Messy Perfect

by Tanya Boteju

Genres: YA Contemporary; YA Coming of Age; YA LGBT & Pride; YA Social Themes

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of Mason Deaver and Becky Albertalli, this tender, raucous novel follows a rule-following, perfectionist teen who starts an underground GSA club at her conservative Catholic high school, from the acclaimed author of Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens.

Cassie Perera is a star student in St. Luke's junior class. But the new school year brings an unwelcome surprise—the return to St. Luke's of Cassie's former friend, Ben, who left a few years ago after a homophobic bullying incident Cassie knows she didn't do enough to prevent.

Still harboring guilt from her inaction, Cassie decides, in her usual, overzealous way, to team up with the neighboring public school to found an underground Gender and Sexuality Alliance—as a complicated strategy for making things up to Ben. Secretly, Cassie is also tempted by the possibility of opening up about her own sexuality for the first time.

As Cassie’s new friends urge her out of her comfort zone, she unlocks a kind of joy and freedom she’s never felt before—even as she struggles to balance these experiences with her typical tightrope of being the perfect daughter, student, and Catholic.

Cassie’s perfectly curated life unravels into turmoil, but can she embrace the mess enough to piece together something new?

Release date: April 1, 2025

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue

Ben rearranged my world from the moment he walked into it.

When he sat down next to me in the fourth grade and said, “Hi, I’m Ben,” with the biggest smile on his face, I didn’t know you could just do that—sit next to someone of the opposite gender and introduce yourself like it was nothing. Like you weren’t going to look like a weirdo or start rumors that you liked that boy or girl.

Before I’d even had a chance to say hi back, he took out his multicolored stationery and started to describe a drawing he’d made, a circle of cartoonish birds in tutus twirling between jagged-looking trees. He explained—in one long breath—how he danced ballet and how one of the dances he was learning made him feel like a bird sometimes. A lisp presented itself at the end of certain words, but he didn’t seem to care.

At nine, I’d never met a boy who danced ballet and had a lisp and seemed beyond comfortable talking to girls like this. It didn’t feel quite right, and my brain told me this boy was odd. Between Catholic church and Catholic school and Catholic immigrant parents, I’d already learned a very specific set of rules and expectations for how to carry myself, and Ben seemed to have a completely different set of rules.

But I couldn’t pull myself away from his drawing or his chatter, even if I was a little embarrassed by it all at first. Once he’d handed me a lime-green pencil from his polka-dotted pencil case, that was it. We were instantly friends, and by fifth and sixth grades, we were even closer friends. We both hung out with other kids, too—Ben was athletic enough that the boys tolerated what set him apart from them. And I forced myself to hang on to a small group of girls who gossiped and giggled over boys at lunch when I’d rather be playing ball hockey with those boys in the parking lot. Some rules were difficult to break at that age, I guess—at least when we were around other people.

When we weren’t at school, though, we managed to carve out a world separate from all of that. The creek that ran right behind my house and through the school grounds became the center of that world. We used to play there constantly, exploring its waterways and grassy banks, searching for new paths and openings.

The water was shallow and slow enough that we could cross on rocks that rose above the stream or simply slap through it with bare feet or boots. On one side of the creek was the school playground. On the other side were dense bushes and tall, soft grass.

Early on, Ben and I were two spies, arranged in the thicket like crouching tigers, accompanied by notebooks and pencils. We would hunker down in our favorite hollowed-out space in the brush, the grass cushioning us as we added to our notes. Ben would take out his bright journal and write his sentences in elegant cursive he’d learned from his mom. Not like me, who scribbled in fat, bubbly lettering—so different from the perfect print I used in class—and filled entire pages of my notebook with just one or two sentences, not caring about how big and ugly it was because no one would see it but me and Ben.

And Ben didn’t 

care about my messy writing or the nonsense I wrote, because we both reveled in nonsense back then, making ridiculous observations like “Pecky the duck hates to get his butt wet” and “Pirates have left their rum bottles here and the rum tastes like feet.”

But as time wore on, our imaginary observations became more tangible.

I’d fling a sentence across the page. “The rocks are greener today, slicker and sad,” I’d read out loud, feeling fancy.

Ben started to take a little longer to write down his thoughts. I would watch him press his pencil into the paper, his tongue poking through his lips as he wrote with care and assurance.

“What did you write?” I’d ask.

“I wrote, ‘Sometimes, I wish I could live right here.’ ”

I think we were both starting to feel that way by then—like we were building a little home for ourselves, away from the rules and expectations that just seemed to grow stronger and more rigid around us.

Midway through the sixth grade, our notations shifted to questions and contemplations. At times, we’d abandon our notebooks altogether.

