Making Pretty (24 page)

“We don't have to get our rings today,” Bernardo says when he sees my face. He's bought me a graphic novel about love and religion called
Blankets
, and we look at it from the floor of the store for a while until I start to cry. “I thought you wanted me to be into comics.”

Love is really sad, when you get right down to it.

“I need to walk,” I say.

“You want to tell me about it?” he asks.

“I want to tell Arizona about it,” I say. But I know I won't.

Bernardo nods and I can see the thing on his face again—the heartbreak and pinch—but he lets me have it.

“You are one great fiancé,” I say.

We wander Williamsburg, and it's never as pretty as I think it's going to be. It's gray and half-run-down and half-industrial and doesn't quite live up to the promise of coolness that it makes when you're riding the L train toward it.

“We should get the rings,” I say.

Bernardo walks me to a tattoo shop.

“I can't do that,” I say. It's the cool, clean kind of tattoo parlor. But still.

“My cousin works here. It's cool, you're eighteen-ish. He won't tell,” Bernardo says. It is the most beside the point he's ever been.

“I don't have tattoos,” I say.

“Well, yeah. Me neither,” Bernardo says. “But it seems like something we'd do, doesn't it?”

“No!” I say, because my reflexes tell me to. But I think back on the weeks we've been together. Weeks that could be years for how enormous and life-changing and real they've been. This does seem like something we'd do. This is sort of who I am now. Who we are together.

“We don't have to. I thought it'd be cool. Maybe put each other's initials on our ring fingers? Or something? I don't know. You came up with the hair and the piercing, so I guess I thought you'd like this.” Bernardo is rubbing my ring finger with his thumb.

“Yeah,” I say.

The Arizona in my head tells me this is a terrible idea. But I like the idea of permanence. It's something Sean Varren would never do. For all the women he's changed and done surgery on and married, he's never once done something permanent to himself. Only Botox, which doesn't stick. He makes little changes, becomes variations of a different person, but doesn't make a real leap. He marries them, knowing he
can get out. He can slip the ring off. He can leave them behind.

I won't be able to leave Bernardo behind if I do this. It will be a real kind of forever. That's the kind of forever I'm looking for.

“So I guess we'll be telling people tonight,” I say. “We won't be able to hide anything.”

“I'm ready,” Bernardo says.

We say
I love you
when I'm in the chair. We kiss. It's like a ceremony but not. It's a lot like the piercing—doing something we aren't old enough to do, but pretending we are.

The guy with the needle leans over my ring finger and starts drawing a cursive letter
B
in the place where a diamond might go.

There's a buzzing pain, something that I feel in my finger and my brain. I'm panicking and wishing myself somewhere else entirely, so I keep looking at Bernardo.

It sort of works. I try to breathe through the jolts of pain and pre-regret.

DO NOT FEEL THAT
, I tell myself.

Once upon a time, Roxanne and Arizona and I planned on getting tattoos together.

It wasn't that long ago. Maybe a year and a half. Before they went to college and before Arizona's surgery and before the first time Roxanne had sex and before Karissa. Back when Dad was still with Tess. We were going to get matching best friend tattoos. Roxanne suggested a sketch of our bench. Arizona said we should get three hearts tattooed underneath our belly buttons. I said we should get
our initials in a line on our arms.
ARM
.

We laughed and looked places up online and bragged to people at school about our plans.

Then Arizona said it would look ugly, and Roxanne and I didn't want to do it without her, and Dad got divorced again and the idea fell away, the way great ideas sometimes do.

It hurts but not that badly, getting Bernardo's initial on my finger.

It hurts more thinking of the things that have vanished this year and past years and that maybe everything I've ever thought was real wasn't.

This is real.

Nothing that stings like this and stays like this could be fake.

I don't look at it until Bernardo's is done too. I'm hyperaware of that finger and nothing else, and I hope that feeling lasts for a while, because it's exactly as it should be. Bernardo breathes heavily while they draw the
M
on his finger, and it's fast but before it's done, I can't help being a scaredy-cat.

“Is this really happening? Are we insane?” I say.

