“Absolutely not,” Bernardo says the next day as we’re walking around the Upper East Side, Bernardo in a suit and me in one of Janie’s old dresses, like we belong there. We’re near my dad’s office, heading to this French place I’ve been going to since I was little and wanted to show Bernardo.
“I don’t mean I’d be getting surgery, like, tomorrow,” I say. “I’m just wondering if I should consider the possibility.” It’s getting harder and harder to stop thinking about that photograph. I’ve been avoiding my father in the house, playing a weird kind of hide-and-seek that he doesn’t know is going on. I don’t want to see his gaze slip from my eyes to my chin. I don’t want to see what I know he’s thinking.
“When I was with Casey and after she dumped me, I felt like I had to change everything,” Bernardo says. “But you made me feel like I can be who I am. Or we can become new people, but together.”
“Casey wanted you to change?” I say.
“I mean, not my chin. But be older. Be different. Have more direction or something. Be a different kind of better person that she’d like more. It’s a losing battle, though.”
“I made you dye your hair,” I say, covering my face in embarrassment for being every bit as bad as Casey.
“You did not make me dye my hair. You inspired me to be a weirdo,” Bernardo says.
I want to cover him in kisses but I can’t, because we reach the restaurant and I catch sight of Karissa in the window.
Bernardo hadn’t understood why I wanted to come all the way uptown to go to a bistro when there are so many identical French bistros all over the city. I couldn’t fully answer except to say I like the predictability of the menus and the always-red chairs and the waiters’ accents. So I like Café Moche. Especially for their french fries.
I’ve known my dad comes here for lunch when he has to work on weekends, so maybe Karissa in the picture window shouldn’t be so much of a surprise, but it is. A breathtaking one. I stop Bernardo before he barrels in to say hello and steal some of her fries.
“Jesus,” he says, his exclamation for everything from terrible weather to great kissing. “Tiny city we live in, right?” I nod but keep holding him back.
“What’s she doing?” I say.
“Probably waiting for your dad?”
As soon as he says it, my dad comes back from the bathroom, and they make out right there in the window. It’s disgusting and I turn away. I can almost see Central Park from here. It’s a green haze in the distance, and I wish I could leap straight into it. I keep wanting to be somewhere other than the place I am.
Maybe I simply want the summer to be over, even though it’s what I waited for all year.
“I’m sorry,” Bernardo says, like he’s responsible for me witnessing this reality. “It’s over. I think they stopped.”
I turn back to look at them, hoping they have taken up residence on their own separate sides of the table. I don’t even want to see them holding hands after that display. But I catch something else, a last gesture that looks affectionate except for how well I know it.
My father uses two fingers on her jaw and turns her face to the light. Even in the daytime, French bistros manage to stay pretty dim, so he has to move his face closer to hers to see properly, and he does. He inspects her face. Not for loveliness. For flaws.
I know because he’s done it to me.
Karissa doesn’t wince away from him. She smiles. She nods her head when he’s done telling her what I’m sure is a laundry list of things that would make her better. She grips his arm while he’s inspecting her.
He is going to change her.
He keeps chipping away at this person I thought I had, and soon she won’t even exist.
“You wanna say hi, or no?” Bernardo says. I picture, for a moment, eating burgers and fries and drinking big mugs of latte with Karissa and my dad and my handsome, perfect, crazy, solemn boyfriend. It could almost be nice, but I can’t shake the nausea of Karissa giving in to Sean Varren, like the rest of them do.
The sad-happy look on her face isn’t something I can look at while eating.
“I hate my father,” I say to Bernardo. Karissa’s settled back in her chair, but her grip on my dad’s forearm hasn’t loosened, and she keeps touching her hair and her face like she wants it to stay in place.
“Nah,” he says, and I know he’s right. He’s all I have, parent-wise, and he’s good, sometimes. He’s even great on occasion. For small spurts of time. For moments.