Better Than Perfect

by Melissa Kantor

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he laughed bitterly. “Now I sound like fucking Sean.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  I was staring at the back of the seat in front of me, tracing the seams with my eyes in the pale light that filtered through the window.

  I glanced over at Declan, but he was looking straight ahead of him. “Great,” he said finally. “Now we’re both sorry.” There was a silence, but I couldn’t think of what to say to fill it. Finally, Declan pulled on the door handle and opened the door, putting one foot on the ground before turning to look at me. “So, look, are you going to be okay? Getting home, I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said immediately. “Yeah. I’ll . . . I’ll be fine.” I tried to smile at him, as if to show how unnecessary his concern really was.

  He didn’t say anything back, but he kept looking at me for a long time. His blue eyes were black in the darkness, and there was something in them that made me want to reach my hand out and touch his face. I forced myself not to, though, and after a minute he got out of the car, shut the door, and walked back into the hospital.

  22

  I almost forgot to put my bra on before going inside, but luckily at the last second I remembered I wasn’t wearing it, and I pulled over in front of the house next door to Jason’s, got out of the car, and dug around on the floor until I found it. It was one of my nicest bras—dark blue with a lacy border. This was exactly the bra you would put on if you thought you were going to have sex with someone in the back of your car. I got back into the driver’s seat, pulled my arms out of my shirt, put on the bra, and slid the shirt back on over it.

  As I parked in Jason’s driveway, I realized I should make sure there was no evidence of what I’d just been doing. But it wasn’t like Declan wore lipstick that he’d have left on my collar. Not that my shirt even had a collar. Did I smell like him? I lifted the bottom of my shirt up to my nose, but it just smelled like the detergent Jason’s housekeeper used.

  My lips felt chapped, and I touched my finger to them lightly. The pressure brought back kissing Declan, and my body gave an involuntary shiver. I forced myself to stop thinking about him and focus on what I had to do to make sure I looked normal, but just as I was about to turn the rearview mirror toward myself and check to make sure there wasn’t lipstick smeared across my chin, the front door opened.

  I stepped out onto the driveway. I’d assumed it would be Jason standing there, but it was Grace.

  “Juliet?” she called.

  “Yes,” I answered. “It’s me.” I’d texted Jason that I’d be home late; then I’d pulled up in the driveway in my car. Who did she expect it would be?

  I walked toward the house. Grace had stepped back inside, and when I followed her, I saw that Jason was standing in the entryway.

  “Oh my God,” said Grace, putting her hand to her mouth. “You—” She didn’t finish the sentence, but Jason’s face had an equally horrified expression.

  How could she know? How could she know what I’d done?

  My lipstick! It was smeared all over my face. But before I could turn to look at the hall mirror, Jason said, “What happened to your hair?”

  “My—” I put my hand to my head and laughed with relief. Of course. My hair. I’d completely forgotten about cutting my hair. “I cut it.”

  “You cut it?” Jason repeated sarcastically. He stepped forward so he was between me and his mother and touched my hair like it was something he’d never touched before. The expression on his face made it clear he wasn’t all that happy to be touching it now. “Is this black?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or . . . it’s ebony.”

  Jason took a step back. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “What do you mean you don’t get it?” I asked. “What is there to get?”

  “Why would you do that to your hair?” he asked.

  “Excuse me,” said Grace, slipping out of the foyer. “Juliet, if you’re hungry, I’ll leave a plate out for you.”

  “I can’t believe you would do that to your hair without talking to me,” said Jason.

  “What the hell, Jason?” I demanded. “I can’t cut my hair without your permission? Do you, like, own my hair?”

  “No, Juliet, I do not own your hair. I just thought we discussed major decisions. Like when the soccer team was going to shave their heads last year and you told me I couldn’t do it and so I convinced the whole fucking team not to do it. Or is it just my hair that we co-own?” His arms were crossed tightly over his chest.

  “We don’t co-own anyone’s hair, Jason. And I didn’t tell you you couldn’t shave your head. I told you you looked good with hair. The fact that you then turned that into some kind of interdiction against—”

  “Who the fuck are you, Juliet?” Jason was shouting now, angrier than I’d ever heard him. He pointed at me, his index finger practically in my face. “You’re talking about not going to college. You’re singing in this fucking band. You’re dyeing your hair. Why are you pretending to be this person you’re not?”

  “I’m not pretending to be anyone,” I shouted back, pushing his finger away. “I made a joke about not going to college—I’m sorry if college is, you know, too sacred to joke about. And I like singing in a band. I wanted to try a different hair color. It’s a free country, Jason.”

  Jason stepped back, almost as if he was too angry to trust himself standing so close to me. “Well, I liked you the way you were before.”

  “Fine,” I said, and I picked up my bag from the bench. “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Juliet, don’t go.” He grabbed for my arm. “You know I don’t mean it like that.”

  I shook it free. “No, Jason. I really . . .” I was about to cry, but I forced back the tears. “I really think it’s better if I go now.”

  “You can’t go,” said Jason, exasperated. “You live here. My mom will freak out. Just . . . just calm down, okay?”