“It’s annoying that I have to wear a kilt when you get to wear pants, right?” I asked once, examining the smudges of dirt on my knees.

We weren’t supposed to wear our uniforms after school, especially if we were playing outside. We weren’t even supposed to be in the creek by then, since my parents had decided it was too mucky and maybe even a little dangerous, despite the fact that the creek felt safer to us than most places.

Nonetheless, even though the school and creek were just behind my house, my parents wanted me to come home right after school with my younger sister, Kendra. Ben could come, too, but we were to stay put until one of my parents arrived home from work. And we weren’t to roam around in the creek anymore.

We’d shunned the rule, however, swearing my sister to secrecy and setting her up with reruns of Saved by the Bell as we escaped to the creek, not even changing out of our school clothes in our urgency. It was like we needed to be there, at the water, in the bushes, to be these other people we were becoming. People who didn’t want to wear uniforms, who questioned things we’d accepted to that point, who wanted to explore more than just the water and grass.

Ben shrugged at my kilt question and said, “Yeah. Dumb rules for girls, I guess.”

“Dumb rules for girls and boys,” I said. “Why shouldn’t you get to wear a kilt, too?”

I giggled like it was a joke, but it wasn’t really. Ben had already broken so many of those kinds of rules. He’d been dancing ballet since he was four. He still had a lisp and didn’t say the gross things other boys his age said. He didn’t show much interest in girls, except me. He was soft and sweet. He was periodically teased for these things, but I loved those parts of him—his softness and self-assurance had made me feel safe right from the start, like I could break some rules, too.

And I wanted to. I didn’t want to wear dresses to church anymore. I wanted to go to the sixth-grade parties my parents said were too unsupervised and too late. And when the girls in my grade sent little bits of paper to a boy to ask him if he liked this girl or that, I wished I could send a note to the girls asking if they liked me.

“I can do whatever I want,” Ben said, with a mixture of defiance and sass. After a moment, he added, “You can, too.”

I scrunched up my nose and looked at the closed journal in my hands. “Maybe.” Talking about these things here, with him, felt okay. But the rules seemed so much heftier beyond this space.

“I might not go to church anymore.” I remember he said this like it was the most ordinary thing. Like he and I hadn’t been going to church all our lives, hadn’t been baptized and received first Communion and now sat near each other in the pews each Sunday.

We were crouching in our favorite spot by the creek, and it was March.

“Really?” I asked, a twinge of jealousy in me. Not because I didn’t want to go to church anymore—I liked church, even if I was starting to question some aspects of it—but because he’d be defying his parents, and because I’d miss him sitting in the pew in front of me if he stopped coming.

He shrugged again. “Maybe. I’m not sure it’s for me.”

“Oh” was all I said. I guess I was trying to get my head around that kind of choice—the making of it and the repercussions that might come.

It went on like this, Ben and me, hidden away from prying eyes, becoming emboldened to share the bits of ourselves we weren’t sure we could share with anyone else—the questions about God and Jesus and Mary we couldn’t ask in our Catholic school, the wonderings we had about the two women who lived together in the house at the end of my street, the desire to be close to other girls and boys in ways that no one else seemed to want. With Ben, there in the creek, I was discovering new ways of being and was thrilled by the possibilities.

But we should have known our private world would crack open at some point.

When it finally did, it was May and we were nearing the end of the sixth grade.

After an annoying episode in school that morning where several girls were made to kneel on desks so our teacher could measure the distance between their kilts and knees, Ben and I had stolen away at lunch to a new spot we’d created along the creek bank—one with a bit more room to move around but that was still well hidden, or so we thought.

The school didn’t allow us to go in the creek, but we went anyway—when the most distracted teachers were on duty, and when the other kids were too absorbed in themselves to notice. But maybe we were a little careless that day. Maybe we were just annoyed and needed an escape. How else to explain the risk we took?

We’d decided to switch uniforms. We wanted to see what it felt like. We wanted to break these dumb rules others had set for us. I’d hinted to him by then that I might like girls. I already knew he liked boys—not just because of all the things that set him apart from other boys, but because of how easy it felt to talk about my own secret longings with him. Like he knew exactly how I felt.

As I climbed into his too-long school pants and he buttoned my kilt around his waist, we couldn’t help our quiet giggles. We stood across from each other for a second before his face grew very serious and he said, “Oh, hold on.” He rolled the waistline of the kilt a few times so the kilt rose up his thighs several inches. We looked each other up and down. We burst out laughing again, forgetting where we were. But eventually, our laughter died down

I guess it wasn’t that big a deal for me to wear pants. And maybe it wasn’t even a huge deal for Ben to put on my kilt. But this wasn’t something I would do with anyone else. And I knew he wouldn’t, either.

