Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  His hair is unimpeachably excellent. Not too coiffed. Not fussy and stiff with product or the calculated androgyny of boy band members. Patrick unfailingly wore hats, until he got this transformative haircut that made him hot overnight. He was utterly forgettable until he absolutely wasn’t. Patrick was partial to bucket hats. I’ve never understood the appeal of looking like a giant toddler.

  Back then, I wasn’t ever sure my infatuation with Patrick made sense. School was rife with cues as to who to desire. The jocks were kings. You could see it in how adults behaved. The way teachers nodded along to their jokes, lips drawn back, readied for the laugh. Holland Hint was objectively attractive. The bathroom walls told me so. There was no controversy in gold hair and green eyes at six foot one.

  At church, Patrick was a feeling. A giddy, swirly bubbling that flushed my face, but I couldn’t talk to June—or anyone from school—about some boy from church.

  I zoom in. Patrick’s cheekbones seem swiped with highlighter. Especially with his mouth hung open. He’s wearing a somewhat clingy Rick Owens shirt. It’s either Rick Owens or very, very old.

  I click on his name.

  @40_7264N_73_9818W.

  We get it—you do art.

  The tagged pictures set a different tone from his feed. There’s even a photo of him at Léon. We could have been at the restaurant at the same time, except that the caption reads that he was at an impromptu album release for a reclusive singer-songwriter. A party I would never have gotten into. Jeremy wouldn’t have either for that matter. I take some satisfaction in that.

  I feel foolish now that I’d been right all along. About Patrick’s hotness. Less that I’d squandered the chance to stake my claim but more how clear it is that he’d been out of my league then, too.

  Patrick’s account has more than fifty-three thousand followers. Way more than anyone I personally know. In fact, Jonah Hill follows him, which seems significant to me. There are only two selfies. One in glorious morning light, where his face is slightly puffy. Another with a black eye.

  Most of the images are mood boards. Typefaces. Buildings. Album artwork. Some very thin Asian girls with explosively big lips and freckles dressed in designer goth layers. I wonder if he’s dated any of the women. Probably. He’s either an art director or a photographer.

  I had no idea he moved to New York. Not that he’d have told me. His family left Texas forever ago, so the church network wouldn’t have dispatched the all-points bulletin either.

  I go to his saved stories. The one called shoots.

  I open on a beautiful white loft with a curved wall on one side, which gives a Stanley Kubrick spaceship effect. There are windows all along the back, with fifteen people standing around.

  They watch a screen instead of the model in front of them. A model with dark hair in a blue-and-white dress who lifts her arms and waves them, the sleeves billowing dramatically.

  She does this over and over and I’m transfixed. The delicate, translucent fabric refracts the light. The dress is familiar to me. The woman laughs, throwing her head back, her wavy hair coiling around her pale cheeks.

  I recognize her too. She’s not a model but an actor. Korean, but Korean American. She’d won an award from an indie film about CEOs who moonlit as contract killers. And as she gathers the full skirt around her, lifting its hem, I realize she’s wearing a variation on a hanbok. Almost exactly the gown my mother was married in, the one in her wedding photo. The one that still hangs in her closet. It’s startling to see someone who resembles me, us, in such a setting. Commanding attention without being ninety pounds, without backing from a girl group.

  I go to my own grid. See if there’s a photo of me at Léon. There isn’t and I’m disappointed. I start deleting. It’s mostly pictures of magazine covers from the nineties, dressing-room selfies of clothes I can’t afford, and close-ups of my hands and mouth.

  I tidy it up. So it’s more aesthetic.

  I find that the more I hide, the more presentable I am to the world.

  Then I follow him. He probably won’t even notice.

  I’m filled with the urge to tell June. But the version of June I want is the one I sat with at church. The one I grew up with. The one from long ago, before all the screaming fights in high school, and not this one at all.

  June.

