Pushing Perfect(51)

She stopped walking and turned around to face me. “Look who we have here,” she said.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Do we, now?” She gave me her old up-and-down look and then sniffed, as if I hadn’t met her standards.

I nodded. I wasn’t going to let her scare me off.

“Do you want us to wait for you?” one of the girls asked.

“Nah, I got this,” Isabel said. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.” She waited until they’d walked away. “What’s up, Kara?”

I got out my phone and opened the photo stream we’d pulled from the video camera, then handed the phone to Isabel. She frowned at me but took the camera and looked at the first photo.

“Keep going,” I said.

She scrolled through the pictures, her frown deepening.

“Got anything you want to tell me?” I asked.

“Where did you get these?” she asked, sounding more scared than angry.

“It doesn’t matter where I got the pictures,” I said. “I just want to know why they exist.”

“Not here,” she said. “Come on.”

I followed her into the auditorium, up a small set of stairs onto the stage. She took a left back through the curtains. They smelled musty as I walked behind her. She wound her way down a hallway lined with gray concrete blocks until she reached a door, got out a set of keys, opened the door, turned on the lights, and motioned me in.

She’d taken me to a dressing room in the depths of the theater. The walls were completely lined with posters from shows the school had done over the years, designed to look like Broadway playbills: The Wizard of Oz, Our Town, a whole bunch of Shakespeare, and lots of shows I’d never heard of. It was the first time I’d ever felt like Marbella High had a sense of history—the school had been completely renovated before we got there, and everything was so new and shiny and high-tech that I’d forgotten it had actually been around for decades.

Isabel locked the door behind us and then pulled two chairs close together. “All right, talk.”

“Me? I’m here to talk about you, not me.”

“You already know something about me, if you’ve got those pictures. How did you get them?”

“We set up a camera in the library.”

“Who’s we?”

“Nope,” I said. “I need more from you first.”

“Fine. I was there to pick up whatever was behind those books. Pills, apparently.”

“I know that already,” I said. “I’m the one who put them there.”

“Perfect Kara? With drugs? How the mighty have fallen.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said. “Just tell me who told you to get them.”

“You want me to share my secrets with you? That’s pretty ballsy, considering you’ve never been willing to share yours.”

“I don’t have secrets,” I said. More lying. Would it ever stop?

“Oh, please,” she said. “You and your little transformation?” She motioned toward my face.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not the first person who ever had to cover up a zit. You think we didn’t figure out what was going on? We were your friends. We knew everything about each other. You might not have wanted to tell us why you started letting your mom give you makeovers, but it was totally obvious.”

“Are you kidding me?” There was no way they could have known all along. It wasn’t possible.

“You went from makeup-is-the-devil to being able to do a contouring video in like two point five seconds. And then no swimming? Come on. It might have taken us a while to figure it out, but that’s only because you never said anything. Did you think you were too good for us when you started getting all hot? Or were we just not smart enough for you?”

“That’s not what happened,” I said. I couldn’t believe she and Becca had known about my skin but had read everything else so wrong.

“We tried to understand,” she said. “And we tried to keep the threesome together. But you didn’t want to do anything we wanted to do. And then you flipped out the night we went to that guy’s house and wouldn’t tell us why.”

It was the night I’d tried so hard not to think about anymore. It had been after the disastrous PSAT, when all Isabel and Becca wanted to do was go out and party. I still wasn’t over the panic attack I’d had, and even the thought of a party made me feel the nausea and headache that signaled something was wrong. I was afraid of what would happen if we went somewhere and things got bad.

I was right to worry.

It wasn’t even a party, really. It was just a night at Drew’s house, and a case of beer and some drinking games. It didn’t sound so bad. Better than the clubs, anyway. Becca and Isabel both had their eyes on some of Drew’s friends, and Drew was paying attention to me in exactly the way I’d always hoped he would. The beers were gross, but I drank them, and after a couple I understood why people drank; my whole body felt looser and a little tingly. I started to relax. My breathing came easier, and I even started to think I might have fun.

“What do we have to do to get these ladies to dance?” one of the guys shouted.

Someone hooked their iPhone to the speakers and music started blasting. Someone else shut off the lights, and all of a sudden it was like we were in a different place. Everyone was dancing. I drank another beer and felt like I could fly. I wasn’t worried about freaking out anymore.