Yolk

by Mary H. K. Choi

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” she balks, voice strangled, agog. She flops her hands against her naked thighs.

  “What?”

  “That sounds tough? The fuck am I supposed to do with that? I confide in you about the greatest humiliation of my life and it sounds tough? Are you even listening to me?”

  “Fuck, June. God.” I hurl a sock ball at the large window, where it thunks feebly.

  She sits up, openmouthed, head swiveling to the window, then back at me as if I’d tossed a brick through it.

  I roll my eyes. “What do you want? It’s always the same fucking story with you. What did you do? You definitely did something.”

  “Just be on my side!” she yells, face purpling. “Just once.”

  “No. You’re delusional!” I uncross my legs, ready to pounce if this escalates. “You did something! Just like you did something to me.” It feels good to say it out loud.

  “Oh my God, what do you want?” she says, throwing back her head. She looks like her stupid avatar.

  “Fuck you, June.” The gall makes me want to knock that smug expression off her face.

  “Two grand.” Her gaze locks onto mine. “Just let me pay you. Two thousand dollars or however much the fuck it takes you to stop crying when I have way bigger things to worry about. Empathy? Ever heard of it? If you could just think of someone else for one fucking second, you’d see that this has nothing to do with you. I don’t have a job, asshole. And I have cancer. For once there’s something you can do for somebody else and you’re bitching and whining about it. Nothing’s changed. You don’t have to lift a finger, no one has to know, and you’re still being a little bitch.”

  I get to my feet, the rage swelling my chest. If we were younger, I’d be going after her hair, her clothes. I’d smash her head on the coffee table. There’s no way she’s turning this around on me.

  She stares up at me from the couch.

  “No,” I snap, balling my hands, searching for something hard to launch at her. My eyes land on the cancer book, but I can’t take the irony. “I won’t shut up. You don’t get to tell me to shut up. This is about you, not me. About how you’re fucked up.”

  “You wouldn’t even be in New York if it weren’t for me,” she rages. “Who the fuck are you to tell me what’s not okay? Just look at your life. You have no home—”

  June pushes herself up from her low couch, rising in her granny panties. She almost falters, and the whole thing would be funny if she didn’t have murder in her eyes.

  “You have no home,” she shouts, sticking out her thumb, counting my faults. “School is bullshit because you’re too chickenshit to commit to a real major.” Her index finger snaps out, her hand a gun in my face. “And you have zero focus because every ounce of energy is spent alternately obsessing about your stupid body or chasing after some boy.” That’s three. “Where the hell do you get off coming to my doctor’s appointment with your smug stupid face and your dumb bag in some Tinder dipshit’s clothes…?”

  “Your doctor’s appointment?” I counter, looming over her. It’s times like these that I love outsizing my older sister. “I went because you need help, you delusional bitch. You practically black out when you’re there. You said so yourself and now I know why. You just sit there pouting and rolling your eyes like you’ve been called to the principal’s office. That woman is trying to help you. I am trying to help you.” My throat strains from the effort.

  “You?” she taunts. “You’re more help to me when you stay out of my fucking way. Christ, Jayne. Look at you.”

  Her voice catches and she stuns me by bursting into tears. “Fuck,” she says, arms finally falling to her sides. “How are you going to help me?” At this she covers her eyes with her palms, shoulders heaving in heart-wrenching sobs. “I have literal fucking cancer but we both know… we both know that you’re sicker than me.”

  I’m dazed. Blood is hammering in my ears. She’s always been conniving and ruthless—no one fights dirtier than June—but I’m thunderstruck that she’d turn this around to humiliate me. I wonder how far she’ll take it. Whether she’ll speak the words we both know she can’t take back.

  “You’re fucking insane,” I seethe. I shake my head pityingly. I back away, almost tripping over my suitcase.

  “Mom and Dad might be fucking blind, but I know,” she says in a low voice, gaze unflinching.

