Faking Perfect (3 page)

“When are you going to get rid of that slimy thing?” Mom asked as I emerged from my room and shut the door behind me.

“I could ask you the same,” I said lightly.

A tinge of pink leaked through her fake-and-bake tan. “And what is
that
supposed to mean?”

I walked past her to the stairs. She knew exactly what it meant. Her latest boyfriend, Pete something, was a forty-five-year-old unemployed construction worker with an ex-wife and four kids he didn’t support. He also stole all our food, spent Mom’s money, and called her names whenever she forgot to buy beer. He was the definition of
slimy
.

Then again . . . considering who I entertained in my bedroom on a regular basis, it wasn’t like I had much room to judge.

“Anyway”—she followed me to the kitchen, where I washed my hands at the sink—“I went downstairs to tell you . . . shit, I forgot what I was gonna tell you.” She kneaded her forehead for a second. “Oh yeah. You can use the car tonight. I don’t need it after all.”

“I thought you and . . .” I refused to say the jerk’s name. “I thought you were going to the casino tonight.”

“Nah.” She caught her reflection in the microwave door and started picking at her hair, smoothing it down. Mom and I shared the same kind of hair, but hers had been chemically straightened into submission and bleached light blond. Like Barbie. “I have a date, actually,” she said, a sly smile curling her lips.

I dried my hands on a dish towel and raised my brows at her. “What happened to . . . ?”

“Pete?” She stopped playing with her hair and sighed. “He’s history.”

Whew
, I thought. We’d have food in the house again.

“This guy,” she said, fanning herself with her hand, “is freaking gorgeous.”

That was how my mom talked, like a teenager sharing secret crushes with her besties. She even looked the part, with her diminutive figure and heavy makeup and short skirts. At thirty-nine, she was edging very close to the “too old to pull off that look” category. My friends thought she was fun and cool, but they didn’t see her makeup-free and sullen in front of the TV late at night, or smudged and wrinkled and smelling like a stale tavern on Sunday afternoons.

“He’s not a client, is he?” I asked, suspicious. Because she worked at a day spa, most of her massage therapy clients were women, but the occasional straight man showed up. She’d dated a client once, years ago, even though it was unprofessional and possibly even against the rules. He must have really enjoyed her massages.

“No. I met him at Starbucks a couple days ago when I was out on my lunch break. There was this big mix-up and he accidentally grabbed my hazelnut latte.” She giggled. “Anyway, everything got straightened out and we just started talking.”

Moving over to the table, I idly started thumbing through yesterday’s mail. Flyers, coupons, bank statements, and an innocent-looking letter from the cable company. I ripped it open.

“His name is Jesse,” my mother babbled on, her voice honey-sweet and lilting like it did when she was in a good mood. Her
I-met-a-new-man
voice, full of promise. “He works in one of those huge office buildings on the waterfront. He’s really smart and he must make good money because—”

“Mom,” I said, not taking my eyes off the paper I was reading, the one from the cable company that claimed our bill was well overdue. Usually she hid this kind of mail from me, knowing I’d nag her about it. I didn’t even have a key to our mailbox. “This payment was due
weeks
ago. They’re cutting off our cable on Monday.”

She finally shut up about the latte guy and stared at me, open-mouthed. “The cable?” Panic seeped in as it dawned on her that she’d soon be without The Game Show Network.

“Yes, the cable.” The paper crackled as my fingers tightened around it. “What else didn’t you pay?”

She closed her mouth and started gnawing on her bottom lip. “I’m
sure
I paid the electric bill this month.”

I took one look at the uncertainty on her face and rushed down the hall to the spare bedroom where we kept the computer. She followed close behind. I brought up online banking and gestured for her to enter her username and password, information she refused to divulge to me no matter how much I begged. “I’m the mother and you’re the child.
I
pay the bills around here,” she’d say, even though it was only half true. Sometimes she paid them, sometimes she didn’t, and we never knew which one it was until an overdue notice appeared in the mail or, in extreme cases, we lost the cable, phone, lights. We’d lived a few days in complete darkness more than once.

“Okay,” she said slowly as she looked over her account. “So I didn’t pay it. I will right now, don’t worry.” She sat down in the computer chair and started typing.

