“Did you know you can get a Banana Split Blizzard?” I crane my neck until I can see the big plastic menu. “I didn’t know that was a thing until I read it online. Ooooh, should I get Butterfinger?”
I snap a photo for Patrick. There are still four or five cars ahead of us. I’m so excited I can’t take it.
“Jesus, get both,” she says. “Literally nobody gives a shit.”
June leans out the window when it’s finally our turn. “I’ll have a pineapple sundae,” she calls out. I stare at my sister as if she’s a stranger.
“Ew, that’s your DQ order?” It’s the most milquetoast thing I can imagine. Of all the desserts in the world.
“It’s what I’m in the mood for,” she says, shrugging. “This isn’t, like, fucking Christmas for me. I get drive-thru every time I’m on the road.”
I order a Heath Bar Blizzard.
“Why’d you quit driver’s ed?” she asks as she inches the car closer to the window.
“Dunno.” I recall the red-faced instructor with the buzz cut. He worked as a waiter at Pappadeaux and told me he’d give me free drinks. He was at least twenty-five and deeply creepy.
I stopped going. I had other things on my mind. Mom was gone.
“What’s the point?” I tell her. “You could drive eight hours west from Texas and still be inside Texas.”
“Because knowing that you can leave makes it more tolerable,” she says. “It helped me. I just drove around under this stupidly big sky with nowhere to go but at least feeling like I had some say in it.”
When June first got her license, she did seem so much happier. After homework, she’d text me and we’d go to DQ for frozen desserts, Sonic for cherry limeades, and Long John Silver’s with a side of Whataburger chicken fingers with cream gravy and Texas toast if we were feeling decadent.
June’s always been easier to talk to in a car. “Thanks for this trip,” I tell her quietly.
“It’s not so bad, right?”
“Yeah. I didn’t even hate church.”
“See?”
“Yeah.” I stare at the chess piece-sized Virgin Mary effigy affixed to mom’s dashboard. I remember how, when I unpacked my things at school, there was an identical one in the bottom of my suitcase. I threw her in a sock drawer and haven’t seen her since.
“Did anyone at church ever ask about me?” I can’t tell if I’m disturbed or relieved how little has changed in the last four years.
June laughs. “You mean, did the church ladies light a vigil candle for your scorching soul every week? Or did the priest dedicate his homily to Jayne returning to the flock?” She turns to me. “Is that what you’re asking?”
“What I’m asking is why you’re such a dick.”
June laughs. She pulls up a little farther, then sets the car in park again.
“Did they ever ask you where Mom went?”
She shrugs. “Nah. I’m not even sure they asked Dad. You know how it is, church-folk are all up in your business until that shit actually gets dark. Then, they just think you’re contagious.”
I do know. It’s not just church, though; that’s everywhere.
“Do you think we’ll ever know where she went?”
“We could ask her,” says June.
At this, we both crack up.
“You really didn’t think she was coming back, did you?”
I think about her packed suitcase. The eerily placid look on Mom’s face. “No, I really didn’t,” I tell her honestly.
chapter 35
The last time I told June Mom wasn’t coming back, she’d smashed an alarm clock on my head.
“You fucking whore!” She’d wrapped her fist deep into my hair and pulled with everything she had.
“Get off me, psycho!” I twisted, eyes filling with rage tears. She managed to hook me behind the ear where my scalp’s most tender. I raced down the stairs, turning around on the carpeted landing to taunt her.
I’d called her a dumb bitch. Disgusting. A loser. I screamed for her to get a life. I crashed into the living room, grabbing my things, blindly shoving keys, wallet, lip gloss into my bag.
I checked my shallow pocket for the hard contour of mom’s ring. I’d tried to tell June that first night. That this was our new life and still she wouldn’t listen. It was so pathetic the way she kept pretending that things were ever going to be the same. Her naiveté sickened me. She was supposed to be my older sister. She was supposed to be so fucking smart.