  I hold my breath, willing her to shut up and spare me.

  June sniffs hard and composes herself, wiping her cheeks roughly.

  “Look,” she croaks. “Your part’s done. You can forgive me or not—I don’t give a shit—but I did it this way to protect you. All of you. My way is the only way it was going to be okay.”

  “Yeah, well, what if you die?”

  She blanches. “Wow, thanks a lot.”

  “Seriously, what if you die?”

  “I’m not going to die,” says June, catching her breath. “Besides, if I die, lucky you. I’m leaving you everything.”

  I don’t even realize I’m crying until I taste salt on my lips.

  “I’m not going to die,” she says again. Quieter this time.

  “June.” I say it slowly. “If you die, then Jayne Ji-young Baek is dead. I’ll be dead at the hospital. They’ll file a death certificate in my name. I’ll be dead at school. New York City, New York State, the United States of America—they’ll all think I’m dead. Your will won’t matter. You’re the one who’ll be alive in name, June. It’ll be me and Mom’s dead baby who will be gone. I’ll be fucking trapped in some nameless purgatory. I’ll be some in-between ghost.”

  June’s eyes widen. The color drains from her face. She really is so smart at a lot of things and dumb at others.

  “Fuck,” she says.

  “If you die, I die.” I spell it out for her.

  “If I die, you die,” follows June.

  She sits back down on the couch.

  I take my place on the floor. All the piles of clothes blur in front of me. I fold a pair of her white underpants as small as they will go.

  “You’d better not fucking die, June, I swear to God.”

  For once my sister doesn’t have a response.

  chapter 28

  When I meet June at the Delta terminal three days later, I’m no longer angry. In fact, I’m no longer much of anything.

  I hadn’t realized the extent to which I’d grown accustomed to my sister’s apartment until I went back to mine. This time it wasn’t just a dead roach that greeted me when I opened the door. It was a dead roach and the startling movement of a red baby roach in my peripheral vision. Until that moment, I hadn’t known roaches scaled walls. I watched as it hesitated at the perpendicular obstruction of the ceiling. But then it pushed ahead, hanging upside down, before clinging stubbornly for dear life, unable to move forward.

  I’m nowhere near as determined.

  I almost capitulate and apologize so I can return to June’s before remembering that I’m the one who’s mad.

  That first night was death by a trillion cuts. I’d left June’s in the midafternoon when she fell asleep for a nap so we wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

  Back at my apartment, the heat came on. Finally. Except I’d forgotten that the warmth I’d prayed so fervently for has no thermostat. Unlike at June’s, where there was a central command system operated by smartphone, which glowed blue with exactly your desired temperature, I had baseboards that encircled me in a ring of fire, and they were outside of my control. The exposed pipe in the living room that stands stupidly close to the only available outlet fills with steam, hissing angrily and scalding the tops of my knuckles whenever I have to unplug anything.

  I didn’t sleep at all. I was tormented by a persistent, arrhythmic clicking in the radiator that was so loud, I found myself listening for it but managing to be startled awake by it each time.

  By the morning, when my moldy shower curtain clasped my leg with cold, slimy insistence just as shampoo slid into my eyes, I c
ried. I sobbed ramrod straight, unable to lean against the tile or collapse to the floor in a proper cinematic meltdown because every surface seemed so filthy.

  Jeremy’s comings and goings only added to the psychological turmoil. The second day, I didn’t leave school until late into the evening, completing all my homework in the library. I never knew when he’d be home, and I’d slowly open the door, searching for evidence of him. I scoured the room. He’d rearrange small things for maximum unraveling. A single mug that I’d left in the sink appeared on the counter. His vintage Lakers sweatshirt migrated from couch to chair.

  In my sleep-deprived fever dream, I caught myself believing it to be the handiwork of a particularly lethargic poltergeist. But the lingering smell gave him away, Le Labo Santal 33. It was olfactory retribution for my ylang-ylang shower spray. It worked every time. I felt instantly, violently ill when I’d smell it. My head would whip around in a paranoid frenzy whenever I caught it on other people at school or on the street.

