We Are the Perfect Girl

by Ariel Kaplan

  —

  The cookie in the right side of my bikini top felt kind of nasty and sweaty, but it made my boobs look great, so I tried to ignore it. We gave our passes to Shannon Garcia, who goes to school with us, and went through the locker room.

  We walked out onto the pool deck. Kit, who had gone through the men’s room, ran off to join some kids from his school who were playing Marco Polo in the shallow end. “Don’t forget about my Fudgsicle!” he called.

  “Don’t run on the deck!” I called back, and we watched as he did a belly flop next to his friends, who screamed at the splash of chilly water. There’s something kind of liberating about seeing little kids at the pool; they’re just there to have fun and that’s it.

  Bethany grabbed my arm. “Ohmigod,” she said. “Ohmigod.”

  “What?”

  She jerked her head toward the guard chair. I shaded my eyes and looked up at the bronzed body of the lifeguard. I had to squint against the sun to see who it was—he was wearing sunglasses and his face was in profile. Of course, it was Greg D’Agostino, every bit as handsome as he’d been the last time I’d seen him. You know. Yesterday. I’m not sure why Bethany was acting like seeing him was a surprise, since that was literally the entire purpose for our being at the pool: to see Greg, or, more to the point, for Greg to see Bethany.

  We were not the only people who had noticed Greg in his half-naked splendor. There was a whole contingent of girls sitting opposite the pool from him, in the best viewing spot. They weren’t even trying to pretend not to stare. Greg was trying his best to pretend not to notice. Or maybe he really was watching the pool. Which I guess was his job.

  He glanced up as we walked over and took seats to his left. His eyes barely stopped on me or my perfect, symmetrical chest. But they went to Bethany in her blue bikini and stuck there.

  I’d expected that, honestly. Bethany is legitimately the prettiest girl I have ever seen; I suspect she’s probably the prettiest girl most people have ever seen. I swear to God I’m not jealous, though. I’ve seen the way people treat her for it, and in my opinion, it’s actually better to be plain.

  Bethany noticed him watching and stood up a little straighter. Which basically means she stuck her chest out a little farther.

  I rolled my eyes, just a little. I couldn’t see Greg’s, obviously, because of the sunglasses, but his face was still pointed in our direction. I’d already spread my towel out on one of the deck chairs and sat down, but Bethany was still standing up. She cocked a hip, propped a toe on the chair, and started to spray sunscreen on her leg.

  I snorted, because she’d already put on sunscreen before we left the house. I watched as she repeated the process with the other leg.

  “He’s still looking,” she hissed. “Do yours, too.”

  “He’s not looking at my legs,” I said. I was already sitting on my very exposed butt and I was not getting up for anything. I pulled out my AP Euro reading, which was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and dropped it on my chair. It was a big book. It went thunk.

  “Why did you bring that? That isn’t a beach book.”

  “We aren’t at the beach, and I have to write an essay on it for next week.”

  She shoved the book away from me and pulled her bikini straps down her shoulders. “Do my back,” she whispered. “And make it look good.”

  This whole business was shockingly un-Bethany-like.

  “Did you get a personality transplant since yesterday?” I asked.

  “Shhh. He’s still looking.”

  “Possibly because you woke up this morning and decided to become a complete attention whore.”

  “Shhh!”

  But I was already spraying her back. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “You’re going to fall out of your top.”

  “He stopped looking,” she said. “Can you get him to look over here again?”

  “Oh, Bethany!” I shouted, making a show of rubbing in the sunscreen. “Your skin is so soft!”

  “Not like that,” she hissed. I glanced up at Greg, who had just moved to hide a smile behind his hand.

  I’d made Greg D’Agostino smile.

  I pulled Bethany’s straps up and sat back with my book, glancing down toward the shallow end to make sure Kit was still playing with his friends. “I’ve done my duty,” I said. “I’m going to read now.”

  She took a few deep breaths, like she was psyching herself up for something, and then said, “Let’s go off the board.”

  I blinked at her a few times and shut my book. This was another un-Bethany-like thing to suggest. “What?”

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll look stupid if I go by myself.”

  I was about to say, You’ll look stupid anyway, but she was doing pleading Bethany eyes, which work as well on me as on anyone else. Also, it was kind of hot, and I was starting to leave sweat marks on my towel.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go off the board.” I got in line behind Bethany and a couple of other girls, who were trying to get Greg’s attention with flips and twists. Bethany did an elegant swan dive. I got up on the board.

  Greg’s eyes were still on Bethany as she climbed the ladder, flipping her shiny black hair over her shoulder.

  I felt something weird.

  I tried to catalog the feeling. It was definitely not philia. I was jealous. I am never jealous of Bethany, but right then, for some reason, as I stood at the end of the board with my perfect chest in my red twelve-dollar bikini, I wanted, just once, for Greg to look at me. That’s it. Just for him to acknowledge that I was even there, that I existed, and that my boobs looked really, really good. I bounced my way down the board. One major jump at the end, and I catapulted myself up in the air for the biggest cannonball Greg would see all summer.

  At the last second, I heard Bethany call, “Wait!” I twisted around to see what was wrong and ended up landing flat on my back.

