The cheese is exceptional. Nutty and buttery and the tiniest bit sweet.
Karissa grabs my cheeks, a weird, hard gesture like she might press with too much force and smush my face entirely. Her hands are cool despite the wicked humidity, and I’m always shocked by her ease with intimacy. “Let’s be magnificent,” she says. She’s grinning and her eyes are wild but warm. If there is a feeling that is smack-dab in the middle of scared and elated, I’m there. “We’re still us, okay? We’re Montana and Karissa. We eat cheese on stolen plates in the middle of the night on the stoop. We are spectacular.”
She stares at me until I nod.
ten
I wait for Bernardo outside after Karissa goes upstairs. If I work at it, I can pretend she’s not in my father’s bedroom.
“You’re still pink,” I say, when he’s halfway down the block. He has his scarf and combat boots on, and I wonder if this guy ever dresses for summertime.
Bernardo laughs, the best kind of chuckle that comes from surprise and not obligation. He is not a guy who laughs often, so his laughter is especially awesome.
“You’re still pretty,” he says. We have matching laughs now. Matching darting eyes. Matching pink hair.
We’ve texted so much over the past week that I can almost forget we haven’t actually been together. He doesn’t know much about me, except it feels like he knows the most important things about me. Who I am, rather than anything about my day-to-day life. I probably look like a distraught mess and smell like garlic and repressed rage.
I care but don’t care. I feel the same rush of closeness with him that I felt when I first met Karissa. Like we have something vital in common.
Or maybe I’m simply becoming a person so desperate for connection that I feel it with randoms all the time. I don’t know. That’s what Arizona would say. That ever since Arizona and Roxanne left for college and Tess moved out, I’m all kinds of unstable and overeager and emotionally wonky. That I’m a little bit like my dad.
But I’m not pretending I’m in love and I’m not counting things I could change about Bernardo, so I can’t be that Sean Varren–esque.
I give Bernardo a hug despite Arizona’s voice in my head. His arms are strong, something that matters to me.
Bernardo’s someone who translates well from real life to text messages. Still, it’s nice to see him and smell him and remember that his glasses get foggy in the humidity and that his nose is straight and his teeth whiter than white. The fun of pink hair makes the rest of him more serious, those dark eyebrows underlining his solemn steadiness.
“So it’s you and me,” I say, sitting back down on the stoop. I don’t really do coy. “Real life. No friends around. I like it.” I smile and hope he likes it too. He doesn’t return the smile, but I still get the sense that he does.
“You don’t need to go get your groupies?” he says.
“If anything, I’m Roxanne’s groupie,” I say. The idea of me being the ringleader is preposterous. I keep trying to be my own person, but it seems like all the options are taken already.
“I don’t think you’d pull off groupie very well,” he says. Nothing that comes out of his mouth is light or flirtatious. It’s all so real. Words with weight. “Groupies have to be background noise, right? You’re melody. You’re like a strong melody. Get-stuck-in-your-head melody. The Beatles. You’re the Beatles.”
I am pretty sure my body falls through the stoop and down into the depths of Manhattan. With the mole people and the rats and the subway. I have been stuck all year between trying to be unique and trying to still fit in with my friends or Karissa. The idea that I’m actually solid and verifiable on my own feels good. Makes me fuller than the pasta and cheese feast did.
“You can’t think I’m that great already,” I say. But it’s a lie, because I sort of think he’s that great already.
“Don’t be self-deprecating,” he says. It’s beautiful and unnerving not to be able to make everything into a joke.
“I’m not sure I can stand up,” I say. “All the sweetness is making me sort of shaky.” We’ve skipped some normal part of the dating experience. Right from nervous first meeting to swoony falling in love.
“I want to see you in the streetlights,” he says, and pulls me off the stoop and onto the sidewalk. I want to ask about his perfect hint of accent, but I don’t know how. I want to know everything about where his voice, his tone, his pronunciation of the word streetlights comes from.