“Do your goddamned homework!” she commanded, getting right up in my face. “What if she comes back and your grades are even worse?”
I laughed bitterly, drawing myself up tall. “You’re so naive.” I wanted to tell her everything. That our precious mother didn’t love us enough to stay and that she’d given me a ring because I’d caught her. I hated that only I knew of this lopsided bribe and how cruel it was. June loved Mom more than anyone, but Mom didn’t care. She hadn’t left her anything. That’s how much she thought of her firstborn daughter.
“Honestly, I feel sorry for you.” I shoved her off me, glaring. She looked peaked then, small, as if all that piss and vinegar and moral outrage had been drained from her. She was still wearing her ridiculous Hogwarts sweatshirt from school that was stained at the sleeve. It was humiliating enough that she was a social liability on campus, that she telegraphed her obsessions with magic and fantasy for everyone to see. The fact that she couldn’t at least be a realist at home when the truth was excruciating enough to accept was unforgivable.
“She’s not coming back!” I screamed for a second time.
June shoved me and I landed so hard on my ass, I bit the inside of my cheek. I hated her so much, I vibrated with it.
“You are such a fucking traitor,” she shrieked, blocking the door. “You have zero loyalty. You’re so selfish, you make me sick. You don’t deserve to be in this family.”
“Family?” I screeched into the empty house. “Do you see a family anywhere?” Dad was at work, again, desperate to avoid us, leaving us to fend for ourselves with no explanation.
June needed to wake up. “She’s gone. She doesn’t give a shit about us. You could be fucking valedictorian and clean the house spotless and go to church every day and pray your ass off and it still won’t make her come home. She’s gone. She doesn’t care.” Mom didn’t have to say it for me to know. Her voicemail was full. We’d filled it up. And her silence broke my heart.
It had been a month, and I’d moved on. As far as I was concerned, Mom leaving was the best thing that could have happened to me. If she could forget about us, I could sure as shit forget about her first. I’d smoked pot for the first time. I’d stayed out on a school night, drank gin, and puked so hard I’d thought I’d lost hearing.
I summoned all the hauteur in my entire fifteen-year-old body to push past her. I added a snotty head tilt. “I’m going out. It’s not my fault you have no friends. Fucking loser.”
June lunged for me. I kicked her off and swung the door open. As I ran down the drive, sandals slapping at my feet, wind lifting my hair, I felt high. I slipped Mom’s ring onto my finger without looking back.
* * *
The car jerks forward.
“Maybe Mom was sick,” says June. Her face is haloed in a red glow from the brake lights in front. “She looked insane when she came back.”
Mom returned three months later. It was early in the morning. She was drawn and pale and immediately went to take a nap.
“God, Dad was sad.”
“Yeah, that’s why I couldn’t let him go to church by himself.”
In the car ahead of us, the driver reaches for four full bags and two holsters of desserts.
“Who gets food at DQ?” June muses.
We both shake our heads in disgust and drive up.
“Oh, hey,” says June to the cashier. I hear acid in her tone and duck my head low to see what she saw. I recoil quickly, face burning as I feel June’s eyes flick over to me. I recognize him ri
ght away when he wouldn’t know me at all.
It’s Holland Hint’s little brother Willy.
With a constellation of acne on his cheeks, he’s lengthened out in the last few years, seemingly as tall as Holland but less filled out from what I could see.
Two years younger than Holland, he wouldn’t know either of us, but I realize I’m holding my breath.
A horrible fear gnaws at my guts that his brother works here too, even though the last time I stalked him, he’d enlisted in the air force. I turn to see if I can spot a beat-up blue Nissan truck in the parking lot. All those memories. Driving around with the radio on, rarely talking, him making me duck whenever he thought we saw someone we knew.
I hear Willy give her the total. June primly unbuttons her wallet clasp and hands him a twenty.
I pull out my compact. I’m oily. And my lips are flaky.
He hands over her change and tells us to drive up to the next window.
June throws the car in drive. I jerk forward when she slams the brakes.
