Better Than Perfect Read Free Page A

the right of my parents’ bedroom door; I didn’t need to see the photo that had hung there to remember it. It was of my father, taken the day he and Oliver came home from their first father-son camping trip. My dad had a three-day growth of beard, and he was standing by the door of our old Subaru, a backpack in one hand, a fishing rod in the other. He looked like a man who could handle anything. He looked like a man who could fix anything.
    I want my dad, I thought to myself. I want my dad to fix this.
    But I knew he wasn’t going to be able to. After all, his leaving was the reason everything was broken in the first place.

2
    â€œNot like the religion,” Sofia said, slapping my foot with the flash card she was holding. “Catholic lowercase c . We’ve done this one already.”
    â€œOkay, okay, okay,” I said, biting my lip. Sofia was lying on her bed and I was lying on the floor with my legs hooked over the bed and basically draped across Sofia’s lap. Sofia’s room was tiny, which meant that when we were in it, we were always more or less on top of each other.
    â€œYou keep saying okay, but you’re not saying what the definition is,” Sofia said. She leaned on her elbow and looked down at me, her black curly hair tumbling over the edge of the bed. I’d always envied Sofia her hair, but she said it was more trouble than it was worth; all during swim season (and most of the off-season), she just shoved it into a ponytail.
    â€œPatience is a virtue,” I reminded her.
    She rolled away onto her back. “You know what I think of when I hear stalling like that? I think of all the people who are applying to Harvard early action.”
    â€œDo I do this to you about Stanford?” Sofia was obsessed with going to California, which she believed was her spiritual home. Her mom’s family was from there, so if she got in, her mom was going to move west with her, which Sofia was actually happy about. I couldn’t imagine my mom moving to Cambridge with me if I got into Harvard. Of course, I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen to her when I left, either.
    It was one of the many, many things I tried not to think about lately.
    â€œYou are competing with hundreds of girls who want to go to Harvard,” Sofia reminded me.
    â€œThank you so much, Sofia Taylor.”
    â€œ Thousands of them!”
    â€œWhat is your point ?” I swung my feet off the bed and sat up, irritated.
    Sofia sat up also and pointed at me with the index card. “My point is they can probably all define catholic . So why can’t you?”
    Like a bolt of lightning, the definition came to me. “Including a wide variety.”
    Sofia held up her palm. “High five, baby. That’s the last of them.”
    I slapped her hand lightly, then lay back down. Sofia was also retaking the SAT, but she only wanted to get her score up by a little bit. Even though we were supposedly both studying, our study sessions had turned into her spending hours trying to drill vocabulary words into me.
    â€œDo you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “My mom says she misses you.” Sofia’s mom was a nurse on a maternity ward. She’d started working the night shift when we were sophomores because she said she got to see Sofia more if she worked from midnight to eight a.m. Usually they had dinner together before her mom went to work.
    â€œLet me call my mom,” I said. My mother and Jason’s mother said they liked Sofia’s mother, but sometimes I got the sense they didn’t totally approve of her. She’d had Sofia on her own, and they lived in a pretty small apartment, and she worked, while both of our moms stayed home. Whenever Sofia and I had a sleepover, we almost always stayed at my house. My mom had never said I couldn’t sleep at Sofia’s. Instead, she’d say, “I think I’d prefer if you two slept here.” Now