  But I couldn’t calm down. I yanked open the door and stumbled along the gravel path to the driveway. As I pulled open the door of my car, Grace stepped out of the house.

  “Juliet,” she called. She stayed on the porch, as if I were a deer or some other skittish animal she didn’t want to scare. “Juliet, come inside.”

  “I’m sorry, Grace. I can’t stay here tonight.” I hadn’t realized I was crying until I heard how high and thin my voice was.

  “Just come inside, Juliet. I can’t have you leaving in the middle of the night like this.”

  “I need to go, Grace. I need to go home.” As soon as I said the words, I knew they were true. Today had been too much. The hospital, Danny, Declan. I needed to sleep in my own bed.

  “You can’t go home,” said Grace. “There’s nobody there.”

  I hated that what she was saying was true. There really was nobody at my house. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t be there. I slipped around the door of the car. “It’s okay, Grace,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Juliet—” She took a step toward me, and I thought she might try to stop me physically. I imagined driving across the lawn, tearing over Grace’s perfect flower beds in order to get away from their house. But all she did was raise her hand in my direction, and I just shook my head, got into the car, shut the door, and drove away. As I passed the house, I saw Jason outlined in the doorway, and part of me wanted to try to explain everything to him so he wouldn’t be mad at me and part of me wanted to keep driving so I would never have to see him again.

  23

  What was the matter with me? I was losing my mind. It was a good thing my mother was going to get released from Roaring Brook, because I needed her room there.

  Who the fuck are you, Juliet? Jason had been so mad there’d been spit flying out of his mouth. Who the fuck are you?

  Well, who the fuck was I? Practically having sex with Declan in the backseat of my car. Throwing a fit and storming out of Jason’s house in front of his mom.
Ignoring her when she told me not to go. Who was this person walking around with my face and my driver’s license and nothing else about her that I recognized?

  I was sure that Jason’s dad was going to come after me. It was one thing to tell Grace and Jason to leave me alone, but I didn’t think it would be so easy to shake off Mark Robinson. Like most dads, he had something a little scary under all his niceness. I could imagine him telling me to get my ass in gear and hightail it back to the Robinson house and not taking no for an answer. And who could blame him? What sane adult would trust me to act responsibly?

  I was certifiable.

  With no awareness of how I’d made it from Jason’s driveway to mine, I put the car in park and turned off the headlights. But I didn’t get out of the car, just sat and looked at the front of my house. The solar-powered lights leading up to the front door were on, of course, because while my family might have imploded, the sun continued to shine. As I watched, a light in the guest bedroom went off, and my heart skipped a beat at the thought that a person was in the house before I realized that someone—my dad, probably—had set the timers, as if we were just on vacation and wanted to keep the house safe for the week or two we were away.

  I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. How had my life become such a reality show? Why had I run off like that? I should have just worked it out with Jason.

  But the thought of turning the car around and driving back to Jason’s house made it suddenly hard to breathe. What was going on? Why was it easier to make out with Declan than to talk to Jason?

  I opened the car door and sucked in the chilly night air. The effort calmed me down, made it possible for me to think. I was acting crazy. Grace was furious. Jason was furious. Mark was probably dealing with the two of them right now. Not to mention poor Bella, who we’d no doubt woken up with our screaming.

  Standing there on the lawn of my empty but seemingly occupied house, it felt as if what had happened to my family was some kind of communicable disease, its chaos and unhappiness infecting everyone I came in contact with. I pictured the Robinsons conferencing in the foyer, trying to decide what to do about Jason’s crazy girlfriend. Then I pictured Declan’s face as he realized he’d been cheating on Willow with me.

  What was wrong with me? How had I become so toxic?

  I had to explain to Jason and his family that I was safe. It wasn’t fair to leave them all wondering what was going on, Grace feeling responsible for me as if I were some stubborn, explosive teenager who she’d accidentally adopted.

  But I couldn’t deal with Jason and his perfect, perfect family. Maybe I was crazy, but they made me feel even crazier than I was.

  Leaning back against my car, I took my phone out of my bag and hit his number on speed dial. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Juliet? Is everything okay?”

  The voice was so familiar it hurt. I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I’m sorry that everyone but me seems to know how to keep it together. I’m sorry you can’t be proud of me the way you used to be.

  But I knew that if I made a scene, I’d scare him and he’d send me back to Jason’s. Instead, I took a deep breath and got myself under control.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said calmly. “I need your help.”

  “Okay,” he said, not sounding at all angry that I’d called and woken him up at one o’clock in the morning. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

  I’d had to promise my dad I wouldn’t “do anything” (i.e., try to kill myself), and in exchange for that, he agreed to tell the Robinsons that it was okay for me to spend the night at the house. When I hung up the phone, I walked across the lawn and up the front steps. It almost surprised me that after everything that had happened the key still slipped easily into the lock and opened the door.

  I stepped into the foyer. The house was spotless. Like the gardener, the cleaning woman must have kept coming. I figured my dad was paying her, and I wondered if it was strange to him to be writing the same checks he’d been writing for years to keep a house running that he was never coming back to.

