The Perfectionists Page 4

  “Where’s the rest of the band?” she asked, glancing around as if the other band members might be hiding behind the shelves.

  Blake made a face, counting on his fingers. “Javier had an SAT cram session, Dave is rewriting his Yale essay for the fifth time, and Warren has, quote, ‘a thing with a lady,’ though I bet they’re just going to study for an AP Chem exam together.” He rolled his eyes. “So it’s just you and me tonight.”

  Mackenzie swallowed. Her and Blake . . . alone? That hadn’t happened since he started dating Claire.

  Forcing herself to be normal, Mac sat down, and they started going through the set list for an upcoming gig song by song. There were a few covers—Coldplay, Mumford & Sons, even a Beyoncé arrangement—but a lot of the songs were written by Blake himself. Blake had quit orchestra at the beginning of junior year, but he was more musically talented than almost anyone she knew.

  Mac played and played, trying to get that heady buzz that hit her whenever she was in the zone. That was what she lived for: making music, feeling music. She’d been playing the cello since she was four years old, when her parents had sat her down to listen to The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and told her to choose the instrument she wanted to learn. They had a vested interest, of course: Her mother played the flute in the Seattle Symphony, and her father was a professional piano accompanist who’d worked with Yo-Yo Ma, James Galway, and Itzhak Perlman.

  Mackenzie had chosen the cello—she loved the warm, rich sounds and the enormous range the instrument produced. When she was focused, she felt like she was a part of the music, her instrument an extension of her. When she played, she could almost forget about the big Spanish test she still hadn’t started studying for, or the Audition with a capital A, or Nolan.

  Almost.

  After the first time she saw Claire and Blake holding hands at the spring concert, Mackenzie started deliberately avoiding both of them—not that they noticed. She’d holed up in her family’s airy practice room, going over every single song in her repertoire. Her parents had been thrilled. No one seemed to notice how lonely she was.

  And then, about a week into her heartbreak, Nolan Hotchkiss approached her in the hall. Mackenzie, right? he’d said.

  That’s right, she’d answered shyly.

  His smile grew wider. You look cute today, he said. And then he spun on his heel and walked away.

  The Nolan Hotchkiss. Captain of the lacrosse team, first in line for valedictorian. Cute, confident Nolan, with his strong jawline and intoxicating grin. He thought Mac looked cute. Suddenly Blake didn’t seem so amazing anymore. The one comment led to a lunchtime talk . . . and then to texting . . . and then an actual phone call. Mac might have lost Blake, but maybe that was okay? Maybe she should have been aiming higher all along?

  So when Nolan asked her out on a date to Le Poisson, the most extravagant restaurant in all of Beacon Heights, and told her to “wear a dress,” she did.

  Nolan was so charming that first time . . . and the second, too. And so, when he asked for those pictures, she barely hesitated. She . . . posed . . . and then she hit send on her phone before she could think twice. It wasn’t until he showed up at her door the next day that she realized she’d been tricked.

  “Thanks,” he said, waving something in front of her face. It was the pictures, printed out on shiny paper. Most of her body was hidden behind her cello, but it was obvious that she was naked. Mac looked past him to his car; his friends hung out the windows, laughing at her. Her heart had sunk.

  “I just wanted to let you know you won me an important bet.” Nolan chuckled, then tossed something at Mac—a wad of bills. Before she could put the pieces together, before she could throw the money back at him, he hooted again and sauntered back to his car, pics tucked in his back pocket. When Mac came to her senses, she burned that money in the backyard. And then she’d cried for what felt like days.

  No wonder she’d wanted revenge.

  When she finished the piece and opened her eyes again, Blake was staring at her. “That was . . . wow.”

  Mac ran her hands down the length of her face, trying to refocus. She’d been so lost in the music that she’d forgotten Blake was there. She glanced away, his gaze too intense, too potent.

  “Why do you always do that?” he asked.

  She glanced at him again. “What?”

  “Look away. Hide.” He was watching her closely now, his eyes a piercing blue. “It’s so weird. When you play, you look so . . . so confident. Like nothing could faze you. But then you stop, and you get quiet and hidden. It’s like you save the best of yourself for your music.”