  When I told Mari at the store that I needed her to cover me because I was going home for the weekend, she asked if everything was all right. I burst into tears. She ushered me into the back and let me cry all over her shiny, lemony-smelling hair as she hugged me. I wanted so bad to tell her that my sister had cancer that I could taste the words in my mouth. I could imagine her understanding it all and knowing exactly what to say. Instead she just held me and gave me an Ativan.

  When I retired that night, the apartment was filled with an acrid, warning smell. The charger cube for my phone had melted from the radiator pipe, so I cried again. By the time Patrick canceled our dinner after seeming what I felt to be aloof in his texts for the previous three days, notably from the hours of midnight to 3:00 a.m., which to be clear, was my most vulnerable shift, I was unsurprised. I could barely remember a life that hadn’t been a blistering hellscape.

  When he texted his apologies—he’d had a deadline—I was lost to Terrace House reruns tented under a humid sheet with every square inch of my head and body covered as protection from falling infant roaches.

  He’d called twice later that night, but I let it go to voicemail.

  I listened to his messages over and over, waiting for the pipes to clang, checking his Instagram stories to verify his whereabouts, but of course he was too sneaky to post anything.

  He said he wanted to see me for lunch before my flight, but I preferred to remain deeply offended yet demonstrably chill on text.

  “It’s work!” I’d told him zestily. “It happens!”

  He should have known how sad I was from the exclamation points.

  By the morning I was due at the airport, there was no water. I tried the bathroom first as the pipes groaned, yielding nothing. The kitchen faucet emitted a rust-colored trickle. It was just as well. I felt strangely clean. It was clear that my soul had left my body.

  “You look nice,” I tell June when I see her at the gate.

  “Thanks,” says June. It feels like it’s been a month since I’ve seen her. It’s oddly reassuring that in her black suit and tall, spiky heels, she’s back to the June costume I’m most familiar with, the version of her I know least well. She may as well be a memoji. I’m still in sweats.

  “I need to grab something to eat,” she says, nodding to the ambiguously European restaurant. Watching her heels clack, I marvel at her hard-shell suitcase, which glides alongside her. In airport taxonomies, we don’t at all look as though we belong together. I wonder if she ever feels as bewildered by me.

  “When’d you get here?”

  I arrived three hours ago, trying to figure out who the fuck David Buxbaum—the man I’ve been writing rent checks to—might be. I hadn’t realized that flushing the toilet to see if it worked was the one flush I’d have. I brushed my teeth at the airport but June doesn’t need to know that. “I just got here,” I lie.

  She nods her approval. “A half hour before is plenty,” she says. “Especially if you have CLEAR.” My sister is such a specific breed of asshole. As if I can afford CLEAR.

  We sit at the bar on leather-backed stools and look at our phones. The number I have for the broker rang and rang—ominously—without ever going to voicemail. The text I sent remains green.

  She orders a glass of white wine and a pressed sandwich. I order a water. She asks for our check with the food. I somehow feel as though I’m on a terrible first date. With my sister.

  It’s too bright in here. Too loud. Everyone around me seems unhappy in distinct ways.

  In the little seating pods to the right of us, clustered around a café, are stooped heads with noise-canceling headphones, scrolling through iPads and phones, hiding behind sunglasses, sitting under hats while flipping through magazines, and sprinkling chips, candy, trail mix, and beef jerky into their mouths. Down the bar there are huge, sweaty glasses of beer, wine, cocktails, french fries, calamari rings, and a thick slice of chocolate cake.

  Airport departure halls are like enormous day care centers where every adult baby has a credit card.

  Even still, I would kill for a pound of Reese’s Pieces right now.

  “How do you feel about seeing Mom and Dad?” June asks.

  “Fine.” I shrug.

