Making Pretty (18 page)

Her face is twisted, and the other teachers come up to her, stroking her arm to calm her down like she's a rabid dog, which I guess she sort of is.

I want to cover Bernardo's ears. Because some of what Tess is saying is true, and some of who I am is a terrible person who roots for women's lives to fall apart. And I'm not ready for Bernardo to know all the bad things about me.

I know that that is probably love too. Knowing what makes someone awful. But after seeing what my dad hates about me, I'm not sure I can handle seeing what Bernardo hates about me too.

I'd sort of like to know what people love about me.

“You don't know Montana,” Bernardo says. I stroke his arm too.
I'm scared of this version of Tess. I've never seen the ugly aftermath of my father, the stepmoms after they've been discarded. I've only seen the butterfly transformation of Natasha and nothing else. This is treacherous.

“I know her. I know all about her.” At the end, Dad used to call Tess shrill, and I guess I know what that means now, even though I hate being on Dad's side. “You and your sister treated me like a joke.”

“I liked movie nights,” I say. I'm going to cry if I don't shut up. Maybe it's what I should have said to her on the stairs that day, maybe that would have meant something, meant that I'm a good person, meant that she was a real part of our family for a minute.

“I wanted to know something about forever and why it didn't happen for you,” I say. I don't know why I came here.

“You need to leave,” one of the managers says.

“I'm only trying to understand,” I say.

“I'm not some project,” Tess is yelling. Then she's pushing the other teachers out of the way and coming at me. Her hands reach my shoulders and she gives one giant push before they can pull her back again. Bernardo pulls me into a protective hug.

“We're going, we're going,” I say. The tears are coming, but I don't want them here. We make it into the elevator before they splash out.

“We can press charges,” Bernardo says. He's hot, his whole body feverish from indignation.

“It's my fault,” I say.

“She touched you! She hurt you! She's insane!” He punches his own thigh. I can't stop crying. I don't have any anger in me. She's
right. And Bernardo doesn't see it. Which means he either really loves me, because he only sees the good. Or he doesn't love me at all, because he doesn't really see me at all.

“We were rooting against them. Arizona and me. Like it's a game. We root against all of them. We're the worst,” I say.

Bernardo rubs my back and tells me I'm the best over and over again, but he says it too many times and it loses all meaning.

I wake up a few mornings later to the sound of Karissa rummaging around in my room.

I'm asleep in the clothes I wore out with my Bernardo the night before. I took him to Reggio to explain to him why I continue to love my dad. I still smell like the café: espresso and butter and toast and candle wax. I am not ready for Karissa. Not this early. She has on blue-striped pajama bottoms and a cropped white lace top and this oversize sweater cardigan that is all wrong for a summer morning, except that the AC is on so high that it's almost warranted.

“Morning!” she says at the first sign of me shifting into wakefulness.

“You're in my room,” I say. I want to be cool with it, but it's too early to be cool. I can't feel anything but confused and exposed and deeply awkward. The thing that shifted last week when she said yes and put a sparkly ring on her finger didn't unshift because we got drunk right after. The shift happened, and I'm not sure it can unhappen. When the earth quakes, does the land go back to its original state,
or do things stay slightly askew? Do the fault lines become faultier?

They must.

“I need a strapless bra,” she says. There is zero hesitation on the word
bra
. I make a grumpy morning coughing sound.

“It's early,” I say, like that's the real issue here. I want to be having a fuzzy dream about what sex with Bernardo will be like. I do not want to be watching her tornado through my room.

I don't want her anywhere near my room. I don't want the life where she has access to my room.

“It's actually late. I waited. But then I figured, what the hell, you've had a sister your whole life, no big deal, right?” Karissa is rummaging through my sock drawer. I have no idea if she's made it to my underwear drawer at this point or not.

“No. Not right. Not okay!” I shake my head back and forth to wake it up and adjust last night's tank top and jeans. I feel chalky and dry. The AC makes my eyes burn first thing every morning, a blast of cold air after a night of warm dreams.

Karissa stops unpacking my socks from the top drawer. There's a pile of white athletic ones at her feet. T-shirts are strewn all over the floor. My closet is open, the contents rustled and misplaced.

The Karissa I loved and still maybe love is there, but so is someone else. Like a third person in the room with us. Old Karissa and Stepmom Karissa. I do not seem to like Stepmom Karissa.

There's a look crossing her face that I've never seen outside of acting class. A hurt look, pained and confused. I'm not following her script. If it were afternoon and not morning, I would defer to the look.
But my head hurts and my mouth is salty and dry from eating Goldfish in bed after Reggio, and not seeing Arizona at the café made me miss my sister even more. “My sister and I shared a closet,” Karissa says.

