Better Than Perfect (21 page)

The first week of Christmas vacation, I met with my new Latin tutor twice. Jason had convinced me to stick with Latin just through the American Latin Exam, which was in January, and I figured I might as well. Plus the exam, which was given in a different place every year, was being given this year at Harvard, and Jason declared that it was a sign from God that we were meant to go. Jason believed in God about as much as I did, which is to say not at all, but I could tell he wanted us to go up there together, so I said okay. He was right—it was stupid to have worked so hard on Latin for years only to drop it now.

It was weird to be meeting with a tutor again. The guy—his name was Adam—even looked like Glen, and he and I sat in the exact same seats Glen and I had sat in when I was
working on my SATs. Adam worked for the same company Glen worked for, and he broke things down just the way Glen had, and a couple of times during our sessions, I had the strangest feeling that time was rolling backward and I'd wake up Saturday morning and have to take the SAT again. Still, after meeting only two times, I could feel myself getting better at Latin the same way I'd gotten better at SAT reading passages and math problems. These guys really knew what they were doing; if they'd had a marriage counseling arm of their tutoring business, maybe my parents would have stayed together.

For Christmas, my mom and my brother and I met Aunt Kathy and her family at my nana and papa's house in Connecticut. My mom always talked about how her father had built the house, which was enormous and right on a private lake, and for years I'd thought she was being literal, that my grandfather had laid the foundation himself and put up the brick walls, roofed it, put in the kitchen sinks. I don't know when I realized he'd built it in the sense of bought the land and hired an architect and builders. My confusion wasn't that weird considering that when I was little, my grandfather had been enormous, literally and figuratively—he was even taller than my dad, and he had a loud voice that scared me. But when I was in seventh grade, he had a heart attack and open heart surgery, and ever since then he'd been a little quieter and slower and even smaller, as if the experience had literally shrunk him.

It was a hard visit for my mom, I could tell. Whatever my aunt had said to keep her parents away from my mom while she was in the hospital had made them nervous around her. It didn't help that nobody was drinking, which was pretty noticeable since my grandparents were big on cocktail hour. Every other visit with Nana and Papa, we spent our evenings sitting around the huge living room in front of the fire eating nuts and having drinks. Even little kids like Andrew and William got served a tiny glass of this very sweet drink called Cherry Kijafa, and by the time I was a freshman in high school, it was assumed I'd have “my” drink (which was always a port, one of the only alcohols that didn't taste disgusting to me).

Nobody said anything about there being no cocktail hour this year; we just didn't have it. I would have liked to ask my mom if she was glad nobody was drinking or if she felt guilty, as if she was somehow spoiling everyone's fun, but since we hadn't acknowledged the change, I didn't know how to bring it up. We also didn't talk about my parents' separation or my mother's stint in the mental hospital. We talked about my getting into Harvard a lot. My grandfather kept telling William and Andrew that soon
they'd
go to Harvard, and even though my aunt and my uncle exchanged a couple of looks, nobody told my grandfather to drop it.

On Christmas Eve day, my grandfather went for a walk with my mom while my aunt and I stayed back and helped my grandmother cook. I saw them standing on the lawn about an
hour later, my mom shaking her head while my grandfather talked. When he came in, she stayed outside, and I went to find her.

She was sitting on the swing on the back porch, looking out at the lake. It was cold, but not freezing, and I sat next to her even though I didn't have my coat on.

“Hi,” I said. “I think we're having dinner soon.”

“I guess I should get dressed,” she said. At my grandparents' house, we always dressed for dinner.

“Screw it,” I said. “It's stupid to get dressed up just to eat.”

My mom leaned her head back against the top of the swing. “I've always hated it and I've always done it. I even tried to make you kids do it when you were little. Do you remember?”

I shook my head. “I just remember doing it here.”

