Excerpt from My Flawless Life by Yvonne Woon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

Picture, if you'll indulge me, a portrait gallery.

It's a jewel-toned room wallpapered to look seamless, as though there are no windows or doors, no entrances or exits. The subjects clasp their hands stiffly at their waists, emanating a quiet power. Power that was framed and nailed into the walls. Power that trapped you, that seemed dead but was very much alive, that you could pass every day, not knowing it was there, watching you, altering the direction of your feet as you walked.

If you asked me to describe St. Francis School in a single image, this is the one I would choose. Not because it depicts a place steeped in old money or a sycophantic worshipping of the past, though both were true of St. Francis, but because it was a trick.

The thing about portraits is that they're an illusion. The subject puts on their best outfit, their finest face. The painter makes their shoulders squarer, their cheeks rosier, their fabrics richer. You believe what you're seeing is true, but it's a distortion.

Look closer. Maybe you'll spot a telling detail: a fly on the still life, a wrinkle in the skin, an errant brushstroke that makes the eye glint.

Are you paying attention?


I was standing in the portrait gallery at St. Francis when the message came in.

The room that evening was humming with people. We were there for the fall alumni gala, which was billed as a night for students to network with alumni about colleges, but it was really a fundraising event for the school. Every event in the Washington, DC, area is, at heart, a fundraiser, you just have to figure out who has the money and who's asking for it. In the hierarchy of fancy parties, alumni galas, even at a school like St. Francis, weren't high on the list of places to be seen at, but my family and I had long stopped being invited to public events, so the ones at St. Francis were all I had left.

"What do you think he did to get his money?" Adam said beside me, nodding to one of the portraits. "Oil? Railroads?"

"Newspaper magnate," I said.

"How do you know?"

"The newspaper on the floor by his chair," I said. "The black smudges on his thumb and forefinger. Everything in art is a symbol."

He feigned skepticism, but I could tell he knew I was right.

Adam Goldman was one of my few remaining friends, if you could even call him that. We didn't spend time together outside of school; in fact, we rarely spent time together in school because he didn't like to be seen with me. I pretended I didn't care, that I wasn't bothered by the way all my former friends avoided me as if what had happened to me was contagious. Though Adam wasn't part of their group, he orbited them—the popular and powerful at St. Francis, which I once was a part of. Sometimes I resented that he had access to them when I didn't, though I was glad for his company, even if it was only in moments like these, when everyone else's attention was directed elsewhere.

"Okay, enough about the dead. How about him?" Adam nodded to a man who looked like he was in his thirties and was talking to Jessica from the volleyball team. The sticker on his shirt read Mark, Dartmouth.

"I say banker," Adam said.

"His clothes aren't nice enough."

"Corporate lawyer," he countered.

"He looks too friendly." I studied him. "Like he's trying to sell her something. I'd guess advertising."

Adam and I were similar in that we made it our business to know things. We traveled on the periphery, observing others, figuring out their secrets, though I liked to believe that I was much better at it than he was.

"What about her?" Adam asked, nodding to a woman talking to Rahul from AP Calculus. Her tag read Sarah, Columbia.

I considered her clean white suit, the way she crossed her arms and nodded her head. "Head of a nonprofit."

Excerpted from My Flawless Life by Yvonne Woon. Copyright © 2023 by Yvonne Woon. Excerpted by permission of Katherine Tegan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.