The moment was over the instant we heard “Oh my God, what are you guys doing?”

We turned toward the voice, which was coming through the thicket to my left. We heard thrashing next, laughter, more exclamations of disbelief and disgust.

Panic invaded my chest. My heartbeat thumped into my throat. In a nonsensical decision, I started to unbutton the pants, but I saw Ben was just standing still, making no attempt at all to switch our clothing. My hands froze, but my next impulse was to escape back along the path we’d created to our spot.

I didn’t have a chance, though. Four boys from our grade tumbled into the space with us, pushing at each other and snickering. Pointing at us, our clothes, and gasping with that exaggerated laughter people make when they’re less amused and more intent on making other people feel bad.

My entire body tensed. I wasn’t ready for whatever this was. I knew it the moment I heard the boys’ voices breaking through the brush.

“Why are you guys wearing each other’s clothes?”

“ ’Cause Ben wants to be a girl!”

“And Cassie wants to be Ben’s boyfriend!”

“Are you guys gay or what?”

“Ha ha, yeah, they’re lesbians!”

“Only homos cross-dress, freaks!”

I’d witnessed the taunts our classmates had leveled at Ben before. A jab about his lisp, a side comment about his ballet. It was bullying, of course, but we hadn’t named it that yet—so convinced that this was just normal schoolyard behavior at that age. It’s not like both of us hadn’t put up with teasing about our ethnicities, too—Ben for being Chinese with his “ching chong” eyes and me for my “poo brown” skin. Ben just ignored these things, so I did, too. We had our space to retreat to and be safe and together.

But now we didn’t. And this attention felt different. More targeted and cruel. Maybe that was just because it was also aimed at me now. Fear rose through me, right from the bottoms of my feet, into my legs and gut and chest. The words they were using were words I’d yet to use myself, but they pierced through me with their truth. Gay. Lesbian. Homo. The possibility of those things had felt okay here, with Ben. But those possibilities made public felt like a threat. A judgment. Freaks. They came with so many things I couldn’t imagine fitting with the rest of my life beyond this place.

What could I do? In the face of so many loud boys and a secret, terrified self? 

The words were out before I could stop them.

“It was Ben’s idea, not mine! I’m not gay.”

I could feel Ben looking at me, but he didn’t say anything, and I avoided his eyes as the boys jeered and laughed at my accusation and insinuation.

“Gross!” one of them called out. “Let’s get out of here before we get infected with sin!”

“Wait’ll we tell everybody about this!”

They pushed and shoved their way out of the space and crashed through the bushes away from us.

I stripped off the pants quickly and held them out for Ben to take, staring at the ground the entire time. He did the same with the kilt. We exchanged the clothing and re-dressed in silence. My stomach lurched with fear.

The creek gurgled below us, and my body moved toward it like instinct. I worked my way through the bushes and back down the path. I didn’t bother trying to find elevated rocks to step across the creek—I just plunged my school shoes right into the water and splashed to the other side. I blinked away the tears that kept trying to escape and hauled myself up the other embankment, then away toward the school entrance—fear and shame entwining around one another and into my bones.

 

Chapter One

I’m barely able to close the gate from my backyard before Manika, my lab-retriever mix, yanks me down the path to the playground of my old elementary school, Our Lady of Mercy. She’s always eager to sniff around the monkey bars and bark at the ducks in the creek.

When we enter the playground, a few kids are hanging out on the new abstract structures made of metal instead of the giant wood-beamed pirate ship we used to play on. It’s barely September and the air is already a little cooler. The sun is just starting to lower behind the school, sending the playground into shadow.

I’m not expecting to see Ben sitting there, on the swings. When I do, my footsteps falter, and I have to brace myself. His back is to me. Manika is still pulling, dying to sniff. My chest grows tight.

The last time I saw Ben was four years ago. It was the final day of sixth grade, and we’d barely spoken since the incident with the boys, despite a few pathetic attempts on my part to regain his friendship. I’d watched him walk across the small bridge that crossed the creek and then disappear behind the school. He never came back to Our Lady of Mercy after that. He left for the National Ballet School in Toronto that summer.

Since then, I’d only heard a few vague things about how he was doing. His family and mine still went to the same church. My mom still spoke with his mom from time to time, even after what happened. He was doing well. Wouldn’t be home for Christmas. Too busy.

I always wanted to know more—if he was happy, if he missed home at all. If he thought about me. But I had no right to ask, so I didn’t.