“Well, we stopped when you were about four. It was a lot of trouble.” She lifted her head and stared out across the lake, but I had the feeling she wasn't seeing what was there so much as she was looking at the past. “It turns out making things look nice is a lot of trouble.”

“I'm sorry,” I said abruptly.

“What are you sorry for?” she asked. She turned to face me, but there was something vacant about her look, almost like she wasn't seeing me. It reminded me of how she'd looked at me that day at the hospital.

“I'm sorry that . . .” I didn't know how to explain everything
I was sorry for. I was sorry that when she talked about the past she looked so sad, and I was sorry that being with her family was hard for her, and I was sorry that she'd thought she had to make us get dressed for dinner when we were little even though she hated doing it.

But I was embarrassed to say all of that, so instead I just said, “I'm sorry that we have to change when we're so comfortable in our jeans.”

She shrugged and got to her feet. “I'm used to it.”

In the distance, I could hear my grandmother. “Barbara? Juliet?”

“Let's go change,” she said.

I stayed sitting. “We should just wear what we're wearing. What are they going to do, refuse to serve us?”

She smiled, but it was a sad, tight smile. “Who knows?” She held out her hand to me, and I followed her into the house.

When vacation ended, it was actually a relief to be back in the grind of school. Thursday, Sofia came and found me in a corner of the library, where I was frantically cramming for a Latin test.

“Dude, I'm getting Battle of the Bands tickets right now for Elise, Margaret, George”—she hesitated for a second—“and Lucas.” Over Christmas break, she and Lucas had started going out. Or kind of going out. Going out enough that she was getting him a ticket for Battle of the Bands but not enough
that she was ready to call him her boyfriend. “Did you and Jason already get tickets or should I get tickets for you?”

“What?” I lifted my head from my textbook, deep in my Latin haze. Outside there was a dusting of snow on the ground. When had it snowed?

Sofia rolled her eyes at me, mimed getting punched in the chin, then moved her hands rapidly in front of her.

“You're running?” I guessed. She shook her head and moved her hands even more frantically. “You're having a seizure? You have to go to the bathroom—”

“No!” she finally cried in frustration. “Battle of the
Bands
. Get it?” She mimed the punch and then the hand thing again. “Battle. I'm getting hit in the face. Bands. I'm drumming.”

“Oh! That's what you were doing.” I nodded my comprehension.

“So, did you already get tickets?”

When I'd been in the Clovers, we'd talked about the Battle of the Bands. It was at the end of February. Sinead was going to skip her music class that week, and she and I were going to sing “I Got You Babe.” Was there even a band anymore? Danny had probably recovered. But Sinead spent her weekends in Boston getting voice lessons and Sean was . . . I didn't like to think about where Sean was. And I was studying for Latin. Making music in the Brennans' basement felt like it had happened in another lifetime, to another person, a different Juliet. And as with all things related to Declan, I
told myself that maybe it had.

“What are you doing, anyway?” asked Sofia. “Are you studying?”

“I've got a big Latin test next period. I'm kind of freaking out.”

She stared at me. “Juliet, you got into Harvard.”

“Really? Wow!”

She didn't respond.

“What?” I asked finally.

“You
got into college already
.”

“I
know
,” I said. I gave a brief laugh. “Did you, like, think I didn't know that?”

“Juliet, look at me.” She sat down next to me, then held her hands wide to show there was nothing in them. “Am I studying? No I am not. Am I doing homework? No I am not. And
why
not, you ask? Because I am a second-semester senior who got into Stanford early, and second-semester seniors who have been accepted by the college of their choice do not do homework.”

I shrugged. “It's just that the American Latin Test is coming up, and the whole class is going, and, you know, I want to do well.”

“Okay,” she said, but she was wearing a face.

“What?” I demanded.

“What what?” asked Sofia. “I just said okay.”

I gave her a long look. “It's not what you said; it's
how
you
said it.” I pointed at her. “The face.”

“You're being paranoid,” she said.

“I am so not being paranoid. You made a face. What is your point?”