“We're the good kind of insane,” Bernardo says. The tattoo artist forges ahead, and I do my impression of a girl laughing it off. Everything's throbbing. My finger, my ears, my heart, my tongue. My eyebrow. I don't know that I want to be insane, even the good kind.

“Look. Beautiful,” he says, and shows me his finger. It's red but the
M
is fancy and sweet and fits the space perfectly.

I finally look at my own finger.

The
B
is an alien force, a foreign being on my skin.

“It's big,” I say.

“You two are all set,” the tattoo artist says.

“We are?” I'm having trouble thinking. Everything around me is spinning, and I have tired, heavy eyes and Bernardo's initial forever on my ring finger and a whole mess of a life that I can't even get a handle on anymore.

The world shuts off for one stunning minute. And I faint. I've never fainted before, but it's like a mini-break from the world. Brief and long at the same time. When I come to, Bernardo's face is over mine and the tattoo artist is standing by with water and fanning me with a tattoo pamphlet.

“It happens,” he says.

Bernardo kisses my eyes when they're open, and he says I scared him and I say I scared myself, but I mean something different from what he means.

“My family first or yours?” he says.

We do his first.

They hate the tattoos and the engagement. They smile anyway.

The kids actually love it all. His sisters and brothers swirl around me like I'm a maypole. They ask questions about dresses, and I decide not to let it slip that I have a gown already too.

“You think this is what you want?” Bernardo's dad asks us both. “You don't know what this is.”

“We're in love,” Bernardo says, and it would be sweet if he didn't sound like every movie about stupid kids. Everything he said about the pointlessness of promise rings and how adults don't take them
seriously is coming back to me. We are every bit as not-serious when he talks about our Deep and Unwavering Love like it's a thing no one else has experienced.

His mother rubs her husband's hand in hers while he fumes, and I know they know what love is. We sound small and stupid in comparison. There's chicken sizzling on the stove top and a supply of beer in the fridge and coffee brewing in the machine at all times. They exchange looks that tell whole stories between the two of them.

Bernardo can't even tell what I'm trying to say when I speak in half sentences.

“This is a huge mistake,” Bernardo's dad says. “You're always in love. You have to get ahold of yourself,
mi hijo
. Not everything is one and only and forever and the biggest and best. You're a kid. You're not able to make these sorts of decisions. Look at you! Look what you do!” He says words in Spanish that I can't understand, and his mother tries to make everything quiet and calm again.

“Not that we don't love Montana!” his mother says. “You are a sweetheart, honey. You seem really wonderful, and I know Bernardo is so happy to have met you.” She pours me a cup of coffee without asking if I want it or how I take it. She loads it with sugar and milk like that may make this whole conversation go down easier.

“Yes. You're a good girl,” his dad says. “It's not about that. It's about being real adults. And responsibility. And college. And growing up. And knowing the difference between love and
love
. And what were you thinking, doing this to yourselves? What if you change your mind next month?”

“That's the whole point,” Bernardo says. He is indignant. “This is about us not changing our minds. I mean, you can see, now, how permanent this is. How serious we are. I'm not a kid. I'm not being ridiculous. I'm being very, very serious.”

I cringe.

When it's me and Bernardo alone, the things he says sound true and wise. But with my throbbing finger and post-fainting brain, I hear him through his parents' ears, sounding impetuous and impulsive and intense.

“No,” his mother says, “this is about you rebelling or trying to prove something. I don't even wear a ring. I don't need to. You see?”

I see.

His brothers and sisters write
B
s and
M
s on their fingers, to match our tattoos.

“Look what you're doing,” Bernardo's dad says. “Look at the example you're setting. We should never have let you sit in that room and read poetry all day long. Did something kooky to your head.”

“Raul!” Bernardo's mom says, smacking her husband on his shoulder. “Poetry is fine. Loving Montana is fine. But the rest of it. We can't support. We can't let you do this. Okay? We can get this all undone. It's not too late. Okay?” I have never heard anyone sound so desperate. Whereas Bernardo's dad is filled with a controlled anger, his mother is eager and trying so hard to stay sweet.

