We Are the Perfect Girl

by Ariel Kaplan

  I sat down and pulled up Deanna’s stats on my computer.

  I jumped a little. Forty-six people had downloaded the app, and five of them had actually used it. I went to check the logs, to see if she’d actually learned anything yet.

  The first person had written, I hate my mom.

  Deanna had written back, Relationships with parental figures can be very important, especially to the burgeoning adolescent. Have you tried telling your mom how you feel?

  No, stupid. She’s a total skank who left my dad for her personal trainer.

  For example, Deanna continued blithely, you might say, “I am having difficult feelings right now. Is this a good time for us to talk?”

  No response.

  The next person had written, Your a stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid ho.

  Deanna had written, Intelligence comes in many forms. Einstein once said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

  Stupid beyotch.

  This was a problem. And not just because it should have been “You’re.”

  The way the original programming—a two-way AI—works is that it learns by talking to people. She learns how to map questions onto different responses. So, for example, over time she learns that Hi, Hello, Hola, and Good afternoon are all greetings, and answers appropriately. Basically, she is supposed to determine a user’s intent and then find a way to respond.

  But if her users are teaching her that “Your a stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid ho” is a greeting…that’s not good. I’d already blacklisted every four-letter word I could think of to keep her from developing a potty mouth, but I couldn’t blacklist stupid, because that was something Deanna might need to talk about at some point, like if someone was feeling bad because they flunked a test or whatever. I made a note to blacklist beyotch, ho, and skank, since those words, at least, she wouldn’t need.

  The next message said: I think I have herpes.

  Deanna said, An STD is a communicable illness like any other. It’s important, though, to get immediate treatment and notify your current and former sex partners. And then she gave the number for the closest Planned Parenthood.

  The response was, K thanks.

  Well, at least she helped someone.

  I got the ping of an email and saw that it was from Delia, who is my older sister. She’s a freshman at the University of Virginia. The subject line said, Hi.

  Here is the story of Delia Brown, the abridged version:

  Delia is barely two years older than me. We looked so much alike as babies that in our old photos, no one can tell which of us is which. And we looked alike until high school, when Delia did some weird business with her eyebrows and started going in for Brazilian blowouts every three weeks. She still looked like me, mostly, but with overly groomed eyebrows and shinier hair.

  “Why are you doing that?” I’d asked her.

  “I like it better,” she’d said. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  And then, the summer after she graduated from high school, she informed my parents that she’d been saving all her birthday and babysitting and summer job money for the last four years, and she was getting a nose job.

  “What?” they’d said.

  “What?” I’d said.

  But she was eighteen and it was her money, so one Tuesday in June my sister went into one of those outpatient surgery centers looking just like me, and a few hours later she came out looking like we were unrelated.

  I have not spoken to her since.

  I mean, it’s not like it’s been that hard to avoid her. Two months later she went off to college with three boxes of clothes, a new laptop, and a nose that looked like a stupid ski slope.

  The worst thing is, before this happened, I never really hated my nose. It has a bump on the bridge, and it’s definitely bigger than average, but so what? It’s a nose. I use it to breathe in and out, and it generally works pretty well for that unless I have a cold. It’s also useful for holding up my sunglasses. When I was little, my father always said it looked aristocratic, and in my small-child brain, it must have been true because Dad wouldn’t lie about something like that.

  I mean, I didn’t think it was perfect or anything. But among my litany of less-than-attractive features, it didn’t stand out as anything awful.

  But now, every time I look at my nose in the mirror, I think, Delia thinks you are so ugly she paid $4,000 to some guy to break you with a hammer and cut you up. That’s what they do, you know. They pump you full of anesthesia, they break your nose with a hammer, and then they go at you with sharp objects. I looked it up before Delia had it done, when I was trying to talk her out of it.

  “Do you know what they’re going to do to you?” I’d asked.

  “Of course I know. But it’s worth it.”

  “How is it worth it?”

  But Delia couldn’t answer, because the truth was she thought it was worth it to get bashed in the face and cut up so that she wouldn’t have to look like me anymore.

  And now she had the unmitigated gall to say hi to me on email.

  I deleted the message without reading it and went back to Deanna’s source code. When someone typed the keyword sister, I programmed her to respond: Genetic relationships aren’t everything.

  On Monday afternoon, I was in Latin staring at Greg D’Agostino, who sits toward the front of the room, wondering when he’d learned Russian. Our school doesn’t teach it, and I didn’t think he’d learned it at home. We were translating Ovid in pairs; he was working with Mitzi Schwartz, who seemed to be getting distracted staring at his face. I was working with John O’Malley, who is the coxswain for the boys’ eight and who was definitely not getting distracted staring at my face.

  Bethany has had a thing for Greg for a few months now, and, I mean, it’s not for nothing. He’s hot. He’s athletic. And besides that, he’s actually nice. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say a mean word to anyone, ever. Except one time.

  That one time.

  I’m sure he doesn’t remember it, but it will stay with me until I’m an old lady drowning in half-done knitting projects and a dozen mismatched cats.