  I imagine her from last night. I dislike that every unkind thought will now be tempered by this other feeling. Pity. I hate it.

  I glance up just as I’m about to miss my stop. It’s by some kind of magic that I always manage to step out at Twenty-Third. My stomach gurgles from the coffee, but I need the caffeine. I promise myself not to eat today.

  I hustle into my entrepreneurship lecture. Total adjunct professor struggle. The teacher’s a youngish, sandy-haired dude in glasses and a blue shirt. He seems the type of guy who’d rather host a podcast than have anything to do with us.

  Last year, there’s no way I would have made it to class. If I stopped partying even for a moment, I couldn’t get out of bed. It was fascinating that if the feeling of impending doom and dread made my limbs leaden and my head cottony, no one ever found out. You could get away with anything if no one cared enough to check. Far away from my family for the first time, I learned that everything was profoundly optional. So I opted out. I couldn’t not.

  Podcast Guy drones on about Recent Business History—youngest self-made billionaires, Harvard grads that go onto entrepreneurial greatness, upwardly mobile white women who seed their businesses from well-connected families, and the industry disruptors and influencers whose parents happen to be celebrities or early employees at tech monoliths. As if any of these lessons apply to me. As if any of these relics aren’t ancient. As if any of it is ever to be repeated in my lifetime.

  He insists the lesson is that we’re supposed to be able to isolate unmet needs in the marketplace, but I can tell he doesn’t believe his own bloodless recitation. He may as well be crossing his fingers behind his back. Or have a massive hashtag above his head that reads: ad.

  I stare out the window. What’s the point? The planet is on fire and everything is random. June is one of the smartest people I know and she got a job at a prestigious hedge fund without a master’s because her first roommate was a finance scion who also happened to be obsessed with Animal Crossing and shojo manga.

  I start clicking through the spring collection slideshows for next year. During last fashion week some rando Ivy was dating got us onto the list for an after party at Le Bain, that club with a hot tub in the middle of it. But of course she didn’t show up and I was her plus-one so I didn’t get to go.

  I know that attending college is like praying to God. It’s not that you believe in it; you do it just in case. Because other people are. Design school in Manhattan is Hunger Games for East Asian kids with severe haircuts. I can’t tell if I’m the racist one for feeling like we’re interchangeable, but all the incentives seem scammy to me.

  I’ve never met a single person whose job I can remotely admire.

  I google “who is the richest Asian in the world” for sport. Jack Ma’s up there. He’s the founder of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce site. I had no idea he looked like that. His features look like they should be on a much smaller face. He needs longer bangs. It’s eerie how much he resembles a fetus.

  Then I google image uteruses, thinking of June; turns out ovaries are outside the uterus. The uterus is weirdly small, too. Picture the goat head: it’s the nose.

  I check the time. I’ve only been here for twenty-three minutes.

  Jeremy texts. I wonder if he’s going to say something about last night, apologize or at least acknowledge in any way what an asshole he is.

  He wants to know where I am. Class. He wants to know if I can do him a favor. My mouth drops open. What? He wants a high-res TIFF of a portrait I took of him. Jeremy’s shockingly bad at technology. I once accused him of being homeschooled by Mennonites and he didn’t speak to me for days. He says he needs it for a magazin
e that’s doing an article on him.

  I don’t respond, seething. Instead I check Tinder. I swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe. It’s dazzling how disposable we all are.

  chapter 8

  “It’s why everyone thinks the Monopoly man has a monocle, but he doesn’t.”

  “Does he not?”

  “No, we’re mixing him up with the Planters peanut guy. And it’s called the Mandela effect because everyone believes Mandela died in prison, but he didn’t.”

  On Tuesdays at 1:00 p.m., I have therapy. I love therapy so much. Mostly because I’m an excellent patient. Gina Lombardi’s a social worker, not, like, a psychiatrist or psychologist, which made me dubious at first, but she’s soothing to spend time with. She’s super tanned with a deep side part, and sometimes I just pretend that I’m talking to Miuccia Prada.

