“Better than that,” he says.
Karissa dances over to us, her bracelets jangling, presumably, but we can’t hear it in the booming room. She hasn’t asked what we’re celebrating. I guess once she found out we’d chosen her, it didn’t matter what for.
“I have to tell you why we’re celebrating,” I say. I yell directly into Karissa’s ear for her to hear me.
“Oh right!” she says, like it’s a side note to the rest of her night. “I figured you and the big guy finally did it?”
“We did,” I say.
“You had sex? It was your first time, right? Was it good? Was he good? That is so freaking adorable,” she says. She hugs me and I’m astounded, even though I shouldn’t be, that she thought I’d run to her to celebrate losing my virginity. At a club. I guess in some alternate universe where we are the old Karissa and Montana, I maybe would have told her, at least. And she would have bought me a glass of wine or talked me through it or laughed with me about the awkward bits. But that alternate universe is so far away.
I hold my hand out to Karissa, palm down, like it has a ring on it. Like I am waiting for her to kiss it, all royal-like.
“What. Is. This,” she says. She pulls my ring finger close to her face so she can get a good look at what I’ve done to myself.
“Bernardo proposed!” I say.
“And you’re telling me first?” she says. The thrill is all over her face, but it’s for the wrong reasons. I nod. It’s almost true. “MONTANA! OH MY GOD!” she says. She pulls me into a huge hug, and the clubbers in our vicinity look over to see what the commotion is about. Karissa keeps me pinned to her with one arm and grabs Bernardo with the other. “I’m so happy for you guys!” she says, exactly like we wanted.
Bernardo finally smiles.
I’m too drunk to remember what a smile feels like.
We drink and dance more, and Karissa starts to fall apart a little. Her limbs get swingy and cumbersome. Her face gets droopy. She moves her jaw strangely, like she isn’t yet used to her new chin.
“Are you okay?” I say, and bring her to the bathroom. Bernardo goes to the bar to get us all water.
“You told me something important,” Karissa says. She isn’t looking at me directly. She looks to the lights above my head and the sign on the bathroom door and at her own shoes and my tattoo. “You really, really did,” she says.
“Yeah, I did,” I say.
“I should tell you something too,” Karissa says. “Now that we’re family.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“No but, like, we need to be close. In the real way,” she says. “I want that. Don’t you want that?”
I shrug. I don’t want anything right now, except for her to be more sober.
“I miss my mom,” Karissa says. “We had the same face. Now we don’t. Now I have a new face. And I don’t have anything else of hers. Maybe I should have kept the face.”
“I know, I know,” I say. It would be impossible for me to compete with the way she misses her family, so I don’t tell her I miss mine too, or that I’m sort of tired of hearing about her family. Instead I nod and rub her back and fight against throwing up.
“But, like, I miss her,” Karissa says.
“I know, you must miss them all,” I say. My knees are giving out a little, so I lean against the wall.
“No. Only her. They’re all around. I hate the rest of them. But my mom I loved.”
It’s one of those sentences that’s hard to hear or put meaning to. I almost ignore it, it seems too drunk and impossible and indecipherable.
“I don’t know what that means,” I say, shifting even more of my weight to the wall. My head to my shoulder. “I think I’m really drunk.”
“They didn’t die,” Karissa says.
I try to lift my head from my shoulder and my body from the wall.
“I don’t understand. What? I mean . . . what?” I say. I’m yelling, but only because the music is loud. She has a look on her face that’s a little too cute and not enough ashamed.
“My family’s all . . . nice,” she says. “Nice in a way that’s awful. And I left them. It’s hard to explain to people. Especially people like you.” All her vowels are long and singsongy. Her eyes are foggy, and I have a feeling this will be another night that is erased in her mind, but not in mine.
I will never forget this exact moment.
It’s the worst moment. Of all the things I’ve been told that I didn’t want to be told, this is the one I hate the most, because I didn’t anticipate it. Not even a little.