“My point?”

“The point of the face.”

“The point of the face is . . .” She paused, then said, “For someone who got into Harvard early action, you sure seem pretty stressed out all the time.” She stood up. “And that's all, folks. I'm going to go buy the tickets. If Jason already got you one, you can scalp it.”

I thought about calling her back and asking her what she meant by
all the time
, but then I caught a glimpse of the clock out of the corner of my eye and I realized I had to focus on the Latin.

If you've never been there, Harvard looks exactly the way a college campus should look. Old brick and stone buildings. Geometric quads dotted with patches of melting gray snow. Spring break of junior year, I'd toured it with my mom, who'd kept pointing out things that had changed since she'd been a student. The school was a part of her; she'd clearly felt a right to be walking its lawns and paths. I'd never been jealous of an adult before, but as I followed the enthusiastic tour guide and tried not to get my hopes up, I felt jealous of my mom. She didn't have to deal with applying to college. She didn't have to stand in the bookstore looking at the T-shirts and the notebooks and the mugs and the bumper stickers and wondering if she'd ever have the right to wear and drink from them, to put them on her car or the window of her bedroom. She did. I'd walked out of the bookstore empty-handed, positive that if I
ever got into Harvard, I'd never wish for anything else in my life.

And now I had gotten in. And here I was with Jason, walking the very paths and quads we'd be walking as actual Harvard students in just over seven months. He kept putting his arm around me and squeezing my shoulders.

“That's us next year,” said Jason, nodding in the direction of a small cluster of people talking in the lee of a building. The school was still on January break, and I wondered if the people he was pointing to were even undergrads.

“Which one of us is the smoker?” I asked, as one of them extracted a pack of cigarettes from his bag and lit up.

“Okay, so maybe that's not us.” He laughed and kissed my ear, giddy with everything, still drunk on his acceptance letter.

Ms. Croft maneuvered all of us up the steps of a small stone building into which a sea of kids was flowing. We joined the current and followed it along a wide corridor that ended in a lobby, along one wall of which was a row of tables in front of three sets of open pale wooden doors that led into a lecture hall. Ms. Croft got on the line marked
MID-ATLANTIC STATES
while the rest of us huddled by the window, looking around at the competition.

The American Latin Test is given once a year, and it's only open to seniors who are currently studying Latin. Unlike the AP Latin Test, it doesn't focus on a certain text. Instead, it's the whole body of what you've learned. Each day we'd been
back from vacation, Ms. Croft had given us a quiz that was meant to preview the material that was likely to be on the exam. There was a small college scholarship given to anyone who scored above the ninetieth percentile, but as far as I knew, nobody in our class needed the two-thousand-dollar break in tuition. It was more about the prestige.

Ms. Croft waved us over and gave each of us a badge. I hadn't thought I cared that much about the test, but as I tried to pin mine on, I realized my hands were shaking.

You weren't allowed to have any food or even water bottles in the exam room, and you weren't allowed to leave once the test started, not even to go to the bathroom. Ella Williams and I went to go pee, and as soon as we walked out of the bathroom, I immediately needed to pee again. I stood with our group, letting Jason hold my hand. He was rubbing his thumb over my knuckles in an irritating way, and between that and thinking I needed to pee, I was starting to feel itchy and impatient. When they called for people to start going inside, I slipped my hand out of Jason's and walked ahead of him.

The lights in the lecture hall were bright, and I could feel a slight ache at the back of my eyes. I slid into a seat at the end of a row, and Jason sat next to me. There must have been a thousand people in the room, but even though the test hadn't started, it was hushed. There was the squeak of people sliding into seats and lowering the small desks attached to them. People coughed, and at one point someone called out to a friend.
Otherwise, it was basically silent.

