Pushing Perfect. Michelle Falkoff

about which part?”

      “Right about all of it. I do pretty much only hang out with Julia and those guys, and only at school, because they’re not fun.”

      “I’m totally fun. We’re going to start getting you out more.”

      I’d never met anyone so direct. It was kind of amazing. “That would be great,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I used to have friends, that it wasn’t always like this, but that wouldn’t change anything.

      “Oh, that is so excellent. I have such a good feeling about you, you know? And we’re like twins.” She pointed to our outfits, which were both variations on the hoodie/tank top/jeans/tennis shoes combo.

      I raised my eyebrows at her. One minute into our friendship was too early to state the obvious.

      “Oh, yeah, except for the Asian thing,” she said.

      Or maybe it wasn’t. Even better.

      Alex started her fast talking again. “Isn’t it weird, how hard it is to make new girlfriends? It’s like you hang out with the same people forever, and at a certain point that’s all there is. Boys are so much easier. You can just go right up to them and say whatever you want, and either they’ll be friends with you or they won’t. Girls are so much more complicated.”

      “Is it really that easy?” I asked. “With boys, I mean?”

      “It has been so far. Except for if they get a thing for you. Then it gets complicated. But I bet you know how to deal with that, pretty as you are. God, it’s so great to have someone to talk to about this stuff! We should tell each other everything!” She must have seen the look on my face. “Uh-oh. Is this not a good topic? Are you not into guys? Girls are good too. I mean, I’ve only made out with a couple, just to see if it was my thing, but …”

      I couldn’t help it—I started cracking up. She was so different than she came across at school. She wouldn’t be the kind of friend Becca had been, but that was okay. “I’m not into girls. It’s more that my experience with guys is kind of … limited.” I was flattered that she thought I was pretty enough to have dealt with guy issues before, but of course she had no idea what I really looked like. Then again, no one did.

      “Well, then, we’ve got some work to do. We’ll have to strategize. Let’s hang out next weekend.”

      “Saturday’s the SAT,” I said.

      “You didn’t take it yet? I got it out of the way at the end of last year,” she said. “Such a relief.”

      I didn’t feel like explaining about the whole panic attack thing. Besides, I’d studied my ass off and read a bunch of meditation books and eaten my mom’s brain food for weeks. I’d be okay this time. “I put it off,” I said. “I really need to do well.” That much was true, anyway. So much for telling each other everything, though.

      “Just come over after,” she said. “We can keep it low key. We’ll just hang out.”

      “That would be great.” If all went as planned, I’d be in a good mood, and it would be fun to talk about it with a friend. Now that we were friends.

       4.

      The morning of the SAT I stumbled out of bed bleary-eyed and in desperate need of coffee. I’d resolved to get a good night’s sleep to prepare, had even tried the stupid meditation techniques from the books I’d read, but nothing worked. I’d stayed up most of the night remembering that disastrous attempt at the PSAT, the one that had kept me from taking the test last year, when I should have. This time had to be different—if I didn’t manage to get through it, I only had one more shot.

      Mom was in the kitchen by the time I got downstairs, coffee brewed, a plate of what looked like green eggs at my seat. “Are we channeling Dr. Seuss today?” I asked.

      “Scrambled eggs blended with spinach, kale, spirulina, and hemp seeds,” Mom said, coming over and kissing my forehead. “That plus coffee should help you focus. I packed some baggies of almonds and blueberries for you to bring in with you. You’re going to be terrific today.”

      “Wow,” I said, picking at the eggs with my fork. They looked beyond disgusting. “Um, thank you?”

      “I tasted them first,” Mom said. “They’re not as bad as they look. I added lots of salt and pepper. Give it a shot.”

      I took a very, very small bite. They tasted … green. Which was fine. Other than that epic dinner at Alex’s, I’d eaten almost nothing but green food for a week in preparation for today. I was used to it. “Not bad,” I said, though I loaded up my coffee with cream and sugar, just to have something that tasted good. “Where’s Dad?”

      “He’s at work already.”

      “On a Saturday?” I shouldn’t have bothered asking; lately he’d been working every weekend, and most of the time Mom had too, now that she was working with him. Weekends were irrelevant now that he was starting a new company.

      “He’s stressed about the next round of funding,” Mom said.

      “Should he be?”

      “I don’t think it matters. He’d stress out either way. Just like you.”

      And here we’d been doing so well. She was right, though; Dad and I did have a lot in common, and we both had a tendency to stress. But Dad’s stress always seemed tied to work, while I managed to get myself anxious about everything. At first I’d thought it started with the skin, but then I thought about all the things I’d worried about before that—my friendships, school, my parents. Really, I worried about everything, all the time; the only thing that had ever helped me relax was swimming, and that was gone now.

      I’d tried to talk to my dad once about how he managed, hoping he’d have a suggestion that would help me, but he’d told me he just tried to convert his stress to energy and put the energy into work, which to me seemed kind of circular. “I did go to a doctor once,” he said. “He put me on some medication, but I had a really bad reaction to it.”

      “I don’t remember that,” I said.

      “You were really young. And that was a good thing, because it was a very scary time. I was hallucinating and stopped sleeping. It was awful for your mother. She still doesn’t like to think about it.”

      That did explain a lot, especially her emphatic “No!” when I’d asked her about beta blockers or Xanax. I knew lots of kids at school were taking them, but she wasn’t having it. The whole brain food thing was her way of trying to make up for it, which I appreciated.

      “When do you need to get going?” Mom asked, watching me pour myself another cup of coffee.

      “Not for almost an hour,” I said. “Can you pass me the crossword?” Better to keep my brain busy than to think about what was coming, I figured.

      “Oh, I don’t think it’s here yet,” she said, not looking at me.

      “Mom. They drop the paper off in the middle of the night. You bring it in every day. The one time it wasn’t here when you woke up, you called them to complain. I know you have it, so where is it?” I didn’t mean to sound irritable, but I could hear the edge in my voice.

      She sighed. “Can you just skip the crossword for today? You can do it when you get home. You have enough to think about as it is.”

      “Which is exactly why I need it.” Why was she being so weird?

      My question was answered as soon as she pulled the paper out from under a stack of magazines and handed it over. Marbella was small enough that the newspaper was half the size of a normal paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. And we had so little crime that the front cover was usually devoted to something related to local politics, or high school sports.