How To Be A Perfect Girl

How to be a Perfect
Girl

Mary Williams

Copyright 2013 by Mary
Williams

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1

Valentina Hunter: girl of my dreams and love
of my life. I’ve loved you since I was the awkward kid in the back
row of pre-algebra and you were the adorable blonde sitting front
and center. I’ve had a crush on you for as long as I can remember.
I want to shout it from the rooftops: I love you Valentina!

But you’ve never loved me back. To you, I’ve
always been that dorky kid you’re too cool to talk to. Well that’s
alright, my mom says you’re missing out on a lot. But now that
we’re going our separate ways, I had to tell you how I feel or
regret it forever. Even though you barely noticed me, I spent my
whole middle school career trying to impress you; I didn’t actually
want to be on student council, I just wanted to be near you. I
joined the Spoken Word Society so I could express how I felt for
you. Opportunities came and went, and now are no more!

It’s ironic that I only have the courage to
write this now. Now that we are going our separate ways and I
probably won’t see you again, I am free to express my emotions. I
love you Valentina! Soccer playing goddess of Walker Middle School
and Student Body President, I love you! I’d shout it from my own
rooftop, but the internet is so much more public.

Although you were kind of mean sometimes,
like when you made fun of my valentine to you, I don’t think it was
deliberate. Or at least, I hope it wasn’t. From the outside looking
in you always seemed like a nice girl. When my beaker broke in
chemistry and you helped me clean it up, I like to think you knew
what that would mean to me.

And although you laughed
with everyone else when I puked at the end of the Walker-Run, I
can’t blame you; it
was
funny. Maybe I would have laughed too, if I had
been watching instead of living that moment.

I know you will never reciprocate my
affections, and that’s probably why I waited till now to write
this; you can go to Palm Lake Prep with all the other rich kids,
and I’ll go to Gentry. You can leave Mckayla and me and all the
rest behind; I know you’ll be ok. After all, you did better than ok
at Walker. To hear the other kids talk about it, you were the queen
of the school. Queen, empress, beauty-laureate, that’s what you
were to me. Who cares if your mom invented some stupid clasp for
necklaces and it went big on QVC? You belong at Gentry, with the
rest of us Walker graduates. Maybe then I could have a chance to
profess my love for you in person.

Pass this along to your friends. If enough
people like it, maybe Valentina will read what I have to say,

Jaxton.

Valentina read the letter again; it made her
feel bad for ignoring Jaxton all those years. They had been friends
in kindergarten and first grade, but growing up had also meant
growing apart. He was right; she had come to see him as the awkward
kid who sat in the back, barely worthy of notice. His love-letter,
posted on Facebook for everyone to see, had hurt her at first. It
reminded her that her popularity had come at the cost of ignoring
many friends, and sometimes she had to be mean to maintain her
position. When the incident Jaxton had mentioned—his mishap after
the Walker-Run—happened, she hadn’t wanted to laugh. But all her
friends had been laughing, so Valentina had joined in. Being
popular meant fitting in just as often as it meant standing
out.

Val agreed wholeheartedly with the final
plea; she wanted to go to Gentry as well. All of her friends were
going there; it would be home. Palm Lake would not be home.
Valentina saw the girls from that school every time she opened the
door of her family’s new house. They were obsessed with all things
brand-name, and they tittered in absurdly high voices. Valentina
imagined most Palm Lake girls could give Minnie Mouse a run for her
money.

Orientation for Palm Lake Prep was set for
tomorrow. Jaxton had sent the letter at the beginning of summer and
Valentina had meant to go see him; for what reason, she didn’t
know. Maybe she just wanted to relive their carefree kindergarten
days. But now that school was starting again, it seemed like the
opportunity had passed. Besides, she had enough on her mind without
introducing a new factor into the equation. Soccer tryouts would
come in the first month, and Valentina knew she had to be on her
game; the girls’ soccer team at Palm Lake was the best 5A team in
Florida. They’d taken first place in the state tournament each of
the last four years. Valentina was a good player—maybe not a great
one, but definitely good—and she planned on making varsity her
first year.

There was also the matter of involvement to
consider. At Walker, Valentina had been a member of every club she
could; from Monday to Friday, her schedule was booked. As much as
her parents pressured her to do as much as possible, she pushed
herself to do as well as possible. She wasn’t satisfied to be just
a student council representative; she had been the president. She
hadn’t been satisfied to be a first-string player on her
competitive soccer team; she had been the MVP. The Trivia Bowl team
had to create a new leadership position for Valentina, since she
was so determined to be the best even in that. With so much
pressure from without as well as within, Val’s friend Mckayla often
joked that she was surprised Valentina didn’t simply explode from
the pressure.

Mckayla. Valentina felt a pang of guilt as
she thought about the best friend she’d be leaving behind at
Gentry. While she became a high-pitched, Gucci-chasing Palm Lake
girl, Mckayla would flounder at Gentry. She’d always needed
Valentina to push her to do anything; well, anything non-academic.
Mckayla was brilliant, but unmotivated. Valentina knew that if she
wasn’t there, Mckayla could easily become a shut-in, only
interested in her books. Worse, without daily interactions, their
friendship might disappear. This summer, they’d barely seen each
other; true, Valentina had been in Cartagena for most of it, but
when she came home Mckayla had barely wanted to hang out at
all.