“That’s the brother, isn’t it?” says June, jaw set.
I don’t respond. If anything, I’m surprised that she remembers. I check the rearview, making sure he’s not within earshot, making sure June doesn’t see me checking.
She shakes her head, studying me. “Fuck if these assholes don’t look exactly the same.”
I sense her seething gather steam.
“Why didn’t you say hi?” she hisses.
“June, stop.”
She grabs my compact from me and snaps it shut.
“Do you honestly think he’s about to go call his brother and tell him how you looked?”
I stare at the powder puff in my hand. I wasn’t aware I’d gotten it out.
“June.”
“He doesn’t know you,” she says, dumping her change in the center console. “And even if his brother were here, he’d pretend he doesn’t know you either. Just like high school.”
The anger comes off her in waves.
“Look.” I shrug. “I barely even remember high school.”
“You’re so full of shit,” she says. Even in the dark, I can see there are twin splotches of red high on her cheeks.
I sigh and look out the window.
“Let me guess,” she says. “You don’t want your ice cream.”
She’s right about that. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Fine,” she snaps. June guns the engine, spinning the wheel wildly to the right, and I’m convinced she’s going to clip the tail lights of the sedan in front, when she throws the car in reverse at the last second.
“June!” I scream. My hand shoots up to the ceiling as my feet grind the floor.
“Shut up!” she says. Horns blare.
I turn my head, catching the surprised eyes of a Mexican family behind us. June curses while inching out so we can leave. “Thank you!” We both wave in our rearview, but just as our car lurches forward, we almost pitch into the van coming into the parking lot at a wide angle from the road.
June slams the brakes again. And just like Mom, she sticks out her arm to brace me, but she ends up hitting me hard in a clothesline, elbowing me right in the sternum.
“Ow. Fuck.” I rub my chest, glaring at her accusingly.
The van flips us the bird.
“Jesus Christ, June, will you just pull over? Just park for a second.”
“Fine.” June silently slides into a spot.
There’s a maroon van parked next to us. On the back windshield there’s a sign written in white shoe polish. NEED A KIDNEY. BLOOD TYPE A OR O. And a phone number.
“Why are you so weak?” She’s staring straight ahead and I’m braced for the insult, but the last word slices clean through my defenses. She inhales sharply, eyes clenched closed. She exhales shakily. “Look, I know you can’t help it. But you’re just so fucking…” June smacks the bottom of her steering wheel with the heel of her hand.
* * *
When I popped open the door of Holland’s blue truck, Mom’s rubies on my finger, my sister’s voice ringing in my ears, I thought I was going to be his girlfriend. That’s how it felt. I was finally the lead. I was the love interest. I was the one they were singing about in every single pop song.
“Hey,” he said, expression unreadable. I’d expected a smile. I’d hoped for a hug, but he seemed put out. As if I was an imposition. It’s true that I’d been the one to surreptitiously approach him while my friends were in the back of Planet K, the head shop where he worked, but he’d asked me to hang out. When I’d hoisted myself up to the cab of the truck, I was startled by the empty plastic bottles of soda on the floor, the stink of tobacco, the grid of duct tape on the navy pleather seat, and the gristle of coiled spring trying to elbow its way out and dig into my ass. I tried to keep the distaste off my face. I didn’t want to be accused of being high maintenance. It knew it to be the worst possible insult that could be hurled at a girl.
“I thought I’d take you to the Chateau,” he said, without facing me. I’d never been to the Chateau before. We rode in silence, which I chose to think was romantic. We passed railroad tracks, turning into a subdivision that seemingly didn’t end. He was silent and brooding, but I knew we’d talk eventually. He’d reward me for my own quiet and let me in. I couldn’t wait for him to tell me I was easy to talk to. For him to tell me things his girlfriend wouldn’t understand.
We drove into a cul-de-sac where no porch lights were left on as a courtesy. I discovered what few sophomores were privy to. That the Chateau all the seniors talked about at school, the spot for all the wildest parties, was nothing more than a half-built model home in a nothing-neighborhood in a zombie part of town.
