No Such Thing as Perfect

by Daltry, Sarah

  NO SUCH THING AS

  PERFECT

  SARAH DALTRY

  Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Daltry

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  http://sarahdaltry.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  No Such Thing as Perfect

  PART I: | FALLING

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  PART II: | HOVERING

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  PART III: | Flying

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  About the Author

  Further Reading: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: A Modern Reimagining

  About the Author

  Also by Sarah Daltry

  Dust

  Backward Compatible: A Geek Love Story

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  Bitter Fruits

  “Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”

  – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

  “I don’t think it’s the innocence that I miss; I’m still innocent really. It’s the energy and opportunity of a fall midnight, when what you did had no permanent impact. There were no missed opportunities because opportunity was infinite and maybe that is the only tragedy of my life my so far … but I can hurt too, as much as anyone.”

  – Pete Clark, It Tasted Blue

  PART I:

  FALLING

  1.

  “My name’s Lily and James Naismith ruined high school for me,” I offer.

  It’s too hot in this room. The window fan is just blowing more heat over us, along with some old dust or dirt from the window. It makes the noise of plastic that is being asked to do more than plastic can do; the fan’s cheapness makes it too weak to be a fan and it groans with its own failure.

  I’m not good at social events; I never have the right thing to say. This is some kind of floor meeting for all new students and I’m sitting in the middle of my RA’s room with ten other girls, all of us in pajama pants, and I’m trying to sound interesting.

  “I mean, he didn’t personally. I think he died almost a hundred years ago,” I stutter.

  “So why don’t you explain how the inventor of basketball did ruin high school then?” one girl asks. She’s angry, but I don’t know her. I don’t know anyone, except my roommate Kristen, and so far all I know about her is that she’s majoring in education, she brought the fridge, and she’s decorated her side of our dorm room to look like the inside of a Pepto-Bismol bottle.

  This girl doesn’t want to hear my story. She doesn’t want to be here. I don’t, either, but now that I’m here, I was the one dumb enough to open my mouth.

  “It was gym class,” I try to explain. “I don’t know. Something about ed reform. We had homework and tests and all that in gym now and I’d been up all night writing an essay about James Naismith. I hadn’t slept and I was in a rush trying to make the bus that morning.”

  It had been cold, the rushing towards winter that mirrors the years that aren’t like this one. This is one where summer lingers and it resists every attempt to make it yield to fall. I remember the leaves were already falling that year, even though it was only early September. Some years it seemed like they were in a greater rush to die. In the moments between life, each leaf took its suicidal leap and fell slowly while no one noticed. We only notice when they’re all dead and suddenly the sky hangs on us and we crave shade.

  The bus was about to pull away from the curb near my house and I cried out for it, running faster and slipping on a clump of leaves. The entire patch was squishy. I wondered as I fell if I had taken out a small family of worms. My outfit was ruined, but it wasn’t the clothes that scared me…

  “I tripped on leaves and fell on the driveway hard. The gravel left a slash along my cheek and it looked like someone had punched me. That was the day of school pictures, which we used for the yearbook and our IDs. Not to mention the fact that my mom…”

  I can’t finish. I don’t want to talk about my mother. I certainly don’t feel like confiding in these girls, don’t feel like telling them how disappointed she was, don’t want to confess that I ruined everything. It wasn’t my fault that fall had come early, but I ruined the pictures and in her album of school photos, my freshman year still remains a giant, empty black page. A constant reminder that I will never be whole, never be perfect, never be what she wanted.

  “What about your mom?” someone else asks. They don’t care about this story. They don’t care about me. Everyone is only politely listening because we were promised ice cream for showing up, although it’s mandatory.

  “Nothing.”

  I don’t want to tell my story anymore. I want the fan to stop trying. I want it to be tomorrow and the day after and any day when I can start in the morning and get through to night without making a mistake.

  It’s dropped, though, anyway, because Ellie, the RA, turns to another girl, who is pocketing a handful of condoms. “You don’t need to take them all,” she barks. “I have plenty, but other people practice safe sex, too. Unless you’re planning on having a massive orgy tonight, you can probably come back and get some later.”

  The condom hoarder blushes and returns half her pile and the floor meeting turns back to pointless small talk and ice breakers that no one wants to be a part of. Ellie hands us soggy ice cream sandwiches for guessing each other’s majors. The fan clicks another meaningless rotation.

  I’ve been a college student for six hours now and I’ve never been so lonely in my entire life.

  ****

  “Do you want to order a pizza?” Kristen asks an hour later in our room. I shouldn’t begrudge her the fact that she’s color coordinated her laptop, bedding, hangers, and lamp, since my side of the room is sporting the jailhouse chic look and I’m still living out of cardboard. I waited until the last day to move in, because I wasn’t ready.

