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Better than Perfect
Melissa Kantor
They say the higher you climb, the harder you fall – how will Juliet cope when her perfect world starts to crumble around her?Juliet seemingly has it all. Popular, pretty, with laidback, loving parents, a devoted boyfriend and an effortless straight A report card. But then the cracks start to show: her parents separate, which leads to her mother taking an overdose. With the stress of college applications looming on the night of her mother’s hospitalization, Juliet takes comfort in the arms of a stranger. Now her relationship with Jason is on the rocks too – can she piece her perfect life back together before the shockwaves threaten to collapse it completely?
Copyright (#ue2890752-842b-599e-8a99-0ff26366254c)
First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © Melissa Kantor 2015
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015
Melissa Kantor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007580200
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007580217
Version: 2015-01-06
For Jennifer Klonsky
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
Contents
Cover (#u27a8beef-0358-5442-9a22-0a11b6bbb12a)
Title Page (#u2bae728e-aaa4-5b9d-ba79-d796c549faf1)
Copyright
Dedication (#u992f1df0-4a92-5923-8d04-6363e3568020)
Epigraph (#u828612e8-963a-59e6-b198-75034d7655af)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
(#ue2890752-842b-599e-8a99-0ff26366254c)
“I’m going to miss you.”
Jason’s arms were around me so tightly I could barely breathe, but lack of oxygen wasn’t the reason I didn’t say anything. If I tried to talk I was definitely going to embarrass myself by bawling, so I just nodded.
He kissed the top of my head. “Don’t think of it as being stuck at home. Think of it as a chance to study so you can kick my ass on the SATs.”
“Sure, but will my perfect score come between us?” I asked, my cheek still pressed against his chest. Jason had scored a 2380 on his SATs, just shy of a perfect 2400. Those twenty points were a sore spot with him, and if I ever wanted to get him riled up, all I had to do was get a sad look on my face, sigh, and ask what it was like to have gotten so close to perfection.
“I’m man enough to handle it,” he assured me.
Neither of us said anything about why I’d gotten a crap score on my June SATs, which I’d taken a week after my father broke the news to my mother that he was leaving her, just like neither of us said anything about the reason I wasn’t going on a family vacation this year.
Neither of us said anything about how it’s hard to go on a family vacation when you don’t have a family anymore.
Since there was nothing to say, I stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“I’m going to need way more than that to get me through the next two weeks,” he said. His hands on my hips were warmer than the August afternoon, and we kissed again, harder. Jason and I had been kissing since eighth grade, when he came up to me at Max Pinto’s spin-the-bottle party and asked me if I’d done the English homework.
Which is how nerds fall in love.
I heard the click of the front door, and then Jason’s mom called, “Okay, you two. Jason, it’s time.”
Given how often it happened, I probably shouldn’t have gotten embarrassed whenever Jason’s parents caught us kissing, but I did. In some ways I was more daring than Jason—I was the one who’d tried to get him to sneak a bottle of wine from his parents’ wine fridge yesterday so we could drink it on our last night together—but when it came to PDA in front of his parents, he was the one who didn’t care. I slipped out of Jason’s arms and turned to face his mom, my cheeks flushed.
“Sorry, Grace,” I said as Jason wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close. We fit together perfectly. There had been about six months freshman year when I was a little taller than he was, but now he was exactly the right height for me to slide under his shoulder.
“Hey, Mom. I was just telling Juliet that you changed your mind about the international phone plan and she can text me as much as she wants.”
Grace laughed and ran her fingers through her hair, which was dyed the same dirty blond that Jason’s hair was naturally. “Try it and spend the rest of the year paying me back,” she said. Apparently it cost a ton to do international texting, and even though the Robinsons had plenty of money, they weren’t the type of parents to give Jason and his sister whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. While he was in France, Jason and I were going to have to email, which his mom insisted was very romantic and old-fashioned.
“Remember,” Grace added, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” She glanced at the thin gold watch on her wrist. “And … we’ve gotta go. We’ll miss you, Juliet.” After my dad moved out, Grace had asked me if I wanted her to ask my parents if I could join the Robinsons on their vacation, but I’d told her I couldn’t miss the end of my internship at Children United. I’d competed against kids from all over the world to get accepted, and my English teacher who’d written my recommendation for the summer was also writing my recommendation for college. I told Grace that if he found out I’d ditched the program, he might not write my rec in the fall. My reason was a lie, but it was plausible enough that she just smiled and told me how impressed she was by my living up to my responsibilities.
