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“Hide the ring, hide the ring!”
It’s thrust into her hands before she can protest. The ring. Her ring.
Amanda has spent many a night falling asleep to a dream where Clarissa gives her a ring. None of them have ever involved hiding it from the guy who had dumped Clarissa without a car ten miles from home, causing her to spend the trip back in Amanda’s car sobbing into her hands and going through Amanda’s supply of glove box tissues.
When the two of them were little, and every day after school was spent kicking around her dad’s restaurant while they waited for their parents to finish work, Amanda learned what love was. Some afternoons, Amanda would bite a hole in the middle of a pepperoni and present it, smiling, on one knee. On others the ring was a paper straw wrapper, lovingly formed into an imperfect circle and slipped onto Clarissa’s finger.
Every time, Clarissa would smile, roll her eyes in that way Amanda had memorized, and play along for a moment before losing attention and throwing the ring away.
Every time, Amanda tried again, and pretended it meant nothing, and hurt all over again, and spent her night dreaming that Clarissa would someday love her.
As Amanda learned how the world worked and helped Clarissa through boyfriend after breakup after boyfriend, the dreams faded to a rare fantasy. The only one that refused to fade was something hauntingly like the scenario she had just half-listened to, whispering behind the half-closed pocket door to the kitchen: Mrs. Jenkins closes Amanda’s hand around a tarnished silver ring, in the family for generations (no matter how few), and says that she could imagine no one else taking care of her daughter for the rest of their lives.
When she takes the ring from Amanda, Clarissa does not look away from her until she needs another shoulder to cry on. She looks at her like she is her world, and never looks away.
But now, with Mark hammering at the door, Amanda feels more like choking when the cool metal meets her fingertips. It’s been years since any of those fantasies felt like they could really come true, especially since Clarissa had started seeing Mark, but it’s never felt more bitterly impossible than right now. The sensation is cruel, and the metal burns, and with nowhere else to go she shoves it against her lips and holds the ring under her tongue.
The shocked stares of Clarissa and her mother barely register as her tongue explores the taste of the ring that will bind Clarissa to Mark for the rest of their lives.
“That’s been in the family for three generations!”
The cogs of Amanda’s brain start up again.
You just put your best friend’s wedding ring in your mouth.
She fumbles, but Clarissa is already running for the door (for Mark), and yelling at her over her shoulder: “Keep your mouth shut!”
So she does, despite the fact that hearing Mark call Clarissa’s name through the door makes her want to spit.
Is this a bad time? Mark asks, and Amanda would laugh if it weren’t for the ring. Is any time a good one after you dump the most beautiful girl in the world for taking a call? Clarissa could take a thousand phone calls if it meant I could be hers for even a minute.
When Mark gets around to face her, Amanda is not sure that she would have said anything even if she could. She has always gotten the feeling that Mark could tell how she felt, and so they’ve never been more than a curt, polite sort of friendly to ensure that Clarissa was happy. Now, with Clarissa unhappy anyway, Amanda glares, and hums at the excuse Clarissa tosses out to explain her silence.
When Mark then tells Clarissa to apologize, Amanda looks around for some alcohol.
Who the hell does he think he is, she thinks as she spots a half-empty glass of wine with Clarissa’s lipstick color on the rim, to ask her to apologize after the shit that he pulled? She shakes her head at Clarissa and then remembers, with the ring resting between her slightly clenched teeth, that she can’t even drink this away. She returns it and gets drunk off of Clarissa’s voice instead.
“No, Mark, I don’t want to apologize, okay?”
That’s right.
“What, why?”
“I— I did what I did. I got sucked out of the moment for a while, because I was looking after my family,” Clarissa says.
Amanda points in agreement and nods. What kind of an asshole calls off a proposal because the love of his life answers a phone call from her mother in hospice? Tell him that, honey, tell him… The taste of the ring drips down her throat, and she settles back on her hip, a familiar turn in her gut.
“But I do love you, and I don’t want you to question that. It shouldn’t be based on me focusing on you 100%, all the time, okay? We’re equal partners in this, Mark!”
And when Clarissa falls silent, that stubborn pout on her face, a bittersweet kind of pride mixes with the metallic taste and becomes that fierce love Amanda has felt every day since the first day of first grade.
For that same speech that Amanda loves, Clarissa’s mother calls her a bitch. Amanda has barely hit her on the shoulder when Mark explodes.
“You embarrassed me once. You made me feel small. I came into your home, and you made me feel even smaller. You know what,” he snarls, “ I hate you!”
I love you, Amanda thinks, hand over her heart.
“I HATE YOU!”
I love you.
Mark slams the door, and Amanda spits the ring out like poison.
It clatters onto the tiles that she and Clarissa had played on, and built pillow forts around, and danced to the radio on after school was over.
When she looks up, Clarissa isn’t looking at her. She’s looking at the ring in her mother’s hand. Despite the tears in her eyes, her jaw is set in that stubborn way, and Amanda knows that she’s going to marry Mark despite it all.
The little butterflies flutter and die in her stomach. She will always be there when Clarissa needs her. Just like she always has been. But Clarissa never will need her, not for anything more than a shoulder to cry on, or a night out, or a place to hide a ring.