  “Does that make you question your own long-held beliefs? What you thought you knew?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Sure.” I mostly want her to know that I’ve read entire Wikipedia pages about South-African political revolutionaries. “Don’t you find it fascinating that we don’t know what we don’t know?”

  Gina gets my best material if I’m honest. For the past two months I’ve been saving up clever bon mots for her benefit. For our initial appointment, I’d spent the whole ride reading up on the news and world events because her office is on the Upper West Side. She’s in the garden apartment of a town house, and you can see everyone’s calves and purebred dogs on the street level out her windows. She has built-in bookcases and a white-noise machine, and though I’ve only ever seen the little waiting area by the downstairs entryway and her office, I like to imagine this is her actual home. I feel giddy at the possibility that there could be an Egyptian cotton pillowcase with her silvery-blond hairs on it mere feet from where I’m sitting. I bet she wears a pajama set. And that it’s monogrammed.

  It’s moments like these when I wish we could be real friends. I’ve only made her laugh out loud once, but I felt high all day. When we first met, she said she didn’t know who Rihanna was, which made me almost walk out until I thought about what that signifies. She has no loyalties. To not know about Rihanna means she’s a total nihilist.

  Gina’s constantly telling me that it’s my negative self-talk that’s derailing my productivity, not a debilitating laziness. The first time we met, I tried to ice her out because I was so pissed that student services made me wait five weeks for the appointment, but then I forgot I wasn’t talking to her and complained about a stupid documentary. It was about violin prodigies. Gina mentioned that I was responding with undue hostility that someone would dedicate themselves to a single pursuit and then she said something that blew my mind.

  She said that there was more than one type of perfectionist. And that I qualified because the kind of perfectionist I was, was the kind that abandoned everything if I wasn’t good enough at it. And that’s why I couldn’t finish tasks. Meanwhile, I thought you had to be Natalie Portman from Black Swan to be a perfectionist, all shivering from malnourishment and eighteen-hour practices, but she’s right. I’d rather fail outright than be imperfect. It’s why last year, when I was on academic probation, I couldn’t bring myself to cram for finals and end up with a C average. I just kinda gave up. There’s nothing more humiliating than trying so hard for everyone to see and still ending up a loser. Right now I have As and Bs, and I like to think that’s due to Gina.

  “It is fascinating,” she says. I beam back at her proudly. “Knowing that we don’t know everything leaves room for mindfulness. It opens up the possibility that thoughts and feelings can change. Perception is a lot more subjective than anyone feels in the moment.”

  “Totally.” I nod enthusiastically, before serving up a thoughtful pause. “But don’t you think that sometimes it’s better not to know anything at all? My sister, June, is the least self-aware person in the world and she’s really fuck—she’s extremely accomplished.” I try not to curse in front of Gina. She has Diptyque candles on her desk and wears pantyhose.

  She glances up. My therapist removes her hand from her chin and uncrosses her legs.

  Unclasping the enormous silver cuff bracelet from her wrist, she sets it down on the tasteful coffee table between us and studies me. I wonder if she’s about to tell me something unbelievably profound.

  “How old is your sister?” she asks.

  “Tw-twenty-three,” I stammer, holding my breath.

  “And she’s extremely accomplished?”

  I nod, watchful. I know it’s not how psychology works, but a part of me really believes Gina’s like an oracle.

  “You know you’ve never mentioned your sister before?” she says, and then writes something down in her notebook before I can answer.

  “Where does she live?”

  “Twenty-sixth and Sixth.”

  She writes even more down. I feel like I’m failing a test.

  “Are you close?”

  “Yes?”

  “But you’ve never mentioned her before and you both live here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you find this significant?”

  I hate when she does this.

  “I guess so…”

  “How so?”

  “Well, we have nothing in common. She doesn’t like me and I don’t even know why.”