“You didn't know what you were getting yourself into,” she says to me, like she has a world of knowledge about her son and I do not. “I'm sorry.”

“This can't be undone,” Bernardo says. He puts a hand on his mother's shoulder and looks her right in the eyes so she can't pretend it's not happening or that it's something else.

I bury my nose and mouth in the coffee mug and wish everything were as simple and perfect as the smell of coffee.

We don't talk much on the way to my place.

I don't want to storm into the house and announce our engagement to the angry masses. I don't want to have another terrible conversation today. I'm exhausted from Janie and fainting and Bernardo's parents. And my father already disapproves of the most basic things about me—my fucking face, for instance—so he won't like this newest complication.

“They don't get us,” Bernardo says.

I'm desperate for him to stop staying stuff like this. I don't want him sounding like some broken record of misunderstood youth. It makes me feel stupid. I try to think of a way to tell him so.

Instead I shrug. I'm losing my words.

“They're always like this,” Bernardo says.

“Always?”

“They didn't want me even dating Casey, so I guess this is an improvement.”

He says
Casey
with a little whistle on the
s
, like he's used to saying it in a whisper, in her ear. We are still so, so new.

“I thought they'd be happy,” he says. He wraps his scarf tighter around his neck, like he's hanging himself in protest.

“Really?” I say. We weave through the park and I buy myself another coffee at a cart near the exit. It's the crappy kind, but it still smells exactly like coffee always smells. What I actually want is to get drunk, but getting hopped up on coffee is going to have to do for now.

“Let's tell Karissa first,” he says.

“That's random,” I say. I'm sweaty and pink and wishing I hadn't worn my cutoffs to announce our engagement. I should have gotten dressed up for his family again. I should have worn something with a trim or a ribbon or a patch of lace or a polka-dot pattern.

“I think she'll approve,” Bernardo says. “I think I need to hear someone approving. I need to hear a congratulations. We haven't heard congratulations, you know?”

I beam at him. My fiancé. He sounds like the person I love again. It's so true, what he's said. So right. So exactly what we need. I trample on all those doubts and focus on how often he says the perfect thing.

Karissa's on the stoop. She's drinking green juice and smoking a cigarette.

She has a new face.

Not a new face, but a new chin.

“Holy fuck,” I say, because that is what you say when someone
looks like themselves but like someone new. It's what you say when the thing you hoped would stay is gone.

The new chin is still swollen and bruised, but I know what it will look like later. It will look the way my dad wants my chin to look. Defined and strong.

“I know it's a little shocking,” she says. “It's still healing, so it looks scary now. But it is going to look out-of-control gorgeous. It's going to change everything.”

“Jesus,” Bernardo says.

I think she got Botox too. Her forehead has an eerie stillness, a plastic, inhuman look that makes me sad. She had this one line in the middle of her forehead that I bet had been there since she was younger than me. Not a wrinkle, but a piece of her. Now it's gone.

“I know, I know, I look like someone punched me,” Karissa says. I have all these fighting words to say, but I can't get the energy to say them.

I try to let go one more inch of who I thought Karissa would be. I try to sink in one more inch to what Bernardo could be for me.

He looks confused and overwhelmed, and I must look the same. We are two people who have been unprepared for the things happening around us.

“We want to go out,” Bernardo says. “We want to do a celebratory night out. Are you allowed?”

“Awesome!” Karissa says, as willing and filled with unquestioning as usual.

I'm missing her face.

“Where are we going?” she says. “Dirty Versailles?”

“Fancier,” Bernardo says.

“So what are we celebrating?” Karissa asks. She grabs my elbow. “You didn't celebrate whatever it is with Natasha already, did you?”

“No. You're the first,” I say. I'm shaking from the pressure. She's holding this thing over me like it's a boulder she could drop on my head at any moment. She could crush me.

“Well, let's make sure you don't feel the need for any other celebrations. Let's make sure this one is truly epic.” Karissa takes a drag of her cigarette and hands it to me, and I don't give it back. I hide the hand with the tattoo on it. We have to reveal it at the right moment. With champagne and house music and sparkly clothes that I'd never in a million years wear otherwise.