Living up to your responsibilities was a big deal to Jason’s mom.
I was embarrassed by how my throat got tight when she said she’d miss me, and I forced myself to give her a cheerful wave and a jaunty “bon voyage.”
She waved back. Jason’s mother was always beautifully dressed, and today she wore a simple but flattering red linen dress and a pair of red-and-white strappy sandals. The whole ensemble was très Français. “Let’s go, Jason,” she said again.
As soon as she shut the door, Jason put his arms around me. I leaned against him, trying not to see the next two weeks as a black hole I was getting sucked down into.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said quietly.
Lost in my own thoughts, I wasn’t quite listening to him, which seemed to happen to me a lot lately. “It’s all so weird. Like, who am I now?”
Jason stepped away from me and took my shoulders in his hands. “J, that’s crazy. You’re still you.”
“I don’t know, J,” I said. My eyes hit Jason right at his collarbone, and I didn’t lift them to his face. I tried to find the words to explain what I was feeling. “You know that thing where you look at your hand and suddenly you’re like, ‘It’s so weird that that’s my hand.’”
“Stop.” Jason’s voice was commanding. Confident. It was his debating voice, the one that had won our team the regional championship last spring. He let go of my shoulders and lifted my chin. His dark gray eyes stared into mine as he enumerated points on his fingers. “One: you’re a third-generation legacy. Two: you’ve got a 4.0 average. Three: you’re one of ten Children United interns in the whole world. Four: you’re going to spend every second while I’m away studying for your SATs, on which you will get a near-perfect score.” I hip-checked him on that. “Next year, when we’re at Harvard, this will all seem like a bad dream.” When he said Harvard, he tapped me lightly on the nose. That was our plan: to get into Harvard early action.
Jason was our lead debater, but I was no slouch. I thought of countering his points one by one. First: half the kids applying to Harvard are legacies. Second: there are thousands of applicants with 4.0 averages. Third: my internship has consisted of reading useless reports, summarizing them for no one, and sitting in on endless lectures delivered to nearly empty rooms. Fourth: every time I try to sit down and study for the SATs, the words just swim around on the page.
But I didn’t want our last few seconds together to consist of my whining. Instead, all I said was, “Hey! Don’t jinx Harvard.” I was superstitious about our acceptance, which was why, while he was wearing a white T-shirt that spelled out HARVARD in red letters, I’d made him remove the Harvard bumper sticker that he’d put on my Amazon wish list.
The front door opened again, and Grace stuck her head out. “Jason! In the car! Now!”
You didn’t mess with Grace when she said Now! like that. Jason opened his arms, and I slipped into them, hugging him back as tightly as he was hugging me, hoping some of his optimism about senior year—which was only two and a half weeks away—would enter my body by osmosis.
The jerk of the garage door rising was followed by the car honking as Mark backed the Lexus into the driveway. Isabella, Jason’s little sister, rolled down her window and shouted, “Bye, Juliet! Bye! We’ll miss you.”
“Bye, Bella,” I called back. I’d always wished I had a little sister; Jason and I had been together since Bella was six, so sometimes it felt almost like I had one.
His dad gave me a little salute. “Take care of yourself, Juliet,” he said. Mark Robinson was always saying dad things. Take care of yourself. Drive carefully. Do you kids need any money? His saying that made me think of my own dad and how my mother said he was having a midlife crisis. My dad, on the other hand, said it was more complicated than that, that they’d both been unhappy for a long time. My older brother said I shouldn’t even bother trying to figure out what was going on with them, that I had to focus on school because if my grades dropped first semester of senior year, I was screwed with colleges.
Apparently everybody understood and accepted what was going on with my family except me.
Jason gave me one last squeeze, and then he linked his pinky with mine. “J power,” he said, gently squeezing.
I smiled and squeezed his pinky back. “J power,” I echoed. Then he let go and headed toward the car. I stood on Jason’s perfect lawn in front of Jason’s perfect house and watched the car carrying his perfect family back down the driveway, and then—with Mark honking the horn good-bye—I watched it drive down the block, turn the corner, and disappear.