  Color rose in her cheeks, her heart stuttering in her chest. “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “No?” He reached toward her and carefully took off her glasses, folding the stems in and setting them on top of the amp. She blinked, the world blurred without her lenses—but Blake was so close to her she could see him perfectly. His eyes moved slowly across her features, like he was committing her to memory.

  “Do you even know how beautiful you are when you play?” Then, to her shock, his lips were on hers, soft but insistent.

  For a moment, she sat perfectly still, too confused to react. Blake tasted faintly of chocolate and peanut butter, his unshaven jaw lightly scratchy against her chin. Mac knew she was supposed to do something, to stop this, but soon everything fell away: her jitters, her concerns, what happened to Nolan. It just felt . . . right.

  That was when a Feist song erupted from his phone. Mac knew the ringtone: It was Claire’s favorite song. She pulled away fast, her cheeks red.

  Blake broke away, too, a guilty expression crossing his face. “Shoot.”

  He walked uneasily through the door to the kitchen, but not before she overheard him say, “Hey, baby, what’s up?”

  Mackenzie sat frozen, her lips still tasting like peanut butter. She squirmed, as though Claire could see her through the phone. As if Claire knew.

  She shot up, grabbed her things, and stole out of the cupcake shop before Blake could stop her. She banged through the front door, the bells jingling. As soon as she got outside, the rain misting her face, she realized the enormity of what she’d done.

  She’d kissed her best friend’s boyfriend. And she’d liked it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AVA JALALI SLID INTO HER desk in the film studies classroom just as the bell rang for fourth period on Friday. She was usually fashionably late to class, but she’d had so much on her mind this week that it was worse than usual.

  “Cutting it close, Miss Jalali,” said Mr. Granger, but she could tell he was mostly teasing. Mr. Granger was one of the youngest teachers in school, just a year or so out of college. He couldn’t even pretend to have an authoritarian air when his students were only five years younger than him.

  Ava turned her thousand-watt smile on her teacher. “Sorry, Mr. Granger. Vending machine emergency. Sour Patch Kids are back in stock, everyone!”

  A ripple of laughter cut through the classroom. Her boyfriend, Alex, craned around from the seat in front of her and winked. A different teacher might have gotten mad, but that was what Ava liked about Mr. Granger—and why she knew she could get away with this stuff. He just gave her a dry smile.

  “Well, now that our candy-shortage crisis has ended, we can focus on what we’re here to do.” Mr. Granger picked up a piece of chalk and started to write in sloppy handwriting across the chalkboard: MORALITY AND ETHICS IN CRIME FILM. “We’re starting a new unit today.”

  Ava flipped her notebook to a blank page and poised her pen to take notes, ready to think about something other than Nolan. His picture was plastered every two feet in the hallways, and she’d barely made it through the assembly yesterday. Advanced film studies was her favorite class—she’d originally signed up because it sounded like an easy A, a chance to watch movies all semester, but she’d ended up really getting into the classic films they watched. So far, they’d talked about representations of wome
n in early monster movies, the way World War II–era Bugs Bunny cartoons had been used as American propaganda, and identity and trauma in psychological thrillers. There was so much to learn. Under the glitzy, glamorous surface of the simplest popcorn flick, there were often hidden depths of meaning.

  Just like with her, she thought.

  Ava hadn’t always taken school seriously. Her freshman year, she’d thought studying was for losers. Nerds. Geeks. Uglies. Ava was gorgeous, and she knew it. Half Iranian and half Irish, she had striking almond-shaped eyes, smooth caramel-colored skin, and a long-limbed figure with impressive curves. She’d even worked a few modeling gigs, posing for an upscale makeup company based in Seattle and shimmying into skintight designer jeans for a department store’s ad campaign. Who cared about getting into Yale or Stanford—maybe she didn’t even need to go to college.

  Then her mom had died, hit by a drunk driver one night on her way home from campus. Her mom had always insisted that Ava was smarter than her report cards. Every time Ava brought home another mediocre test score, Ava’s mom defended her to her dad: “She’s figuring out who she is, Firouz. She obviously has a great role model for how to be brilliant”—she pointed to herself ironically—“but no one around here can show her how to be brilliant and beautiful at the same time. That’s a burden only she can bear.” Ava’s dad would laugh, and the storm would pass.