  Which caused the clasp of my top to pop open.

  It occurred to me, belatedly, that there might have been a reason this suit was on clearance.

  I managed to clasp it again before I surfaced, and I hoped no one had actually seen anything important. It had been a huge splash—my back still stung from it—so hopefully that had been enough to cover my nakedness.

  Bethany was standing at the top of the ladder.

  “What is wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Uh, are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I dog-paddled over to where she was standing and pulled myself out of the water. “What were you screaming about?”

  “It’s just, I remembered something. Like, a reason you might not want to go off the board.”

  “You were the one who told me to do it!”

  “Yeah, because I forgot….” I pulled myself out of the pool, and she said, “Oh, no.”

  “What? What?”

  She stared pointedly at my chest. I looked down.

  I had one full-looking boob and one that looked sadly deflated.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Where is it?”

  We stood side by side looking down into the water. By now, some little kids had lined up and were splashing in behind me.

  “I don’t see it,” she whispered. “Do you think silicone floats or sinks?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, if it were floating, we’d see it, right? So it must be under there somewhere.” She prodded me with her elbow. “Go get it.”

  “What?”

  I had to move out of the way of the ten-year-old boy coming up the ladder behind me. “Would you move?” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Just dive in and get it!” Bethany whispered.

  “I don’t have any goggles! You get it.”

  “I don’t have any goggles, either, and it’s your
boob!”

  “It’s not a boob! It’s a cookie! And it was your idea! You get it!”

  “What am I going to do with it? I’ll look pretty suspicious climbing out of the deep end with a fake boob”—I gave her a dirty look—“I mean, a cookie in my hand. Just dive in, find it, put it back in your top, and get out again.”

  “How long do you think I’m capable of holding my breath?” I asked, but I turned to one of the little kids in line and said, “Can I borrow your goggles?” and someone else in line ahead of me said, “OW!” and I looked up and realized one of the other little shits—kids! I mean kids!—had thrown my fake boob in his face.

  “What was that for?” he shouted, picking it up and throwing it back.

  “OW!” said the first kid. “I found it in the pool! It’s a tan jellyfish!”

  “It doesn’t have any testicles,” one of the other kids pointed out.

  “You mean tentacles!”

  “That’s what I said!”

  He threw it back and it hit the kid next to him in the stomach, who shouted, “You suck, Cooper!” and then pelted him back.

  “Do something,” Bethany whispered. “Do something, do something, do something.”

  “Boys,” I said in my best babysitter voice. “Can I please have the…uh…jellyfish?”

  “We found it!”

  “I just want to check something,” I said.

  “You’re gonna steal it!”

  “I want to see what brand it is!” I tried grabbing it from the nearest kid, but now the little boys were in full-on keep-away mode, and he threw it over my head to someone else, which was when it hit Greg D’Agostino square in the chest.

  And for one long, horrible second, thanks to the viscosity of wet silicone and the terrible luck I was born with, it stuck there.

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “Oh, God,” Bethany said.

  The fake boob dropped to the floor of the guard stand. Greg picked it up between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it.

  Greg D’Agostino was touching my boob.

  It was a lot less enjoyable than I would have expected.

  I tried to decide which was worse: claiming the boob or walking away and hoping that he maybe thought it belonged to someone else. “We’ll go sit down,” I muttered to Bethany. “And we’ll walk slowly. Just pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m walking in front of you. We’re walking….We’re walking….Hey, do you want a Dr Pepper?”

  “Not. Now.”

  “Right, sorry.” She sat in her chair, and I sat next to her. Greg D’Agostino blew the whistle for break and climbed down from the guard stand.

  He was yelling at the little boys, who were trying to get my boob back from him. “It’s ours! It’s ours!” they shouted.

  “It’s not yours!”

  “Yuh-huh!”

  “Do you guys want a time-out? It’s break. Go sit down.”

  “We want the jellyfish!”

  “Do I need to call your mom again, Cooper?”

  “You suck!”

  “I told you to sit down!”

  Cooper stuck out his tongue, but Greg already had his back to him, because he was walking around the edge of the pool. Toward us.

  “Your book,” Bethany whispered. “Get your book.”

  I grabbed Crime and Punishment from the foot of my chair and opened to a random page. As Greg approached, I turned the page and said airily, “I just love Russian novels, don’t you?”

  “American novels are so short,” she agreed nervously.

  “I mean, why bother? You might as well read the back of a cereal box.”

  “I know!”

  By now, Greg was standing at the foot of my chair. I swallowed.

  He said, “Hi.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hello. We were just discussing the merits of Russian literature. Thoughts? Opinions?” I glanced up at him. He really was beautiful. Dark wavy hair. Good muscle tone. Excellent teeth. “Revelations?”

  He glanced at my book. He said, “Лично я думаю что работа Чехова немного более актуальна.”

  I…had not seen that coming. I glanced at Bethany, who I knew did not speak Russian any better than I did, and she raised her eyebrows fractionally.

