Pushing Perfect. Michelle Falkoff

before we went to Lake Tahoe. And that I wanted to go buy some makeup.

      By the end of the summer I had a diagnosis: papulo-pustular acne, which basically meant that my whole face and neck were covered with zits. I had a dermatologist I would see every week who told me chlorine might have triggered the initial breakout and I should give some serious thought as to whether continuing to swim was a good idea. I didn’t get in the water all summer.

      By the time school started, I had two new regimens: drugs and makeup. Every day I got up, took my pills, and counted the cysts to see if there were fewer than the day before, writing the numbers down in a notebook I kept in the bathroom. And then I slathered my face with foundation, along with a little eye shadow and lip gloss so the foundation didn’t look weird. Self-evaluation, cover-up, and makeup.

      SCAM.

       2.

      The Brain Trust was occupying its regular table when I came into the cafeteria with my brown bag lunch. As always, I had to walk by the drama table, where Isabel hung out with her theater friends, and the swim team table, where Becca sat. They didn’t look up when I passed them by. They never did.

      Mom had made me spinach salad with quinoa and feta and a lemony dressing. Brain food. She’d done a ton of research into my skin condition and had made me try a million different diets that, just like everything else, did nothing. She’d amped up her game in anticipation of the SAT exam. The test was coming up in a little over a week, and though I’d studied so much I’d worn my Princeton Review guide to shreds, I was terrified to actually take it.

      Ever since everything went down with Becca and Isabel, I’d buried myself in schoolwork, spending all my time writing papers and studying for tests and making sure I did as well as I possibly could. It was all I had left. I was still hiding my face with makeup, but sometimes it felt like I was hiding my whole self, too. Or that I didn’t have much self left to hide. By my count, it had been over a year since I’d talked to anyone about anything except school. Even at home, all my parents talked about was how well I was doing, how proud they were of my hard work; they didn’t seem concerned that I was always alone. Sure, Mom had asked about Becca and Isabel at first, but I’d mumbled something about people changing in high school and she’d let it go. I’d convinced myself that everything would be different if I went to the right college.

      But I could only do that if I killed it on the SAT.

      I’d always been good at taking tests, but the SAT was different. I don’t know if it was just the pressure of how much was riding on it, or if some secret part of me was convinced that standardized tests would somehow reveal how very not perfect I was, but I’d had a full-on panic attack when I took the PSAT—I hadn’t even finished it. I’d left the room before people could see me freaking out. I was so spooked by the thought of the SAT that I’d put it off until this year, rather than taking it as a junior like everyone else in my classes.

      The Brain Trust was a group of kids I’d met in the Gifted and Talented Program back in grade school. We weren’t friends, exactly, but we had all our classes together, and we all shared the common goal of wanting to go to college on the East Coast. Harvard, specifically. Arthur Cho was a classical violinist whose parents didn’t want him to go to Juilliard because they thought it would limit his options; David Singer dreamed of being an entrepreneur like Mark Zuckerberg, even though I kept telling him what my parents told me, which was that Silicon Valley was full of Stanford grads who looked down on people from Harvard. Julia Jackson, my nemesis, was gunning for a particular science scholarship and wanted to go straight from undergrad to Harvard Med.

      As for me, I just wanted to get as far away from Marbella as possible. I liked the idea of Harvard because it seemed like the kind of place I could start over, where everything might be different. No one would know me as Perfect Kara there; at a place like Harvard, it would be normal to love math and to care about academics more than anything else. It didn’t necessarily have to be Harvard; any good school out east would do. My last name was Winter and I’d only ever seen snow in Tahoe. I wanted red and orange leaves in the fall, tulips in spring, baking heat in summer. I wanted change.

      “The National Merit Semifinalist list came out today,” Julia said, her voice all sugary. “Didn’t see your name on there.” Julia and I had been in classes together since kindergarten and teachers had been pitting us against each other the whole time. Handwriting competitions in first grade, speed-reading contests in second, multiplication table races in third—by then it had gotten old for me, but it never had for her. Now I was first in the class, but she was right on my heels, and I knew she’d made it her mission to pass me by.

      “Nope,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “I assume congratulations are in order?”

      Julia nodded, as did the other two. Great. So I was the only one. “Well, I’m really happy for you guys.” And I was, but I could also feel the anxiety kicking in. It had become a familiar feeling—I’d get this wave of nausea, then a weird thumping in my head, and then my pulse would start to race. I’d feel cold but get sweaty, which was usually the point when I’d take a walk or something to calm myself down. They were sort of my friends, but they were also my competition, as my guidance counselor kept reminding me. The problem was that they each knew exactly what they wanted, and everything they did was in service of their goals. I had no idea what I wanted, other than knowing it had something to do with math, and that put me at a disadvantage. The only way to make myself stand out—the only way to have a real chance at a new life—was to be valedictorian at one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, which Marbella High was. And to nail the SATs.

      Basically, I had to be perfect.

      I had to put the SATs out of my head if I wanted to avoid an actual panic attack, though, so I turned to the immediate task, which was staying at the top of the class. Which meant acing next week’s calc and econ exams. “We should get out of here,” I said. “I don’t want to be late for class.”

      We all had calculus next, which was my favorite class, with Ms. Davenport, who was my favorite teacher. Today was a review session for a test we had coming up, and I was actually looking forward to it.

      The thing I loved about math was that you could usually tell when you got the right answer. Like the logic puzzles I used to do with my mom that I now did on my own, for fun: if seven girls go to a birthday sleepover and each one brings different gifts and snacks and has to leave at a different time the next morning, how do you figure out which is which, given a list of clues? There was something so satisfying about creating a chart, with little boxes for Xs and check marks, and drawing inferences from the clues that let you put all the pieces together. Calculus, with its graphs and equations, was similar enough to be fun.

      I finished the practice test quickly, secure in the knowledge that I’d gotten all the answers right. It took another ten minutes or so for everyone else to get done, and then Ms. Davenport started going over the answers. She was such a great teacher—she walked through everything so carefully, I couldn’t imagine how anyone didn’t get it after that. She’d been the same way when I had her for geometry as a freshman, a class I found much harder than calculus. And she was cool, too—she dyed her hair auburn and wore it in fancy rolls like she was from the twenties, with vintage dresses and cowboy boots. She seemed so much younger than the other teachers, though I knew she couldn’t be as young as I thought she was, given how long she’d been teaching.

      “Ready for the test?” she asked me, on my way out of class.

      “Ready enough, I hope,” I said.

      “I’m so not,” a voice said from behind me. “Ready, that is.”

      I turned to see Alex Nguyen, a girl who was in my calculus and econ classes. I didn’t know her very well; she didn’t talk much in class unless Ms. Davenport made her, and we’d never done more than say hi in the hallway once in a while. Last year she used to fall asleep in class a lot but this year she’d gotten it together.

      “It won’t