“Tinker Bell is sort of a tragic literary figure, right?” I say. It seems smart and interesting in my head, like a brilliant thesis I’ve come up with that Karissa could get behind. Something that will astound and impress her. Make it clear I’m worth the trouble of sneaking into a bar.
“Huh. Maybe,” she says. “But I’m an Ophelia girl personally. Crazy and gorgeous and loved and ill-fated. Not that I’m gorgeous. I’m like the opposite of gorgeous.” Karissa makes a nervous gesture with her hand running through her hair, and she is completely gorgeous. “But I’m a little crazy, like all the best people are.”
She looks at me like I’m supposed to say something, and I want to say something even though I have nothing to say.
“They so are,” I say. “I’m, like, bonkers.” It’s a word Roxanne uses all the time so I am a total fraud, but it works. Karissa beams.
“And Ophelia’s about a million times better than Juliet, you know? Juliet had a stupidity to her. Ophelia is all tragedy, all the time,” she says. I nod and wonder at talking about Ophelia on a Thursday night at a downtown bar next to a guy with a beard and a green drink and a neon-yellow bow tie.
“Ophelia commits to the tragedy of life,” I say, playing with the gold tassel on my bar stool. “She knows how it is.”
“Yes!” Karissa says, before turning to the bartender and ordering a bottle of red. He gives us goblets and some kind of French wine and fills everything to the tippy top because he’s so distracted by Karissa. It doesn’t matter that her teeth are crooked and her chin is a little small and she’s even flatter than me. It doesn’t matter that she’s freckled and that her hair is light brown and not honey blond or platinum blond or champagne blond.
She is charged. And beautiful. And telling me to drink faster, harder, more enthusiastically.
“Let’s be drunk,” she says. “Let’s be drunk best friends who rule the world.”
“Best friends?” I say. The music is loud and I wonder if I’ve misheard her. I’ve been aching to have a best friend again. Even though Roxanne has been back from college for a few weeks, it hasn’t felt the way it did last year or the ten years before that. She talks about people whose names I’ve never heard. People who have names I didn’t even know were names. People who go only by their last names. People who go by shortened versions of their last names: Hertz and Scal and Jav and Gerb. It’s hard to keep up.
Arizona gets back tonight. We haven’t spoken in over a month, which seems impossible for someone I used to co-parent a stuffed elephant with. She won’t even be living at home over the summer. Dad’s letting her split a summer sublet with one of her new Colby friends. I hate that the word sister has this shifting, changeable definition that doesn’t mean two people who share a room and a brain and a speech pattern and a body type anymore.
I’m over it. Over them. Over the things I knew and did and thought. I’m with Karissa now.
“I think we could be best friends, don’t you?” Karissa says. She slams down her goblet and fills it up with more wine. Her teeth are insta-purple. “If I find you a cute college guy to hook up with, would you ditch your other best friends and become mine?”
“I’d definitely consider it,” I say, but really I’m looking everywhere for the guy I see sometimes in the park. I’m pretty sure we have developed a whole relationship based on continuous, awkward eye contact over the last two months.
“It’s rare to have a real connection with someone,” Karissa says. She leans in close to me. She smells like baby powder deodorant, and I know from experience, even though I can’t hear them now, that her cheap metal earrings are making tiny clanging noises. “You’re in high school, so maybe you don’t know this, but you’ll mostly hate people when you’re in your twenties, and you’ll be wondering why everyone’s trying to be so boring. They’re all scared.”
I don’t tell her that I’m scared.
I do tell her that I’ve seen a lot of women on a quest to be boring.
My dad’s a plastic surgeon. A fancy one who specializes in marrying women, changing everything about them on his operating table, and divorcing them when they’re as close to perfect as he can get them.
That’s not what’s written on his business card or anything. But that’s how it goes with Dr. Sean Varren.
“There’s a guy for you,” Karissa says, pointing across the bar to a dude in a plaid button-up whose mohawk is so tall it almost touches one of the low-hanging chandeliers.
“I think he’s for you,” I say. He’s handsome in the same unknowing, wild, fantastic way that Karissa is beautiful. He doesn’t look kissable because he doesn’t look knowable.