Making Pretty by Corey Ann Haydu

Author:Corey Ann Haydu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

twenty-five

That night, as planned, we hold candles in Washington Square Park and wait for Karissa to walk by, which she is supposed to do with her friend at exactly nine p.m., when the sun is mostly set but the summery sky is still sort of gray and blue and gold instead of black.

Arizona is there.

Somehow we’re still unable to put a real foot down when it comes to this shit.

“Maybe she’ll change her mind,” I say. “Maybe getting proposed to is one of those things that seems like a great idea until it happens.”

“I have a friend from school who thinks she’s about to get engaged,” Arizona says instead of postulating about Karissa. “I mean, this guy is sort of Christian-y or whatever, and I guess Christian-y people get married young.”

“Midwest?” Roxanne says.

“Exactly,” Arizona says, and I know I’m missing some joke about the rest of the country and the people you meet when you leave New York City, and I try to lean harder on Bernardo. I hold his hand with one hand and a candle with the other.

“Karissa’s not Christian,” I say. “Or from the Midwest.”

“I know,” Arizona says. “I wasn’t talking about Karissa.” She has this edge in her voice that she used to use sometimes with Roxanne when Arizona and I would be using all this shorthand and Roxanne would struggle to keep up. Roxanne would keep asking who the guy from the beach two summers ago was, or which ice cream place it was that spilled the rainbow sprinkles down Dad’s girlfriend’s shirt one time, and Arizona would sigh and refuse to explain except in really short, irritated, fraught sentences.

I’ve never heard her speak that way to me.

The part of me that still thinks of Karissa as a friend has a strange instant of being happy for her, watching for her to come and for her face to light up. I can’t stop hearing the words she said the other day, about deserving something good. I wonder if she’ll be sad her mother’s not here. I wonder if she’ll wish she could call her sister.

I would want to call my sister.

I move to Arizona, to put my chin on her shoulder for a moment.

“Remember the girl with the bad breath?” I say. She’s our favorite of Dad’s girlfriends to make fun of. “I’ve decided I think it had something to do with Tabasco sauce and sex.”

“You’re disgusting,” Arizona says. “And it was absolutely McDonald’s french fries, poor flossing, and mouth breathing.”

“Mouth breathing,” I say, nodding my chin against her shoulder blade before moving back next to Bernardo.

She’s not gone entirely.

Dad’s a few feet away, and he keeps rubbing his hands against the top of his thighs, like he’s nervous. But it seems like he shouldn’t be nervous. He’s had practice.

We’re all new versions of ourselves tonight.

I haven’t even tried to scrub off the Sharpie, and neither has Bernardo.

“It’s pretty out here,” Roxanne says, looking at thirty-five people with tea candles circled around the bench that was the site of Karissa’s first date with my father.

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