even managed to thank Cody
when he suggested they split the bill even though she’d asked him
out, so
really
she should be paying.

Emily had
crawled into the passenger seat of his car thankfully, eager to get
home, eager to be out of this situation.

But instead
of taking her home, Cody drove up and parked his car on a slope
overlooking Rosewell, the very same ledge that Hayden had parked
his beat up convertible on nearly five years before. This time
there was no lightening or thunder to serve as an excuse to go
home.

Schmidt
kissed her forcefully, holding her face in his hands. When she
pulled away slightly, he ran his hand over her cheek, “I didn’t
spend all that money on a meal for nothing did I?” he asked,
feigning disappointment. Something more sinister than
disappointment lingered beneath his words though, a threatening
edge, just under the surface.

He pulled her
face towards his again, and Emily felt trapped suddenly, she just
wanted to go home, lie in her bed with her blankets wrapped snuggly
around her. This had all been a big mistake.

She felt hot
tears blur her vision, but she said nothing, she’d led Schmidt on,
it was
her
fault,
she couldn’t go back now, she couldn’t say no now, she owed him
this. And if she didn’t do it, he’d tell everyone. He’d say she was
a loser, that she was no fun. She couldn’t bear Schmidt thinking
that of her, let alone all his friends.

As she lay in
bed that night, feeling dirty and used and empty, her heart filled
with longing for Hunter all over again, and she realized that
settling for second best only made her miss Hunter more.

The following
morning, Emily woke up feeling feverish and blurry-eyed.

If Cody
Schmidt has given me some sort of mouth to mouth STD I will murder
him
, she told herself. She didn’t know if
those counted as STDs, or if they even existed, but if they did,
Cody Schmidt would definitely be carrying them.

Not
necessarily mouth-to-mouth STDs,
she
realized, as memories of the night before flashed across her mind.
She cringed as she remembered them and shook her head violently to
drive them away.

Her mother
insisted she stay home, arguing that she couldn’t risk getting ill
at this point in the school year, so Emily had stomped back up to
her room, pulling her curtains closed as sunlight made her head
ache.

Winter had
lasted a thousand years. That’s what it had felt like
anyway.

Endless days
of grey skies and bitter winds, the dainty snow had stopped long
ago, and for the last few months it had just been cold rain and
angry storm clouds.

Finally, the
clouds had parted and the blue skies of spring teased the town of
Rosewell, waiting impatiently in the darkness of winter.

Sun broke
through the clouds, filling the world with light for the first time
in a long while, and everything suddenly seemed brighter and
cleaner and fresher.

Rosewell
shook off the gloom of winter and let spring soak over
it.

Flora
bloomed. Rich green leaves, pastel-coloured blossom, wispy white
clouds danced across the azure skies.

Vivid colours
all around, in the nature, in the sky, on the faces of its
inhabitants, awakened Rosewell to the spring and summer ahead after
a long time of living in black and white and grey.

Smooth
zephyrs triumphed over the blustering gales that had raged all
winter.

But Emily
didn’t care about the end of winter. Spring meant new beginnings
for many things, for the plants, for the animals on local farms,
but not for her, never for her.

She lay in
bed, ruminating over her lost love and the illness Cody had passed
on to her.

She’d scanned
her bookshelf looking for a book to pass the time. Someone had slid
a book in back to front, its spine concealed and only its tattered
pages showing. She pulled it out hopefully, but it was
‘Carrie’.

She’d started
it half a dozen times with the intention of finishing it that very
same day, but a novel about an ostracized teenage girl desperate to
be part of something, how was she supposed to relate to
that
?

Eventually,
her mother fixed up the sofa with some extra cushions and blankets
and Emily spent the morning watching reruns of old soap
operas.

Every half an
hour or so she would anxiously check her phone, assuring herself
that her friends would have noticed her absence by now and would be
texting her, waiting for her reassurance that she was in stable
condition.

As her mother
fixed her a tuna sandwich for lunch and her friends had made no
enquiry regarding her health, Emily’s mood began to rapidly
deteriorate. She was getting bored of the constant reruns and the
thick layer of blankets was making her sweat
uncomfortably.

At 2pm there
were still no text messages, lunch had come and gone, her friends
would have had every opportunity to contact her, they spent most of
lunch periods texting away on their phones when she was sat right
there next to them.

Had none of
them thought to see if she was okay? When she would be back? Had
any of them even
noticed
she was gone?

Emily felt a
lump in her throat, her weakened immune system made her especially
vulnerable to her already frequent self-pitying
tendencies.

She imagined
Amanda and Sarah, chatting over lunch, deciding that actually it
was quite nice not to have Emily there for a change, maybe they
should stop being friends with her all together.

Regardless of
whether or not they had noticed her absence (
surely they must have
!) neither of
them had cared enough to check in with her and make sure she was
okay, neither of them missed her enough to ask when she would be
back.

There were
three of them, you’d think one person being gone for a whole school
day would be a pretty big deal,
but
no
, apparently Amanda and Sarah preferred
it that way.

She could
already sense that she would be cold with them tomorrow, even if
she made an effort not to be. At the end of the day it took barely
any effort to send a quick message making sure she was
okay.

She could
hear how naggy she sounded and she hated herself for it, she
wanted
so
badly
to be carefree and laidback. If she was carefree and laidback maybe
her friends would have missed her more when she was ill. They would
miss someone fun and free spirited, someone who didn’t take things
too seriously. Someone who would reassure them that their problems
would work out just fine, instead of being negative or talking
about herself all the time.