I watch him now, from a distance. He’s leaning back and forth into his swings, and I can hear the chains clink as his swing shifts from one direction to the next. His bright yellow T-shirt billows around him as he moves. Though he’s a little far from me, I can see he’s grown tall—much too long for these elementary-school swings.

I tug on the leash and turn back toward my house. I didn’t know he was back. I’m not prepared to see him, especially here, where we’d spent so much of our childhood together and where I’d made a mess of things. Maybe it’s just Manika yanking on the leash, but I feel like I’m tilting sideways, off-balance—barely able to find a firm piece of ground to step onto. Moments from those last few weeks after he and I stopped being friends push at me, trying to break past the careful boundaries I’ve set up for myself.

I remember sitting in my sixth-grade classroom after lunch that day, curling and uncurling my toes inside soaking-wet shoes to keep them from freezing. I remember shivering in my chair, from cold feet but also from unease.

Giggles and whispers and pointing fingers made their way around the room quickly—the boys who’d found me and Ben had wasted no time in telling the story with as many elaborations as possible. Not just the facts: Ben was wearing a kilt. Cassie was wearing pants. But so much more: “They were acting so gay. Ben loved it. He was acting like a girl. Cassie said it was his idea!” The consequences for Ben were so much worse than for me—because he was a feminine boy in a kilt, and because I had put the blame squarely on his shoulders.

By the time the teacher started the afternoon lesson, I was just a girl in wet shoes who’d gotten mixed up with the weird gay boy. Ben sat in front of me, his body rigid, as though staying perfectly still would keep the whispers and blame from reaching him. I stared at the back of his head, frozen in my own way.

Eventually, the story made its way to the teacher, and then, because what Ben and I were doing was apparently so incompatible with the expectations set for us, the teacher made sure the principal and our parents knew.

That night my parents were very clear about how “not normal” it was for a

 boy to wear a kilt and for Ben and me to spend so much time together, alone like we had been—never mind how mad they were that I’d broken their trust by traipsing around the creek, and then come home with wet, ruined school shoes.

They even had the school chaplain at the time, Father Baird, speak with me. He sat me down to tell me that this kind of exploration—the kind Ben and I were doing—showed an impurity that would require the need for “reestablishing a firmer foundation of goodness.”

I remember feeling at the time that the worst part wasn’t what Ben and I had done—although I’d come to understand that as wrong, too—but more what I’d done. How quickly I’d turned on Ben when others had witnessed the smallest portion of our private world. How easy it was for me to allow my fear of anyone seeing certain parts of myself to outweigh our friendship. What kind of person does that?

Father Baird had asked me, “How will you recenter your goodness and faith, Cassie? What will you do?”

I’ve spent the past four years answering those questions. Making sure that whatever parts of me that caused all of this messiness—the terror in me, the weakness, the disappointment of others—remained packaged up and stored away. Those parts couldn’t help me recenter goodness, so I abandoned them for what would. I focused on being a good student, a good daughter, a good Catholic. I didn’t include friendship in my new focus—at least not the kind that would tempt out the messy parts of me.

But with Ben back, I’m not sure what my focus should be.

 

I find out from my mom that night that Ben is back for good and starting at my high school, St. Luke’s. She tells me she spoke to his mom, Marianne, after their recent Catholic Women’s League meeting. Marianne said Ben wanted to come home.

“Apparently he’s been doing very well at ballet,” Amma says, “but he wanted to have a normal high school experience.” She shoves the dog food dish at me in her usual subtle way. My sister, Kendra, smirks and sticks her tongue out at me. This is supposed to be her job, but she skips out of the kitchen before I can shove the dish at her instead. Brat.

I take the dish and head to the kitchen cupboard where we keep the gigantic bag of dog food for Manika, who is stepping on my heels and already drooling.

As I scoop two mounds of food into Manika’s dish, I glance at my mom to see if she’s showing any signs of the concern she and my dad felt about me back then, when they found out what Ben and I had been doing, how other people were interpreting it. I can’t tell, though. She’s cutting up an onion for curry and just frowning in her usual way.

I shift to wondering if what Amma is telling me is the truth. Whether Ben really wants a “normal high school experience,” given what he’d gone through in elementary school. After those boys told everyone what they saw, the teasing got worse. Girls offering him their kilts, boys lisping whenever he was around, more whispers of “gay” and “gross” and “weird.”

I’d been mostly left alone. I’d only been wearing pants, after all. I’d made it sound like the whole thing was his idea. And I’d made sure

any hints or whispers of my own transgressions were neatly packed away. Ben couldn’t—wouldn’t—hide his own differences, and it just made things worse.

