“Okay, all right, we’ll keep taking our time with this,” Karissa says, like there’s this day in the future when I’ll be able to withstand the image, the word, the amount of skin she’s showing right now, her comfortable way of sinking into all our couches and armchairs, my father calling her baby once when they were in the other room.
“You want to move slowly, right?” I say. I guess I’m going for it. Having this conversation.
“With you and me and dealing with this new aspect of our friendship?” she says. They don’t sound like her words. They sound like my father’s.
“Well, like, with this whole thing.” I can’t bring myself to say anything close to your relationship with my father.
Karissa cocks her head and smiles. The towel on her head shifts and threatens to fall down. Tess had this detailed way of wrapping her hair in a towel that involved a special absorbent cloth and a butterfly clip. She used bottles of moisturizer, different kinds for every part of her body. She tried to teach me how to do it correctly. Karissa’s still dripping a little. She has not moisturized, I’m sure of it. She’s barely dried off. There are wet footprints from the bathroom to my bedroom. Her shoulders are bony.
“A casting director yesterday told me I need to wear more eye makeup,” she says, looking in my mirror and apparently changing the subject. “I mean, what is that? That sucks. I’m not booking anything. Terrible, terrible actors who are really hot book everything, and I’m too weird-looking to get commercials and not fancy enough to get plays and not L.A. enough to get movies. You any good at eye makeup?”
It’s impossible to imagine inhabiting Karissa’s body and having any complaints about how you look, but there’s always been that raw, insecure side to her. Our acting teacher told her to hang on to it.
“Confidence is beautiful,” the teacher had said, “but insecurity is fascinating. Wouldn’t you rather be fascinating?”
“Wouldn’t you rather be fascinating?” I say now, knowing we both loved every word that came out of our teacher’s mouth.
“I’d rather be able to act,” Karissa says, shrugging. Six months ago I’m positive she would have answered differently. I can’t stand that Karissa doesn’t think fascinating is enough anymore. Almost as much as I wouldn’t be able to stand it if Karissa became my new stepmom.
“Okay, I’m going to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone I told you,” I say. “And you’re going to think this is crazy and that my family is nuts, but I warned you, so don’t lose your mind.”
“I’m ready,” Karissa says, grinning. Her towel finally falls all the way off her head, and she lets it go to the ground, her hair a mess of wet curls. She’s dripping even more now, a puddle forming around her feet.
“My dad thinks he’s, like, going to propose,” I say. I start to laugh. Saying it out loud makes it kind of hilarious instead of totally panic-worthy. I can hear how ridiculous it is. How mismatched and nonsensical. How it will sound to Karissa. “On, like, Friday,” I say. “Do not ask me where he gets this stuff. He’s sort of nuts with women. So, like, I thought I should tell you so that you can tell him not to do it. Or make it clear that’s not your thing. Or be prepared. Or whatever.” I can’t stop doing this low-level half breath, half giggle. I can’t stop shaking my head at the absurdity of it all.
“Oh,” Karissa says. “Wow. Oh wow.”
“I know.”
She starts smiling. But the smile never turns into a laugh. It stays caught on her face, stuck in confusion.
“Oh wow,” she says again. “Oh my God! This is . . . this is . . .”
“So fucked up?”
“I can’t believe someone like him can really see a future with someone like me,” she says. She weaves her long hair into a sloppy braid, missing huge chunks.
“I mean, I know, right?” I say. I can’t wait to tell Bernardo. I can’t wait to tell Arizona! Arizona will lose her mind with relief. She’ll throw herself on me, and we can celebrate with enormous ice cream sundaes from Serendipity. We can spend the rest of the summer in the park without this hanging over us, ruining everything.
Maybe we can even chill at Karissa’s one night, near the end of the summer, when it’s so over we barely remember it happened.
“Friday?” Karissa says. “Oh my God, Friday!”
She finally starts to laugh.
But the laugh is all wrong. It’s happy. It’s ecstatic. It’s nervous.
It is the laugh of a woman who is going to say yes.
“Karissa,” I say. I can’t think of a sentence or question to follow her name.
“I, like, love him,” she says. She is glowing. I’m choking on a feeling I don’t have a name for that’s close to disgust and panic and confusion.