The Perfectionists (20 page)

Now she looked around the crimson-and-gold restaurant. The air smelled like soy and ginger, her favorite scent combo. Paper lanterns hung over the tables, giving off a muted glow. Behind the bar a sushi chef stood frowning in concentration, his knife flying over the cutting board. She finally caught sight of Carson at a table in the corner, under an enormous
Gyotaku
-style print of a chinook salmon. He was looking down at the menu and didn't notice her. She still couldn't believe she'd let Parker talk her into this. “You
deserve
a dream date, especially after the past few days,” she'd said, and had physically taken the phone from Julie and texted Carson back an emphatic
yes.

“Hey,” she said as she approached, nerves clanging.

Carson's bright olive eyes flicked up to hers, and he did a double take, standing up so fast his knees hit the table. Julie hid her smile. She was wearing her favorite black dress with faux-leather detail and big sparkly earrings. It looked like something Ava might wear.

“Hi.” He moved around the table to pull out her chair. “Um, you look fantastic.” She loved the way his accent drew out the vowels. Fan-
tas
-tic.

“Thanks. So do you.” He wore a gray blazer, distressed jeans, and a vintage T-shirt with a seventies-style graphic of a sunset over palm trees. Julie was acutely aware that every girl in the restaurant kept turning to ogle him, but she pretended not to notice.

The waitress sidled up to the table, pen poised over her pad. Carson glanced back down at the menu. “So what's good here?”

“Well, we definitely want some spicy tuna rolls and eel and salmon sashimi. And the
ebi
. Oh, and miso soup. And probably some
inari
,” Julie said.

He started to laugh. “Just how much fish do you plan to eat?”

“You've officially been warned. This is not amateur hour.” She raised her eyebrow in a mock challenge, and he grinned up at the waitress.

“Okay. Bring us everything she said.”

“And some edamame!” Julie added as the waitress started to walk away. “Please!”

She met Carson's eyes and smiled. He was so gorgeous, with the gold flecks in his eyes and his smooth dark skin. She almost couldn't believe he'd wanted to go out with
her
.

“So, Julie, tell me something about you that I don't know,” he said, fidgeting with the straw in his water glass.

Julie blinked. There was so much he could never know. She spooled through her life details, looking for something innocuous. “I'm a lifeguard at the indoor pool at the Beacon Rec Center. It's just a lot of wild kids and old-lady lap swimmers.”

His eyes twinkled. “A lifeguard? You sure you're not an Aussie?”

“An honorary one, maybe,” Julie joked. “I guess everyone's born knowing how to swim there, huh?”

“Pretty much,” Carson said, his fist resting on his chin as he gazed at her. “And, you know, everyone rides kangaroos to school and wrestles crocodiles.”

“And here I was thinking you all just drove around the Outback, talking in sexy accents.”

“You think my accent is sexy?” His voice was low, and a smile played around his lips.

Julie smiled back at him, filled with a sudden confidence. “The accent, yes. I'm still deciding about everything else.”

“Well,” Carson said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table. “Let me see what I can do to change your mind.”

The waitress brought out their edamame, and they swapped stories, laughing almost the entire time. Carson told her about filming comedy sketches with his friends in Sydney, and about surfing in the Tasman Sea. “One time, a great white shark circled my surfboard for forty minutes,” he said, widening his eyes. “I had to just stay there and wait him out. I thought I was shark bait for sure.”

“You think that's scary?” Julie teased. “One time, my friend Parker persuaded me to hitchhike to Portland for a Taylor Swift concert. We spent hours on the highway with no luck. And then this skeevy guy picked us up. His car was full of bobbleheads—I mean
packed—
and he kept humming this weird song that sounded like it was from a horror movie. We were so creeped out we made him let us off at the next exit. And then this
other
car came along, and it ended up being Mr. Downing, our algebra teacher.” She giggled at the memory. “Let's just say that we never made it to see Swift.”

Carson reached for an edamame pod. “I've done some hitchhiking in Sydney and the outskirts—it can be dicey. Who's your friend you're talking about? Parker?”

