Free No Such Thing as Perfect by Sarah Daltry Page B

on hold while you decide if I’m good enough?” I ask, turning to face him.
    “College is hard. I’m doing this for you,” he says.
    “No.” I push him away, angry at the condescension in his voice. He might be older, but it’s been a year. One. Fucking. Year. It’s not like he’s the world’s leading expert on college life transitions.
    “Okay, but you’ll see. I’ll be up in a month and I promise you’ll be happier with this arrangement.”
    “Whatever,” I say. I choose the passenger seat, mostly because Derek is on the other side of me and it’s easier to walk away in that direction. Maybe I’m being childish, but I don’t care. I can go back to school and work on my paper about Elinor and none of this is important. He’s just a guy. It doesn’t matter that he was always the only one. It doesn’t matter that everything I’ve ever told myself is one giant, glaring lie.
    ****
    Y our analysis is shallow. It feels like you only understand emotion or humanity on a superficial level. Maybe try something that challenges your foundations, rather than grasping at them.
    “She’s gotta be kidding,” I repeat to Kristen. She’s been listening to me for the better part of an hour. “I’m not shallow. She’s shallow. God, half the kids in the class didn’t even read the book and I could recite the stupid thing.”
    “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t have any lit classes, but it could be good for you. She’s right. Try something new. You do have a tendency to expect the future to look exactly like the past.”
    “You’ve known me for a month.”
    “Technically almost two, but I live with you, Lily. You don’t like to be challenged, but maybe your professor is right. It’s only a paper, so what’s the worst that happens if you try something a little out there and it’s a disaster?”
    “Um, I fail,” I say.
    “One paper?”
    “Okay, well, maybe not fail , but I won’t be able to be get an A.”
    “So? When you die, your tombstone isn’t going to say, ‘Lily Drummond. B in Lit Study.’ I feel like you’ll survive.”
    “This is so ridiculous. I know everything about Elinor. Ask me. I don’t have time to rewrite this whole thing because she wants me to try something new. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing what’s familiar. Why does everyone want things to be different all the time anyway?”
    Kristen reaches over and takes the paper out of my hand and tears it up. It’s a symbolic gesture; the original is saved on my laptop and I’ve memorized my professor’s comments. Still, I actually reach for the flickering scraps, ready to tape them back together only to be reminded of how shallow I am.
    “Write something else,” she tells me.
    “I can’t.”
    “Then go for a walk. And when you come back, come back ready to start over. There’s nothing wrong with starting over. People do it all the time.”
    Arguing with her is pointless, because people like her do. People like Kristen come away to college and make friends while grabbing a pizza menu in the lounge and shed who they used to be like another skin they’ve outgrown. But for people like me, the past is a guide to the future, a lesson in how many mistakes you’ve made and how to be better. Otherwise, it’s just a cycle of screwing up over and over again and that terrifies me.

20.
    R ocks were complicated. I wouldn’t have thought so, but I’d studied for weeks because there were just too many kinds of rocks. I didn’t understand all the variations in rocks and how they were formed, but I kept making the flashcards. It didn’t stick, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I had never done poorly on anything. I was only ten, but rocks would be the death of me. 
    ‘Explain the difference between slate and shale.’ I’d stared at the question for half the exam. I had been almost certain one was sedimentary, but I didn’t know which – and the other could have been anything. I knew these had to have been in my