The Karissa I loved and still maybe love is there, but so is someone else. Like a third person in the room with us. Old Karissa and Stepmom Karissa. I do not seem to like Stepmom Karissa.
There’s a look crossing her face that I’ve never seen outside of acting class. A hurt look, pained and confused. I’m not following her script. If it were afternoon and not morning, I would defer to the look. But my head hurts and my mouth is salty and dry from eating Goldfish in bed after Reggio, and not seeing Arizona at the café made me miss my sister even more. “My sister and I shared a closet,” Karissa says.
I think I’m simply tired. But maybe I am also, horribly, a little tired of this story.
“Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what was whose,” she continues. “Like, if I’d bought a certain shirt or if she had. That closeness . . . it’s beautiful, right?” She’s getting choked up, like she always does when she remembers her family, but it’s so early for grief that I don’t know what to do.
The grief has turned a little sour. Or possibly I’m exactly like my dad—thinking something’s beautiful until I look too closely, then seeing everything I want to change about it.
“That’s so cute,” I say, careful and not convincing enough. “But we don’t really do that.” I want to also say and you’re not my sister. But I don’t. Arizona would.
It’s weird to start getting sick of someone’s grief, but it happens. Or maybe it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to me. Maybe this is proof positive that I actually am the terrible person Tess accused me of being. I can’t even work up early-morning sympathy for someone whose entire family died in one fell swoop.
“Look what I found, though!” Karissa says. She’s made her way back over to my closet and pulls out a dress I bought secondhand with Arizona last summer, when she dragged me to some boutique with too-girly clothes. The dress is butter yellow with doily-looking white sleeves and a blue ribbon that wraps around the waist. It’s pretty and extremely not me. I have been planning on wearing it out with Bernardo, since he promised we’d spend the summer eating at sidewalk tables, and it is the exact kind of dress a girl wears to eat in the sunshine. I have a whole plan where I wear my hair in loose curls and barrettes and act sweet for an afternoon. Order éclairs. Drink tea with my pinkie up.
“That’s mine,” I say. I get out of bed fully, since she is clearly not going to stop. I try to feel that compassion for her again, like I did a few weeks ago. “I mean, I guess you could borrow it sometime if you want,” I try, but it comes out pissed, and Karissa’s not paying attention to me anyway. I’m like an object in this conversation. A lamp or maybe something truly useless, like an ottoman.
“Well, I mean, you have to wear this. Let’s picnic. That’s a picnic dress if I ever saw one.” Even Karissa’s voice is grating at this time in the morning. I get the feeling this is an apology, and it’s not enough. We can’t picnic away her marrying my father.
I want to see her with a cigarette on the stoop or a beer in the basement or sitting cross-legged on her kitchen counter, pickle in hand, or perched on a bar stool at Dirty Versailles with strangers watching her.
I do not like this new part of her.
Her eyes say nothing has to change, but that’s not true, and I can see that, at least.
“I’m saving it,” I say.
“For the boyfriend? We can all go. Call him up. I’ll buy baguettes and cheese and salami or something. It will be very French. It will be romantic. I have a dress I made a few summers ago when I was into making clothes. It’s perfect. We’ll be perfect.” Karissa holds the dress up to my body and gets her face too close to mine. “Have you picnicked before? Mom used to take me and, like, my dolls on picnics when I was little. We’d just go behind the house, but it was my favorite thing to do. Let’s do that.”
“Are you okay?” I say, trying to root her behavior in something specific. “Is it, like, another anniversary or birthday or something?” I want to put a name to her grief. Maybe it will feel more controlled then, less wild. I want to make it not about us and our relationship and how to fix it.
Karissa shakes her head.
“I want to spend time with you. I want to have a Karissa-Montana day. This is about us.” It is the exact thing I didn’t want her to say. I never would have guessed, in Dirty Versailles that night a few weeks ago, that we could have gotten here so fast. Her saying the wrong things and making my head hurt. Me wondering how long I have to smile around her for. When it’s appropriate to scream.