The door was ajar, with a hole where a doorknob would be. Holland walked in first, without holding the door for me, and I felt foolish for my crushing disappointment. The floors were littered with beer cans and broken glass, and it smelled powerfully of pee. There was a filthy mattress on the floor and a few plastic chairs around it, a jet-black streak of char coloring the far wall. A gold glimmer caught my eye, and I realized it was a condom wrapper. In fact, there were multiple bits of foil confettied all around the mattress.
I’d thought it would be a mansion, but who knew where I’d heard that. I’d stupidly wondered if there was a pool, whether we’d dip our toes and laugh, but there wasn’t even electricity in the sad, abandoned house. The glass had been busted out of the window frames. There were no appliances in the kitchen, a toilet had been dragged into what would have been a dining room.
I could feel my fingernails digging into my palms like teeth as revulsion rolled thickly through my body.
We drank Fireball, which left our mouths spicy and warm. Still without talking, he kissed me, pushing up against me on the splintery wall of that dank shell of a house. His hooded eyes were open but unseeing, and I left my body there, preferring to witness this as a bystander. I knew this was going to have to be a secret—at least for a while—but I was confident that everyone would recognize the change in me. They’d see it in my movements. That this intense, pulsing charge of rage at my mother could be alchemized into power. He was a good kisser. Slow and deliberate, melting into my edges, which were already fuzzy from the cinnamon liquor. For that moment, I didn’t mind that we stood in a squatter’s den. That there was so much broken glass on the floor. We were both floating.
I led him back to his truck by his hand. It was surprisingly warm and soft. He had a rough, woven blanket in the bed. All I could think while his hands groped my breasts was that I hoped he wouldn’t go for my pants. I’d heard that you could contract tetanus in your cervix if you got fingered by a guy with dirty fingernails. I tried to check his nails, but it was dark, and when he switched from sucking on my neck to kissing my mouth again, I moaned in that way that every girl knows how even if they don’t want to.
It was surreal when he took my hand and guided it to his fly. I was shocked by how suddenly I was touching Holland Hint’s penis.
And by how hot his penis felt. It was not unlike petting an unseeing animal wholly separate from him. Like caressing the spine of a small hairless cat. When the spurt of feverish ooze landed on my hand, it glistened as it cooled. I couldn’t tell if I was sick from giddiness or loathing. I knew that this part I wouldn’t tell anybody about. I checked my own nails. They were clean.
I also saw that my ring was missing.
“My ring.” I sat up, heart hammering. It was everything she’d left me, and I’d lost it down some stoner’s pants.
“What’s that?”
“My ring,” I heard myself say, hysteria edging. “We have to find it.” Holland, who was prone to doziness in the sober light of day, was practically comatose. He didn’t stir. Didn’t help me look for it. Didn’t jump up and down to see if it fell out of his pants. Didn’t so much as pull his phone out to help me search his car filled with garbage.
The next morning, he passed right by me as if nothing had happened. And still, two weeks later, I’d silently lost my virginity in that room. I’d watched my own condom wrapper falling to the floor. I was grateful that we’d done it standing up. Even if it hurt. Even as he crashed into me at angles that felt brutal and wrong. I was careful not to touch anything. A week after that Holland Hint never spoke to me again.
It’s how I learned that nothing ever met expectations.
Every time I saw him kissing his willowy, glossy girlfriend in the hallways, pulling her narrow frame toward him as he draped his arm across her shoulders, I felt a deep, digging pain through my midline.
They both had the same straw-colored hair. From the back they looked like siblings.
I thought no one knew. But a few days later, the rumors began. My friends became distant and more boys came calling.
* * *
June kills the engine.
“Every time someone hurts you, you find a way to hurt yourself ten times worse.”
It doesn’t sound untrue even if it feels wounding coming from my sister.
Yolk Page 23