An older Asian woman stepped up to a microphone at the front of the room. “Welcome to the American Latin Exam. If you haven't been taking Latin this year, you're probably in the wrong place.” Nervous giggles. She continued. “In a minute, the proctors will begin handing out the exams. When you get your envelope, please do not unseal it until you are told to do so. Once you have begun, you will have ninety minutes to complete the exam. When you are done, you will reseal the envelope, following the instructions. If you have any questions, please raise your hand and a proctor will assist you. As you have been told, you may not leave the room for any reason during the exam or you will not be allowed to return.”

The proctors started walking down the aisle, handing out a pile of envelopes to the person at the end of each row. When mine came to me, I rubbed my finger over the stiff brown paper. Jason reached over to my desk and put his hand on mine.

“You're totally going to beat ninety percent,” he whispered. He slipped his pinky into mine. “J power.”

“You may begin,” said the woman, and the rustle of hundreds of envelopes being opened filled the room.

The first question was an easy one. I answered it, but then I found my mind wandering as I thought about all the other Latin tests I'd ever had to take. I remembered how much I'd liked learning common Latin expressions, translating
e pluribus unum
and
et cetera
for my parents. I moved on to the second question. To my left, I could see Jason's head bent over his test.
I couldn't see his face, but I knew he was biting his top lip the way he always did when he focused on something.

I shifted in my seat. How many Latin tests had I taken in my life? Maybe ten a year starting in seventh grade. So that was fifty, plus five so far this year. Fifty-five. Fifty-five times forty-five minutes per test was . . . I did the math on my test sheet. Two thousand four hundred and seventy-five minutes of Latin tests. And how many more was I going to have to take? Well, this one, clearly. The AP. I started counting the number of quizzes Ms. Croft was likely to give before graduation. Probably about one per week. How many weeks were left in the year? I counted on my fingers.

Jason glanced over and saw me counting. He wrinkled his forehead like,
What?
and I smiled at him and shook my head, dropped my hand, and put my eyes on my paper.

If your main verb is pluperfect, what tense (or tenses) of the subjunctive can come after it?

A. present

B. imperfect

C. perfect

D. all of the above

E. none of the above

I read it through, then read it again. And again. The third time I read it, I realized something.

I didn't want to answer it.

I didn't want to answer it. I didn't want to answer it. I never wanted to answer another question on another fucking Latin exam. I knew as much Latin as I wanted to know. I didn't want to take the AP. I didn't want to take any of Ms. Croft's quizzes. I didn't want to take the next Latin test she would give.

I didn't even want to take
this
Latin test.

I imagined what Jason would say if I told him how I felt.

He'd point out that Harvard could always rescind my acceptance if my grades dropped second semester.

He'd say that I might not like Harvard, that I might want to transfer to a different college after my freshman year, which would mean my second-semester transcript for senior year of high school would suddenly matter.

He'd tell me to stick with it in case there was a class I wanted to take at Harvard that required me to have taken the
Aeneid
AP.

And that's when I knew.

That's when I knew the truth.

There would
always
be a reason not to quit Latin. Or not to quit something. There'd be graduate school and a job and a career and promotions. In a horrifying waking nightmare, I saw Jason and my parents and all my future classmates and colleagues and mentors and bosses telling me to keep doing something I hated doing because someday I would be glad to have done it.

I got to my feet. Jason jerked his head up. “J?” he whispered.
Every head in the immediate vicinity turned toward us.

“I'm okay,” I whispered back.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, and even though he was trying to be nice, I could tell he was annoyed.

“I have to go,” I said.

“What?”

“Shhh,” someone whispered.

Jason ignored him. “J, if you leave, you can't come back.”

“I know,” I said. “I don't want to come back.”

“J, what are you—”

“Quiet, please!” said a proctor, standing at the end of the row.

“Good luck,” I whispered to Jason, and I slid in front of him and out past twelve pairs of annoyed knees and then up the carpeted steps and through the lobby and down the corridor. I told Ms. Croft I was leaving, got my cell phone from her, and stepped out, all alone, into the chilly Cambridge afternoon.