“Uh-huh.” Julie's smile dimmed a little.

“Does she go to our school?”

Julie picked an imaginary ball of lint off her sleeve. But before she had to figure out how to describe Parker, the waitress walked up with their sushi and rolls, and the subject was dropped. Carson gasped in mock horror at the mountains of food on the table before them. “How are we ever going to finish all this?”

“Have you ever
had
eel?” Julie challenged. “Trust me. You'll be licking the plate.” She reached for a piece with her chopsticks and dunked it in soy sauce. Carson grinned and followed her example.

After some more easy conversation, Julie stood up and excused herself. She slipped into the bathroom and checked her makeup in the big round mirror over the sink. Then she experimented with a big, honest, dazzled smile. Everything was going so well that she almost couldn't believe it. Maybe she really
could
do this. Maybe she could even have a relationship. It might be easy to keep her secret. Nyssa had never come to Julie's house, and Julie had been friends with her for years.

She rummaged around in the depths of her purse for the petal-pink lipstick she'd bought just for tonight, thinking about how she was going to ask Carson more questions about life in Australia. He was so playful and funny without being boastful or lame. She snapped the lid back on the lipstick and reached for a paper towel to blot. Then a face materialized in the mirror behind her.

Julie almost screamed.

“Hello to you, too,” Ashley Ferguson said, a cold smile spreading across her thin lips.

Ashley wore a short skirt that was at least a size too small for her. Her boobs peeked painfully out over the cleavage of her tight cashmere sweater. Her makeup looked almost exactly like Julie's, except she'd gotten the shades subtly wrong—her foundation was too dark, and she'd managed to spread a glittery highlighter over her entire face. It was like looking at herself through a fun-house mirror, distorted and grotesque.

“W-what are you doing here?” Julie sputtered.

Ashley silently plucked Julie's purse out of her hands, pulling the lipstick out and applying it in the mirror. It was too light for her complexion, but she smacked her lips together approvingly. Then she dropped the tube into her own purse.

“Um, excuse me, that's mine,” Julie said, staring at Ashley in disbelief.

“But you're so nice, I thought you'd want to share,” Ashley said lightly, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

“Well, I don't. Please give it back,” Julie said, holding her hand out. That lipstick had cost her two paychecks.

But Ashley just looked at her challengingly. “No.”

Julie shifted her weight, losing patience. She had enough to deal with right now; she didn't need a stalker on top of it. “You can't just go around stealing other people's things.
Or
looks,” she steamed. “You're such a freaking copycat.”

Instead of looking taken aback or ashamed, Ashley just smiled at her, looking oddly excited. “Copy
cat.
What an interesting choice of words.”

“Whatever, Ashley. Just get a life already and stop stealing mine,” Julie said, snatching her lipstick out of Ashley's purse and striding out of the bathroom, proud that she'd finally stood up to someone. Maybe the police could push her around, but Ashley Ferguson couldn't.

And more important, she had a hot date to finish.

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, AVA SLUMPED
into film studies, her head down. That was the bitch about school: No matter what happened, no matter who you got in a fight with, who broke up with you, or whether a teacher tried to molest you at his house, you still had to go to the same freaking classes every day. Face the same demons and humiliation. You couldn't run and hide, no matter how badly you wanted to.

Case in point: There was Mr. Granger pacing up and down the aisles, his fingers laced cockily in his belt loops, a look of superiority on his face. “So,” he spoke to the class, “how is
The Postman Always Rings Twice
different from the other movies we've seen in this unit?”

Silence. When Granger passed Ava's desk, she intentionally looked down. To her horror, he paused next to her. He was so close she could feel the heat of his body.

“Miss Jalali?” She flinched at the sound of her name. His voice sounded ice-cold. “What do you think?”

