“When your dad was proposing, it hit me. He’s done it, like, a million times, but he still believes. That’s cool. And, like, getting married doesn’t make sense for anyone, which means it makes sense for everyone,” Bernardo says. He’s smart; it’s one of the things I love about him. Smart and deep and romantic, and I am four-leaf-clover, rabbit-foot, double-rainbow lucky. I drink some more wine, dizzy from the strangeness of what I guess is a proposal.
I’m seventeen, I say in my head over and over, but I don’t say it out loud. Maybe because I’m sort of over being seventeen. I don’t feel seventeen. The way I love him isn’t the way seventeen-year-olds love.
I think about my father on one knee, proposing to Natasha. Or the photograph of him and my mom on their wedding day, holding hands on the beach like the world made sense.
I wonder if showing Bernardo that picture would make him feel the same weird tangle of feelings—hope and hopelessness, fear and excitement. Belief and faithlessness. Wonder and terror.
“You’re insane. And adorable. And you know, someday, obviously,” I say. “Oh! What about a promise ring? Roxanne had one of those once with the guy she dated who had a mohawk and a coke problem. But they got a promise ring. It was the Irish kind—a claddagh ring. It was cool.”
“And they broke up,” Bernardo finishes. “And it was like a joke, right? Like, their parents thought it was totally adorable?”
“Sure,” I say. Roxanne’s mom gave one of those soft, sweet laughs and said she’d had a boyfriend who got her one when she was young too. She said it like we’d all understand how silly we were when we’d grown up. Roxanne hated her for it, but she was right. A promise ring doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t have an impact. It isn’t a real thing. “Yeah. You’re right. It’s like a kind of joke to the rest of the world.”
“We’re not a joke,” Bernardo says. “We’re not high school sweethearts. We’re not Roxanne and her coked-out boyfriend.” He puts his hands on my face. My cheeks are cupped in his palms. He is breathing hard, and soon I am too. “I think I love you more than most people love other people. I want us to be married. You’re going to be eighteen in a few months. And why be jealous of people who do romantic and crazy things when we could do those things ourselves? Why not be the people in the books and movies and in our heads?”
I don’t know if I understand or agree or even hear Bernardo over the buzzing in my head and heart.
I wonder what he’s been reading, which characters he’s jealous of. Which love story he thinks we could rival.
“I saw your list of things, the gratitude diary thing,” Bernardo goes on. “I know I shouldn’t have looked, but I will show you all of mine. I’ve been doing it, like Natasha told me to.”
I’m speechless. I try to remember everything I’ve written in those pages, so I know how much he’s seen of me.
“Those aren’t for you,” I say. I wonder if more wine is going to make it better or worse. I take a few sips to find out. “I read you the ones I wanted you to read, but the rest weren’t for you.”
I’m not sure I like being seen. Not so fully.
“You show them to Natasha, you said.” He sounds genuinely confused, like he must be missing something. Bernardo doesn’t let go of my face, even though I’m sure it’s getting hot under his hands. I’m blushing with confusion. “You showed them to me. We know everything about each other. That’s why I was so honest about Casey.”
“That’s different,” I say, trying to find a voice under the love and the wine and the lost feeling of my world changing. It’s hard.
“You can’t be closer to Natasha than you are to me,” he says. It’s weird, because it’s the second time in three days that someone has said essentially that to me. I get cold inside; I don’t want Bernardo and Karissa to have anything in common right now.
“I’m not. Of course I’m not,” I say. I pretend this doesn’t feel so bad. I try to understand that this comes from love and him wanting to know me. “The lists are a thing between us, though. Like, a Natasha-Montana thing. And I sort of wish you’d asked to see it. I would have shown you.”
“She gave me my own notebook so it could be a Bernardo thing too,” he says. He’s still speaking gently; nothing’s a fight with him. And maybe he’s right. Maybe Natasha gave him the notebook so that he could join our club, so that I wouldn’t have anything without him.
Bernardo’s not Karissa, I say to myself. Then I say it a few more times, to make it true.
But I feel a little like territory again.
“Right,” I say, and my messy mind tries to make order of all this. It’s confusing, learning what love is. It’s some of the things I thought it would be, plus some other things, and I keep getting off track. I can’t seem to stop myself from feeling the wrong things in the right moments.