Page 19 of Perfect on Paper

I had about half an hour before Brougham was due to arrive for round two. Even though he’d given me way less time to prepare than I would’ve liked—while simultaneously ruining my potentially romantic night with Brooke—at least I’d been able to grab a notebook from the staff supplies closet at school. That was a start, right? Now, to work on the personalized plan for His Lordship of Demands and Condescension, Alexander Brougham the First.

I shoved my laptop backward on my desk to make room for the notebook, then opened it to page one. After some thought, I settled on a title page.

THE EX-GIRLFRIEND GETTER-BACKER EXPERIMENT

STARRING:

DARCY PHILLIPS—A LITERAL MIRACLE WORKER

ALEXANDER BROUGHAM—SINGLE, BUT NOT QUITE READY TO MINGLE

I devoted a few minutes to decorating it with hearts, lips, sparkles, and stars, until I felt too guilty to keep procrastinating. Okay, all right, focus. I decided to start with a list of things I knew about Brougham. That seemed like a good bouncing-off point.

Character Analysis:

Alexander Brougham

Thinks he’s much hotter than he is.

Total entitled asshole.

No wonder Winona left him.

No ability to problem solve, because he usually solves issues by throwing unlimited cash at them until they go away.

Doesn’t care about anyone but himself!

After a moment’s thought, I ripped this page out and crumpled it up. Better not let Brougham see that one. But this helped. Well, helped in that I now knew what we had to devote today’s session to: information gathering. A relationship assessment, or postmortem, if you will. I couldn’t begin to help Brougham until I knew what went right in the first place, as well as what went wrong.

Energized, I darted down the hall to Ainsley’s room. Again, the air was clogged with vanilla and caramel. Kneeling on her plush carpet, surrounded by scissors and scraps of fabric and sewing patterns, was Ainsley. Apparently, she’d started work on her next creation the moment she got home from class.

A lot of the time she kept her door closed so she could film her next YouTube video in peace. Once I’d burst in on her during what was meant to be a time-lapse take, and she’d raged at me so dramatically our neighbor poked her head over the fence to check no one was hurt. But her open door now was my green light, so I went in without hesitation, carefully stepping around the bomb site of material and errant clothespins. “What are you working on?” I asked.

Ainsley was halfway through tracing a pattern onto the back of a pale blue strip of cottony fabric, so she didn’t take her eyes off it while she answered. “I found a hideous bag of a lace dress at Jenny’s,” she said, referring to Jenny’s Thrift Store, one of Ainsley’s favorite haunts, “that I think’ll work well as a two-piece crop and skirt set. I’m making a new lining for it because it’s practically see-through right now, and then”—she grabbed a pair of scissors—“I’m thinking like an elastic, frill trim on the bottom of the top part.”

“Nice. That’ll look awesome.”

“I hope so. Will you be my model?”

“For a crop top?” I cringed. “I think I’ll pass. I can’t wait to see you in it, though. I bet you’ll look incredible.”

Ainsley smiled to herself, pleased at the compliment.

She had always been thin, narrow hipped, and tall, taking after Dad’s side of the family in height and figure. Her hips and chest had gained gentle curves over the last few years, but she was still very slim by all measures, more likeour paternal aunts. I was tall, too—at five foot nine, I towered over most girls my age—but I had Mom’s bone structure. “Child-bearing hips,” Mom had commented when I was still a child myself, an eleven-year-old who’d just gotten her first period and suddenly exploded outward with hips and breasts that couldn’t be contained by any of my old school clothes.

At the time, I couldn’t have cared less if my hips were ideal for sliding out babies with ease and grace, I just didn’t want to be the only kid in the grade who had to go up two uniform sizes in a year to accommodate puberty’s offerings. These days, I liked my hips, and I liked my boobs. Even if they meant that I couldn’t get away with borrowing any of Ainsley’s old size-six school clothes.

But the above didnotmean I wanted to model a crop top on a channel with thousands of subscribers, thanks all the same. Loving my body didn’t make me magically immune to stage fright, or to comments from nasty, sexist strangers on whether girls should or should not be wearing revealing clothing to begin with. I didn’t know how Ainsley did it. Anonymity was a warm blanket, wrapping me in a safe cocoon free from personal attacks.

“What’s up, anyway?” Ainsley asked as she dug around in her wicker sewing kit for measuring tape. “How was Q and Q Club?”

“That was yesterday. They moved it to Thursdays for Mr. Elliot this year. Itoldyou.”

“Okay, but counterpoint, I’m resistant to change and repress that kind of stuff.”

“To answer your question, they’re all missing you desperately.”

“Oh, wow, I almost believed you withthattone.”

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