Karissa delivers on the celebration. She gets us a table at some fancy club she used to go to a lot before meeting my father. She has friends there, the way she did at Dirty Versailles, but they're different kinds of friends. Sadder. Dressier. Older. Drunker.

“You. Are. Perfection,” one woman says when Karissa kisses her cheek on the way to our table. The swelling of Karissa's chin has gone down a little more after icing it, and she's covered the yellow with makeup. The lights, or lack thereof, hide the things we don't like about ourselves from others.

The drinks hide the things we don't like about ourselves from ourselves.

So we get drunk. Blasted. First me, then Bernardo, then Karissa.

Karissa has something else too. Pain pills from her surgery. She takes one, then two.

We go through two bottles, then three. We talk to guys in suits and girls in crop tops and thousand-dollar shoes. I can't stop shimmying in the fringed dress Karissa lent me. I love how the fringes hit my arms and the backs of my legs when I twist.

I've never gone out dancing before, and adults dance differently than we all do at high school dances. I can't put my finger on what it is, but it's something about the way they throw their hands in the air and the movement of their fingers and who they are looking at and dancing for.

“I feel awkward,” Bernardo says. He's barely dancing, mostly moving his head and his arms, and I tell him to have another drink.

“It's our engagement party!” I say, because it's all become both lovely and a big joke.

“This doesn't feel how I thought it would,” he says. “I hate this music. People keep bumping into me. This place is gross. Depressing. Like, this is what we have to look forward to?”

He'd hate Dirty Versailles if he thinks this place is gross. Which is sad, because I'd pictured us there together when we're Karissa's age, kissing the bartender's cheek and taking shots of whatever bright-blue or green or pink thing he felt like making us. I thought we'd entwine our legs under the bar stools and make out under precarious chandeliers.

“Don't you want to be in love and reckless and wild and us?” I say, which isn't exactly the point I wanted to get across, but it's close enough.

“We are,” he says. He points to his finger. My initial marking him.

“Remember when it was only Sharpie?” I say. That day in the basement when we wrote all over each other felt permanent and scary, but this is even more. Bernardo shakes his head and points to his ear. He didn't hear me.

It's for the best. He'd take it the wrong way.

“Let's hear that congratulations,” I say. “She's wasted, we can tell her. She'll be happy. She'll scream and jump and tell the whole club. That will be fun, right?” I want his mood to match mine.

“Okay. Let's do it. And I have another idea too,” he says.

“Telling Arizona and Roxanne?” I say, unsure if I'm kidding.

“Better than that,” he says.

Karissa dances over to us, her bracelets jangling, presumably, but we can't hear it in the booming room. She hasn't asked what we're celebrating. I guess once she found out we'd chosen her, it didn't matter what for.

“I have to tell you why we're celebrating,” I say. I yell directly into Karissa's ear for her to hear me.

“Oh right!” she says, like it's a side note to the rest of her night. “I figured you and the big guy finally did it?”

“We did,” I say.

“You had sex? It was your first time, right? Was it good? Was he good? That is so freaking adorable,” she says. She hugs me and I'm astounded, even though I shouldn't be, that she thought I'd run to her to celebrate losing my virginity. At a
club
. I guess in some alternate universe where we are the old Karissa and Montana, I maybe would have told her, at least. And she would have bought me a glass of wine
or talked me through it or laughed with me about the awkward bits. But that alternate universe is so far away.

I hold my hand out to Karissa, palm down, like it has a ring on it. Like I am waiting for her to kiss it, all royal-like.

“What. Is. This,” she says. She pulls my ring finger close to her face so she can get a good look at what I've done to myself.

“Bernardo proposed!” I say.

“And you're telling me first?” she says. The thrill is all over her face, but it's for the wrong reasons. I nod. It's almost true. “MONTANA! OH MY GOD!” she says. She pulls me into a huge hug, and the clubbers in our vicinity look over to see what the commotion is about. Karissa keeps me pinned to her with one arm and grabs Bernardo with the other. “I'm so happy for you guys!” she says, exactly like we wanted.