I think I'm simply tired. But maybe I am also, horribly, a little tired of this story.

“Sometimes I couldn't even remember what was whose,” she continues. “Like, if I'd bought a certain shirt or if she had. That closeness . . . it's beautiful, right?” She's getting choked up, like she always does when she remembers her family, but it's so early for grief that I don't know what to do.

The grief has turned a little sour. Or possibly I'm exactly like my dad—thinking something's beautiful until I look too closely, then seeing everything I want to change about it.

“That's so cute,” I say, careful and not convincing enough. “But we don't really do that.” I want to also say
and you're not my sister
. But I don't. Arizona would.

It's weird to start getting sick of someone's grief, but it happens. Or maybe it doesn't happen to everyone, but it happens to me. Maybe this is proof positive that I actually am the terrible person Tess accused me of being. I can't even work up early-morning sympathy for someone whose entire family died in one fell swoop.

“Look what I found, though!” Karissa says. She's made her way back over to my closet and pulls out a dress I bought secondhand with Arizona last summer, when she dragged me to some boutique with too-girly clothes. The dress is butter yellow with doily-looking white
sleeves and a blue ribbon that wraps around the waist. It's pretty and extremely not me. I have been planning on wearing it out with Bernardo, since he promised we'd spend the summer eating at sidewalk tables, and it is the exact kind of dress a girl wears to eat in the sunshine. I have a whole plan where I wear my hair in loose curls and barrettes and act sweet for an afternoon. Order éclairs. Drink tea with my pinkie up.

“That's mine,” I say. I get out of bed fully, since she is clearly not going to stop. I try to feel that compassion for her again, like I did a few weeks ago. “I mean, I guess you could borrow it sometime if you want,” I try, but it comes out pissed, and Karissa's not paying attention to me anyway. I'm like an object in this conversation. A lamp or maybe something truly useless, like an ottoman.

“Well, I mean, you have to wear this. Let's picnic. That's a picnic dress if I ever saw one.” Even Karissa's voice is grating at this time in the morning. I get the feeling this is an apology, and it's not enough. We can't picnic away her marrying my father.

I want to see her with a cigarette on the stoop or a beer in the basement or sitting cross-legged on her kitchen counter, pickle in hand, or perched on a bar stool at Dirty Versailles with strangers watching her.

I do not like this new part of her.

Her eyes say
nothing has to change
, but that's not true, and I can see that, at least.

“I'm saving it,” I say.

“For the boyfriend? We can all go. Call him up. I'll buy baguettes and cheese and salami or something. It will be very French. It will
be romantic. I have a dress I made a few summers ago when I was into making clothes. It's perfect. We'll be perfect.” Karissa holds the dress up to my body and gets her face too close to mine. “Have you picnicked before? Mom used to take me and, like, my dolls on picnics when I was little. We'd just go behind the house, but it was my favorite thing to do. Let's do that.”

“Are you okay?” I say, trying to root her behavior in something specific. “Is it, like, another anniversary or birthday or something?” I want to put a name to her grief. Maybe it will feel more controlled then, less wild. I want to make it not about us and our relationship and how to fix it.

Karissa shakes her head.

“I want to spend time with you. I want to have a Karissa-Montana day. This is about us.” It is the exact thing I didn't want her to say. I never would have guessed, in Dirty Versailles that night a few weeks ago, that we could have gotten here so fast. Her saying the wrong things and making my head hurt. Me wondering how long I have to smile around her for. When it's appropriate to scream.

“Don't you have an audition or anything?” I check my phone. Bernardo has texted a few times already, and Roxanne sent me some link to something, and I want my room to myself so badly my skin itches.

“No auditions today,” Karissa says. “But I should have some soon! I have a plan. What if we did a little dress shopping?” I wonder for a moment if she's on something. She's that hyped up. It seems like she may throw her arms wide and start spinning around and around until
she falls down from dizziness, the way little kids sometimes do.

“Like . . . summer dresses?” I ask.

“I was thinking maybe wedding dresses. I sort of want to look around. See what's out there. It's, like, what you're supposed to do when you get engaged, right?”

I am the expert, clearly.

“I guess. But maybe you want to go with someone else?” It isn't until I see the look on her face that I know I've said the wrong thing. I forgot, for long enough to ask one question, that her family is gone. And that we pledged best friend status when we were drunk. And that somehow I am the person she has to do this with.

“I'm engaged,” Karissa says, her eyes big and her mouth drawing down. “I want to do things other people get to do.”

I think of how many times I have said and thought this exact sentence.

She hasn't made a move to get out of my room, so I wonder if she's expecting me to change in front of her. I cross my arms over my chest and wish they were wide enough to cover all of me. I have sweat marks on my shirt and the image of my bikinied body with lines on all the ugly parts in my head. I don't want to be seen.

