I leave the bathroom and lean against a wall on the side of the dance floor. Everywhere is too cramped and close. I want to be on the street. Karissa follows me out and stands next to me. I can’t get away from her.
“I wanted us to be close,” Karissa says. “And I feel like they’re dead, you know? Like they died when I left? Like it could have happened, and it was something you would understand better than me leaving them. I know you don’t like people leaving.” She’s sort of falling asleep by the end of the sentence. A thing that is sliding away from her. She looks like her mouth is trying to catch up with her words.
“But you told us so many stories about them and all the crying and stuff and, like, what the actual fuck are you talking about?” The music shifts from one dance beat to another, and there’s a whooping from the crowd. I look over at Bernardo. He’s got three glasses of water lined up in front of him at the bar. He waves and I wave back, but I think even from across the bar he can see what’s happening to my face. It’s falling. It’s cracking. It’s breaking down, and I wish this news was sobering me up, but instead it’s making me drunker.
“I mean, I really, like, lived through them dying,” Karissa says. She takes another one of her painkillers, and I can see future-her, all doped up and tight-faced. “Like, in my heart, it happened. Like with acting. When you’re really living through it?”
Bernardo finally comes over with two of the glasses of water. He hands one to Karissa and one to me and holds my face in his hands.
“Hey. Hey, Montana. You okay?” He’s a little drunk too, or at least he smells like whiskey and beer and sweat. “What’s going on? Should we leave? What are you guys doing?”
I smile a lazy smile in his direction. “Nothing was true,” I say.
“It’s not like that,” Karissa says. She grabs hold of my arm, and I let her stay there but only because I don’t have the energy in my limbs to shake her off.
I have a thousand things to say to her.
I have nothing to say to her.
forty-one
“We can say good-bye to everyone,” Bernardo says. The cab ride home smells like french fries and Axe body spray. Whoever was in here before us was the worst. I’m motion sick and trying to will away the drunk.
Karissa is slumped against one of the doors. We’ll have to carry her upstairs.
I’ve told Bernardo what happened, and we can’t think of anything to say about it, because the lie is so large and strange and impossible.
“Say good-bye?” I say. I keep checking Karissa’s breathing and heart to make sure she’s still alive. I don’t know all the rules about drinking.
“We could leave here. Leave all these people. Maybe meet your mom? Out west? And then get jobs. At bookstores or flower shops or whatever,” Bernardo says. “We’re engaged. You’re almost eighteen. We can do whatever we want.” When I’m drunk, I’m messy and confused. When he’s drunk, he’s clear and insane.
“What are you talking about?” I say. I nuzzle into him so the words come out sweet and affectionate instead of bewildered, which is what I actually am, by literally every conversation that’s happened tonight.
“What is going on here is nuts, Mon. Absolutely absurd. We need to get away from it. From her. And from everyone. But her especially. She’s fucking toxic. She’s a toxic crazy person who is manipulating everyone, and we have each other so we don’t need this shit.”
He’s swearing so much it makes me sad. I don’t like him all worked up and growling.
“Don’t leave me,” Karissa says, waking up long enough to hear about us running away. Long enough to try to keep me close. She grips my thigh.
The cab is extremely rickety and speeding like crazy.
Karissa passes back out, but her hand stays on my thigh. Her nails dig in.
She is always attaching herself to me. Bernardo puts an arm around me. It’s too warm to feel good in this stuffy car. I need out.
“I’d love to take a weekend trip to find my mom,” I say. “You’re the best boyfriend. Fiancé. You’re the best fiancé of all the fiancés I’ve ever fiancéd.” I sort of know the words are twisty and wrong as they come out, but I don’t care.
“I don’t mean a weekend trip,” he says. “We need to get away from this. This is bad. What’s happening with your family is really, really bad. And you saw my family. They’re not okay with us. I don’t want to sit around while they judge us. You want to live in disapproval land for the next year or whatever?”
“I’ve always lived in disapproval land,” I say. They’re sad words but sound funny right now. I cackle. The cabdriver looks in his rearview mirror.
“I don’t usually drive around drunk kids,” he says. “And your sister there looks sick. You gonna tip well?”
“We’re not kids,” Bernardo says like a mantra.