  It was eighth grade. We were in the health unit of PE, and our teacher, Mr. Fordham, put us in pairs to practice doing the Heimlich. We were supposed to pair up by gender, but we had an odd number and I’d come to class late—I can’t remember why; doctor’s appointment, maybe—so I’d been the odd duck. I’d ended up paired with Kieran Thompson. He looked at me. I looked at him. I was taller than he was, and probably stronger, too, and when he looked at me and said, “Ugh,” I briefly thought about slugging him. But I pretended I didn’t hear him, until he went to put his arms around me and said, to Nick Tanner, who was next to us, “At least I don’t have to worry about getting a boner, right?”

  I yanked away from him, and then I really did think about punching him. The thing is, I wasn’t even sure which was worse: the idea of Kieran Thompson getting a boner (ugh) or the idea that his not having one was some kind of an insult. I was ready with about five quips concerning the inconsequentialness of the state of his dick, or the inconsequentialness of his dick itself, or why he thought anyone needed to hear about it when clearly no one was asking to see it. Before I could pick a comeback, though, Greg D’Agostino, who was Nick Tanner’s partner, said, “You’re such a dumbass.” Then, to Nick, he said, “Dude, go switch with Aphra so she doesn’t have to worry about Kieran’s boner.”

  Nick made a face. “I don’t want to have to worry about Kieran’s boner, either,” he said, but since he was actually a pretty decent guy, he went over and stood next to Kieran, saying, “Keep your dick away from me, please.”

  Greg walked up to me. I felt…weird. On the one hand, I was grateful. On the other, I f
elt kind of pathetic.

  “I could have handled that,” I said.

  “Of course you could,” he said. “He’s a dipshit.” Then he shrugged and said, “Can you speak? Can you breathe?”

  I stared at him for a second before I realized this was the script for the Heimlich. I bugged my eyes, stuck out my tongue, and put my hands around my own throat. He laughed.

  He had, I thought, a really nice laugh.

  And then he wrapped his arms around me from behind, put his fist in my diaphragm, and pumped three times.

  It was, to date, the most erotically charged moment of my life.

  I’m sure I must have Heimliched him next, but I don’t remember it all that well because of the searing feeling of Greg D’Agostino’s chest against my back. There is some part of me that’s still back in that health room, with the posters that say HUGS, NOT DRUGS! and CHLAMYDIA IS NOT A FLOWER! feeling Greg’s arms around me and his breath on my neck.

  After that, whenever Bethany mentioned Greg, I went kind of quiet. I started to notice things about him I hadn’t before, like the way he sometimes smiled with one side of his mouth when he was alone, as if he was thinking of some private joke. Or how he came to school with his hair still wet from the pool because he swam on some year-round club team. That day in the health room, he’d smelled like chlorine, and ever since then, the smell of swimming pools has always made me a little giddy. Which is stupid. It’s stupid. But there you are.

  * * *

  —

  I remembered, after a moment of staring too long, that I was supposed to be translating Ovid, not waxing poetic about having once received the Heimlich from Greg. Next to me, John was saying, “Okay—‘Miratur et haurit pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignes.’ What do you think?”

  I said, “Yes. Please.”

  John snorted a little. “Take a picture,” he said. “It’ll last longer.”

  “What?” I asked. He nodded in Greg’s direction. “I wasn’t looking at Greg.”

  “Oh, of course you weren’t. You were watching Mitzi sweat through her shirt.”

  “She’s not—” I started, but then I stopped talking because I looked, and she was. I felt legitimately sorry for her. If I’d been partnered with Greg, I might have sweat through my shirt, too, especially since we’d been working on the part of Metamorphoses that talks about Pygmalion feeling up his statue of the ideal woman, which he apparently did repeatedly and, like, with vigor.

  “Should we get her some water?” I asked.

  Mitzi looked up and saw John and me looking at her and mouthed, “Help.”

  I shouted, “Hey, Mitzi, can you help us out with this noun? John thinks it’s potato, he’s so dumb.”

  “I know the Romans didn’t have potatoes!” he protested, but Mitzi was already bolting from her desk. Ms. Wright, the teacher, ignored us, because she was grading Friday’s quizzes at the front of the room.

  Mitzi skidded into an empty chair next to us. “I’m not sure how much more of that I can stand,” she said. “I don’t want to objectify him, but I can’t even help it. I’m just, like, flop sweat all the way down.”

  “At least you’re good at Latin,” John said. “Just dazzle him with your declension skills.”

  “Oh,” she said. “No. That’s the worst part. He’s, like, fluent. He already did the whole thing. I just sat there like a sweaty statue.” She winced. “I mean, not like the statue in the story. The sex statue. I mean, Pygmalion’s basically a misogynistic creeper who made a sex statue, right? That is what’s going on here?”

  Mitzi was saying sex statue way too loud, and people were starting to stare, although we were all reading the same poem, so I’m not sure why anyone was surprised. Pygmalion was a misogynistic creeper, and he totally did make a sex statue.

  “Fluent?” I asked. “In Latin?”

  “Yeah. I don’t even know why he’s in this class.”

