Making Pretty (25 page)

I have a thousand things to say to her.

I have nothing to say to her.

“We can say good-bye to everyone,” Bernardo says. The cab ride home smells like french fries and Axe body spray. Whoever was in here before us was the worst. I'm motion sick and trying to will away the drunk.

Karissa is slumped against one of the doors. We'll have to carry her upstairs.

I've told Bernardo what happened, and we can't think of anything to say about it, because the lie is so large and strange and impossible.

“Say good-bye?” I say. I keep checking Karissa's breathing and heart to make sure she's still alive. I don't know all the rules about drinking.

“We could leave here. Leave all these people. Maybe meet your mom? Out west? And then get jobs. At bookstores or flower shops or whatever,” Bernardo says. “We're engaged. You're almost eighteen. We can do whatever we want.” When I'm drunk, I'm messy and confused. When he's drunk, he's clear and insane.

“What are you talking about?” I say. I nuzzle into him so the words come out sweet and affectionate instead of bewildered, which is what I actually am, by literally every conversation that's happened tonight.

“What is going on here is nuts, Mon. Absolutely absurd. We need to get away from it. From her. And from everyone. But her especially. She's fucking toxic. She's a toxic crazy person who is manipulating everyone, and we have each other so we don't need this shit.”

He's swearing so much it makes me sad. I don't like him all worked up and growling.

“Don't leave me,” Karissa says, waking up long enough to hear about us running away. Long enough to try to keep me close. She grips my thigh.

The cab is extremely rickety and speeding like crazy.

Karissa passes back out, but her hand stays on my thigh. Her nails dig in.

She is always attaching herself to me. Bernardo puts an arm around me. It's too warm to feel good in this stuffy car. I need out.

“I'd love to take a weekend trip to find my mom,” I say. “You're the best boyfriend. Fiancé. You're the best fiancé of all the fiancés I've ever fiancéd.” I sort of know the words are twisty and wrong as they come out, but I don't care.

“I don't mean a weekend trip,” he says. “We need to get away from this. This is bad. What's happening with your family is really, really bad. And you saw my family. They're not okay with us. I don't want to sit around while they judge us. You want to live in
disapproval land for the next year or whatever?”

“I've always lived in disapproval land,” I say. They're sad words but sound funny right now. I cackle. The cabdriver looks in his rearview mirror.

“I don't usually drive around drunk kids,” he says. “And your sister there looks sick. You gonna tip well?”

“We're not kids,” Bernardo says like a mantra.

“She's not my sister,” I say, because that's
my
mantra.

“I'm asking if you're gonna tip well,” the cabbie says. He's angrier than I'd noticed, and I wonder if maybe the Axe cologne and french fries were his, and not the people before us. It's weird, when you think about it, that we let strangers drive us around when we're wasted. It's not safe. I want to tell Bernardo my epiphany, but he's handing over a twenty and sighing.

Karissa groans and Bernardo covers her mouth with his hand, like she's going to get us kicked out despite the ridiculous tip.

It's nice, though, having someone take care of me.

The cabbie slams the brakes at a red light, and all three of us pitch forward. Karissa and I hit our heads on the glass. It hurts.

“Do you really need to stay here for this?” Bernardo says, like the inside of the cab is all that my life and my city really have to offer.

“We'd go to California?” I say. All I know about California is palm trees and a warmer ocean than the one we have here.

“Or Portland. Or Seattle. Or Hawaii. Anywhere you want,” Bernardo says. “I just thought you might want to see your mom first.”

“Maybe I do?” I say, but it seems like a big, huge question. I've seen the rest of them. The almost-moms. Do I want to see the actual mom? These are questions I don't want to answer in a stopping-and-starting cab next to the biggest liar I've ever met.

“We don't need any of this,” Bernardo says. The cab's pulling up to my brownstone. It's gorgeous in the streetlights. Tess's potted plants are still on the stoop, and they're drooping in a kind of tragic beauty.

