Making Pretty (22 page)

The first part rings true. Dad doesn't do memories.

“Did he ever tell you about the gift certificate she gave us? They gave us?” I say. I can barely get the words
gift certificate
out. They catch in my throat and burn like a summer cold caught in there.

“I don't know what you're talking about. But you need to be staying away from her. Do you have any idea what this would do to your father? You can't decide to invite her back in. It's unfair.”

There are one million things to say about my dad doing that exact thing to me, not the other way around, but I can't put words to it all. That he's allowed to change everything but I'm not allowed to change anything. That it's my job to roll with whatever new family construction he comes up with, no matter how much it hurts. And that I'm expected to let it all go whenever he says it's over.

“Look. I know things have been hard lately,” Karissa says. She
takes a deep breath and her cig finally gets lit and she blows a whole bunch of smoke into the sky. It only makes the sidewalk hotter and more insufferable. “I know we don't know how to fit together quite yet. And that I'm a little off. But you know me. Remember?”

I do remember.

“Remember that scene we did together in class? Those long nights we spent at the studio rehearsing the shit out of it? How fun that was?”

Yes, I do.

“Remember convincing Donna to let us all order Ethiopian food when everyone was really cranky that one day? Teaching them all to eat with the spongy bread?”

Yes, I do.

“Remember when I took you swing dancing?”

I do.

“Remember when we hung out on Valentine's Day and made each other Valentines and I told you about every guy I ever loved?”

I do.

“Those were real things,” Karissa says.

I shake my head. They were real, but they're not anymore. They're real, but they don't mean what they used to.

We finally make our way up the steps, under the awning.

“I can't go inside until we're okay,” Karissa says. “Until you remember that you love me.”

My head hurts.

“We can't go inside until you choose me.”

We stand on the stoop for a long, long time. Karissa's face gets lit
every few seconds by passing cars, and she's chain-smoking and I'm chain secondhand smoking and about a thousand conversations pass in front of us but we don't speak.

“Okay,” I say at last, because I can't stand the gross weather anymore and Karissa reminded me about one more day—the one I came in crying that Tess was leaving, and she bought me hot chocolate and listened to me explain the way it feels to have something taken away that you weren't totally sure you wanted but that you were trying to want.

“Let me in,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, and we go inside where it's air-conditioned and my dad's white noise machine is humming the perfect non-sound and he's left out apple and cheddar sandwiches for us both.

Days later, when the heat wave has passed, Bernardo and I are sitting in my basement, drinking white wine and smoking ridiculous clove cigarettes, and he asks what my dad did with all the old rings.

“Do the women keep them?” Bernardo asks. “Do they keep everything he gives them?”

“I mean, the boobs for sure. And the new catlike faces.”

When Bernardo thinks something I say is funny, he kisses me instead of laughing. It's one of the million things I love about him. I find something new every day, practically. The texture of his hair on a particularly humid afternoon. The way his lips move a little when he reads the back of a book. I love lying on a blanket in the park in his arms while he runs his fingers up and down my spine. I even love the noise my phone makes when he's texting me. It sounds different, somehow, that
ding ding!
when I know it's him.

It's all stuff I can't tell Arizona and Roxanne, exactly. Things that are too small or cheesy or random to say when they ask me how it's going with him.

“What's gonna happen with Karissa?” he says.

“Maybe she'll surprise me,” I say. “Maybe it will be okay.”

“Natasha turned out okay,” he says. He rubs my back, and any other day it would be the perfect thing to say, but I'm trying to let go of Natasha, in my head first, and then I'll do it in reality. I'm trying to give Karissa what she wants.

Because yesterday we had coffee on the roof and got tans, and the day before we drank white wine at my favorite movie theater, the Angelika, from thermoses, and laughed at a documentary about supermodels, and those are things that make it seem like it could be okay, even if there's a snaky feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me it's all wrong and even if every few hours something is dark and strange on her face. And because the real truth is that I'm afraid of what she'll do with the secret I've been keeping. I'm afraid of Karissa.

Bernardo's eyebrow ring scrapes my forehead a little when we kiss. “You are the best kisser,” I say.

“You too,” he says before kissing me again.

“Better than Casey?” I say. I say it because I'm drunk and lost in the kissing and because he teared up a little when we were in Battery Park the other evening. I asked him why, and he said he and Casey used to go there together.

“You miss her?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said, and I thought it would hurt except it was so real and true that I didn't mind. It was better than pretending she'd never existed or never mattered.

“I decided something,” Bernardo says now, and I'm worried he's
decided he's not really ready to love someone again. “I'm over her. In the real way. In the over-over way. In the I-don't-miss-her-anymore way.”

