We say I love you when I’m in the chair. We kiss. It’s like a ceremony but not. It’s a lot like the piercing—doing something we aren’t old enough to do, but pretending we are.
The guy with the needle leans over my ring finger and starts drawing a cursive letter B in the place where a diamond might go.
There’s a buzzing pain, something that I feel in my finger and my brain. I’m panicking and wishing myself somewhere else entirely, so I keep looking at Bernardo.
It sort of works. I try to breathe through the jolts of pain and pre-regret.
DO NOT FEEL THAT, I tell myself.
Once upon a time, Roxanne and Arizona and I planned on getting tattoos together.
It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe a year and a half. Before they went to college and before Arizona’s surgery and before the first time Roxanne had sex and before Karissa. Back when Dad was still with Tess. We were going to get matching best friend tattoos. Roxanne suggested a sketch of our bench. Arizona said we should get three hearts tattooed underneath our belly buttons. I said we should get our initials in a line on our arms. ARM.
We laughed and looked places up online and bragged to people at school about our plans.
Then Arizona said it would look ugly, and Roxanne and I didn’t want to do it without her, and Dad got divorced again and the idea fell away, the way great ideas sometimes do.
It hurts but not that badly, getting Bernardo’s initial on my finger.
It hurts more thinking of the things that have vanished this year and past years and that maybe everything I’ve ever thought was real wasn’t.
This is real.
Nothing that stings like this and stays like this could be fake.
I don’t look at it until Bernardo’s is done too. I’m hyperaware of that finger and nothing else, and I hope that feeling lasts for a while, because it’s exactly as it should be. Bernardo breathes heavily while they draw the M on his finger, and it’s fast but before it’s done, I can’t help being a scaredy-cat.
“Is this really happening? Are we insane?” I say.
“We’re the good kind of insane,” Bernardo says. The tattoo artist forges ahead, and I do my impression of a girl laughing it off. Everything’s throbbing. My finger, my ears, my heart, my tongue. My eyebrow. I don’t know that I want to be insane, even the good kind.
“Look. Beautiful,” he says, and shows me his finger. It’s red but the M is fancy and sweet and fits the space perfectly.
I finally look at my own finger.
The B is an alien force, a foreign being on my skin.
“It’s big,” I say.
“You two are all set,” the tattoo artist says.
“We are?” I’m having trouble thinking. Everything around me is spinning, and I have tired, heavy eyes and Bernardo’s initial forever on my ring finger and a whole mess of a life that I can’t even get a handle on anymore.
The world shuts off for one stunning minute. And I faint. I’ve never fainted before, but it’s like a mini-break from the world. Brief and long at the same time. When I come to, Bernardo’s face is over mine and the tattoo artist is standing by with water and fanning me with a tattoo pamphlet.
“It happens,” he says.
Bernardo kisses my eyes when they’re open, and he says I scared him and I say I scared myself, but I mean something different from what he means.
“My family first or yours?” he says.
We do his first.
They hate the tattoos and the engagement. They smile anyway.
The kids actually love it all. His sisters and brothers swirl around me like I’m a maypole. They ask questions about dresses, and I decide not to let it slip that I have a gown already too.
“You think this is what you want?” Bernardo’s dad asks us both. “You don’t know what this is.”
“We’re in love,” Bernardo says, and it would be sweet if he didn’t sound like every movie about stupid kids. Everything he said about the pointlessness of promise rings and how adults don’t take them seriously is coming back to me. We are every bit as not-serious when he talks about our Deep and Unwavering Love like it’s a thing no one else has experienced.
His mother rubs her husband’s hand in hers while he fumes, and I know they know what love is. We sound small and stupid in comparison. There’s chicken sizzling on the stove top and a supply of beer in the fridge and coffee brewing in the machine at all times. They exchange looks that tell whole stories between the two of them.
Bernardo can’t even tell what I’m trying to say when I speak in half sentences.