“My
God
, Mom,” I growled. She was a child. I lived with a bleached, tanned, almost-forty-year-old child. “I set reminders for you on your phone and everything.”

“Yeah, well . . . “ She shut down the browser and spun around in the chair, her expression a mix of apology and belligerence. “They always get paid eventually, don’t they?”

“No! That’s the problem.”

Her face turned pink again. “Get off my back, Lexi,” she shouted. “So a bill gets paid a little late sometimes. Who cares? I’m sick of you constantly nagging at me. Nag, nag, nag.
I’m
the mother and you’re the—”

“Right,” I said, cutting her off. “
I’m
the child. And that dynamic has always worked so well around here, hasn’t it?”

She stood up to her full five-foot-one height and glared at me. “And what is
that
supposed to mean, Lexi Claire?”

Oh, I knew she was angry when she brought out my full name, the name I used to go by when I was little but shortened to just Lexi when I was twelve.
Claire
came from my paternal grandmother, a woman I didn’t even remember. I thought of her in the same way I thought of my father—a stranger who was probably dead by now.

“Nothing, Mother,” I replied with false sweetness. She opened her mouth to yell at me some more but I didn’t give her the chance. I turned and walked out, not stopping until I reached the front door. I yanked it open and stepped out into the cold, forgetting about my jacket. Too pissed to even notice the biting March wind, I tramped across the street to Nolan’s house.

“I’d offer you a shot of vodka,” Nolan said, smoothing his finger over a line in his pencil sketch, “but my parents put a lock on the liquor cabinet last weekend after they figured out that Landon had been into it. He and his friends were sneaking rum and then filling the bottle back up with water.”

I laughed. We’d done the exact same thing at that age. Nolan’s little brother was fourteen and apparently following in our devious footsteps. “It’s okay,” I said, shivering. I’d been sitting on the couch in the Bruces’ basement family room, cocooned in a fuzzy blanket, for the past twenty minutes. The walk over here had taken forty-five seconds, just enough time to give me a lingering chill.

“No plans this evening?” Nolan asked, his eyes glued to his sketch pad. “Don’t tell me the Preppy Posse is staying in on a Saturday night.”

I shoved his leg with my foot, but even that didn’t break his concentration. He was in the zone. I’d realized Nolan was going to be an artist the day he got mad at me for going outside the lines as we colored a picture of the Teletubbies together. We were four.

“We’re going to the movies. The late show.” With any luck, my mother would be long gone on her date before I ventured back over to get ready. “How about you? Any plans tonight? Amber?”

He shook his head as he shaded a section of eyebrow in his drawing. People were his specialty. He drew family, friends, celebrities, total strangers. Under Nolan’s hand, faces came to life on paper. “Her grandmother died yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said, frowning. Amber was Nolan’s girlfriend. They’d started dating this past summer. I liked her for several reasons—she was nice, she treated Nolan really well, and she didn’t bat an eye when she came over to find me hanging out with him. Most girls would have been wary, but Amber was open-minded and trusting—necessary qualities for a girl who dated a guy whose best friend was me. “That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“You can come out with us tonight, if you want.”

He laughed. “I think I’ll stay here.”

I snuggled down into my blanket and contemplated doing the same. I loved being in Nolan’s family room. His house was almost identical to the one I lived in with Mom—split-level, four bedrooms (our house had three), two bathrooms, and a family room on the lower level. But while my family room at home was a graveyard of boxes and dusty exercise equipment, the Bruce family room lived up to its name with its comfortable furniture, wood stove, big-screen TV, and every video game system known to man. It was our favorite place to hang out, except when Landon was down here with his friends, polluting the room with potato chip crumbs and odors that made me glad I didn’t have a brother of my own.

Teresa, Nolan’s mother, came down the stairs, a stack of folded towels in her arms. “Check the bottom drawer!” she hollered over her shoulder as she entered the room. Those words, I assumed, were directed upstairs toward her husband or younger son. She turned back around and spotted me curled up on the couch with just my face and a few strands of hair showing. “Oh, hi, sweetie,” she greeted me, continuing on to the bathroom. When she returned empty-handed, she started gathering up game controllers and empty soda cans. “You haven’t been over in a while,” she said, peering at me closely. It didn’t matter that the blanket hid ninety-nine percent of my body; she always knew when something was amiss with me.