“But in Battery Park—,” I say. I don't want to hear a lie that is simply easier than the truth.

“That was the last little bit of feelings for her,” he says. “That was it. I'm not sad about her anymore.”

I trust him so deeply that when he says it's over, I know she's gone and there's only us.

“Bye, Casey,” I say, waving at some ghost of a memory of her.

“Bye, Casey,” he says, waving at the things he loved about her that have stopped mattering.

“I love you,” I say to him in the simplest, clearest voice I have.

“But seriously, Mon, does the dude have a ring collection, like, in his sock drawer?” Bernardo says. The words are thick, but I like the way his hand moves from my knee to my hip bone. It makes me feel a little like a cat, which isn't the worst way to feel when the rest of the time you feel like a mouse.

I adjust his glasses and shiver at how close it makes me feel to him.

“I'm sure he returns them. Or sells them to some diamond expert. Or, like, puts them in a safe at the bank,” I say. I'm actually not sure about this at all, so I add it to the list of things I don't know or don't understand about my father.

“Your dad is not selling those rings. He's classy and shit,” Bernardo says. I've noticed he never swears, so him saying
shit
is a mini-revelation, one more thing to fall in love with. It's amazing how
many things you can love about one person.

I almost understand my father in this moment. Almost. I get how sudden and drastic the feelings come on when you meet someone you like, and the pull to tie it all down and guarantee that it won't ever go away. I have never felt more feelings than right this second. I'd like to tie Bernardo here. Both of us. I'd like to tie us to this moment, anchor us to each other and how it feels to be in love in the summer in New York City when you're seventeen and pink-haired and braver than you were before.

We are fixing each other's broken parts but not in the manic temporary way my dad and his wives and girlfriends do. I can finally un-hear Arizona's voice in my head about
too fast
and
too much like Dad
and
delusional
and
don't know what love is
.

“Is Karissa's ring the craziest? Because that thing is crazy,” Bernardo says. “That's what you should have. Something crazy.” He keeps drinking, even though we're past the point of no return. So I keep drinking too. I don't mind being dizzy when I'm with him. I'm already dizzy around him, even sober, so it almost evens out. Like a double negative or whatever.

I have the best thoughts when I'm drunk.

I smile and drink more wine and take the cigarette from between his fingers and put it between mine because I want our mouths to taste the same. I want to be in that cloud of smoke with him.

Plus, I am cool when I smoke. I'm a girl in a movie.

“Maybe he lets the ladies keep them.” I never know what to call my dad's exes, so I'm always trying different phrases. The exes. The
ladies. The Sean Varren Club. Fakes. “That would be classy, right?”

“Let's look,” Bernardo says.

“Look in my father's sock drawer?” I say. I cock my head and take another drag and put the cig back into Bernardo's mouth, like a distraction.

“Worth a shot, right?”

I can't stop laughing. Love and wine make me laugh. Bernardo, of course, doesn't laugh, but he looks content watching me.

“You better not be plotting a heist of my father's diamonds and socks,” I say. I lean back on the couch, which is too stiff and too leathery to be comfortable. It squeaks under my bare legs, and I can't stop laughing.

Bernardo moves closer to me. He stubs out the cigarette in the crystal ashtray on the coffee table and looks at me like I'm beautiful, like even the parts of me that are not so great are actually amazing. He looks at each part of my face, feature by feature, and does these mini-sighs each time his gaze shifts.

He moves his hand from my thigh to my face, and the other behind my neck. “I want you to have one,” he says. “I think we should do it.”

“Do it?” I say, trying not to squint in confusion or drunkenness.

“We should get you a ring.”

“Like a
ring
ring?” I say. I laugh because seventeen-year-olds don't get rings. I look very closely at his face to determine exactly how drunk he actually is. I can't stop laughing. Bernardo is serious and I'm a mess of feelings, plus my head is heavy, heavy, heavy.

“You're drunk,” I say. It's a fact, and it's the only explanation for what we are talking about.

“We're drunk,” he says.

It's nice, being a we.

“When your dad was proposing, it hit me. He's done it, like, a million times, but he still believes. That's cool. And, like, getting married doesn't make sense for anyone, which means it makes sense for everyone,” Bernardo says. He's smart; it's one of the things I love about him. Smart and deep and romantic, and I am four-leaf-clover, rabbit-foot, double-rainbow lucky. I drink some more wine, dizzy from the strangeness of what I guess is a proposal.

