“Sure. Casey,” I say, hating her already. Casey. She sounds peppy and pretty. She sounds brown-eyed and busty.
“I’m over her, first of all,” Bernardo says, like it’s a question he gets asked a lot. I wrap another coat around myself. I need layers for this. What I really need is armor. “So don’t freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” I say, freaking out.
“She was older. In college. Kind of a partyer. Really smart.”
Kind of a partyer means sex. And smart means really pretty. I should not have asked about her. Older means sex too. And older means better. And older means he’ll never be over her.
I take a deep breath and tell those thoughts to go away. Natasha would remind me that being open is good, I think, and Karissa would tell me to trust in my awesomeness.
Karissa always wants me to trust in my awesomeness.
I take off the coats and try to trust in my awesomeness.
“You loved her,” I say. It’s a statement. I already know it’s true, and I am desperate to be okay with it. A sad look comes over his face, and I know he loved her a lot and I also know that he needs me to be there for him while he talks about it.
So I do something I don’t think I’m capable of, because he’s worth it. I decide to support him. I decide to be okay with it.
“That must have been hard, when it ended,” I say. I start hunting through the store’s box of jewelry. Necklaces and bracelets are all tangled up with one another, but if you look closely, you can find beautiful things. As long as you’re willing to spend some time untangling them, righting them, making them yours.
“It was sort of bad. I don’t know. We were really, really together. Then she changed her mind. Said I was too young and immature, and I think she started seeing someone old. Like twenty-five.” Bernardo shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the image he’s created. “It happened fast. I was pretty unprepared.”
“That sounds terrible,” I say. I’ve pulled out a strand of gray pearls. I’m sure they’re fake, but they’re beautiful anyway. I put them around my neck and look at myself in the mirror. Do I look like the sort of girl who could inspire that kind of heartbreak?
“I sort of thought she was it,” Bernardo says. “My parents thought I was insane. But when you love someone . . . I don’t know.”
“When you love someone what?” I ask. No one tells me much about what it’s like to really love someone. I take off my hat and put on red-framed cat-eyed glasses with no lenses. Bernardo kisses my nose. I didn’t know that I wanted to be kissed there. That I would feel small and sweet and adored.
I wrinkle my nose.
“Damn that’s a cute nose,” he says. I cover it up. It hurts. Being complimented hurts sometimes.
“When you love someone what?” I ask again. “What were you going to say?”
“When you love someone, you want to be with them. You want that to be it. You don’t want it to end. When you love someone and you’re seventeen, you want to be thirty, you know?”
I don’t know.
Bernardo’s the kind of guy who wants to skip ahead fifteen years, to get to the boring part.
“That sounds intense,” I say. I grab a tie from the rack and throw it around his neck. It’s green and paisley and wide. I show off my skill at tying ties. It’s the kind of thing you become an expert in when your dad is sometimes single.
“You say intense like you really mean crazy,” Bernardo says. “Partly she was just really hot and liked watching baseball with me and my dad, and made paper cranes and origami and stuff, and I thought that was weird and cool and hot. Should I not say hot? It’s bad to say hot about my ex, right?”
The store owner is giving us a look that means we either need to buy something or leave, so we leave.
I’ve taken the gray not-pearls by accident. I could go in and return them but they didn’t notice, and the pearls are probably, like, a dollar, and there’s something sort of wonderful about being dangerous and not myself. So I keep them on. Twist them around my fingers.
“You are an intense dude,” I say.
“You’re still saying it like it means crazy,” he says.
“It does, a little,” I say. I bump his hip with mine. I kiss his neck. I haven’t kissed him anywhere but his lips, so the smell and taste and feel are all brand-new. “I’m a little crazy too,” I say, and it sounds flirtier than I meant it to. Like an invitation for something.
“I loved Casey,” he says, a sentence I didn’t need to hear. “Because she made me feel like I could be someone else. Someone new.” He shrugs. “Casey, loving Casey, was hopeful, like I could change. But that meant she wanted me to change. Wanted me to be someone else. And, I don’t know, it’s like . . . you can grow, but you can’t really change. Or something.”