  “I’m starving,” I admit. “I would love that.”

  “Cool. I’ll order. Do you want anything special?”

  “Whatever you’re having. Just tell me how much,” I say.

  When she goes to the lobby to get the menus and to see if anyone else on the floor wants food, I check my phone. My boyfriend, Derek, is moving into his dorm today and I haven’t heard from him.

  “Hey, Lily, this is Lyle,” Kristen says when she returns, introducing the lanky guy following her into our room, carrying the menu. “And Don.”

  “Hey,” I say.


  “Lily’s waiting for a call, I think,” Kristen explains to them. “She keeps staring at her phone.”

  “Sorry, I…” I don’t know what to tell them. That Derek’s an hour away? That although my grades are better than his and this is a better school, I already miss him? That I regret trying to be independent and it’s only been a day? How pathetic.

  “Boyfriend,” Lyle confirms. “Right?”

  I nod. “I don’t mean to be rude. I’ve just been waiting all day for him to call.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kristen says. “I’d probably be anxious, too.” She opens the menu and takes out her phone. “So, two cheese and a pepperoni? You guys want fries?”

  “Poppers,” Lyle says. “I’ll pay.”

  I just nod again. I wish I was better at socializing, but my only real friend, besides Derek, is my best friend, Abby and she’s traveling in Europe so she can “find herself” before starting college. I’m stuck trying to figure this all out by myself.

  Don’s about to say something when my phone rings.

  “Sorry. I just need to take this.” I go into the hall, where I can be alone.

  “Hey, sweetie. Settling in?” Derek asks.

  “I miss you,” I reply. “Is that dumb?”

  “No, I miss you, too. But hell, we survived almost a year while you were still living at home. And now you won’t have your parents telling you what to do all the time.”

  “It’s kind of quiet here. It’s not what I expected.” Everyone’s parents left hours ago and now there’s just the lonely echo of the lives we’re trying to leave behind us.

  Derek laughs. “Give it time. It hasn’t even been a full day. When do your classes start again?”

  I’ve told him several times, because we waited to move in on the same day, although his classes don’t start until next week. “Tomorrow,” I remind him.

  “Right. Well, you’ll do fine. Call me tomorrow night after you get done with classes, okay?”

  I want to ask him to stay on the phone, but I know he’s probably trying to set up his room. He’s probably hungry, too, and I should get back to my pizza. I feel the ache of needing to speak clutching at my throat, but I swallow the words and hold them back. “I will,” I say. “Say hi to Jon, okay?”

  “I will. Love you,” he says, but he hangs up before I can tell him that I love him, too.

  2.

  It was raining on the day I fell in love with Derek. That’s what I remember most. Everything was damp. It felt like the entire world had been soaked through, and it was way too cold for July.

  We were camping, because my mother had watched Oprah or some talk show that suggested the best way to “connect with family” was to “break away from the ordinary.” This was her year of connecting, because another show had said that’s what good parents did. So thanks to Oprah, we were headed to the wilderness at the command of my mother, a woman who lives for Crock Pots, bath soaps, and electricity. I’d helped my parents and brother, Jon, along with his friend, Derek, load up our SUV and we sat on a crowded highway, waiting to engage with nature. Abby was supposed to come, but she’d gotten poison ivy a few days before we left and now she was at home, covered in Calamine lotion, texting me images of poison ivy plants so I didn’t meet the same fate.

  The wilderness, it turned out, was only ninety minutes away in a resort town in New Hampshire, and our tent was pitched less than thirty yards from the cabin my parents had rented “just in case.” A cabin with an oven, TV reception, and Wi-Fi. It took only six hours before my mom decided she preferred the comforts of indoor life to the bugs and trees after all. This left me to spend the first night in the tent with my dad, Jon, and Derek. It was leaning precariously towards the west. I knew it was west, because the only use I got from the compass I bought for our adventure was to gauge the leaning of the tent.

  The next morning, before dawn, my dad woke us up, declaring that he and his back weren’t cut out for the ground, before heading inside to the luxuries of a mattress as well. And then there were three.

  By the time the storm hit on the third day and staying outdoors meant braving the elements, too, only Derek and I were still up for eating food on sticks and sleeping in the dirt.

  You have to understand - at fourteen, there was not much in the way of excitement in my life, so this little change was topping the charts. The tent was making its westward expansion, likely towards the river, and the wind was helping it along nicely. However, I was determined to stick it out, because I wanted something different in my life.