“Can we go get croissants? I'll meet you at Pain Quotidien in, like, fifteen?” I say, desperate to change the subject. Chocolate croissants should be a strong enough force to put a stop to almost anything. But they are not strong enough to stop her.

“I was thinking you could be my maid of honor. I know that might be weird, with Arizona and stuff, and of course she'll be a bridesmaid.
But what do you think?” Karissa smiles. She's flushed and wild-eyed. She still hasn't let go of my yellow dress. She uses her free hand to grab my hand. “You remind me so much of my sister. And I really meant what I said, at Dirty Versailles, you know? I want you to know I wasn't just drunk. I feel that bond with you. That was real.”

I don't like the desperate edge to her voice or the way she keeps half pacing around my room. Taking little steps in every direction.

“Oh wow,” I say. I'm queasy and hot. My heart's pounding out a particular rhythm that means this is wrong and weird and scary. I decide to put a T-shirt over my tank top and actually change clothes later. I run a brush through my hair and tie it into a side ponytail, and I flip through my texts some more. If I knew how to unlock this moment and move into a different one I would, but my phone doesn't seem to have an app for that.

“That's a yes, right?” Karissa says. “I'm thinking red for you. A red dress. Because, like, screw pastels, right? I am not a pastel bride. Your sister will be a pastel bride. You will definitely be wearing pastel pink or whatever when you are her maid of honor. So let's get you in red for mine.”

HELP
, I text Bernardo.
Attack of the crazy stepmom
.

Tess?????
he says in some kind of text panic. It's too many question marks for so early in the morning.

Karissa
, I text back. I should text Roxanne to come over and join us for the day. She could at least create some distance. Poke a little hole for me to breathe out of.

I'm suffocating
, I text her. I sort of know I won't hear back. She has
friends visiting from Bard, and they're going on some weed-smoking bender that Arizona and I weren't invited on, since we don't smoke weed.

She seemed okay at the thing last week
, Bernardo texts. I think what he means is that we were all too drunk to care that she's unstable. Or maybe Karissa's too pretty for a guy to worry about in that way.

I guess I'm going to spend the day with her
.

Good luck
, he writes back.

I try to think about Dirty Versailles and acting class and Karissa's cool apartment and the way she smokes her cigarettes and the way she uncorks wine bottles and how talented and funny and exciting she can be. I try to hold on to that part of her, the part that I wanted to have.

“You're the reason I found your dad, right? You deserve to be up there during the wedding.” Karissa climbs onto my bed now that I've left it. I would never climb onto someone else's unmade bed, and I sort of wince on her behalf. I'm sure it smells like sleep and Goldfish and cigarettes.

Feelings are clawing, feral cat–like, all over me, along with the realization that in any other version of this, I'd be thrilled. If Karissa were marrying Will from acting class or the bartender from Dirty Versailles or the ex-boyfriend she told me about who started texting her old roommate, I'd be on board. I'd be silly with the thrill of being her maid of honor. I'd be advertising it.

It's hell, wanting a slightly different version of a situation you're in. Or getting what you want, but it being wrong anyway.

“I'm okay being a guest,” I say. It is the most polite I can be.
Karissa gives me a long stare. She looks the way she did when she played Laura in a scene from
The Glass Menagerie
. A disturbing kind of naive.

“You don't want to do it,” she says. That's when she drops my dress to the floor. She gets up on her knees, pushing aside more of my blankets, and tries to get a look at my phone. “Who are you texting? Are you texting everyone? Your friends? Your mom? Arizona? You think she doesn't hate me enough?”

“No, oh my God, no,” I say. “Nothing about you, I swear. I'm saying good morning to Roxanne. I'm making plans with Bernardo. We talked about maybe getting grilled cheese somewhere with really good grilled cheese? Because there are all these places that specialize in random classic foods, and we vowed to try them all?” I sound too panicked, I'm sure, and I turn my phone off so she can't catch sight of the series of distress signals I sent out to basically everyone.

“Sounds fun,” she says. She's still side-eyeing me. She's still furrowing her brow. “I know we have work to do. On our relationship. But I want to do it. I don't want things to change.”

Then you shouldn't have gone and changed everything
, I think.

I don't want to talk about us or the relationship or what we are to each other, because the more we talk about her marrying my father, the more real it will become. So I find a smile and imitate a person whose life isn't getting blown up by a beautiful disaster.

“I'm sorry. I'm not a morning person. But sure. We can hang out for a little,” I say in slow, measured sentences. Karissa makes me a little breathless.

Maybe she does that to everyone.

“So then we'll dress shop? Today?”

“Aren't you planning on a wedding next summer?” I say.