Better Than Perfect (16 page)

“It's your funeral,” he said.

But driving along listening to Blondie didn't feel like a funeral.

It felt like a party.

I loved being in the Clovers.

It wasn't just learning the songs. Since Sinead was still going to be singing with the band until January, we'd agreed I'd just do one song at each gig until January, learning the Clovers' repertoire over the next two months. We were even working on a song to sing together until she left, a reggae version of “I Got You Babe” that UB40 and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders had recorded. We both thought it was übercool that we were two girls singing a love song.

“Everyone's going to think you're dykes,” Sean warned us.

“Maybe we are,” Sinead shot back.

“Better tell that Jason guy.”

“Sean?” I said.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Blow me.”

It was hard, sure. My voice was okay, but it wasn't like I'd had any formal training, and my throat was always sore no matter how much tea with honey (Sinead's formula) I drank. And the Sean factor wasn't irrelevant. Maybe he couldn't make me run out the door crying, but when I sang something and Sinead said I was getting better and Declan said I was sounding good and Danny gave me a thumbs-up and Sean rolled his eyes and Sinead said to him, “What is your problem?” and Sean said, “Why are you guys
lying
to her?” I felt more kinship with Anika Dunbar than I'd care to admit.

Unlike me, they were all amazing musicians. Danny didn't just play the drums. He played drums and piano and guitar, and he could noodle around on bass. Sinead played the bass too, and one night when Sean didn't show up at a rehearsal because (we later learned) he was sleeping off a bar fight, she just played his part. I could read music, a little, from when I'd taken piano, but they could all sight-read—once, when I got there early, they were practicing a song for their grandparents' wedding anniversary, some old Irish tune none of them knew. Sean was playing a fiddle, which I'd never seen him do, and Declan was playing a tin whistle. Their dad had let me in, so they didn't know I was there, and watching them huddled around the music stand, playing and singing, I tried to imagine me and my brother or maybe me, my brother, and my parents making music together.

It was like trying to imagine us vacationing on the moon.

No, what I loved about singing with the Clovers wasn't about what I could or couldn't do or what the other band members could do better than I could, which was pretty much everything. It was how the music made me feel. Tough. And strong. And sexy. And powerful. When I was at rehearsal, I didn't think about school or my mom or my Harvard application or leaving for college or where my next A was coming from. I just thought about the music. It was like a drug, and I was like an addict. My aunt had told me that my mom's doctors were talking about sending her home in a couple of weeks, but if this was how all those little pills she'd been taking made my mother feel, I was going to be surprised if any doctor anywhere could get her to stop taking them.

The Friday morning of our first gig at the Coffeehouse, I logged on to the College Board website to get my SAT scores. My hands were shaking and sweaty. If my score was low, I was going to have to start all over again. More tutoring with Glen. More vocabulary to memorize. More reading passages, more sample math questions. More practice tests. There was no way I'd be able to study for the SATs, do all my schoolwork, swim, stay in debate and sing in a band.

The thought of dropping out of the Clovers and going back to meeting with Glen twice a week made me feel as if I was being shoved into a cell and someone was slamming the
door behind me. But if my scores were bad, I wouldn't have a choice. I remembered the last time I'd logged on to get my scores, back in June, when I'd gotten that crappy, crappy number. Why shouldn't the same thing happen again? It wasn't like my situation was any better now than it had been. If anything, my life was even
more
fucked up. So if my messed-up life was the reason I'd scored so badly in the spring, why wouldn't my scores be even lower this time around?

So much was riding on this one little number. It was like I'd bet my fortune on a roll of the dice, and it either came up high or I lost everything.

Click.
I held my breath and hit the button to see what my future would hold.

And what it held was perfection.

Literally.

I stared at the number 2400 on the screen for a long, long moment, watching it blur and then re-form. All those weeks and months of tutoring. All those hours of studying. All those practice tests.