  Strangely, I’d thought about this trip only as far as seeing June at the airport. My brain may as well be an animal in a carrier. I can sense that I’m going somewhere and that it’s most likely going to be unpleasant, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t even know what to imagine. I’ve never gone home before. I was only ever there already.

  “Fine?” She flips open the black pleather check folder and scribbles the credit card receipt haphazardly.

  I gaze at the receipt. Her signature’s a mess. It’s a cross between a tilted Z and an N.

  “That is not your signature.” I snort.

  “Sure is,” she says.

  I pull out a black spiral notebook from my bag, open it up to a blank page, click my favorite black metal Caran d’Ache, and scrawl a swooping cursive J. I add a Y with a jagged series of barely distinguishable loops that bookends in an elegant K. I do it over. I love signing my name. It’s aesthetically pleasing and precise. It signals good taste. It makes me feel well-bred.

  “Do you even know how to sign my name?” You’d think someone who’d stolen someone’s identity would do a little homework.

  “We’ve got face recognition and chip cards. Nobody gives a shit about signatures.” She takes the pen from me. “This,” she says, “is my real signature.”

  She scribbles what could be a J and a series of hillocks that could be anything. She does it again. And again. Each one is different. She side-eyes me. “You can be vain about anything, can’t you?”

  “I read that if you turn the paper upside down, it’s easier to copy.” I flip my notebook. “Upside down you can focus on the shape and not what the word’s supposed to say.”

  “You idiot.” June snorts. She sips the last of her wine. “First of all, it’s not like I’m going to be at the hospital, like, uh, hold on, Doc. I have to turn this page upside down. Besides, I’m the one who taught you that. The upside-down paper thing.”

  A memory scissors through. “Treat it like a drawing,” June’s saying. It’s the two of us at the dining room table, and I’m copying Mom’s signature from her checkbook duplicates. I’m signing June’s marine biology field trip to Galveston. Mom and Dad were at work, and I’m getting scared reading the small print. The school claimed no liability in cases of accidental drowning, allergic reactions, or any other issues arising from any activities whatsoever. “It’s only, like, three hours away,” says June. “But we’re supposed to be back at eight, so if I’m not back by…” She shrugs, without meeting my eyes. “Maybe call Ms. Hoover at school. Or the cops.” I’d thought it was weird that she’d asked for my help until I realized what she was really doing. She was telling me where she’d be because she wanted someone to know. Someone to worry about her if she needed them to.

  “You want
ed me to know,” I tell her.

  June looks up from her sandwich. She’s plucking out sprigs of arugula. Arugula, raw onions, beets, all June’s enemies. “Know what?” She takes a bite; it smells garlicky.

  “You wanted me to find out,” I tell her. “You need my help. You just didn’t know how to ask for it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she says, chewing wetly. Sometimes eating with June makes me want to gag. It’s always so anatomical.

  I finish my water and shake the ice cubes at the bottom of the glass. Then I pinch the stray arugula off her plate between my thumb and forefinger and put them in my mouth.

  “Fucking disgusting,” says June to me, shaking her head. “Chew away from me. I can smell it.”

  I chew right up in her ear. “If you didn’t want me to find out that you’re snaking my identity, you wouldn’t have told me you were sick in the first place.”

  I know my sister. She could have just as easily signed the permission slip herself. We were constantly filling out our own permission slips and tardiness notices. June wanted to tell me where she’d be that day without having to tell me.

  “You don’t think you’d notice if I had cancer?” She pushes me away from her, eyes flicking skyward.

  “You could have hidden it from me.” Before the confrontation, before she invited me over, she absolutely could have pulled it off. “Instead you came to me. And then you let me move in. You handed me your mail.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “You need me.”

  She snorts.

  “You need me emotionally,” I tut, with a sympathetic little frown. “It’s okay that you need me. You don’t have to admit it. Your subconscious spoke for you. I heard you loud and clear.”