I'm seventeen
, I say in my head over and over, but I don't say it out loud. Maybe because I'm sort of over being seventeen. I don't feel seventeen. The way I love him isn't the way seventeen-year-olds love.

I think about my father on one knee, proposing to Natasha. Or the photograph of him and my mom on their wedding day, holding hands on the beach like the world made sense.

I wonder if showing Bernardo that picture would make him feel the same weird tangle of feelings—hope and hopelessness, fear and excitement. Belief and faithlessness. Wonder and terror.

“You're insane. And adorable. And you know, someday, obviously,” I say. “Oh! What about a promise ring? Roxanne had one of those once with the guy she dated who had a mohawk and a coke problem. But they got a promise ring. It was the Irish kind—a claddagh ring. It was cool.”

“And they broke up,” Bernardo finishes. “And it was like a joke,
right? Like, their parents thought it was totally adorable?”

“Sure,” I say. Roxanne's mom gave one of those soft, sweet laughs and said she'd had a boyfriend who got her one when she was young too. She said it like we'd all understand how silly we were when we'd grown up. Roxanne hated her for it, but she was right. A promise ring doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have an impact. It isn't a real thing. “Yeah. You're right. It's like a kind of joke to the rest of the world.”

“We're not a joke,” Bernardo says. “We're not high school sweethearts. We're not Roxanne and her coked-out boyfriend.” He puts his hands on my face. My cheeks are cupped in his palms. He is breathing hard, and soon I am too. “I think I love you more than most people love other people. I want us to be married. You're going to be eighteen in a few months. And why be jealous of people who do romantic and crazy things when we could do those things ourselves? Why not be the people in the books and movies and in our heads?”

I don't know if I understand or agree or even hear Bernardo over the buzzing in my head and heart.

I wonder what he's been reading, which characters he's jealous of. Which love story he thinks we could rival.

“I saw your list of things, the gratitude diary thing,” Bernardo goes on. “I know I shouldn't have looked, but I will show you all of mine. I've been doing it, like Natasha told me to.”

I'm speechless. I try to remember everything I've written in those pages, so I know how much he's seen of me.

“Those aren't for you,” I say. I wonder if more wine is going to make it better or worse. I take a few sips to find out. “I read you the
ones I wanted you to read, but the rest weren't for you.”

I'm not sure I like being seen. Not so fully.

“You show them to Natasha, you said.” He sounds genuinely confused, like he must be missing something. Bernardo doesn't let go of my face, even though I'm sure it's getting hot under his hands. I'm blushing with confusion. “You showed them to me. We know everything about each other. That's why I was so honest about Casey.”

“That's different,” I say, trying to find a voice under the love and the wine and the lost feeling of my world changing. It's hard.

“You can't be closer to Natasha than you are to me,” he says. It's weird, because it's the second time in three days that someone has said essentially that to me. I get cold inside; I don't want Bernardo and Karissa to have anything in common right now.

“I'm not. Of course I'm not,” I say. I pretend this doesn't feel so bad. I try to understand that this comes from love and him wanting to know me. “The lists are a thing between us, though. Like, a Natasha-Montana thing. And I sort of wish you'd asked to see it. I would have shown you.”

“She gave me my own notebook so it could be a Bernardo thing too,” he says. He's still speaking gently; nothing's a fight with him. And maybe he's right. Maybe Natasha gave him the notebook so that he could join our club, so that I wouldn't have anything without him.

Bernardo's not Karissa
, I say to myself. Then I say it a few more times, to make it true.

But I feel a little like territory again.

“Right,” I say, and my messy mind tries to make order of all this.
It's confusing, learning what love is. It's some of the things I thought it would be, plus some other things, and I keep getting off track. I can't seem to stop myself from feeling the wrong things in the right moments.

“I want to know all of you,” Bernardo says. He touches my cheek, my hair, my eyebrow. “I wanted to see the secret parts, and I did, and I love them too, and I think we should do this.” Bernardo grabs my ring finger, the one on my right hand, and I love that he doesn't know that's the wrong one. It's a mistake my dad could never make, and I love the idea of being the First, the Only, the One.

Yes, yes, yes
, my brain says, even though it's confused about absolutely everything else in the whole wide world. Bernardo sounds so sure, and I get lost and happy in the sureness.

We are not Roxanne and her coked-out boyfriend. We are not couples from school who have sex in someone's parents' bed and call it love. We are not some adult's idea of a cute couple. We are not my dad and the way he falls in love without really knowing someone or caring to know them. Bernardo knows me, wants to know more. We are something new.

We're more. We have to be. I've only ever wanted more.

“Yes,” I say. “Let's do it.”