  “What would she say if I asked her?”

  That she resents me for being popular. That she blames me for her own unhappiness and wishes I was never born. That I’m a burden on Mom and Dad because I’m a baby who can’t get over herself. That I’m vapid and vain and that I’m selfish. That I’m a slut and an attention whore. And that I don’t call my mother or hang out with my sister because I’m ashamed of where I came from and that’s why I’ll never be happy.

  “That she doesn’t approve of my decision-making.”

  “Why?”

  “Did you ever see that documentary where the brother murders the sister’s boyfriend because the sister groomed him into believing that her boyfriend stabbed their mother to death?”

  It’s a true story. The sister was on America’s Most Wanted.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s streaming on Netflix or Amazon right now.” I wonder if Gina even watches television. “They’re Korean.”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  This session isn’t going the way I’d planned.

  “Well, sometimes siblings don’t get along. For whatever reason, it’s the path they’re on,” I tell her.

  “How do you feel about your sister?”

  My sister died, I imagine myself saying to Gina in the future.

  I feel the tears teasing at the tip of my nose.

  There’s this whole theory that younger siblings are spoiled. That we’re enfeebled from all the mollycoddling. Soft. That by the time it was our turn to rebel, our parents had already given up. I disagree with this wholly. It’s firstborns who can’t take no for an answer. Youngest kids have iron constitutions. Hardy hides from lifetimes of rejection. A hundred million entreaties for their older siblings to hang out answered by shoves, eye rolls, slammed doors, and stone-cold ditches with peals of laughter.

  It’s always felt like pressing into a bruise to talk about June.

  It’s why I don’t do it.

  I shrug. “I just wish she liked me.”

  chapter 9

  After therapy, in the hour before work, I meet up with Ivy at the Chinese bakery on West Fourth. She kisses the air near my ear and her hair’s wet. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she says as if she’s ever on time. “I’m coming from SoulCycle.” We went once, together, ages ago and I almost passed out in the dark, throbbing room. Everything about it felt like an exorcism.

  When the class let out, all the hardbodies shiny and triumphant, I watched Ivy slip the borrowed cycling shoes into her bag instead of tossing them in the return chute. She just kept right on talking to me as if it wasn’t happening.

  For a second, I’m tempted to l
ook into her gym bag, but it’s not my business or my problem.

  “I’m so glad you picked this place.” She nods to the bakery display cases behind us. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday.” She grabs a pair of orange-handled metal tongs and begins to pile tarts and sweet buns on her plastic tray.

  This was a mistake. Seeing Ivy after therapy is like slamming mezcal after a juice fast.

  When I join the line behind her empty-handed, she cocks her head. “Really? Nothing?” The dark-haired woman behind the counter slides the pastries into individual wax paper sleeves. “Hold on,” says Ivy to the cashier, turning to me. “Go get something right now. My treat.”

  I shake my head. “I’m okay.” There are at least four people behind us in the line, but that’s not the kind of thing that trips Ivy up. She rolls her eyes. “You know, you’re kinda being a wack friend.”

  I order a milk tea, and when I ask for it without sugar, Ivy grimaces.

  “Now you’re just making me feel bad,” she says, angrily stuffing her bakery bag into her tote when we walk outside. We cross the street to watch the basketball players. There isn’t a game on, but there’s a few dudes shooting around and there’s a larger crowd gathered at the handball courts beyond it. I love the way the small, hard ball sounds when it hits the wall. I sip my tea.

  “You want to go the diner instead?” Ivy rummages in her pocket and pulls out a vape and offers it to me.

  “I have work,” I remind her. Her shoulders slump dramatically as she takes a long drag. Her gel nails are painted like pineapples.

  Smoke curls out of her nostrils. We both pretend to watch the game even though we can’t see shit for all the backs turned toward us. “How’s the apartment?”

  “Fine.”

  “I still can’t believe those cunts kicked you out.”