I can't stop thinking about Bernardo's mother's empanadas and the way his littlest sister hangs on to his legs even when he's walking. The tiny coziness of their apartment and the way they sit around reading books on the two couches every Sunday night.

“We don't?” I say. I'm trying to fit the things he's saying in with my feelings. I thought love had something to do with feeling the same things in the same moments, and I want that back.

“Okay, here we are,” the cabbie says. “Get her out. Bring her right inside. Lay her on her side so she doesn't choke. Put water by the bed.” He's listing it off like he's said it a million times to a million drunk people. Bernardo piles Karissa into his arms. We bring her upstairs and tuck her into bed. We keep her on her side. My father's nowhere to be found.

We go back to the stoop when we're done with Karissa and after we've downed a frozen French bread pizza to soak up the alcohol and the feelings.

It's humid and smells a little like garbage, but everyone in the
world walks by and I make up stories about them in my head and listen to their private conversations and think about the sidewalk as being a quilt of moments, and man I'm deep when I've been drinking.

I take out a cig and offer one to Bernardo. We sit like chimneys on the stoop, blowing trails of smoke into the sky.

“I really meant it. We should go,” Bernardo says. “Aren't you tired of being the one who stays here and takes it?”

I am.

I really am.

“I'd have to check with Arizona first,” I say. It doesn't make sense, since she doesn't live here anyway, but I don't want to not have anyone to check with. I don't want to be quite that free.

“Fair,” he says. “We can tell her tomorrow. But she's not deciding for us, okay? It's our decision. As a couple.”

I nod, and the cabs blur together on the street in front of us. I'm still too drunk to move my head painlessly.

“I don't want to tell my dad about Karissa,” I say. “I don't want to be part of it.”

“Okay,” Bernardo says.

“She's not mine,” I say, and it's finally and totally true.

“Agree,” he says.

“None of it's really mine,” I say, meaning my family and my life here and all the things I thought were real. But I don't say any of that. “I guess we could go away after the wedding.”

I light another cigarette. I can't pause, can't let my hands still. Bernardo puts a hand under my butt, so I'm sitting on it.

I'm thinking maybe Bernardo is the only thing that is right about my life.

I get an intense urge to tell the people I love about my engagement. I have no idea what I was thinking telling Janie and Karissa first. It's the first time I've been scared of my own actions. Like my impulses are all off, and some sort of terrible neuron is firing in my brain that's making me do the opposite of the things I should be doing.

I want to tell Roxanne and Arizona and Natasha. I don't want to let go of those things. When Bernardo keeps saying we should be over NYC, I'm not sure I can be over them.

“Maybe it's not that New York sucks. Maybe everything feels impossible after a while, and we get tired of everything. And everyone,” I say. I try to figure out what percentage of me is drunk, what percentage is sober, what percentage is reeling from Karissa's lies, and what percentage is in love.

“Well, I'll never get tired of you,” Bernardo says.

“Me too,” I say.

I light another cigarette. I don't usually chain-smoke, and it goes down rough. Everything's spinning, and I feel like crap. I feel like I'm in someone else's body. I'm saying words that one part of me means but another part of me is scared of.

“Okay,” I say, because I want to make out, not fight. “We'll go far away.”

“We'll get married on a mountain,” he says. “Romantic and just us.”

“Right,” I say. “Sounds great.”

We make out. It should be gross, the sweat and the queasiness and our smoky mouths and boozy lips, but it's not. I feel less vomit-y, less like death, more like myself.

That must be love too.

After we head up to my room, Bernardo falls asleep, but I can't. Everything's spinning and Karissa is scaring me. I don't like her sleeping down the hall, a stranger.

I call Roxanne, missing her voice and the way we planned to spend the whole summer together but didn't. Won't. I need to tell her everything, immediately.

I'm choking on all my new decisions and the things I miss.

She answers the phone all sleepy and strange.

“I'm going to get married,” I say, and she wakes right up. “I'm going away,” I say.

