“Don’t you have an audition or anything?” I check my phone. Bernardo has texted a few times already, and Roxanne sent me some link to something, and I want my room to myself so badly my skin itches.
“No auditions today,” Karissa says. “But I should have some soon! I have a plan. What if we did a little dress shopping?” I wonder for a moment if she’s on something. She’s that hyped up. It seems like she may throw her arms wide and start spinning around and around until she falls down from dizziness, the way little kids sometimes do.
“Like . . . summer dresses?” I ask.
“I was thinking maybe wedding dresses. I sort of want to look around. See what’s out there. It’s, like, what you’re supposed to do when you get engaged, right?”
I am the expert, clearly.
“I guess. But maybe you want to go with someone else?” It isn’t until I see the look on her face that I know I’ve said the wrong thing. I forgot, for long enough to ask one question, that her family is gone. And that we pledged best friend status when we were drunk. And that somehow I am the person she has to do this with.
“I’m engaged,” Karissa says, her eyes big and her mouth drawing down. “I want to do things other people get to do.”
I think of how many times I have said and thought this exact sentence.
She hasn’t made a move to get out of my room, so I wonder if she’s expecting me to change in front of her. I cross my arms over my chest and wish they were wide enough to cover all of me. I have sweat marks on my shirt and the image of my bikinied body with lines on all the ugly parts in my head. I don’t want to be seen.
“Can we go get croissants? I’ll meet you at Pain Quotidien in, like, fifteen?” I say, desperate to change the subject. Chocolate croissants should be a strong enough force to put a stop to almost anything. But they are not strong enough to stop her.
“I was thinking you could be my maid of honor. I know that might be weird, with Arizona and stuff, and of course she’ll be a bridesmaid. But what do you think?” Karissa smiles. She’s flushed and wild-eyed. She still hasn’t let go of my yellow dress. She uses her free hand to grab my hand. “You remind me so much of my sister. And I really meant what I said, at Dirty Versailles, you know? I want you to know I wasn’t just drunk. I feel that bond with you. That was real.”
I don’t like the desperate edge to her voice or the way she keeps half pacing around my room. Taking little steps in every direction.
“Oh wow,” I say. I’m queasy and hot. My heart’s pounding out a particular rhythm that means this is wrong and weird and scary. I decide to put a T-shirt over my tank top and actually change clothes later. I run a brush through my hair and tie it into a side ponytail, and I flip through my texts some more. If I knew how to unlock this moment and move into a different one I would, but my phone doesn’t seem to have an app for that.
“That’s a yes, right?” Karissa says. “I’m thinking red for you. A red dress. Because, like, screw pastels, right? I am not a pastel bride. Your sister will be a pastel bride. You will definitely be wearing pastel pink or whatever when you are her maid of honor. So let’s get you in red for mine.”
HELP, I text Bernardo. Attack of the crazy stepmom.
Tess????? he says in some kind of text panic. It’s too many question marks for so early in the morning.
Karissa, I text back. I should text Roxanne to come over and join us for the day. She could at least create some distance. Poke a little hole for me to breathe out of.
I’m suffocating, I text her. I sort of know I won’t hear back. She has friends visiting from Bard, and they’re going on some weed-smoking bender that Arizona and I weren’t invited on, since we don’t smoke weed.
She seemed okay at the thing last week, Bernardo texts. I think what he means is that we were all too drunk to care that she’s unstable. Or maybe Karissa’s too pretty for a guy to worry about in that way.
I guess I’m going to spend the day with her.
Good luck, he writes back.
I try to think about Dirty Versailles and acting class and Karissa’s cool apartment and the way she smokes her cigarettes and the way she uncorks wine bottles and how talented and funny and exciting she can be. I try to hold on to that part of her, the part that I wanted to have.
“You’re the reason I found your dad, right? You deserve to be up there during the wedding.” Karissa climbs onto my bed now that I’ve left it. I would never climb onto someone else’s unmade bed, and I sort of wince on her behalf. I’m sure it smells like sleep and Goldfish and cigarettes.
Feelings are clawing, feral cat–like, all over me, along with the realization that in any other version of this, I’d be thrilled. If Karissa were marrying Will from acting class or the bartender from Dirty Versailles or the ex-boyfriend she told me about who started texting her old roommate, I’d be on board. I’d be silly with the thrill of being her maid of honor. I’d be advertising it.