I do remember.
“Remember that scene we did together in class? Those long nights we spent at the studio rehearsing the shit out of it? How fun that was?”
Yes, I do.
“Remember convincing Donna to let us all order Ethiopian food when everyone was really cranky that one day? Teaching them all to eat with the spongy bread?”
Yes, I do.
“Remember when I took you swing dancing?”
I do.
“Remember when we hung out on Valentine’s Day and made each other Valentines and I told you about every guy I ever loved?”
I do.
“Those were real things,” Karissa says.
I shake my head. They were real, but they’re not anymore. They’re real, but they don’t mean what they used to.
We finally make our way up the steps, under the awning.
“I can’t go inside until we’re okay,” Karissa says. “Until you remember that you love me.”
My head hurts.
“We can’t go inside until you choose me.”
We stand on the stoop for a long, long time. Karissa’s face gets lit every few seconds by passing cars, and she’s chain-smoking and I’m chain secondhand smoking and about a thousand conversations pass in front of us but we don’t speak.
“Okay,” I say at last, because I can’t stand the gross weather anymore and Karissa reminded me about one more day—the one I came in crying that Tess was leaving, and she bought me hot chocolate and listened to me explain the way it feels to have something taken away that you weren’t totally sure you wanted but that you were trying to want.
“Let me in,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, and we go inside where it’s air-conditioned and my dad’s white noise machine is humming the perfect non-sound and he’s left out apple and cheddar sandwiches for us both.
July 9
The List of Things to Be Grateful For
1Pasta for breakfast.
2French toast for dinner.
3The sunset, as seen from Battery Park with Bernardo.
thirty-six
Days later, when the heat wave has passed, Bernardo and I are sitting in my basement, drinking white wine and smoking ridiculous clove cigarettes, and he asks what my dad did with all the old rings.
“Do the women keep them?” Bernardo asks. “Do they keep everything he gives them?”
“I mean, the boobs for sure. And the new catlike faces.”
When Bernardo thinks something I say is funny, he kisses me instead of laughing. It’s one of the million things I love about him. I find something new every day, practically. The texture of his hair on a particularly humid afternoon. The way his lips move a little when he reads the back of a book. I love lying on a blanket in the park in his arms while he runs his fingers up and down my spine. I even love the noise my phone makes when he’s texting me. It sounds different, somehow, that ding ding! when I know it’s him.
It’s all stuff I can’t tell Arizona and Roxanne, exactly. Things that are too small or cheesy or random to say when they ask me how it’s going with him.
“What’s gonna happen with Karissa?” he says.
“Maybe she’ll surprise me,” I say. “Maybe it will be okay.”
“Natasha turned out okay,” he says. He rubs my back, and any other day it would be the perfect thing to say, but I’m trying to let go of Natasha, in my head first, and then I’ll do it in reality. I’m trying to give Karissa what she wants.
Because yesterday we had coffee on the roof and got tans, and the day before we drank white wine at my favorite movie theater, the Angelika, from thermoses, and laughed at a documentary about supermodels, and those are things that make it seem like it could be okay, even if there’s a snaky feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me it’s all wrong and even if every few hours something is dark and strange on her face. And because the real truth is that I’m afraid of what she’ll do with the secret I’ve been keeping. I’m afraid of Karissa.
Bernardo’s eyebrow ring scrapes my forehead a little when we kiss. “You are the best kisser,” I say.
“You too,” he says before kissing me again.
“Better than Casey?” I say. I say it because I’m drunk and lost in the kissing and because he teared up a little when we were in Battery Park the other evening. I asked him why, and he said he and Casey used to go there together.
“You miss her?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said, and I thought it would hurt except it was so real and true that I didn’t mind. It was better than pretending she’d never existed or never mattered.
“I decided something,” Bernardo says now, and I’m worried he’s decided he’s not really ready to love someone again. “I’m over her. In the real way. In the over-over way. In the I-don’t-miss-her-anymore way.”
“But in Battery Park—,” I say. I don’t want to hear a lie that is simply easier than the truth.