Pushing Perfect(12)

There was a light tapping on the open door of the nurse’s office and I looked up to see Ms. Davenport. “I came as soon as I could,” she said. “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t help it—as soon as I heard her voice, I started crying. Ugly crying, too, not just a few tears; I sobbed until I was almost hiccuping, burying my head in my arms. The cot creaked as Ms. Davenport sat down next to me and patted my back, waiting for me to calm down. Once I’d stopped crying long enough to try to breathe, she handed me a Kleenex. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I opened my mouth to say no, but instead all these words came pouring out, along with more tears. “I can’t believe this is happening. I worked so hard and now I’m so embarrassed and I’m never going to get into college and I’m never going to get out of here and everyone saw and now they’re all going to talk about me and my parents are going to be so disappointed and . . .” I started sobbing again, enough that I couldn’t talk.

I couldn’t believe I’d said all that to Ms. Davenport, but it made sense that if I said it to anyone, it would be her. She’d become more than just a teacher to me; we’d worked really closely together during geometry, and after a while I’d started telling her about all the pressure I was feeling, and she gave me advice on how to keep it from getting to me, reminding me that everything I was doing was for me, not for my parents, or for the competition. It didn’t always work, but I did try to keep my eyes on the future. My future. I was thrilled to get her for calculus, and sometimes I’d stay after class or even after school and talk to her about colleges. She gave me a list of some of the East Coast schools with good math programs and said she’d write a recommendation for me for wherever I wanted to go. All the students loved her, so it made me feel special that she’d taken a particular interest in me.

I hated that she’d seen me like this, but I knew she wouldn’t judge.

“All right, Kara, you’re all about logic, so let’s break this down together,” she said. “I know you, so I have no doubt that you worked hard. And I understand you’re embarrassed, but no one made fun of you; a couple of the girls asked if you were okay, but everyone else just went back to the test, because that’s what people do—they worry about themselves. No one’s paying as much attention to you as you think, and that’s okay.”

I wanted to believe her, but I also knew that the worst of it wouldn’t happen in front of her. That would come later. I wondered whether Becca and Isabel were the girls who’d asked about me.

“You’re also going to get into college, and you’ll get out of Marbella too, if that’s what you want. You’re right that the SATs matter to a lot of places, so that’s something you’ll have to figure out some other time, but there are also schools that don’t require them, and some of those schools are fantastic. You have options. And I met your parents at parent-teacher conference night back when you were a freshman, and they were very loving and supportive.”

I did my meditation breathing while I listened to her. I liked that she knew me well enough to know that logic was the best way through this—if she’d just been all sympathetic and sweet, I’d have never stopped crying. “Okay,” I said, and tried to blow my nose as discreetly as possible. I hoped my makeup hadn’t smeared all over the place. “That helps.”

“Now, do you want to tell me what happened in there?”

“Panic attack,” I said from behind the Kleenex. It was getting easier to say it out loud.

“I’ve given you lots of tests and never even seen you break a sweat,” she said. “What’s different about the SAT? Or is it just the SAT?”

“It’s not just the SAT, but it’s mostly that. I just get so stressed out about it, because my scores need to be perfect if I want to go to Harvard, since there’s, like, nothing else interesting about me. I used to swim, but I don’t anymore, so now all my extracurriculars are just filler, and all the schools will know it. I have to ace this test. But if I keep losing it every time I try to take it, I’ll never get in.”

“If you’ve convinced yourself that you need perfect scores, then it’s no wonder you’re panicking every time you think about this exam. Perfection is an unrealistic aspiration.”

“That’s what my mom says. I should ‘just do my best.’” I made air quotes. “But we both know that’s not always good enough. She just won’t say it. She and my dad were both great students, killed it at Stanford, killed it in grad school. She can pretend that she doesn’t want me to be perfect, but she doesn’t mean it.”

“Maybe she does,” Ms. Davenport said. “Maybe you should take what she says at face value. Do what you can. Take the pressure off. All this pushing for perfection is damaging, you know. You’ve heard about what’s happening in Palo Alto.”

Of course I had. Everyone had. The papers were calling them suicide clusters. Kids who were scared of not getting into the right colleges didn’t see any other futures for themselves. I bet a lot of them felt like me. I don’t know what kept me from reaching that level of despair, but I felt lucky that I’d been able to avoid those kinds of thoughts.

“That’s not happening in Marbella,” I said.

“It could. Same circumstances—public high school in an affluent town, parents putting pressure on their kids to go to elite schools. I don’t want to have to worry about you.”