All of a
sudden Emily thought back over her actions the last few weeks,
she
had
been
pretty whiny. She hadn’t been entertaining or funny or anything
that would make anyone want to spend any time with her.

Why did she
always have to be this person? Even when she tried to reinvent
herself, her personality would always slowly shift back to its
usual whiny self.

She was
sure
Kennedy
must
receive a myriad of messages when she was ill, if she was even
capable of being ill, as that would mean not being perfect for a
day or two. Principal Andrews probably called her up to ask her how
she was feeling and how long she’d be gone because the school was
barely functioning without her utter flawlessness.

Hunter
probably sent large bouquets of red roses for every hour of school
that she missed, and by the time she recovered and arrived back at
school, her locker would have been transformed into a shrine where
students would meet and pray for the swift recuperation of
Rosewell’s teen queen.

Okay,
maybe
Emily was over
dramatizing the situation, but even if Kennedy didn’t receive eight
bouquets of roses a day, she definitely would’ve received some
messages from her friends, well-wishers and general
stalkers.
Unlike Emily
.

Emily’s
mother interrupted her mental soliloquy when she dropped a plate of
chocolate chip cookies on to the coffee table.

“
I’m on a
diet mom, Jesus Christ, how many times do I need to tell you?” She
snapped.

Her mother
picked up the plate slowly and swayed awkwardly for a
moment.

“
Why don’t
you research some more colleges if you’re bored…”

“
Could you
stop your relentless pestering?” Emily shouted back aggressively
before her mother could even finish. “Why are you even pushing this
whole college thing so much? So I can go to college and pretend to
study for a course that has absolutely no relevance to real life,
while in actual fact I’ll be drinking illegally and having sex with
total strangers, but it’ll be worth it because I’ll be able to use
that Bachelors to compete with thousands of other people with
equally useless college degrees for a job in a coffee shop or as
the grovelling office bitch of some start up firm, a job none of us
really
want
, but
all of us need because how else are we going to pay off our student
debts? How else are we going to afford to finally move out of our
parents’ house?”

It was like
that quote from that Shakespeare book she’d read in English last
year… ‘
All the worlds a stage and people
merely players’.

Something
like that anyways.

God she hated
that quote, but it was true. Maybe that was why she hated
it.

“
Fuck that.
College degrees are all bullshit, stuff you could learn from
borrowing the right books at the local library. Save yourself a
hundred thousand dollars and buy a fucking library card. I’d rather
flip burgers for the rest of my life than work for some flimsy
piece of paper that claims I’m knowledgeable in some random subject
when I probably just paraphrased every essay from
Wikipedia.”

“
Maybe you
should ask your doctor if his college degree was ‘bullshit’ the
next time you’re sick” Her mother mused, “rejecting the idea of
college is a grand romantic notion Emily, but twenty years from
now, when you’re obese from all the free food you’ve stuffed down
your throat at work, living in a shitty studio apartment on the
wrong side of town, unable to wash the smell of frying fat from
your hair and skin, you might wish you had gone.”

“
I’m not
going to fucking lie to myself and say I want it. I’m not going to
pretend.”

Her mother
was watching her curiously, her arms hung at her side
awkwardly.

“
Why not?
Everything else you do is a pretence.”

“
That’s not
true…” Emily replied abruptly.

“
You spend
every waking minute comparing yourself, judging yourself, scoring
yourself out of ten. Your whole life is consumed with some sort of
obsession with attention and adoration. You’re trying to be
Veronica Stell and Brooke Kent. You’re trying to be Kennedy
Blakewood, when all you should be is yourself. That person you just
were when you got all passionate and argumentative,
that’s you
, not the ditz
you keep forcing yourself to be. You have to make your own path, be
a leader, not a follower.”

Her mother
smiled to herself mysteriously, Emily glared at her, “What?” she
snapped.

She shook her
head.

“
You focus on
the wrong traits when you look at Kennedy. Forget the clothes and
fawning admirers, regardless of whether you like her or not, what
separates Kennedy from the Brookes and Veronicas of the world is
that she is her own person. She doesn’t let anyone tell her she
can’t do something; she doesn’t let anyone convince her she
shouldn’t do something because it’s not cool. She leads and others
follow, and that’s exactly what makes her so much more intriguing
than any of the others.”

Emily looked
at her mother like she was seeing her for the first
time.

Time had not
been kind to her. She’d been youthful once, never beautiful, yet
she’d possessed a certain adolescent charm. That charm was gone now
though, in its place a haggard used up woman. What were once
breasts had sagged, two drooping bags of flesh that swung
lifelessly as she moved. Her chin had retreated over the years and
now it was hard to tell where face ended and neck began. Limp
wrinkled jowls creased together grotesquely when she turned her
head. Her hair was like Emily’s, a shabby brown, knotting together
like the coat of some neglected sheep. Beneath the hair there was a
deep sunken line on her face for every worry she’d ever
had.

She never
spoke of Emily’s father anymore. When he’d still been there he’d
been the source of all her problems, he was to blame for the boss
she hated or the rude customer she’d serviced at work. When he’d
started spending his evenings at the local bar, the resentment in
her grew like a turgid tumour pressing against her brain. The
arguments, the fighting, it had only served to ostracize him
more.