Read Making Pretty for Free Online Page B

not.
    â€œMy name’s Bernardo,” he says. He sounds nice but firm.
    I give Arizona a pleading look. She knows how long I’ve had my eye on him and how few guys I’ve ever had my eye on.
    Bernardo shrugs again. I guess it’s a thing he does. I take note. When my dad meets someone and “falls in love” and marries her, he doesn’t know anything about her. Except for the way she makes him feel and how pretty she is and how pretty she will turn out to be. How pretty he will make her.
    Our apartment, decorated by years of wives and girlfriends, is something I have chronicled extensively in my head. I know which toothbrush holder, throw blanket, overpriced vase, chaise loungeis from which wife. It’s obvious, the objects perfectly matching up alongside their personalities.
    Dad has no idea.
    He could easily confuse a Natasha couch with a Mom one, or a Tess piece of art with Janie’s taste. As if he never knew them at all.
    I’m not my father. I notice the drawings on Bernardo’s sneakers, little stick figures near the soles, etched into rubber that used to be white but is now gray from the grimy New York streets. I want to notice everything about him, and like him because of it. I don’t want to extract or shift or mold. I don’t want to love the way my father loves.
    Bernardo is a guy who shrugs and doesn’t smile all the time and draws stick figures on his shoes and likes crazy adventures with strange girls. Bernardo is unafraid.
    I’ll look up the band on his shirt later. I’ll listen to no fewer than five songs. I will learn something about him from the lyrics and the rhythm and whether the guitars are loud and electric or cooing and acoustic.
    â€œMontana has to do the honors,” Roxanne says when she’s back in the bathroom. With all four of us in the tiny space, we can barely move. Bernardo sits on the closed toilet and Arizona perches on the ancient standing tub. Roxanne slips rubber gloves over my hands and holds her nose while showing me how to do the bleach and then the dye.
    I can’t feel the texture of his hair through the gloves, but it’s intimate anyway, pulling at the strands, covering them in thick paste,making sure I haven’t missed a spot.
    â€œToo late to change my mind?” he says halfway through.
    â€œThis is the weirdest day of my life,” Arizona says.
    â€œThat’s A, not true and B, really sad if it is true,” Roxanne says.
    Standing over Bernardo feels right. And when he winces from the way the cheap dye burns his scalp, I laugh instead of apologize, and that feels right too. “I have a good feeling about this,” I say.
    â€œMe too,” Bernardo says. I don’t think he’s talking about the hair.
    â€œYou smoke?” I say as we wait to wash the dye out of Bernardo’s hair. We haven’t moved from the cramped bathroom, although I can’t really say why. It smells like the kind of chemicals that will kill you, and it’s deathly hot. Arizona has shifted from the edge of the tub into the tub itself, where she can stretch her legs out and lean back. Her shoes are off. Her hair’s in a high, frizzy ponytail. If it weren’t for the French manicure and khaki shorts and C cups and pink polo, she could be my old sister. I wonder if Bernardo sees it now too. If the fact of our being sisters has clicked into place as soon as Arizona chilled a little.
    I wonder if this side of her came out in hostels in Austria and France last week. I don’t think the dorms at Colby even have bathtubs.
    Arizona asks for a cigarette too, but she hates smoking. Used to hate smoking. I should know exactly how she feels about smoking these days, but I don’t.
    â€œI could smoke,” Bernardo says. “I don’t really do it, but it’s one of those days, I guess, right?”
    Bernardo is a guy who doesn’t smoke but sometimes smokes.
    Bernardo is a guy who