Roxanne doesn't say too much, but she's there and that feels right, at least.

Nothing else feels right.

I fall asleep eventually and wake up a few hours later. Bernardo's passed out cold. He's beautiful and fretful in sleep. I could wake up with him every day. I could do that. I will.

I shake him a little, wanting to talk or hook up or something since I'm awake and the rest of the world is asleep. But he doesn't even grunt in response. I get out of bed, and as soon as I'm upright I realize how seriously fucked up I still am. The room's at a solid forty-five-degree angle, and my mouth is dry even though the rest of me is damp and sweaty. I can't totally keep my head up. Or I could, but I don't really want to.

I take out my gratitude journal and try to choose three things from the day that make me feel lucky. Champagne. Bernardo. Potted plants on the stoop. The idea of palm trees being a part of my everyday life. Being engaged. My new tattoo. Roxanne. There's sort of a lot to be grateful for, even when I'm drunk without wanting to be and overwhelmed.

But writing it down doesn't give me any kind of certainty.

I'm looking for certainty.

I still can't stomach telling Arizona all the epic ways I've changed and ruined our family by letting Karissa in and the ways I'm ditching her to be in love. But there's Natasha, and the fact that she exists makes the day feel more manageable. I text and ask if I can come over.

Natasha is the kind of person who responds to late-night and early-morning texts. She's the kind of person who gives a shit, all the time, even when she's not mine anymore. Even when I've disappointed her.

Come on over!
her text back reads.
I'll put on the coffee
.

I leave a note on Bernardo's chest that I'm heading over to Natasha's. It feels illicit, traveling the city at five in the morning with boozy breath and unchanged partying clothes, and I love it until I realize how much Natasha is going to hate it.

I'm right. She does.

“Oh, come on, honey,” she says. “Is this because of the new girlfriend? Is she lending you stripper clothes? What happened to your T-shirts and your pretty fresh face?”

“Don't start with me,” I say. “I didn't come over for a lecture.”

Natasha recoils a little, and I do too, from myself and my obnoxiousness, but actually I sound the way Roxanne talks to her mother. Normal teenage girl. I sound like a girl with a mother.

“The girls have been asking about you,” she says. I'm sobering up fast.

“I'm going to get away from the girlfriend. Dad's fiancée. The whole situation,” I say.

I tell her everything.

We have an entire pot of coffee.

She doesn't say anything any other mother wouldn't, and that's nice. Almost nicer than the congratulations we'd been looking for. She tells me I'm too young. I have only known him for five minutes. Love and lust are different things. I don't know what I want. I have to tell everyone about Karissa. This is all dangerous. I can't leave town.

“We're in love,” I say.

“Been there,” she says, and it's like a sunrise, something coming to life in front of my eyes. She tucks some hair behind my ear. Part of me wants to stay here with Natasha, be some other kind of seventeen, the kind that comes with a mother who tells you what to do.

“What do you think my mom would say?” I ask. I never bring my mother up with Natasha. Somewhere along the way I learned that all the mothers had to exist in different, separate spheres. That I, too, had to be chopped up—different bits of me reserved for different people.

I thought having a person would stitch me up. Make me whole. Fix me. The way Arizona used to make me feel—like I belonged to something solid even if I was in pieces. It hasn't been working.

I catch sight of myself in Natasha's mirror and leap at the unfamiliar image. Smudged makeup under my eyes and a scab on my eyebrow and the metal ring pinching the skin and my hair the tiredest, saddest, least pink shade of pink.

“I wish I could tell you what your mother would say,” Natasha
says. “Or I wish you didn't need to know.”

Victoria and Veronica call out for her from their cribs, and she holds up a finger to tell me she'll be back in a minute.

I sneak out while she's in the other room. Some dark and hidden part of me doesn't want to be face-to-face with the things other girls get but I don't. I can't see her be a mother. I don't want to know what that looks like and continue having to live without it.

I don't want to live without it.

The walk home is long, that truth finally unlocked and unrelenting.