  He still had my boob in his hand, this beautiful, bare-chested, Russian-speaking boy. I wasn’t sure whether this was extremely funny or extremely sad, but I guess my better nature won out, because I started laughing. I hoped Greg didn’t think I was laughing at him. Bethany shot me a horrified look.

  I only know one Russian phrase; my father went to St. Petersburg for a history conference a few years ago, and I convinced him that this was the only thing he really needed to learn out of his phrasebook. I asked, maybe a little suggestively, “Cкажите пожалуйста, где туалет?”

  He laughed.

  He tossed my fake boob to me. It landed on page 327 with a splat. I stared at it. He said, “Nice cannonball. By the way.” He smiled. Such good teeth.

  And then he walked away.

  “What did you say to him?” Bethany asked out of the side of her mouth. “It sounded hot.”

  I put my sunglasses on and tried to look as cool as a lopsided girl in a discount-bin bikini can look. “I asked him where the bathroom is.”

  She looked momentarily stricken, and then she laughed and so did I. I said, “You’re lucky I philia you so much.”

  “I philia you, too,” Bethany said. Then, pointing at the cookie, she added, “So are you going to put it back in or what?”

  I picked it up, letting it dangle between my thumb and forefinger as if it really were a jellyfish I’d found in the pool. It was kind of gummy and awful. I looked down at my chest. I said, “Sorry, girls.” And then I shouted, “HEY, COOPER!” and when he looked up, I thwacked him in the nose with my boob. He grabbed it, whooped, and went off to play catch with his friends.

  I first met Bethany back in second grade; she was the shyest kid in the class and I was the loudest, so Ms. White stuck us next to each other in hopes that we’d rub off on each other.

  I didn’t really have any other friends then. The other girls in our class called me obnoxious. I talked too loud, I told too many jokes, I was too sarcastic, and the Future Pearl Clutchers of America were not having it.

  I remember the day Ms. White moved our seats. I’d gotten in trouble three times in the last hour for talking without raising my hand (she called me Aphra the Gabber because I would not shut up). So she moved me up to the front of the room to sit next to the girl the other kids called Bethany Boring because she never talked at all. “Maybe you two can find a happy medium,” she’d said.

  I’d leaned over to Bethany and stage-whispered, “Ms. White has marker on her butt, pass it on.”

  Bethany hadn’t answered. But she’d smiled. She’d told me later that I’d been the first kid to talk to her in weeks.

  So we’d sat together at lunch that day and just clicked, because she didn’t mind if I talked too much, and I didn’t mind if she was too nervous to talk back. I’d maintained both sides of a conversation about My Little Pony until, at the very end, she’d whispered, “I’m a Fluttershy and you’re a Rainbow Dash.”

  I’d liked that, even though I’d always thought of myself more as a Twilight Sparkle. So we sat together again the next day, and the next. My mom once said I had to grow into my personality, and I guess she was right; no one appreciates a smart mouth on a seven-year-old, but at seventeen it’s kind of an asset. But Bethany liked me just the way I was, right from the beginning, which is probably why I never had the loud beaten out of me. She gave me permission to be myself. And since I was never jealous of how pretty she was or put off by how quiet she was (the other girls used to call her a s
nob, which was just plain stupid), I hoped I did the same thing for her.

  After we got back from the pool, we made Kit wash the Fudgsicle off his face and the three of us lay down on the couch to watch some cartoons. We were two episodes into Steven Universe when my phone pinged with an alert that meant someone had used the app I was designing for my computer science class.

  Kit had fallen asleep and Bethany was dozing, too—I guess being ogled by Greg D’Agostino is pretty tiring—so I extracted myself from their tangle of legs and went to my room to use my laptop.

  The class is called Basic App Design, and I’ve been working on the final project for the last month or so. It’s due in two weeks, and it’s worth 35 percent of my grade, and it is totally not working.

  The premise of my project is this: last year, some kids in the computer science department at GMU created an open-source chatbot program and gave it a Twitter account. It was called Lola, and it was supposed to learn language the more you talked to it. It’s a simple enough algorithm, and I had an idea to use their base code and turn it into an app. Essentially, it’s an advice app.

  Basically, it scans for keywords, and then it replies with customized advice. So, like, if you tell it something with the words cheating and boyfriend in it, it tells you to break up with him (which is generally the best course no matter who’s the one cheating). If you tell it something with the word grade, it tells you to study harder. The trick is that it’s supposed to remember what you asked, so that the next time you log in it asks you a follow-up question, and over time it’s supposed to learn patterns and anticipate issues that tend to go together, like poor self-esteem and anxiety. It’s not like it’s a substitute for a real therapist, but I know firsthand how hard it can be to find one of those.

  My chatbot is called Deanna, after the counselor from Star Trek. She was supposed to talk, but I ran out of time, and the text-to-speech software was making the app take too long to download, so now she just types at you. What you see, if you download it, is a cartoon picture of Deanna Troi, in her blue officer’s uniform, and then her advice appears in a dialogue bubble.

  In a few weeks, I’m supposed to turn in a copy of the app, along with copies of the advice Deanna has given to at least ten people. The app is anonymous, because no one will ask for advice if they know the person at the other end, and last Friday I’d put flyers up at school, advertising the program.