  “Hang on,” I said, and took my notebook up to Mitzi’s empty desk.

  “Salve,” I said to Greg.

  “Salve,” he said. I wondered if he was remembering my fake boob incident. Probably. I fiddled a little with my bra strap. “So how is it that you speak Russian and Latin?”

  “Lots of people speak more than one language,” he said.

  “Actually, you speak three. By my count. Because of the English.”

  “Actually, it’s more like six.”

  “Six!”

  He shrugged. “Everybody has a hobby.”

  “So, what, you take classes?”

  “Well, I’ve always known Spanish, because of my mom.” I remembered that Greg’s mom is from Buenos Aires. I’ve seen her a couple of times at Back to School night. She’s tall and beautiful, which is probably where Greg gets it from. “Plus, I take some classes at NOVA, and I did a little studying on my own.”

  NOVA is Northern Virginia Community College. “You take classes at NOVA?”

  “Yeah, two. I’m dual-enrolled.”

  “Huh. So what other languages do you know? Besides the Spanish and the Russian.”

  “Oh. Uh, well, Latin, obviously, plus Italian, and I guess Mandarin, but I’m not very good at that yet.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Well, the Romance languages are all pretty easy once you know the first one, so I mostly learned those on my own.”

  “Obviously,” I said, a little incredulously. He’d taught himself all those languages? Did people know this about him?

  Just then, the alarm went off on my phone. I leave school fifteen minutes early on Mondays because I have therapy. I thought about ignoring the alarm, but Greg had already heard it.

  “Time to turn back into a pumpkin?” he asked.

  I shut it off in my pocket. Sextilingual. That was the word. And here I thought I was some kind of prodigy for taking AP Latin as a junior.

  “I am always a pumpkin,” I said. I grabbed my bag and waved at Ms. Wright, who barely acknowledged me as I left the room.

  On my way out, Greg called, “Hey!” and when I turned around, he said, “До свидания.” Do svidaniya. Until next time.

  “До свидания,” I said, and shut the door behind me. In my dad’s twenty-year-old Honda—he and my mother drive to work together most days—I took out a pen and wrote Russian, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin on my left palm. I’d mention it to Bethany. Bethany took Spanish. That was something she and Greg had in common.

  * * *

  —

  I started therapy last summer after the whole Delia situation went down. I became kind of an angry person for a while, partly because I was mad at Delia and partly because I had to live with the person I was mad at, but yelling at her about it would have meant talking to her, and I really just didn’t want anything to do with her. So one day I bumped into my baby brother and made him drop a glass of milk, and he called me a poopoohead and I blew up and called him a rotten little asshole.

  I still feel bad about that. I remember him crying, because no one in our family ever yells at Kit; he’s the baby, and he’s actually a pretty nice kid. And no amount of saying I’m sorry can ever make up for the fact that I called an eight-year-old an asshole.

  My parents stuck me in therapy a few weeks later. “You need a release valve,” my mom said, and I didn’t really want to go, but if talking to a therapist meant I wouldn’t blow up at Kit anymore, it was the least I could do.

  Dr. Pascal works at the Jewish Community Center, which offers mental health services and is one of the few places that has therapists who take insurance. I remember my mom calling around and around, but everyone she talked to charged like $180 an hour, all out of pocket. I told my mom if she paid me $700 a month, I could buy a red convertible and that would probably fix my mental health by itself.

  Instead, I’d started with this little r
edheaded woman named Lisa Fagan, but that had only lasted about a month before we realized we were a bad fit, which I think means, like, I was too much woman for Dr. Fagan, who was used to kids who didn’t talk back. She’d sent me off to Marc Eberhardt, who, after one session, had referred me back to the front office because I needed someone with a strong personality to “handle” me (and way to go with that weak personality, Marc), and they’d sent me to Dr. Pascal, who normally only works with little kids but took me on out of pity. Whether it was pity for me or for her coworkers I was never entirely sure, especially because I saw Dr. Fagan in the ladies’ room once, and she hid in her stall until after I left.

  Sometimes, when I really don’t want to talk about my own stuff, I flip the script and get Dr. Pascal to talk about herself instead, which is actually fun because she’s pretty cool. Like, if I were fifty years old and not her client, we would probably be friends. At least, I like to think so. We’d go antiquing on the weekends and then go drink sherry, or whatever middle-aged therapists do for kicks.

  Here’s what I know about her so far: she’s half Ashkenazi Jewish and half Indian, she was born in Bethesda, she has two kids, and her husband doesn’t like cats. She’s been trying to talk him into getting one for the past few months, but so far, no luck. When I was in her office a few weeks ago, I gave her some printouts describing how cats lower your blood pressure, but he doesn’t seem to be buying it.

  I sat down on the couch and grabbed three peppermint Life Savers out of the bowl she always keeps on the coffee table.

  “Aphra.” She put on a fake German accent. “Tell me about your mother.”

  This is a Sigmund Freud joke we frequently start off with. I laughed, but I said, “Mom’s fine. She said she’s sending me with cookies for you next week.”

  “Ooh. Chocolate chip, please.”