Making Pretty by Corey Ann Haydu
June 2
The List of Things to Be Grateful For
1A summer without stepmothers.
2That I am suddenly and certainly cool enough to hang out with Karissa.
3The boy across the park who wears weather-inappropriate clothes and checks out me instead of my best friend.
one
I should not be going to a bar.
Karissa and I have matching Elmo T-shirts, but hers is cut to show a lot of skin and mine is layered over a ripped long-sleeved black shirt and under a polka-dot cardigan I stole from my dad’s third wife, Natasha.
“Act cool, Montana,” Karissa says. “Act twenty-one.”
I take my hair down from its ponytail and cock my head to the side and try to look bored.
“Does this look twenty-one?” I ask. We’re across the street from Karissa’s favorite bar, Dirty Versailles. It’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and allegedly lives up to its name. Dive meets fancy French palace. It is the opposite of surprising that Karissa likes it.
“You’ll need this,” she says, handing me a lit cigarette. She lights a new one for herself. “You smoke, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. I like to call Karissa “ma’am” because she’s twenty-three and she hates it.
I take a drag on the cig. My best friend, Roxanne, started smoking at college this year so I started too, wanting to be up to speed when she got home for the summer. I don’t like the taste but I like how much my older sister, Arizona, hates it and how much my dad would hate it if he were home enough to know.
I like how it compresses the time and space between Roxanne and me. With each dirty drag I can almost pretend I spent the year upstate at Bard splitting cigarettes with Roxanne and her Argentinian roommate, or in Maine with Arizona, making out with boys in white baseball caps.
Karissa moves us across the street so that we’re smoking right in front of the bar, where the bouncer can see us.
“Look edgy,” she says. “Look sexy. Look like you don’t give a crap and could go anywhere but have chosen to grace this bar with your presence.”
I’m not convinced I can pull that off, but I don’t want this night with Karissa to end. She has on silver leggings and cowboy boots that she spray-painted neon blue, and her hair is so long and wild she could be a mermaid or a lioness. I’m a little bit in love with her, in the way I used to be in love with my cool teenage babysitters when I was like ten years old.
I blow my smoke up instead of out. I thank myself for wearing skinny jeans instead of the ugly shorts Roxanne and Arizona hate. It’s impossible not to wonder if I should have done some sort of makeup situation.
Karissa stamps out her cig, so I do the same.
“Pretty K!” the bouncer says when she touches his arm and smiles.
“Hey, buddy,” she says. He’s a little bit in love with her too. Everyone is. The boys and men in our acting class. Strangers walking from an Italian dinner to a crappy sports bar. The short dude in the sketchy bodega who sold her the cigarettes.
“Come on in,” the bouncer says.
“This is Montana,” Karissa says, putting an arm around me and kissing my cheek. “She cool?”
The bouncer looks me up and down. It seems like A Moment. I’ve been asking myself this very same question all year long. Am I cool?
I’ve had a lot of time to mull it over, in the absence of my sister and my best friend. It’s the kind of question I’ve been working out, listening to stories of dorm parties and gender studies classes and roommates with dreadlocks and how quiet and sweet and full life outside the city can be.
I haven’t come up with an answer, and the bouncer looks unconvinced.
“She young?” he says.
“Younger than me!” Karissa says. “But old enough.”
“Fine, fine, get her in there,” the bouncer says. “But I can’t promise she’ll fit in.”
“Isn’t the point to not fit in?” Karissa says. Every word out of her mouth is perfect. Wry and flirty and smart and funny and killer.
Goddamn it I want to be her. But I’ll settle for having her take me under her wing for now.
The bar is exactly what it promised to be. Everything is painted gold but also chipping. Chandeliers with fake crystals hang from the ceilings. Half the lightbulbs are out.
It’s funny how something sad is automatically more beautiful than something happy.
It applies to people too. Karissa is the sad kind of pretty. Like a very wise Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell’s sad too. All wrapped in unrequited love and unbelievability and misery. Karissa, Tinker Bell, and this bar are all lovely for the same reasons.