  I wandered into the living room and then into the den, flipping on the lights as I went. When I was little, the room had housed all my toys, but as Oliver and I got older, it had become a space without a purpose. The TV in the basement was bigger, the sofa wasn’t very comfortable, and it was too far from the kitchen to be convenient for studying. It was sort of a forgotten room, which might explain why on the bookcase next to the French doors leading out to the patio there were still family photos. These were from a series my parents had hired a professional photographer to shoot when I was two and Oliver was four. We were still in our old house, the small one where we’d lived before my dad had become a partner at his consulting firm. My mother wore a gray silk blouse and her hair was long and loose. In one of the pictures, she and my dad were sitting next to each other on the couch and my brother was sitting on my dad’s lap holding a stuffed animal while I sat on my mom’s lap, grabbing at the animal’s tail. My parents were laughing, and the picture looked completely candid.

  It was as if the people in the photos were all dead, and when I looked at them and tried to remember what it felt like to be part of that perfect, beautiful family, all that happened was that I felt more and more alone, as if I were the last surviving human after an earth-wide apocalypse. The feeling was so intense that when my phone rang, the noise startled me and I dropped it.

  Even more shocking than the ringing was the person who was calling me.

  I picked up.

  “Oliver?” When was the last time my brother had called me? He texted me sometimes, sure. But he never called. And definitely not in the middle of the night.

  “Hey,” he said. “Dad texted me you were at the house. He asked me to call you if I was up.”

  “Really?” That my dad would suggest my brother call me felt like more evidence that he didn’t know me very well.

  “Is it weird?” I thought he meant his calling me, but then he added, “Being there alone?”

  “It’s . . . I don’t know.” I looked around the unused room, the pussy willows artfully arranged in the vase by the French doors, the stone tile in front of the fireplace. “It’s how it always was. It’s . . . you know. Perfect.” I’d crossed the room, and now I looked back at the photographs on the mantel. “We were so happy, Oliver. What happened?” My eyes stung.

  “Oh, Juliet . . .” He sounded impatient, and I was sure he was sorry he’d called. I expected him to snap at me and tell me to grow up, but instead he said, “I’m sorry. I know you feel that way, and I don’t want to be an asshole, but I just don’t think we were so happy.”

  I was the one who snapped. “How can you say that? You always say that!” I was crying now, but I didn’t want Oliver to know. Crying felt like admitting defeat.

  He sighed. “Look, do you want to talk about this or do you want to yell at me?”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to talk about it, but I didn’t want him to hang up the phone and leave me alone in our empty, purposeless den. “I want to talk about it,” I said quietly.

  “Well . . .” There was an uncharacteristic pause, and when he started talking, he spoke slowly, as if he were picking his words with care. “I guess I just don’t get what was so happy about our family. Dad was always traveling for work or getting home from the city at midnight. . . . Mom was always, you know, organizing everything.” When he said that, we both laughed. “It was weird. And even when they started counseling—”

  I almost dropped the phone. “They were in counseling?”

  “You knew that!”

  “Um, no I didn’t.”

  “What did you think they were doing on Tuesday nights?”

  I knew exactly what my parents had done on Tuesdays. “They were having date night.”

  Oliver didn’t say anything.

  “Weren’t they?”

  He sighed again. Sometimes it felt like I’d been listening to my brother sigh at my stupidity since the
womb. “Juliet, I’m sorry, but I just don’t think they were very happy together.”

  “Do you think . . .” I had to swallow over the lump in my throat before I could ask the next question. “Do you think he was having an affair?” I remembered my lunch with my dad over the summer, how I’d had the same thought then but hadn’t voiced it.

  Oliver didn’t answer right away. “I don’t think so,” he said finally. “But they weren’t really . . . together. Mom was always playing tennis and wanting to redo stuff in the house. And then she’d talk about going back to work, but she wouldn’t do it.”

  I was instantly on the defensive. “So you’re saying it’s her fault?”

  “That’s what I’m not saying,” Oliver yelled, and it felt oddly good to hear my always-in-control brother lose his temper. “I’m trying to get you to see that it was no one thing or one person. It was everything. Dad was trying to make all this money. Mom was trying to have the perfect family. I was trying to be the perfect student. You were trying to be the perfect student. But was anyone happy? Apparently not.”

  I swiped at my nose with the hem of my skirt. “I feel like you’re saying that everything I thought was true about my life was a lie.”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” Oliver said, calmer now. “It just wasn’t what you thought it was.”

  I slid down against the cool plaster wall, suddenly too tired to keep talking. “I should go to sleep.”

  “Yeah,” said Oliver. “Me too.” But neither of us made a move to hang up. I leaned my head back, thinking about Oliver. Someday he’d be grown up. We both would. And one day we’d be old and our parents would be dead, and he’d be the only person who’d known me my whole life.

  I couldn’t figure out how to say what I was thinking without sounding like a cheesy ass. Finally I settled on, “I’m glad you called me,” and then, scared that he’d tease me for my sincerity, I added quickly, “Even if all you managed to do was destroy my few remaining illusions about my childhood.”