  In the void after her mom’s death, Ava had found herself wanting to study for the first time. And it turned out her mom was right—she was smart. Her dad noticed the change in her behavior and her GPA, and constantly told her how proud he was. Teachers began to take her seriously.

  That is, until Nolan Hotchkiss sent all her hard-won efforts crumbling to sand.

  “The crime genre is one that’s changed shape dozens of times over the years, always morphing to provide a commentary on the moral stance Americans take at any given point in time.” Mr. Granger’s voice pulled Ava back to the present. “A lot of crime movies investigate the idea of a gray area of morality, where heroes would be challenged to behave as criminals—and vice versa. Some people love this about crime film, and some people hate it.”

  Ava glanced down at her notes. She’d written the words heroes, criminals, and hate. She realized with a sinking feeling that the hate she’d written looked far too similar to the hate she wrote on Nolan’s face last weekend, the one that was featured in newspapers and newscasts and nationwide blogs. She quickly flipped to a new page before anyone could notice.

  “Now, before we keep going, I’ll hand back your papers on And Then There Were None.”

  Everyone in class sat up, on alert, as most kids did when a teacher was handing back a paper or a test. Ava knew that in the next few moments, there would be huge smiles . . . and some tears, too. Yes, even a class like film studies mattered. Every grade mattered at Beacon.

  “Some of you did very well,” Mr. Granger murmured, peeling a paper off the stack. Ava was sure Mr. Granger looked right at her as he said that, and she sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Some of you, however, need to be challenged. The moral questions this movie asks are complicated and maybe even a little subversive. I’d like to see you really push your arguments on this next unit.” Mr. Granger picked up a stack of papers from his desk and started to move around the room.

  When he got to her row, Mr. Granger set her paper facedown on the desk. Ava turned it over, eager to see his notes—and gasped at the bright red C scrawled across the top.

  A C? She couldn’t believe it. She put lots of effort into this class, watching long-winded interviews with directors and reading film theory articles online. Her papers on the first movies they’d watched, Psycho and Vertigo, had earned her A-pluses. Then again, she’d written the And Then There Were None paper after that eerie group discussion in class—and after she’d lured Nolan upstairs at his party. She remembered the heaviness of his body as he leaned on her, the smell of beer on his breath as he tried to kiss her sloppily. The moment his muscles had gone lax . . .

  She shook her head. The last thing she had wanted to do was think about Nolan, the movie, or what she’d done.

  “How’d you do?”

  She glanced up to see Alex, his arm resting on the back of his seat. His expression changed quickly when he saw that she was upset.

  “Um, not so great,” she mumbled.

  “It’s okay. Maybe he’ll let you rewrite it. We can watch the movie again together—”

  “No,” Ava said quickly, then winced at the flash of hurt in his warm brown eyes. She just didn’t want to see that movie again, no matter what. “Sorry, I just—”

  “Miss Jalali, if you don’t mind, we have more material to cover.” Mr. Granger was watching them both with a frown. Alex quickly turned back to face front.

  Ava barely heard the rest of the lecture. She turned through the pages of her essay, staring at the red ink in the margins. What point are you trying to make? Mr. Granger had written next to one paragraph. This argument doesn’t hold up was scribbled next to another. She felt crushed. It had been so, so long since she’d gotten a C. The grade almost made her feel dirty, and she stuffed the paper into her Hervé Chapelier tote bag, not wanting to look at it anymore.

  Finally, the bell rang for lunch. “We’ll be assigning new groups for this next unit,” Mr. Granger called out over the buzz of people standing up and starting to pack their bags. “Get ready for a new project next week.”

  Thank god, Ava thought, looking up to see her relief mirrored on the faces of her other And Then There Were None group members. Julie took a heavy breath. Mackenzie drummed her fingers against the desk. Ava looked away. She didn’t have anything against any of those girls. She just wanted to put that whole project—and what it had led to—behind her. She knew it was unfair, but if it hadn’t been for those girls and that one conversation, everything would be different. She wouldn’t have gotten a C. She wouldn’t be racked by guilt.

