Chapter 1  Emily the Perfectionist

 

  I love ending the school day with soccer practice. I like running fast. I like joking around with my teammates. I like the feeling when I kick the ball and it goes into the goal! There’s just one thing I don’t like….

  “Ugh! I hate how I feel after soccer,” I complained to my friend Natalie as we walked home. “I’m such a sweaty mess!”

    Natalie laughed. “What are you talking about? You look perfect, as usual.”

  Then she stopped and stared at my face.

  “What?” I asked nervously.

  “I was wrong. You do have one hair out of place! Let me fix it. You shouldn’t let anyone else see you like that,” she answered.

  I didn’t realize she was joking. I must have looked horrified, because she said, “Emily, I was kidding! You look fine. Great, as always!”

  Even though she was kidding, I touched my head, trying to find the stray hair.

       Natalie knows me pretty well. When we’re baking cupcakes for our club, she has seen me carefully scoop the batter into the mini tins without spilling a drop. She’s seen me use a tweezer to put sprinkles on each cupcake, one by one. She knows that I check every cupcake before we pack them up for a client.

       I pick out the ones that aren’t pretty enough and replace them with better ones.

  “People are paying us money for these,” I would tell my friends. “They have to be perfect!”

    Natalie still hasn’t seen all of me, though. She doesn’t know that I neatly roll my socks and arrange them in a drawer by color. She didn’t see me cry that time I got a 98 on a spelling test instead of 100. She doesn’t know that I steam all my shirts to get the wrinkles out.

       “Who does that anymore, Emily?” Katie, my stepsister, always asks me. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  Is Katie right? I wondered. Being perfect all the time is exhausting!