“I’ve been busy,” I told her. “Studying hard. You know me.” That’s the problem, I thought. She did know me, all too well. The entire family did. They knew when I arrived at their door, shivering and out of breath, my cheeks flushed with anger, I’d had enough of being in my own house and craved the normalcy and warmth of theirs.

Teresa narrowed her eyes, which were light brown like Nolan’s. “Is she drinking?”

“No. The bills again.”

Teresa sighed and went back to hunting for discarded wrappers and cans. Nolan kept drawing, barely paying attention. He’d heard conversations like this between me and his parents more times than either of us could count. It started when I was six, the first time Mom passed out from drinking too much wine and didn’t hear me when I called out in the middle of the night with one of my nightmares. When I went to her room and found her sprawled on her bed, fully dressed and unresponsive, I panicked and ran—in my bare feet at two in the morning—across the street to the Bruces’ house. That was back when Nolan’s mother and mine were still best friends.

“Let me know if you need anything, okay?” Teresa told me before going back upstairs. I assured her I would. “And Nolan, sweetie . . . could you please not get pencil smudges all over the couch?”

Nolan smoothed another line, blurring it, before nodding in his absent, preoccupied way.

I peeked over at his drawing and came face-to-face with Mr. Teng, our physics teacher. “That’s incredible, Nolan.” It blew me away that he could recreate facial features just from memory. I was barely able to draw a straight line.

“Eh,” he said, shrugging and closing his sketch pad. “It’s not done yet.” He threw the pad and pencil on the coffee table and stretched out his hand. His fingertips, as usual, were stained black with graphite. “Let’s play
Call of Duty
.”

I glanced at my watch. Seven-fifteen. I still had plenty of time. “Okay.”

He set up the game and handed me a controller. “Want some pretzels?”

“Sure.” Just as I uttered the word, my stomach let out a thunderous growl. My body felt empty. Concave. When Nolan was halfway up the stairs, I called, “Bring down some cookies too, would you?”

“Oreos or chocolate chip?” he called back from the top of the stairs.

“Oreos!” I replied at the same volume. One of my favorite things about this house was the constant, good-natured yelling back and forth, disembodied voices communicating from different rooms of the house. Always loud and chaotic, but rarely angry. At home, I’d never even think to bellow a question to my mother in the kitchen while I was using the toilet or something. But here, I did it just as easily as Teresa called me “sweetie,” the same term of endearment she used for her husband and her sons. And the dog and cat, too.

While Nolan was up in the kitchen, I sent a text to Emily, letting her know I had the car and could pick everyone up for the movie later. Then, as quick as I dared, I pulled up the message Tyler had sent me an hour ago—can I c u tonite—and tapped out a response.

Yes. 1:00.

“Sorry, all we have left is stale gingersnaps.”

I startled at Nolan’s voice and shoved my phone back into the pocket of my sweater. “Yum,” I said as he dumped the box in my lap and settled in next to me with a giant mixing bowl of pretzels. I dug into the box and grabbed a handful of cookies, even though I knew no matter how much I tried to relieve the hollow ache in my stomach, I’d never truly feel full.

Chapter Four

M
y mother’s date with Latte Guy must have gone well because she was up bright and early on Sunday, hangover-free and blasting Green Day on the stereo as she vacuumed the living room. For the rest of the day, she cleaned the bathrooms and organized our finances and made a chicken pot pie for dinner. I liked my mother’s New Man phase the best. It was when she most resembled a normal parent. Too bad it never lasted.

She stayed in maternal mode all day and then went to bed at the reasonable hour of eleven o’clock, where she watched the news instead of
Wheel of Fortune
. Man, I thought, this new guy must be something special.

Her good mood still hadn’t waned by Monday morning. When I strode into the kitchen, dressed and ready for school, I discovered half a bagel sitting on a plate in the middle of the counter, a small piece of paper beside it. A note.
Have a good day!
it said in my mother’s girly script. Two days ago she was screaming at me, and now she was wishing me a good day. I munched on the bagel and shook my head. She was certifiable.