  And Nolan, maybe, wouldn’t be dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FRIDAY NIGHT, JULIE REDDING WALKED up to Matthew Hill’s house. Although the house was large and stately, and well stocked with beer and the typical party snacks, it didn’t even begin to compare with Nolan Hotchkiss’s bash last week.

  Julie shivered, dark memories wafting back to her. But she forced them away just as quickly. She definitely didn’t want to think about Nolan right now.

  She shouldered through the gate to the back patio, feeling that same buzz in her chest she got before every party. Will this one go okay? What if someone sees through me? What if someone guesses? So she did what she always did, a calming trick she’d read about years ago in a book called The Zen Master’s Guide to Calm: She counted, she breathed, she tried to quiet her mind. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Then she shook out her hands, took a deep breath, and pasted her brightest smile on her face. The party smile. The I’m-Julie-and-everyone-loves-me smile.

  The heavy thud of a dubstep track pulsed, punctuated by laughter and squeals. The stone fountain was already full of discarded red Solo cups, along with someone’s iPhone. A couple of kids sat on lawn chairs talking intensely, the smoke of their clove cigarettes coiling around them. As people saw Julie, they waved, their faces brightening.

  “You look amazing!” cooed Renata Thomas, a waifish girl who captained the gymnastics team.

  “Jules!” said Helene Robinson from chemistry class, giving her a huge hug. Three other girls hugged her next. She inhaled their fruity-smelling hair and accepted their loving squeezes. By the time she’d made it inside the house, it seemed like the whole party had greeted her.

  Julie’s pulse began to slow. Of course it was going to be fine. She didn’t need to worry. No one was going to figure out all the things she was hiding. Everyone adored her, and it was going to stay that way.

  Early on she’d learned how to make people admire her. It’d come in handy over the years—because if they were busy noticing how fun she was, how stylish she was, how swe
et she was, they didn’t have time to notice that there were some things about her that were a little . . . off. How she never had anyone to her house. How people didn’t even know where she lived. But that didn’t matter, because Julie was a benevolent queen bee, unlike a lot of the rich, snobby students at Beacon Heights High. She made it easy for people to like her—and so they did.

  “Oh my god, Julie!” cried a voice, breaking Julie from her thoughts. “We’re twinsies! How crazy is that?”

  Julie stared into the eyes of Ashley Ferguson, a junior at Beacon and the one person whom she found it very, very hard to be nice to.

  At least, Julie thought it was Ashley—eerily, it was kind of like she was looking in a mirror. The two girls were about the same height and weight, and Ashley had recently dyed her hair to almost the exact auburn of Julie’s. She also used the same glittery nut-brown shadow on her eyelids and the same neutral gloss on her lips. And tonight—how, Julie wasn’t sure—she was wearing the same BCBG dress Julie had on. Their shoes were different—Ashley’s looked like Jimmy Choos, while Julie wore a pair of Nine West sling-backs she’d gotten on sale.

  It wasn’t unusual for girls to copy Julie’s style. If Julie wore blue glitter nail polish on a Friday, by Monday half the school would be wearing it, too. Usually it made her feel special, powerful, but with Ashley, Julie just felt Single-White-Femaled. The girl tried so hard. It was embarrassing. If she told her therapist, Elliot Fielder, about it, he’d probably say Ashley was what Julie feared she would become if her secret ever got out: mocked, lame, desperate.

  She wondered if Parker had ever looked at Julie like that. When Julie moved to Beacon Heights in sixth grade, she realized immediately that Parker—blond, clear-skinned, and fearless—was the friend she needed to have. It took a few weeks, but Julie nosed her way into Parker’s posse, and pretty soon she was Parker’s best friend. They were both equally beautiful and outgoing, natural partners in crime at the top of the popularity pyramid. And though they talked after school daily, and though Julie had spent many nights at Parker’s house, Parker had never come to hers. Julie had said it was because her mom was super strict. Thankfully, Parker hadn’t questioned it.