It had all paid off. There it was in black and white: I'd done it. My parents' marriage had imploded. My mother had gone off the deep end. I'd joined a band and bombed as many Latin quizzes as I'd aced.

But none of it mattered. The numbers said it all. In this one instant in time, I had done it.

I was perfect.

I ran, screaming, from Bella's room and into Jason's. We were the only ones still in the house, but I wouldn't have cared if I'd woken the entire family.

“Oh my God, you beat me by twenty points!” he cried when I told him my score, but he threw his arms around me and lifted me up into the air, and I knew that he didn't really care about my having a higher score than his.

“I'm taking you out tonight,” he said, putting me down but keeping his arms around me.

“I have the show at the Coffeehouse,” I reminded him. His shirt was unbuttoned, and I touched him lightly on the chest.

“Right. Of course.” He laughed and ran his hand through his hair. “It's so weird. I mean, everyone's been talking about the show, but I keep forgetting you're playing with the Clovers.” He laughed again. “Sorry. I guess it's 'cause you don't really talk about it.”

“I don't?” As soon as I said it, I felt bad. I was lying. It wasn't an accident that Jason didn't associate me with the Clovers. I never talked about the band with him. “I guess I just feel like you don't really like that I'm singing with the band, so . . .” I shrugged. “I don't talk about it that much with you.”

“Wait, why do you think I don't like the band? I like the band. Declan seems like a cool guy and Willow's great, obviously.” He took a step away from me and started buttoning his shirt.

“Willow isn't
in
the band,” I said. I'd meant to say it in a
teasing way, but it came out mad.

“She isn't?” Jason looked genuinely surprised, as if he'd spent weeks thinking about and listening to the Clovers. “I just assumed since, you know, she and Declan . . .” He tucked his shirt into his jeans.

“No,” I said, and this time I managed to keep my voice light. “She's his girlfriend, but she's not in the band. And before, when I said you didn't like the band, I didn't mean that you don't like the individual members of the band per se. I meant that you don't like my
being in
the band. I get the feeling you don't want to talk about it.”

“J, I totally want to talk about it. Are you kidding?” Whenever Jason lied, his voice got slightly higher.

“Look, let's just change the subject, okay? Can we go out for breakfast? Just cut first period and you can take me out. We'll celebrate.”

“I want to finish this conversation,” said Jason. He went over to his drawer and took out a perfectly folded gray sweater.

I shrugged. “There's nothing to finish. I thought you didn't want to talk about the band. You, in fact, have been secretly dying to discuss my experiences with the Clovers but keeping your desire to know more about rehearsals under wraps for some mysterious reason. I can see I was wrong, and I retract my accusation.”

“J, if you want me to ask you about band practice more often, you should just say so.” As he pulled his sweater over his
head, Jason's voice was calm, on the verge of being condescending. It was his tone more than anything else that pissed me off.

“Why do you do that?” I snapped.

“Do what?” he asked, looking genuinely bewildered.

“Make it seem like
I'm
the one with the problem. I don't
want
you to ask me about band practice, okay? I'm just saying that the fact that you never do leads me to believe you aren't particularly interested in my experience as a member of the Clovers. This stands in sharp contrast to your
obsessive
concern, for example, with how I do on every fucking Latin quiz Ms. Croft gives us.”

“J, you're being—”

“I am not
being
anything,” I shouted. “I'm
being
myself. And now I am
being
myself going to school.”

“J—”

But I didn't want to talk to Jason. I knew it wasted gas and was bad for the environment, but I just took my car to school alone. The whole drive, I tried to figure out how we'd gone in under five minutes from Jason's sweeping me up in his arms and kissing me to my storming out the door and driving to school by myself.

My fight with Jason had dampened my spirits, but I was sure that telling my dad about my SAT scores was going to feel as good as seeing them had. Sitting in the parking lot, I took my phone out and dialed his number.

He picked up on the third ring. “Juliet?”

For the first time in weeks, I was glad to hear his voice. “I got my SAT scores.”

“How'd you do?” he asked, nervous.

