The Perfection Paradox (2 page)

Hannah folded
back the tattered lid of her single cardboard box and pulled out
two-dozen books. She lined them up along the rickety shelf looming
over her bed. The wood creaked under the strain and Hannah pushed
her hand down against its splintered surface, testing its strength.
It moved slightly with the motion of her hand, but although the
screws holding it were loose, they were strong enough to keep the
shelf on the wall for the next three months. That was all she
needed. She dropped on to her bed spiritlessly.

She caught a
glimpse of her parents hauling the sofa across the living room and
watched them, bemused.

Her mother
grinned at her father as he nearly dropped the sofa on his foot,
the lines weaving across her face like an intricate spider’s web.
She looked at least a decade older than she was, the sun had aged
her and her new hair colour made her look older rather than
younger. Her hair had been the same dull shade as Hannah’s once,
but was now dyed a deep shade of red, almost burgundy. Their eyes
remained the same though, round and doe-like, with wild unkempt
eyebrows framing their face.

A baggy pair
of dungarees hung from her mother’s gaunt frame. They would’ve been
a better fit on her husband, the trouser legs worn away to frays
where she’d stood on them.

Hannah’s
father gripped the opposite end of the sofa. His features sagged
like that of a wistful St. Bernard, and when the sofa nearly
slipped from his grasp his face creased like soft crumpled leather
as he laughed. A hard bulge, the consequence of years of drinking
cheap beer, poked out from beneath the bleach-stained flannel shirt
he frequented. His dishevelled hair had already started to grey,
and the five o’clock shadow on his wrinkled chin and cheeks shone
silver in the sunlight. He had eyes smaller and narrower than his
wife and daughter’s, grey and cool where theirs were brown and
warm. A misleading air of wisdom surrounded him, an aura of
knowledge that Hannah had trusted when she was younger, but with
time had come to realize was merely a figment of her
imagination.

Hannah’s
parents had been eighteen when she’d been born. She’d been an
accident that had happened before they’d been able to go out and
explore the world. She’d held them back. Hannah often wondered if
they resented her for it, if a part of them wished things had been
different. Sometimes it felt like they were punishing
her.

Hannah didn't
care that her clothes were hand me downs from her older cousins, or
that she listened to music on her dad's old portable cd player. She
had, in a way, become used to living a life void of new unused
things, a second rate life where she settled for whatever was
provided for her by her parents, never daring to voice the opinion
that maybe she deserved more than someone else’s abandoned hand me
downs.

Three days
earlier, Hannah’s parents had sat her down in the kitchen of their
rented apartment on the wrong side of town and repeated the words
she’d heard countless times before.

They’d packed
up their belongings and driven off into the sunset to live happily
ever after.

If only it
worked out that way.

Hannah was
the daughter of two hopeless adventurers with the attention span of
a couple of curious toddlers, and over the course of her seventeen
years she’d been dragged all over the country.

And now here
she was in Rosewell, at the start of her senior year, the ‘new
girl’ once again, a stranger, again. 

Hannah had
never spent longer than six months in any given place, and had
slowly detached herself from the new faces. She stopped seeing them
as potential friends and more as people she would tolerate for the
several months she would be forced to spend with them before her
parents whisked her off once again.

High school
after high school had made her cynical, all she saw were flat
stereotypes, flawed to the extreme, in a way no one else could see
yet. Hannah didn't fit in anywhere. She’d rejected any social
norms, any social circles; those were reserved for people who could
actually belong to them. She had come to resent the fake bimbos who
were
allowed
to
be confident and social. Girls who had college and a
comfortable future they would take
entirely
for granted to look forward
to. After a while, the shiny façade of popularity faded away to
expose the true ugliness beneath.

Hannah used
to daydream about what life as a normal teenager would’ve been
like. She wasn't unattractive, although she didn't tamper with her
hair and face the way a lot of the other girls did. Brown hair fell
just past her shoulders in loose messy curls. Her eyes were a plain
muddy brown and her skin was pale and smooth. She wasn't beautiful,
but she didn’t need to be, all she really needed was the time to
make friends, so she might be more than just the ‘new
girl.’

A youthful
commotion erupted outside her window and she gazed out, watching
children in tattered overalls shriek with laughter as they chased
each other through the dreary streets, snot gushing from their
noses and crusty scabs scattered across their faces, arms and legs.
Most of them were barefoot, their matted hair blowing in the hot
polluted breeze that passed through their neighbourhood. The gust
blew hair into their eyes, and they pushed it out of their faces
with hands that had dirty blackened stubs for fingers.

Hannah sighed
and dropped on to her bed, the springs tensing loudly. She needed
Rosewell to be different, for something or someone to change her
perspective, because otherwise, she might just die of
boredom.

3.

It was an
afternoon in late summer. The sun blazed mercilessly, a hot breeze
thrumming across the cracked earth, its touch barely a relief,
still oppressively stifling.

Crickets sang
their songs in the nearby shrubs. The sky was a perfect blue, not a
cloud in sight.

In the
distance the sound of lawnmowers could be heard, with it wafted the
earthy scent of freshly cut grass.

“
Do you want
another beer?” Ryan asked, padding his forehead and neck with a
towel as he got to his feet.

He barely
cast a shadow, the sun high in the midday sky. Ryan’s shoulders
were pink, his skin struggling against the strong summer
rays.

Hunter opened
his eyes and lifted the sunglasses from his face lazily, sliding
them up to rest amid his mess of hair.

“
Yeah, why
not…” he answered, sitting up to stretch his muscular arms
sleepily.

“
I’ll come,”
he decided, the sun had become unbearably hot and he longed for the
cool embrace of the air conditioning in Ryan’s kitchen.

