“For you!” she says. “Be brave. Live big.” She shakes her mane and the light catches the glittery blush she wears. Her eye shadow is ironic blue, and it matches not only the boots but also a thin headband she’s strapped across her forehead.
I pull my Elmo shirt down so that it covers my stomach. I wave at Mohawk Man. He waves back but doesn’t come over. We pound the rest of the bottle of wine. It’s a brand-new feeling—I’m used to chugging beer or taking shots of cheap liquor, but I’m not used to wine at all, in any context. It hits all slow and sleepy, and I like that it tastes purple, royal, sweet.
Roxanne favors Malibu rum and kegs of light beer.
If Karissa’s my new best friend, everything we do will be different and new and better.
She orders another bottle.
I’ve made it. I’m here. I’m hers.
When we are drunker and it’s later, we end up in a booth in the back. The guy with the mohawk bought us some beers and talked about art for a while, but he must have felt like a third wheel, because Karissa and I have this secret-language way of talking. It doesn’t matter that we’ve only known each other for six months and that there’s no real reason for us to be friends now that acting class is over. It doesn’t matter that I’m seventeen and she’s twenty-three. We’re connected. We fit. We’re mismatched and cozy in the back booth. We make sense in a weird and wonderful way. Like math except sexy and cool.
I’m getting texts from Arizona asking where I am, saying she got home and ordered us a pizza, saying I was supposed to be there to welcome her home after her post-freshman-year European backpacking trip. She could have returned to New York when her semester ended three weeks ago. She chose even less time with me. She keeps choosing less time with me, over and over.
I don’t reply to the texts.
I can’t stop swinging my hair around like Karissa does. She makes it look so good, and I’m convinced I could be a little like her, if I tried harder. Arizona texts again, a bunch of question marks instead of words, so I start to feel bad. Punctuation marks make me feel more than words, sometimes.
“I think I need to get home,” I say. “My sister’s waiting for me. I told her I’d hang out even if she got home late. Start our summer together off right or something. Pizza. Bonding. All that.”
“Your sister’s back,” Karissa says. She doesn’t make a move to pay the bill or slide out of the booth. “You must be so happy.”
“Mmmm. I miss the way things were with her,” I say, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all night and maybe all month. Karissa hits the bottom of her umpteenth glass of wine. She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it. Wipes her mouth and teeters on the edge of weepiness.
“I need to tell you something about me,” Karissa says.
“Anything,” I say.
“I’m sort of messed up, okay? Like . . . okay. Okay. This is such a weird thing to announce, but if we’re going to be friends, real ones, it’s like, we have to know the big things, right? So we need to get all the big things out there, as, like, foundation.” Karissa pushes her hair behind her ear in this ballerina way and I am certain she will be famous someday, even if it is simply for that one gesture.
“Let’s do it,” I say, leaning forward. I wonder if people are listening in on us. I would.
“My whole family is dead. Car accident four years ago. You talking about your sister made my heart—I don’t know. I feel like I can’t even have a normal conversation if you don’t know that about me. Like, you won’t understand anything I say if you don’t know that, right?”
“Right,” I say. Her eyes fill up and mine do too, a mirror image of her. She is Ophelia.
I feel desperately sad for her and a little bit sad for myself that she didn’t tell me before. That I’ve known her all this time without really knowing her. “Are you . . . how are you? About it?” Drunkenness is a blessing right now, because everything I say sounds smooth and deep. I can look right into her green eyes and not blink or blush or get nervous.
“I’m a mess,” she says. “I’m not like anyone else.” She’s whispering, and little pieces of crystal on the chandeliers above chime whenever the air conditioner clicks onto a higher level.
“That’s . . . wow. Wow. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. It’s incredible you, like, get up and walk around every day. Seriously.”
Karissa sighs and licks her lips that must taste like wine and lipstick, and she brushes her hair aside again and again.
“I can tell you have something dark in there too,” she says. “Something that happened. Or something missing. Or something you want.” Even through the beginnings of tears, she sees me. It’s a little scary, to be seen.
“All three,” I say, thinking of my mother who left us and my father who keeps marrying new women and the emptiness of the house without Arizona and the way three stepmothers in ten years feels less like a surplus of stepmoms and more like a deficit of mothers.