Pushing Perfect(28)

Alex’s mom answered the door when I arrived. “She’s been holed up in there all day. Get her to stop looking at all those screens, would you? She’s going to need to change her contacts prescription again if she keeps this up.”

I knocked on Alex’s door and she called for me to come in. Her mom was right; all three screens were on, and they were covered with images of green tables with a mixture of people and animals sitting around them, cards and chips on the table. “Gimme a few minutes,” she said, and I watched as she clicked furiously, moving from screen to screen.

“Which one is you?” I pointed at the players, not seeing the boy avatar she’d shown me before.

“Bottom center,” she said without looking away.

I laughed when I saw that she’d changed her avatar to a scanned-in picture of a screaming baby with a Mohawk. My phone buzzed. I figured it was Mom texting me back, but when I looked down, I saw three new messages from a blocked number. Odd.

I opened the messages and realized they were all photos. The first was a picture of Raj and me from that fancy party. It looked like we were talking. How could anyone have even taken pictures, with all that smoke? Then I remembered the flashes of light, the dust in the air that looked almost like glitter. I’d thought they were strobe lights, but maybe they weren’t.

My heart started to pound. I guessed the Novalert was wearing off.

I scrolled down to the next picture. Raj was holding the baggie of Novalert.

Uh-oh.

And then the final picture. Me, with money in my hand. This wasn’t good.

My phone buzzed again.

Want me to erase these?

I’ll need a favor. Or two.





11.


This can’t be real, I thought. I looked at the pictures again and tried to clear my head. I must have been having a negative reaction to the Novalert. Maybe there was a side effect Alex hadn’t mentioned: paranoid hallucination. I closed my eyes as tight as I could and then opened them again, sure that the pictures would be gone.

They weren’t.

I had the strangest feeling—my stomach wanted to churn, and my head wanted to pound, and my heart wanted to thump, but I still had some Novalert in my system. I wanted to panic, but physically, I couldn’t.

My rational self could, though. Strange how I’d taken Novalert to keep irrational anxiety away, and now it was making it hard for me to freak out when I legitimately had something to freak out about. I’d spent so much time imagining all the downsides of taking Novalert—having a bad reaction, liking it too much, finding out that it didn’t work and passing out in the SAT again, even getting caught buying it—but once I’d actually tried it and then gotten some myself, I’d thought the danger had passed.

It hadn’t.

Now I had to think about a whole other set of terrible options, including the possibility of getting arrested. If the idea of people seeing my skin was the worst thing I could imagine, then the thoughts swirling around my head now were the second worst, and getting close to catching up.

“Your phone’s blowing up over there,” Alex said. “Just give me a minute. I’m almost done.”

“Just my mom checking in,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. I didn’t know what to do, but my first instinct was to keep the pictures a secret. Apparently that was always my first instinct. Which didn’t necessarily make it a good one.

After a couple of minutes of me silently spiraling, Alex turned around in her chair. “Finished!”

“Did you win?” I asked.

“Did I win?” She snorted. “Please.”

I couldn’t imagine ever sounding as confident as Alex did. And I couldn’t imagine her getting into this kind of mess. She could handle anything—she had lots of secret lives, but I got the sense that she kept her secrets to make herself feel powerful. My secrets did the opposite.

“So how did it go? Did the Novalert help?”

“It went great,” I said, relaxing even as I said the words. The test was what was important, after all. I decided not to think about the pictures right now, though in my mind they were all I could see. “It was like the polar opposite of last time. I was focused and calm and everything made sense. And I didn’t pass out.”

“That’s a win,” she said. “Want to let loose tonight? There’s another one of those crazy parties. The boys are going. And Raj asked specifically if I’d bring you. I think he’s actually into you, which is just so great. You guys would be perfect for each other.”

“I told you, he’s not my type.” Except he totally was. He was smart and funny and sweet and so, so cute. Except for the whole drug thing, which I had to keep reminding myself was a very good reason to stay away. Still, I’d found myself thinking about him a lot, no matter how much I tried not to. And now I had another reason to think about him—he was in those pictures with me, after all. I wondered whether I should tell him or whether that would just make him as panicked as I was.

Or maybe he already knew.

He couldn’t have taken them, obviously, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t set me up. I felt my brain spinning again, but the Novalert in my system kept shutting down my body’s desire to react.

“I think you’re being ridiculous,” Alex said, oblivious to my internal freakout. “You guys totally get along, and I know you think he’s hot. You could have a little fling and see how it goes, just for fun.”