Bernardo finally smiles.

I'm too drunk to remember what a smile feels like.

We drink and dance more, and Karissa starts to fall apart a little. Her limbs get swingy and cumbersome. Her face gets droopy. She moves her jaw strangely, like she isn't yet used to her new chin.

“Are you okay?” I say, and bring her to the bathroom. Bernardo goes to the bar to get us all water.

“You told me something important,” Karissa says. She isn't looking at me directly. She looks to the lights above my head and the sign on the bathroom door and at her own shoes and my tattoo. “You really, really did,” she says.

“Yeah, I did,” I say.

“I should tell you something too,” Karissa says. “Now that we're family.”

“It's okay,” I say.

“No but, like, we need to be close. In the real way,” she says. “I want that. Don't you want that?”

I shrug. I don't want anything right now, except for her to be more sober.

“I miss my mom,” Karissa says. “We had the same face. Now we don't. Now I have a new face. And I don't have anything else of hers. Maybe I should have kept the face.”

“I know, I know,” I say. It would be impossible for me to compete with the way she misses her family, so I don't tell her I miss mine too, or that I'm sort of tired of hearing about her family. Instead I nod and rub her back and fight against throwing up.

“But, like, I miss her,” Karissa says.

“I know, you must miss them all,” I say. My knees are giving out a little, so I lean against the wall.

“No. Only her. They're all around. I hate the rest of them. But my mom I loved.”

It's one of those sentences that's hard to hear or put meaning to. I almost ignore it, it seems too drunk and impossible and indecipherable.

“I don't know what that means,” I say, shifting even more of my weight to the wall. My head to my shoulder. “I think I'm really drunk.”

“They didn't die,” Karissa says.

I try to lift my head from my shoulder and my body from the wall.

“I don't understand. What? I mean . . . what?” I say. I'm yelling, but only because the music is loud. She has a look on her face that's a little too cute and not enough ashamed.

“My family's all . . . nice,” she says. “Nice in a way that's awful. And I left them. It's hard to explain to people. Especially people like you.” All her vowels are long and singsongy. Her eyes are foggy, and I have a feeling this will be another night that is erased in her mind, but not in mine.

I will never forget this exact moment.

It's the worst moment. Of all the things I've been told that I didn't want to be told, this is the one I hate the most, because I didn't anticipate it. Not even a little.

I leave the bathroom and lean against a wall on the side of the dance floor. Everywhere is too cramped and close. I want to be on the street. Karissa follows me out and stands next to me. I can't get away from her.

“I wanted us to be close,” Karissa says. “And I
feel
like they're dead, you know? Like they died when I left? Like it could have happened, and it was something you would understand better than me leaving them. I know you don't like people leaving.” She's sort of falling asleep by the end of the sentence. A thing that is sliding away from her. She looks like her mouth is trying to catch up with her words.

“But you told us so many stories about them and all the crying and stuff and, like, what the actual fuck are you talking about?” The music shifts from one dance beat to another, and there's a whooping from the crowd. I look over at Bernardo. He's got three glasses of
water lined up in front of him at the bar. He waves and I wave back, but I think even from across the bar he can see what's happening to my face. It's falling. It's cracking. It's breaking down, and I wish this news was sobering me up, but instead it's making me drunker.

“I mean, I really, like, lived through them dying,” Karissa says. She takes another one of her painkillers, and I can see future-her, all doped up and tight-faced. “Like, in my heart, it happened. Like with acting. When you're really living through it?”

Bernardo finally comes over with two of the glasses of water. He hands one to Karissa and one to me and holds my face in his hands.

“Hey. Hey, Montana. You okay?” He's a little drunk too, or at least he smells like whiskey and beer and sweat. “What's going on? Should we leave? What are you guys doing?”

I smile a lazy smile in his direction. “Nothing was true,” I say.

“It's not like that,” Karissa says. She grabs hold of my arm, and I let her stay there but only because I don't have the energy in my limbs to shake her off.