Taylor was
spread across a nearby sun lounger, headphones blaring; Hunter
could recognize the song from where he stood on the other side of
the garden.

Brad and
Riley were tossing a football back and forth, sweat falling from
their bodies like rain with every throw.

Josh sat
under a large cream parasol, a snapback shading his eyes from the
brightness of the afternoon. He was biting his lip, his face
wrought with concentration as he played some game on his
phone.

“
Beer?”
Hunter called over; Brad and Riley looked at each other and
shrugged, Hunter nodded in compliance, Josh grunted a muffled
“yes”, not even looking up from his screen.

Hunter and
Ryan glanced at each other, shaking their heads and chuckling at
the deathly serious expression on Josh’s face.

The gust of
cool air that greeted Hunter as he walked into the kitchen was
heavenly. He splashed ice-cold water on to his face, the best
feeling in the world.

“
Here,” Ryan
handed him a bottle of chilled beer. Hunter popped the cap off with
a satisfying hiss and drank it greedily.

“
Just what I
needed…” he said, placing the bottle on the granite kitchen
counter. Ryan nodded, sipping at his own bottle, “How do you think
the team’s going to shape up this year?” he asked, brushing blonde
tendrils of hair from his face.

“
We’ll be
fine as long as Schmidt shuts up and follows
instructions…”

Ryan
suppressed a grin, “you’re too hard on that guy, I almost feel bad
for him…” Hunter rolled his eyes but smiled fondly at his friend,
“you’re too worried about pissing people off,” Hunter took another
swig of his beer, “I’m lucky you’re so nice, otherwise you’d be
captain instead of me. Coach knows I don’t care if someone doesn’t
like me…”

Ryan laughed,
“Congratulations on being an asshole!” he joked, Hunter raised his
half empty bottle in a mock toast.

“
You’ll thank
me when our team kicks Hamworth’s ass”

Ryan lifted
his bottle and clunked it softly against Hunter’s, nodding
admittedly and grinning.

“
Just make
sure you’re not too much of a dick around the cheerleading squad,
Brooke would love an excuse to hate you even more than she already
does…”

Hunter
shrugged, an arrogant smile barely hidden on his handsome
face.

“
I’ll try and
keep Brooke sweet, but we both know she’ll find a reason sooner or
later, I don’t really care whether she likes me or not…”

“
Well don’t
tell her that…” Ryan laughed, “Although she always looks her best
when she’s pissed off.” His voice drifted into silence and Hunter
raised an eyebrow at his friend teasingly, Ryan blushed and smiled
momentarily before changing the subject.

“
You’re
setting yourself up for failure, I hope you realize
that…”

“
Campbells
never fail!” Hunter replied, winking cockily.

“
You sound
like a condom commercial…” Ryan joked and Hunter punched him
playfully on the shoulder. 

“
Come on…” he
laughed, picking up five beers from the bottom shelf of the fridge
and heading back out into the blazing heat.

An hour
later, Hunter was studying the wispy clouds that travelled slowly
across the blue sky above him. He had just won a three on
three-basketball game and he and his five friends were now spread
out on the soft fresh grass, allowing the sun to dry their
sweat-drenched bodies.

“
Oh man, I
can’t believe senior year begins in a couple of days” Taylor
exclaimed, yawning as he stretched his body out, basking in the
warmth of the sun. The rest of the group stirred.

“
I wonder if
there are any hot freshmen coming in…” Josh pondered excitedly
above the murmurs.

“
Josh that’s
disgusting” Hunter declared, “They’ll be like fourteen years
old…”

“
He can’t get
anyone his own age so he’s going for freshmen!” Ryan joked. Josh
grabbed the basketball and bounced it hard on Ryan’s chest, making
him shoot up in surprise. The boys laughed wildly as Ryan nursed
his stomach, a round red mark apparent against the rest of his pink
torso.

“
You can’t
talk Brad, I remember that girl you hooked up with before summer,
she looked like she was still in middle school!”

“
Are you
kidding me?! Don’t you remember that girl Kathleen I hooked up
with? She was hot, man!”

“
She was a
hot man?!” Ryan shrieked, and the boys fell about laughing again,
their howls the sole sound amongst the peace of Ryan’s
garden.

“
Weird how
you always seem to hook up with hot girls when none of us are
around to see it…” Taylor mused.

“
Are you
calling me a liar?” Brad demanded with mock rage in his
voice.

There was a
prolonged silence.

“
I bet your
grandma’s hooked up with more hot girls than you have!” was the
final response and the boys all hollered in disgust at the
prospect.

Brad punched
Taylor lazily in the arm in an attempt to regain his grandmother’s
honour, and a playful scuffle broke out, ending with Brad bouncing
the basketball hard off of his friend’s forehead. Taylor grabbed
his forehead dramatically before keeling over on to the
grass.

The boys lay
laughing for several minutes, when Hunter got to his feet, brushing
the stray blades of grass from his baggy sport shorts.

“
I should
head home… Going to dinner with the family… See you guys at
school.”

He started
off in the direction of his silver pickup truck, and as he got in
and pulled the door shut behind him he saw the five boys disband
and head down the garden path to the street where their own cars
were parked.
Followers,
Hunter thought, but he couldn’t help smirking at
the influence he held over them.

He turned the
key in the ignition and reversed, tampering with his stereo until
the songs from his iPod were pumping through the open
windows.

Hunter
cruised through the upmarket streets of Rosewell, slowing down in
front of a colossal mansion hidden behind a large metal gate. When
he saw no activity at the end of the long driveway he sped up
again. He wondered when she’d be back.

Five minutes
later he drove into the garage of his own home, an American flag
above the front door, waving lightly in the breeze.