No Such Thing as Perfect by Sarah Daltry Page A

when I say that. I don’t want to confuse this. I’m enjoying Jack’s company, but the idea of dating anyone – especially with the still present Derek problem – makes me want to run until I can’t recognize anyone.
    “Don’t you have a boyfriend?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “We broke up,” I say. “Sort of.”
    “Oh. You haven’t mentioned it.”
    “Well, it’s not a breakup. Maybe. We’re on a break. He needs time or something. But we have plans in a couple weeks. For my birthday. So I don’t know.” It all sounds ridiculous when said aloud and I’m angry at Derek all over again.
    “Okay, then. Well, not a date anyway. There’s something I want to show you, but it would be one hell of a shitty date.”
    “Yeah, I’m free,” I say.
    “Can I ask you something?” he asks.
    He’s barely eating, which I notice since I’ve been rebuttering a piece of toast since we sat down, trying to appear interested in being here, but he keeps watching my knife slather the yellow spread onto the soggy slice and his dinner is getting cold.
    “Ask away.”
    “Do you ever say no?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean you don’t know me. You don’t know if I plan to take you out into a field somewhere and do horrible things to you.”
    “Do you?”
    “God, no. But I mean, you come to my room with no fear, yet you rarely offer an opinion. You nod and agree, but in the short time I’ve known you, you seem to spend a lot of time saying yes and very little arguing.”
    “Not everything needs to be an argument,” I point out. “And I’ve snapped at you plenty.”
    “About Marianne and Elinor. About abstract concepts, but it’s okay to say no.”
    “Why does it matter? It just upsets people when you’re contrary and you haven’t given me a reason to treat you that way.”
    He takes a bite of his pasta finally. I can almost feel the slimy noodles in my throat, but I’m getting fat. I salivate watching him eat the cold cafeteria pasta. Flipping over the heavily buttered bread, I start on the back side.
    “I wasn’t kidding when I told you I had only two friends,” he says. “And all three of us are beyond fucked up. I’m not a good person. You should just know that, before you agree to do anything with me at all. There are things in a person’s life that you can’t stop knowing once you learn them.”
    I think I’m a selfish person. At no point has Jack benefitted from knowing me. I go to his room and we talk and I do homework, but I don’t encourage him to talk about his life. He makes vague references and says he’s uncomfortable, and I allow that to be enough, but it’s also me. All I’ve done is think about what I did wrong to upset Derek, about my mom and how she would judge Jack, and about what I can do to be better and to put my life back in order the way it used to be.
    “I’m sure you’re not a bad person,” I tell him, but we both know I’m lying. I’m not sure of anything. I’m not even sure what kind of person I am.
    “Tell me about your boyfriend,” he invites. “Or your not boyfriend.”
    I want to eat my nasty bread slice, but it’s too heavy now. I watch Jack spin spaghetti around his fork and it hurts inside of me, in my bones even, but my mom said I had gotten fat and Derek broke up with me and the pasta is to blame.
    “What about him?”
    “What’s his name?” he asks.
    Maybe he’d let me taste just the sauce.
    I peel the soggy crust off of the bread, careful not to get any of the butter on it before I eat it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wanted to look normal, like I was readying myself to eat it, but now it’s a Day-Glo yellow square in the middle of a cracked plastic plate. That feels like a metaphor.
    “Derek,” I reply. Jack’s watching me pretend to eat, but he says nothing.
    “What kind of guy is Derek? Does he read Jane Austen, too? Does he hate the fall or like the security of trees?”
    It’s really strange how