“Don’t feel bad for me or anything. I’ll probably have a new mom soon, anyway!” I say, and Karissa’s eyebrows spike. “I mean, not really. That’d be fast even for him. But he sounds all smitten. And this one’s different.” I scoff so they know exactly how seriously I take that description.
“Sounds like love to me,” Karissa says. “Maybe this one really is different.” She almost sings it, and I wonder when she was last in love. Probably constantly or never at all. However she does love is how I should do it. Cool and calm or crazy and fearless. She has a necklace with a metal heart hanging from her neck, and I decide it’s enough evidence that Karissa knows things about romance that I need to learn. Things my dad or my mostly gone mother or my uninspiring ex-sort-of boyfriends can’t teach me. “Do you want him to be in love?” she asks. And the answer is somewhere deep down far away inside me.
“Yes,” I say. “Like, real love. Not this. I don’t want to watch the same movie play out over and over forever.”
“Things don’t change until they do,” Karissa says.
“My dad’s not like you and me,” I say, which is mostly wishful thinking, that anyone but me thinks I could be like Karissa at all, even a little. “But if you say I should have hope, I will. Again.”
Arizona would call me an asshole, remind me we’re stuck in an endless cycle that’s never going to get better. Roxanne would laugh. Maybe that’s why I need Karissa. For the whole hope thing.
“You’re a rock star. Let’s do this forever, okay?” She kisses my cheek with the side of her pink-painted mouth and squeezes my shoulder. I am the luckiest person in the world, for one moment.
June 9
The List of Things to Be Grateful For 1 The mysterious and imperfect beauty of Karissa’s freckles.
2 Texting so late into the night with Bernardo that we both start typing nonsense: Him: hi&vgh(. Me: 5555ght. Him: @;)rhuo. Me: ** ** **. The hidden meanings therein. The one million possibilities of what that nonsense means.
3 The possibility that my father could be in real love, if I’m to believe Karissa and believe in real love, which I think I have to. The Post-it on the counter that says we have a reservation to meet the new girlfriend tomorrow night. The fact that I don’t rip it up and miraculously Arizona doesn’t either.
seven
When Dad sees my hair almost a week after I dyed it, he changes our reservation from his favorite fancy restaurant, Le Cirque, to this Italian place on the Lower East Side. People with almost pink hair can’t sit in a place like Le Cirque—there is a domed ceiling and silver platters and little one-bite appetizers or sorbets in between every course. People with almost pink hair have to stay below 14th Street where they belong.
“You had to do this tonight of all nights?” he says.
“I did it last week, but you haven’t been around to see it,” I say. “So let’s make sure we’re directing our anger correctly.” To Dad’s credit, he doesn’t tell me to cut my attitude. Instead he nods, swallows, and agrees.
“Well. You have a point there,” he says. Roxanne used to wonder why Arizona and I have never stopped loving my father. Then she witnessed the measured way he admits to screwing up and his serious head nods and the way he laughs at my meanest jokes, and she got it.
“You know, my new friend might just like your crazy ways,” Dad says. He winks and I almost text Karissa to tell her that her signature wink is taking over the world, but I decide texting her and Bernardo will be my reward for getting through this night with a half-pleasant smile on my face.
“Call her your girlfriend, dude,” Arizona says. Dad laughs. His stubble is growing out, and he has this new tie that is purple and striped and a little too hip. He’s wearing it with a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and I have never seen my father unmatched. His fancy gold watch is gone and his hair is a little mussed.
“Okay, dude,” he says, like he’s been practicing saying the word dude lately, in general.
“Tell your sister she’ll never get a job or a boyfriend with that whole punk look she’s rocking,” Dad says to Arizona, and the tone is all joking, but there’s something under it that hurts, and I know that thing is that it’s his truth.
Also, my dad can’t really pull off the word rocking even with his fuzzy face and power-clashing outfit.
“Actually, the color’s growing on me,” Arizona says. I know this probably isn’t exactly true, but when it comes to Dad’s comments on how we look or how in love he is, we’re automatically on the same team no matter what. Even if we haven’t been talking much the past few days or months and even if her new boobs are squarely between us, changing everything. “Better than if she’d gone all goth-black or something.”