“I feel uncomfortable—,” I try to say, but Karissa cuts me off.
“Can you wait until tomorrow to feel uncomfortable?” she says. Her eyes look a little like a stormy sea, and there’s sadness there, under all the dancing and shiny clothing and bright smiles. I can feel her missing her mother, and I can’t say no to it.
“As long as you let me feel not okay about all this tomorrow,” I say, and she meant it as a joke, but I mean it as a reality. I am eventually going to need more permission to feel not okay.
Bernardo comes back smelling of the brand of soap Tess had us stocked up on.
“So what do we think? Board games?” Karissa says when Bernardo’s back. “Drunk board games! For me at least. I can be drunk. You guys, I’m not so sure. I should probably wait before I become your official beer buyer or whatever. I bet you have Taboo, don’t you? Scattergories? I bet you have Scattergories and I bet your dad has Scrabble and I bet Arizona has Monopoly. I’m so right, aren’t I?”
I nod and feel like I’m betraying Arizona for about the millionth time today. She would hate Karissa guessing something about her, pretending to know her. I should hate it too.
“I’m totally kidding about only me being drunk! I’ll chaperone. It’s cool. We’re all cool,” she says, smiling so hard the freckles on her face shift around. I hate how much I still love her.
“Drunk board games it is,” Bernardo says in the flurry of Karissa’s words.
“Thank you,” she says, squeezing my hand. “Seriously. Thank you. I know this is still sticky, but I need you and it means so much to me that you get that.” I smell all of Karissa’s smell—cigarettes and baby powder and musky perfume and supersweet hair spray. A combination that is oddly perfect. I grow a little, from her nice words and the way she is acting like I matter and like she gets it, and I think of things I could do to make her feel better—get a cake in honor of her mother, toast her mother, tell her about the day my mother left.
She winks at Bernardo and sneaks into the kitchen to go liquor hunting. I press myself against him the second she’s out of the room, because this might get awkward and I want him to remember what our bodies feel like together, before the situation scares him off.
“She’s a lot,” I say.
“You’re being good to her,” he says. “You’re really good to people, even when it’s hard for you. Like with talking to me about Casey today. I noticed.”
Sometimes compliments cause these heart palpitations. For me, at least.
Sometimes they hit and make me feel like I might be about to die, until I realize no, that’s a good feeling, not a bad one.
That compliment hits and sparks and practically explodes in my chest. I’ve been spending so much time wondering what’s wrong with me, wondering why I’m not a good enough sister or friend or daughter or person, that the idea of me being good is a little unbearable.
Compliments don’t always sound true, but today, right now, that one does.
Once we are in the basement, Karissa takes a sloppy drink from the bottle of wine and hands it to me, like some ancient family-making ritual.
I take a sip and pass it on to Bernardo.
“So we’re doing this?” he says. I guess it’s a question I should have asked before going down this rabbit hole, where we don’t give up our friendship even though she’s also something else. It’s dangerous, to be two things at once, to be blurry and undefined and weird. We are entering into messiness without asking enough questions.
So it’s my fault, in some ways.
I jump right in.
“Might as well,” I say with this shrug and smile like it’s all so, so cool.
sixteen
Karissa, Bernardo, and I end up on the couch in the basement playing charades because I don’t feel like hunting around for board games, and I don’t want to have any kind of deep conversation either.
Karissa is the world’s best charades player. It is the opposite of a surprise. I’m into it for about a minute, but the wine hits me fast and I’m drowsy quickly.
“You need to commit,” she says, when I try to act out Moby-Dick. I blow up my cheeks and point to a pretend hole in the center of my back and wiggle my fingers around to represent water spouting out of it. “I mean, come on. The word ‘dick’ is right in the title. What are you doing not acting out the word ‘dick’? That’s, like, a gift from the charades gods.”
I shake my head, but there aren’t words to respond to that.