Did he really think our high school would be any better? Or had he learned to adapt the way I had?

My careful adaptations feel fragile right now, though. Hearing this added info from my mom, seeing Ben at the park . . . All of the feelings I’d managed to layer over—with stellar grades, volunteering, church commitments, a solid social schedule, attention to rules and expectations—rise back up.

My chest seizes, and I start to cough as though I’ve swallowed too much water. I put the food dish down, and Manika butts her way in front of me to get at it. I continue to cough so hard that Amma leaves the cutting board to rub my back, which only makes it worse. When I finally stop, she looks at me, concerned.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m fine—just have something caught in my throat.”

She frowns and looks at me, dubious. “Drink some water.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

But I know I’m not. These feelings—they can’t be here. They’ll make a mess of everything . . . unless I can prove to Ben that I’m not that person anymore, the one who can’t control herself and her fears. The one who let him fend for himself.

Chapter Two

“Cassie! You are an absolute angel.”

Dr. Ida appears from her office as I’m tacking up a “Welcome back, St. Luke’s Saints!” poster to the bulletin board beside it. I smile my biggest smile, even though I pricked my finger with one of the tacks just moments before. Even though my stomach is roiling from first-day-of-school nerves and now from all of the other feelings infiltrating my body.

But eleventh grade is no joke, and I have to be ready. I can do this. I press my thumb against the hole in my finger to stop it from bleeding all over the poster. “Good morning, Dr. Ida! Happy to help.”

Any approval from Dr. Ida is more than welcome. She’s a giant in our community. I mean, not in stature (she can’t be over five four—my height), but in regard. She’s been the principal at St. Luke’s for twelve years and has belonged to our affiliated parish for more than that. She has a reputation for being fair, assertive, and brilliant. On top of all that, she’s the only Black principal—of a public or private school—in the city, which feels both momentous and ridiculous all at once.

“And we’re happy you’re willing to help. Especially”—she checks her watch—“A full hour before school starts. I hope you didn’t spend your last few days of summer just working on these signs, though.” She places her hands on her hips and tilts her head, a small smile on her lips.

“Oh, not at all. I had a great summer! Prolific, even!” I answer with an SAT word—for practice and to impress Dr. Ida—and also with a brightness that the St. Luke’s teachers have always noted on my report card comments. Cassie’s bright attitude brings energy to our classroom. Cassie shows a light and cheerful demeanor. My parents have always stressed the importance of good manners and positive contributions, so these accolades are almost as important to them as the good grades that follow. Almost.

“Prolific! Wow. What have you been getting up to?” Dr. Ida asks, straightening out a photo I’d just pinned to the board.

In reality, I did spend the past few days making decor to help spruce up the school for the first week of classes. I like to take initiative like this—I feel it gives me a special kind of status among the staff at St. Luke’s. But immersing myself in poster paints and cheerful signs also helped to distract me from the waves of imbalance and nausea that kept rolling through me.

I quickly glance at the rest of the photos to make sure they’re all straight before replying, “I finished AP Chem, volunteered with the church—”

“And went to the beach and watched some good movies and hung out with your lovely sister and played with puppies, I hope?” She folds her arms and has an amused look on her face.

I falter, but only for a moment. Right. All work and no play doesn’t please the masses, Cassie. I tighten my ponytail out of habit and reply, “Oh, yes, of course! Lots of beach time.” Truly, I only went to the beach twice this summer, and only then to show my face to other St. Luke’s kids and pop a few photos onto social media. Balancing work ethic with social practices is very tricky business, but I’d spent years perfecting my balance of “school-life Cassie” with “church-life Cassie,” “social-life Cassie,” and “family-life Cassie.”

I grin and really try to sell it. “I love Spanish Banks best. Such gorgeous sunsets. What about you? How was your summer?” Adults love it when teenagers ask about them.

“Oh! It was lovely, thank you. I finally made a dent in my book stack.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I say. “You deserve it!”

Some of my classmates probably see me as a suck-up, but that’s fine with me. I’d rather be seen as too good than not good enough.

Dr. Ida smiles at me. Even with her hair in its customary tight bun, her expressions are almost always warm and friendly. “Well, thank you—I do deserve it, don’t I?”

We both laugh more than we need to and then stand awkwardly for a few

moments, staring at my display.

Thankfully, Dr. Ida says, “I’m off to a meeting. Try to enjoy your first day, okay? And have a great year!”

“I will!” I say as she moves past me with purpose. I’m determined to.

 

And then, it’s minutes before the first bell, and I am laser focused. I get to my AP English Lit classroom before everyone else to make sure I have time to say hi to Ms. Miller. ...