Perfectly Flawed

Falsely Anxious

a/n: so, I deleted the original first chapter because it did't feel quite right. Please vote and/or comment. And, thanks for reading! :)

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"Now is the age of anxiety." - W.H. Auden

I was sitting in the living room when I heard the news about Evan Saunders. He had been a student at Berkeley High School, just thirty minutes or so away. The anchor woman said that the eighteen-year-old had gone missing a week ago. His body had finally been found early that morning. There were obvious signs of struggle, but no suspects had been called out.

“Isn’t that terrible? I want you to be careful. Who knows when they'll catch the person responsible,” Mom said while walking through the living room and towards the kitchen. Following after her was Petya, a short woman with a thick accent from some Eastern European country. She was also my mother’s personal doctor. That was one of the first things to gain popularity. Hospitals literally rented out doctors to the people who could afford it.

Sadly, my mother was one of those people.

What about the people who couldn’t afford doctors? Even more importantly, what about the people who really needed doctors, but couldn’t afford them?

Of course, I couldn’t bring this up to my parents.

“They have no idea why he was killed,” I told her.

On the TV screen there was a scene of the Evan’s family. He had two other siblings and both of his parents. I felt my heart break for their loss. And then the clip was over.

Now, on the screen was a middle-aged man dressed in casual clothes sitting a table across from a teenage girl. It was an ad for something. Probably something to help teens communicate with their parents. Not wanting Mom to hear it and get any ideas, I turned off the TV and got up off the couch, taking my empty cereal bowl with me. I had a few more minutes before school to kill.

Walking into the kitchen, I saw Petya and Mom looking over a catalog. I was a little curious about it, but knew better than to ask. If I did it would only mean that I would be dragged into the latest, fashionable “flaw.”

So, ignoring the two, I went straight to the sink and rinsed out my bowl. I had barely made it to the doorway when Mom said my name.

“Yes?” I asked turning to look at her.

“I was just wondering, how are the pills working?” she asked glancing up at me before looking back down at the catalog. She pointed to something in it and Paula nodded her head.

“Yeah,” I told her, trying to look convincing.

At that moment Petya looked up at me. Sometimes I get the strangest feeling like she can tell that I’m lying. But, I don’t know how she would ever know. I act just like everyone else, constantly berating my body and worrying that there’s something else wrong with me. Really, I just don’t like Petya. She’s literally making money off of problems that my family doesn’t really have.

Quickly, I moved out of the kitchen.

“I’m going to head out a little early,” I told Mom while reaching for my backpack in the hallway. That’s when I noticed that the other half of my parental unit was missing. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s upstairs,” she said. “The pills he’s taking really knocked him out last night.”

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked while moving to the kitchen doorway, frowning at the thought that Dad was still out cold. Sometimes I worried about the people I cared for crossing the thin line between harmless flaws and true problems. What if my dad didn’t wake up from his sleep? What if the pills he had taken were too strong? I shook my head, wanting to clear my mind of those morbid thoughts.