Free No Such Thing as Perfect by Sarah Daltry

when you don’t need them, but once you reach a point where you’re surrounded by nothing but questions, you’re standing alone in the middle of people who don’t have a clue.

18.
    W hen Derek returned to school after my birthday, we didn’t talk about Jodie. She was a fleeting idea at dinner and then she was gone. I didn’t know if they had fought, if she’d already known about me, or if he made up another reason, but when I asked if we were dating, he said yes and I didn’t want to dig deeper. So when her name came up in the spring, it felt ominous.
    “Jodie and I were up all night trying to figure this out,” he said. “I am never going to pass this class.”
    It was American History I – Revolution to Civil War, and I didn’t understand what was so hard about it for him. We all had to take almost two years of the same content in high school. I wasn’t even sure how he had gotten into college if he’d been this bad of a student. But when he said her name, I forgot all about Crispus Attucks. With apologies that his death was secondary to Derek and Jodie, I took a deep breath and asked the question I had been afraid to ask for nearly six months.
    “You and Jodie still hang out?”
    “Yeah. Don’t worry about it, Lily. I’m with you. She knows that and it’s fine.”
    “You were up all night? At the library?” I asked.
    “You aren’t serious right now, are you? I’m going to fail and you’re worried about there being a girl in my room? The whole world isn’t like high school, you know. Don’t be that girl.”
    So I wasn’t that girl. I helped him learn about the Boston Massacre and he talked and I listened and I was good. I did the things he wanted from me, and that made me happy because I had always wanted Derek and love was about sacrifice and it was about trust and it was all the things I’d been told. But when I told Abby about the conversation and my fears and doubts over lunch the following week, it scared me when she voiced things I didn’t know how to put words to by myself.
    “You think he’s cheating?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I mean, he’s right, I guess. It’s just so high school of me to ask. So there was a girl. And so they dated before-”
    “You mean they used to fuck. Don’t play innocent. He fucks girls and he throws them away and you refuse to see anything but some guy you liked when you were fourteen. He’s an asshole and he probably is fucking her. But he likes the idea of owning you, so he keeps you distant from it,” she said.
    “But he loves me. He wouldn’t do that. He loves me. And he’s right. I’m his girlfriend. I need to act like it and stop worrying,” I argued.
    “Is that what you’re majoring in? Girlfriendship? I didn’t know that was a thing.”
    “It’s not like you’re single. You’re never single,” I reminded her.
    “So? I like the guys I date, but they’re not who I am, Lily. When are you going to be Lily, and not Mrs. Drummond’s daughter or Jon’s sister or Derek’s girlfriend or my friend? Who is Lily? Do you even know?”
    I’d been picking at my lunch, but the conversation was too big for the cafeteria and it was too bright and too loud and I needed to talk about something normal. I needed life to be as easy to make sense of as things in packets and books and on the classroom walls. I felt like I was preparing for this obscene pop quiz and I had nightmares of showing up with only a giant green marker and I couldn’t fill in the bubbles – not the right way – and I was going to fail. This quiz was my life and I was failing and that’s too much to think about when someone is sitting next to you making a bong out of a Hawaiian Punch can and your tuna salad sandwich is soggy and the plastic circle seat of the table under your ass feels like it’s going to spin off into space any minute.
    “I have to go,” I said and I nearly fell from the seat, my balance off kilter.
    Abby said something, and it sounded