Becoming rich, as
Valentina had experienced, was one of the best ways to lose
friends. The wealth wasn’t even hers, which made it ten times
worse. Her last year at Walker, when her mother’s Magno-Clasp had
become famous, she’d been teased mercilessly. Some of her “friends”
had tried to hide their mockery under the guise of humor, but many
were not so kind. When they heard the Hunters had moved, and saw
Valentina pull up in a cab, they had a fit. Val tried pointing out
that it wasn’t her fault, but that only encouraged more mockery.
She never had figured out a good way to stop the teasing;
perhaps it would have required more cruelty than
I’m capable of,
she mused.

Chapter 2

“Here at Palm Lake there are three kinds of
people: those who make things happen, those who watch things
happen, and—“ the tubby teacher smiled at the assembled freshmen,
“—those who wonder what just happened.”

All freshmen were required
to spend the first part of their first day taking a tour of the
school and participating in other orientation activities. Valentina
got the impression that the staff thought their activities were
fun, but she simply found them tedious;
what self-respecting high-schooler wants to play
leapfrog?
At her old school, Valentina had
organized the welcome party for sixth graders entering Walker; even
though they’d been three years younger than this group, she
wouldn’t have deigned to make them play kindergarten
games.

After an hour of playing those stupid
get-to-know-you games with the rest of her Homeroom classmates, the
seniors who were supervising orientation announced they were going
to the auditorium for a short presentation on clubs at Palm Lake.
Valentina was excited; she planned on being just as involved at her
high school as she had been at Walker.

The presenter, Miss Stevens, was insanely
boring. Valentina soon found herself staring at the pile of papers
they’d all been given; there were fliers for every club and
activity imaginable. There were flyers for the “Palm Lake Forensics
Team” (‘and no, we don’t dust for fingerprints!’), a “Historical
Literature Society”, and even a “Baking Club”. Luckily, there were
several normal activities as well. Valentina found the fliers for
Student Council, Future Business Leaders of America, and the
National Honor Society and set them aside. If soccer practice
demanded too much of her time, she’d only be able to join a single
club, but she hoped she would be able to make those three work.

The seniors led the way back to homeroom;
Valentina talked with the blond girl who seemed to be the seniors’
leader on the way back. Her name was Avery, and she turned out to
be captain of the soccer team. Even though Avery seemed preoccupied
by other thoughts, Valentina tried to get as much information about
tryouts as she could; she hoped it would give her an edge. Avery
told her that the smart girls trying out made sure to share the
ball, “It’s not so much about how many goals you can score, since
you’ll probably be on second or third string if you even manage to
make the team. It’s about how quickly you can get it to the real
stars.” The way Avery said real stars made it apparent she counted
herself among them.

Though Valentina tried to like the older
girl, she found it was very hard; Avery walked, talked, and acted
with a repulsive superiority. Everything she did was done with a
sense of entitlement, and when she spoke with Valentina she gave
off the impression that every word was a favor. Valentina disliked
people who behaved like they were superior to her; after all, no
one had that right. As a result, she found herself disliking Avery,
despite her best efforts.

The rest of the day was spent going through
maps of the school. There were approximately three hundred kids in
Valentina’s incoming class, and Palm Lake was barely large enough
to accommodate them. It was a small two-story with a square
floorplan; Valentina suspected it would take less than two minutes
to walk from one end to the other even if the halls were completely
deadlocked.

Compared to Gentry, Palm
Lake was
tiny
.
Valentina had seen Gentry back in seventh grade, and even from the
outside it was apparent how many students that building could hold.
Palm Lake would have fit snugly within Gentry’s library; all told,
the other school was probably capable of housing ten or eleven Palm
Lake-sized squares. The options for classes at Gentry had been more
numerous as well. There, Valentina could have taken French,
Spanish, or several other languages; even German and Latin were
offered. The only foreign language taught at Palm Lake was Italian,
as if anyone would ever use
that
.
At
least Spanish would come in handy if I ever ordered from Taco
Bell
, Valentina mused. She could see no
possible application of Italian, barring a trip to Italy, which
some Palm Lake students apparently took each year.

To Valentina, Gentry seemed better in every
way. She agreed with Jaxton; she ought to have gone there. She
didn’t care that more Palm Lake graduates went on to the Ivy League
than any other private school in the area (as her parents mentioned
nightly). She didn’t care that ninety percent of their graduates
would start college with at least a year’s worth of Advanced
Placement credits. She didn’t care that more perfect ACT scores
were earned by Palm Lake students than at any other school in the
nation (per capita, of course). All Valentina cared about was being
with her friends, her hard-won friends. They weren’t all loyal, and
some of them could be mean on occasion, but at least she knew them.
Even among those who were not her friends, she had known who to
avoid and who could be counted on for a fun time or a laugh. She
had not climbed her way to the top of the social pyramid just to
leave everyone she knew behind.

But that was exactly the prospect that faced
her. Her peers at Palm Lake were not the carefree, fun-loving
middle-schoolers of Walker. They were all overworked and obsessed
with doing well; from what Valentina saw, each of her classmates
was just as determined as she was to make the most of their high
school experience. Almost all of them had signed up for as many
clubs as she had, and those who weren’t going to be in any sports
were looking at several more. The idea worried Valentina; at
Walker, her work ethic had been her edge. What could it be now that
she was surrounded by peers willing to work just as hard? Her blond
hair?

The final part of the day was devoted to
their first class; Valentina and the other students in her homeroom
group had Chemistry. The teacher, Mr. Phillips, was a middle-aged,
bearded man. He smiled at every student as they entered; when they
had all arrived, he began to speak in a kind, assured voice.