Better Than Perfect by Melissa Kantor Read Free Book Online

up to the side of the van and put my head near the window. He was a little older than I was—maybe in college. He was also odd looking; it was almost as if his face was made up of different people’s faces—nose from one person, lips from another. His eyes were very blue.
    â€œI’m really sorry,” I said again, squinting into the dark van. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
    â€œClearly,” he said.
    â€œAre you okay?” asked a girl from the passenger seat in lightly accented British English. Like the driver, she had bright blue eyes and black hair, but where he was weird looking and bloated, she was beautiful, her blunt-cut bob accenting sharp cheekbones and a delicate chin.
    â€œI’m okay,” I said, because it wasn’t like I was going to tell a complete stranger that almost killing myself and two other people was hardly the worst thing that had happened to me all day. “Are you okay?” I asked her. “I’m really sorry.”
    â€œYou’ve got to stop saying that,” said the driver. “It’s getting on my nerves.”
    â€œFor Christ’s sake, Sean, she’s trying to be polite,” said a male voice from inside the van. It had an accent like the girl’s. Hearing another person in the van revealed the magnitude of the accident I’d almost just had. That was three people I’d come close to killing. My legs started to shake.
    â€œAre you sure you’re all right?” asked the girl. “You look a little done in.”
    The side door of the van opened, and a boy got out. He must have been in eighth or ninth grade, and he was holding an electric guitar.
    â€œHi,” he said. “You okay?” He had the same eyes as the driver and the passenger, and the same black hair. I’d nearly taken out an entire family with my shitty driving.
    â€œI’m okay,” I said. “And again . . . I’m really sorry. And I’m sorry for saying sorry!” I added before the guy in the driver’s seat could object.
    I went back to my car. It was lucky no one had tried to enter the club driveway in the past five minutes, since I was stopped directly in the middle of it. There were black skid marks leading up to where I’d stopped and more leading to the van’s tires. Just looking at how close they came before veering apart made my stomach rise up.
    â€œDrive carefully, would you?” the driver called out to me, and even though it was a harsh thing to say and he said it harshly, there was something in his voice that might have been concern. He watched me get into my car before pulling backonto the driveway ahead of my car.
    Sitting in the driver’s seat, I could feel my whole body twitching. I would gladly have curled up in a little ball in the backseat and lain there, shaking uncontrollably, until Sofia got off work and drove me home. But I was parked in the middle of the road. And Sofia didn’t even know I was coming to see her. She didn’t know anything.
    At the thought of what I had to tell her, I started shaking harder.
    I wasn’t the kind of person who sat in her car shaking too hard to drive it, and the fact that that was exactly what I was doing started to make me angry. “Get ahold of yourself, Juliet.” I said it firmly, the way my mom had talked to me when I’d wanted to stay in bed all day. “Get. It. Together. Now.”
    A few yards up the driveway, the van stopped, and I had the terrible feeling they’d discovered that something was wrong with their car after all. I gripped my hands into fists and tried to get control of my shaking. “Stop it now, Juliet. This is no big deal. If there’s some kind of problem, all you need is your license and registration.” The sound of my own voice made me feel better. I leaned forward to get the registration out of the glove compartment just as I heard the door of the van slide open. When I