“Do you think Victoria and Veronica will be mad at me?” I say. I’m not sure why I’m even thinking of them now, standing in the doorway of this place. But they’re so small, I don’t want to freak them out. “Like, will they think I’m a monster or something?”
“Who?” Bernardo says. It hurts, his forgetting. He’s the only person in my life who knows them, who’s met them, who knows what they mean to me. I need him to know without explanation.
“The girls. Natasha’s girls. My, you know, my not-sisters,” I say. I should have said sisters. Or stepsisters. Or almost-sisters.
“Oh, of course,” Bernardo says. He kisses the place that I’m about to pierce and squeezes me again. “They’ll get used to it,” he says, a thing I’m not sure is ever true. “This is a you and me thing, anyway. Not a them thing.”
I feel a pull of missing them. A gasp of it. Then it’s over and I want to be with Bernardo.
I tap my eyebrow when the guy asks me what I want. Bernardo mimics the gesture. The guy rolls his eyes, but I don’t care. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know.
He does me first, then Bernardo. It hurts, and I hadn’t realized it would be a real needle. It’s not like with ears, where there’s a gun punching a hole in your skin. This seems more hard-core.
I feel hard-core. He slips in a silver ring with a shiny red bead. And like that, I’m new. I’m more. He lets me stare at myself in the mirror, and I move my head this way and that, seeing myself from every angle.
Bernardo needs me to hold his hand while his is done, but he doesn’t yelp or anything at the pinch. His ring is gold and thicker than mine. I want to play with it. I want to ruffle his hair and touch his face. I want to feel the way he belongs to me.
We walk down the street after and probably aren’t getting any more looks than usual, but it feels like they can all see the way we fit together.
thirty-three
When I get home, Karissa is on the couch, blitzed out of her mind and holding her phone in one hand and a lit cigarette that she’s not even smoking in the other. I don’t tell her I saw her uptown with my father. I don’t tell her I saw the way he looked at her face for flaws.
She doesn’t notice my eyebrow, but she cuddles into me on the couch.
“My agent dumped me,” she says. She shows me an email from the agent who signed her in the fall. Someone fancy and skeezy.
“No way,” I say. Karissa isn’t a little bit good. She is a lot good. She is arresting.
“He says my look isn’t selling,” she says. “He says after auditions the feedback is that I’m really good but I don’t look the way they need me to look.” She’s crying not only from her eyes but from her chest.
“But you’re gorgeous. He’s insane. That’s literally insane.”
“I’m all wrong,” Karissa says. She doesn’t move from the couch, doesn’t let me move. “Thank God I have you guys,” she says after a while. I think she means my dad and me, and the sentence makes me tense up. She doesn’t have me. She probably doesn’t even really have him.
My shirt’s wet, soon, from her crying. She is getting messier and stranger and more and more a part of my life.
I touch my eyebrow ring, like it’s a portal to a better place. To Bernardo. To the place I actually now belong.
Dad gets home an hour later. My arm is falling asleep from holding Karissa, and I want to be anywhere but here.
“She needs you!” I say.
“Sean!” Karissa says, and Dad comes right to the couch before putting down his briefcase or pouring himself some water like he usually does.
“What happened here?” he says, and takes her from my shoulder to his own.
“Agent stuff,” I say. I get up to go to my room and let them do this alone, because I don’t want to see love and kindness and warmth between them. Even if that’s what I’ve always wanted for my father and what I want for Karissa, I hate seeing it between them.
Then they’re kissing, and it’s even worse seeing it up close and not through a window. I take another few steps away.
“I can’t do this all,” Karissa says. She is soft and scared. Her voice shakes.
“Sure you can. We’re here for you,” Dad says. “Right, Montana?”
I don’t respond. I can’t. I notice a new lamp on the table next to the couch. It gives off an orange-pink light through a thick glass shell. It’s odd and shadeless and totally from Karissa’s apartment. It is the first new addition to our home.
Soon there will be vintage floral armchairs and gold sheer curtains and beaded pillows and ironic coffee mugs and framed posters instead of original prints.
“I want to be married to you already, you wonderful man,” Karissa says.
“Do you now?” he says. I’m going to be sick. I need to leave the room, but I’m compelled to stay. It’s an awful thing I can’t stop looking at.
“I do,” Karissa says, then laughs. “Like I do, I do, you know?” She’s giggling and my dad’s giggling and the sound has the approximate effect of nails on a chalkboard.