Ava looked up through the long curtain of her hair. “Um. One of the things that struck me was how fatalistic it is,” she mustered. “In
And Then There Were None
, the whole point was that the judge had to punish people because otherwise they'd never be punished. So it's about humanity scheming to have some control over its own circumstances. But in
this
movie, it's almost like fate has set a trap before any of the characters even meet. Cora and Frank are punished because they're, like, doomed to be punished.”

“Because they're, ‘like, doomed'?” Mr. Granger sneered. “Very articulate. Anyone have a less obvious point to make? Colette, what do you think?”

Ava sagged in her chair, the droning of her classmates suddenly very far away. All she wanted was to find some way to prove Granger had murdered Nolan so that he would go to jail—and so that she and her friends would be safe.

But then she noticed something sitting on her desk. It was a folded-up piece of paper, seemingly dropped there a moment ago. Ava glanced around at her classmates, but no one was looking at her. The only person whose gaze was upon her, actually, was Granger's. He glared at her from the front of the room, his eyes dropping to the paper on her desk.

Ava's stomach lurched.
He'd
written it.

She slipped the piece of paper to her lap and opened it up. She recognized his scrawl from his comments on her papers.

Some people know to keep their mouths shut—I guess you're not one of them. I'd be careful if I were you.

And PS: If you show this to anyone, I'll know. You don't want to mess with me.

Ava's mouth dropped open. She looked up at Granger again, but he was facing the board, chalk in hand. Was that a threat? How could the cops not have found those pictures? She thought back to that moment at his house, when he'd caught her glancing at his phone. He must have known she'd seen them and deleted all the evidence.

Finally, the bell rang, and Ava shot up, desperate to be out of that classroom. She had to get as far from Granger as possible.

“Hey! Hey, Ava, wait!”

Even though she knew it was Alex, Ava didn't slow down. Alex caught up with her in the hallway, gasping for breath. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” she said.

“What was with Granger today? He was being a dick. The stuff you said was totally right on.”

She shrugged. “I guess he was in a shitty mood.”

“Hey.” Alex caught her arm and stopped her hard in the middle of the hall. His eyes searched her face. Suddenly, Ava couldn't fight it anymore. Tears sprang to her eyes, her lower lip trembling. She started to turn away from him, but he touched her elbow.

“Hey,” he said softly, giving her a sympathetic look. “You want to get out of here?”

She hesitated. She wasn't sure she was in the mood to hang out with
anyone
. Then again, the thought of staying on campus—where she risked bumping into Granger, or worse, Detective Peters—sent a roiling wave of nausea through her. She wiped her tears impatiently away. “Okay,” she said. “Let's go.”

They took Alex's car. Ava stared out the window as they passed posh boutiques and pedestrians under bright-colored umbrellas. Alex turned the radio up a little as the Beatles' “Here Comes the Sun” came over the air, singing along under his breath as they drove across Lake Washington and into the city. He was adorably off-key.

Finally, the two of them arrived at the Washington Park Arboretum. Alex unfurled an oversize blue-and-green plaid umbrella as he slammed the car door behind him, coming around to hold it over Ava's head as she stepped out into the rain. She inhaled deeply—the air smelled like soil and fir trees.

“I haven't been here since I was a kid,” Ava said, looking around. “But I always loved it.”

“I thought it would cheer you up,” Alex said softly.

He bought two tickets, and they went into the park. Ava's breath caught in her throat. Seattle didn't get many fall colors—the rain kept everything green and lush through most of the year—but here a shock of gold and red leaves fluttered overhead like flames. A peaceful stream wove its way through mossy boulders, murmuring softly in the rain. They made their way down the stone pathway, the only people in the park.
The only people in the world
, Ava thought, her eyes flickering toward Alex.

“So you're letting Granger get to you,” he said. “I can totally tell.”

Ava ducked her head. “He was in a jerky mood. Maybe he didn't have enough girls fawning over him this morning.”

Alex shook his head, a disgusted look on his face. “I don't get why so many girls have a crush on him. He seems like a sleaze.” He frowned. “It seemed like you guys were getting along, though. Like, he used to praise you for
everything.
What ever happened with that paper you were going to rewrite?”