“Twenty-four hundred.”

He gave a cry of delight. “That's fantastic, Juliet. Why don't I take you out to celebrate? You and Jason. Or you and Sofia. I'll make a reservation for tonight if you'd like.”

“Actually, I have a gig tonight. It's my first one.”

“A
gig
?” my father echoed.

I'd never told my father about the Clovers. “I'm singing in a band. We're performing.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding hurt. “Maybe I could come and see you play and then I could take you and your friends out after.”

I tried to imagine my father at the Coffeehouse, then taking me and Jason and Sofia out after. It would be so awkward, everyone either wanting to hang out or to go party at someone's house. What would I do with my dad there?

“Maybe another time, Dad,” I said.

“Well, break a leg,” he said. “I'll be thinking of you.” His saying that made me feel sad, like he'd spend his night sitting in a dark room somewhere trying to imagine me playing with the Clovers. “And Juliet?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for calling. I'm really proud of you, honey.”

Normally my dad's saying that made me feel warm all
over, but suddenly it struck me as a strange thing to say.
I'm so proud of you
. In the past, I'd always thought of what his being proud said about me, but now I thought about what it meant to be proud of something. It wasn't just that he was impressed by what a good job I'd done or that he thought I was a hard worker or a good test taker. It meant
he
took pride in work
I'd
done. That he felt it was something he'd done also. You weren't proud of something that had nothing to do with you. Like, I wasn't proud of the Panama Canal or the Special Olympics.

Or was it
me
my dad took pride in? Did he feel that anything I'd done was something he could take pride in because he was my father and so I was something he'd made?

I walked into the building thinking about how weird it was that I could feel so distant from my dad that I couldn't figure out how my brother filled a weekend with him, but he could feel so close to me that he saw my SAT scores as proof that he'd done something good.

Which one of us was right?

Neither Jason nor I liked to fight in public. Not that we fought all that much, but when we did, we kept it private, unlike, say, George and Elise. When I got to Latin, he'd saved a seat for me, and I slid into it the same way I did every day. When class ended, I asked him if he wanted to go for ice cream after school.

“Soccer practice,” he said.

“Come on,” I said, tracing a line up his arm. “Cut practice.
You cut practice; I'll cut practice. I'll let you buy me an ice cream so you won't feel bad about my having a higher SAT score than you have.”

Jason shook his head. “I can't bail on practice. How about after?”

“I have to shower and get ready. We're doing a sound check at seven.” I didn't really want to bring up the Clovers, considering where that had gotten us last time, but it wasn't like there was some other reason I couldn't go out with Jason after practice.

“I guess we'll do it another time,” he said. He kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Break a leg tonight. I'll be cheering for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. Watching Jason walk away, I felt uneasy, as if there was something I needed to tell him. But if I'd gone running after him and grabbed him and turned him around and said, “I need to talk to you,” what would I have said?

After school I didn't feel like swimming. I'd been weirded out all day by my fight with Jason, and I couldn't seem to get back the feeling I'd had when I first saw my scores, the feeling that I could do anything, that the whole world was suddenly perfectly aligned with me and my goals. Maybe Sofia would want to celebrate. She'd kicked ass too. Why shouldn't we treat ourselves to insanely fattening, gross, overpriced sundaes at Bookers?

On the way to swim practice, I took my phone out to text her and saw that there was a missed call from Aunt Kathy and also an email from her. I checked the email first.

Good morning (well, morning my time)! I just left you a vm. I spoke to Dr. Gulati, and he feels your mom is ready to come home from Roaring Brook next Saturday. She'll keep going to group and individual therapy and she'll be taking medication, but he feels she doesn't need to be an inpatient anymore. I'll come in for the weekend to help her get settled. Let's talk later today, okay? I love you, sweetheart! xoxo Aunt K.

I read Aunt Kathy's email twice, then listened to her voice mail, which said basically the exact same thing, except that listening to her talk I could hear how relieved she was.