  “Are you having fun?” Derek asked as the tent shook again.

  “I am, actually,” I admitted. “Is that weird?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s like an adventure.”

  “Right?”

  Oprah would have approved of our willingness to try something new, although we weren’t exactly family. I’d always sort of thought of Derek as an extension of my brother, but then it rained and we were in a tent and the whole world was suddenly different. When he smiled at me, I noticed for the first time that his eyes got scrunchy and they almost sparkled a little. I also noticed that I wanted to look at his eyes more.

  Until that afternoon, I had never been interested in guys. Abby would go on about some cute boy in a class or on TV, but I tended to focus on reading or anything that kept things from getting complicated. But when Derek smiled and his eyes did that funny thing, I wanted to be the reason he smiled.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “Sorry. Nothing. I was thinking,” I stammered.

  “Okay, cool. Do you want to play cards or something?” He broke out the deck and started dealing without really getting a confirmation, but I did want to play cards. I suddenly wanted to do anything that would keep Derek looking at me.

  I picked up my hand, which I had to peel from the canvas floor of tent. I didn’t even know what game we were playing, but it didn’t matter.

  “You know that painting of the dogs playing poker?” I asked.

  “Yeah. My uncle has that in his basement.”

  “Well, I feel like we’re the dogs, except we’re fish. You know, ‘cause it’s wet?”

  Derek blinked, his eyes going out of focus, but then his smile grew wider. “You are really weird, Lily.” He touched my arm when he said it and I knew he would never be just my brother’s friend again.

  As the afternoon turned to evening, the dark sky never changed. We spent hours playing cards, eating the snacks Jon had left behind and talking about school. Derek had just finished his freshman year, but high school was still only a vague concept for me. His braces made it hard for him to talk when he got excited, so sometimes he slurred random words. It was cute; a few months later, when he had his braces removed, I missed it.

  Eventually my dad came to get us, because the weather wasn’t going to let up. I wanted to text Abby, to tell her what I was feeling, but I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to make it real. I didn’t talk about it for month to anyone. Especially since Derek acted as if the day we’d spent meant nothing during the rest of the trip, and maybe it had. Maybe it was only me who felt something different that afternoon.

  We spent the last night as a group around the campfire and I kept trying to recreate the smile and the feeling I’d had with Derek just a few days before, but he didn’t look at me at all. I would spend three years of high school trying to relive that rainy afternoon in the tent, but Derek went on to become popular and everything I wasn’t. Meanwhile, I studied and I got good grades and maybe I was pretty, but it didn’t matter, because I only wanted him to pay attention. But no matter how much I wanted it, he never did.

  My life from there forward stayed on track, following the plan and schedule, but sometimes, in the late hours when everyone was sleeping, I remembered what it felt like to be a girl who made a boy smile and a girl who stayed outside in the rain when everyone else took the easy way.

  3.

  The
college admissions essay question prompts you to talk about how you can bring something new to the school, but after sitting through a few classes, I start to wonder how many essays get read. I like to think that I’m more than a perfect GPA, plus a nicely varied combination of extracurriculars that included Student Council, track, and National Honor Society, as well as dance classes my mom thought I needed to take. However, the brochures sell diversity, while reality seems to be a collection of people as desperately hopeless as I am.

  “Am I in the right place?” the guy sitting next to me in Literary Study asks. The classroom is small, nothing like those lecture halls they show in movies. There are about twelve old and hard wooden chairs around a table too big for discussion without shouting. The chalkboards on the walls look like they’ve never been used. It’s warm in here, too, but the overhead fan is trying to stake its superiority to my RA’s plastic one, blowing my notebook open but still not changing the temperature.

  “Literary Study – Austen?” I answer. I adjust my backpack, which is on the table and too full. I bought all my books before my first class and I haven’t had time to get back to my dorm yet.

  “Shit. I thought it was Trig.” He leaves and I’m sitting next to the only empty chair during the entirety of the class. I tell myself it’s not a sign of things to come.

  Fortunately, Elinor Dashwood is familiar. As soon as the professor says we’re starting with Sense and Sensibility, I’m back to what I know. I understand Elinor and her responsibilities. I know about being reasonable. When my parents bought me a copy for Christmas during freshman year of high school, the book felt like punishment. Even the inscription – A good start for your SAT reading and college goals – was instruction, but I read it anyway, because it was a book and that’s what my Friday nights consisted of usually. While Abby dated and broke up with guy after guy and while Jon and Derek partied, I sat at home and read and studied. But the Dashwoods became my friends. Who needed to come home smelling like beer when you could be out riding with any of Austen’s heroes anyway?