Yolk(19)

“Can you just go the fuck to school? Please? I know that boy problems”—I wince at the wording—“are a lot for you, but don’t get distracted.” She sighs and closes her eyes for a beat. It’s painful to see how annoying she finds me. “Focus in class, do well, and over the next few weeks, or even months, try not to give Mom and Dad anything to worry about.”

I glance up at her. “Do you really think it’ll be months?”

She sighs again. I’m insufferable. “I don’t know, Jayne.”

“Okay.” I keep nodding.

“You’re so smart when you make the effort,” she says, and instantly my eyes well up. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear her say. Just not in this context.

“I’ll never be as smart as you,” I tell her.

June picks her bowl back up and laughs. “I didn’t say you were anywhere near as smart as me. Just…” Another loud exhale. “I’m smart in ways that make me stupid in others. I’ve made so many fucking mistakes, Jayjay.”

My throat tightens.

“You’re going to be okay though, right?” I hear the warble in my voice.

“What do you want me to say?”

I want her to tell me the day, the hour, and the exact minute when she’ll die. And I want her to go away so I can start preparing for it now with zero new memories because I have enough that I’ll miss.

She gets up. The conversation is over. When I stand, I’m struck again by the heft of it. My sister has cancer.

I follow her into the kitchen. From behind she’s so small. There’s so little of her to invade.

She stoops to start loading her dishwasher. “Siri, play The Graduate soundtrack,” she calls into the room.

I snicker, I can’t help it. “Have you ever even seen The Graduate?”

She turns to me. “You know I haven’t.”

“It’s a classic.”

“I’m good.” She leans over to pop a Cascade pod into the machine. “Who has time for whole movies? I’ve seen clips. I love the soundtrack. I get the idea.”

It takes every ounce of restraint not to fight her again on this. She switches on the dishwasher.

“I can’t believe you have a dishwasher,” I tell her, genuinely impressed. It’s like having a backyard in New York. “And that you use it.”

“I know,” she says, smiling, leaning up against the counter with her arms crossed. “Every time I run it, I imagine Mom shitting a brick.” Our parents have a dishwasher in Texas, but they only use it as a drying rack. June once modeled an elaborate graphic to prove how much more water was wasted doing dishes by hand, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Mom would have an aneurism if she found out detergent pods were even a thing. She dilutes dish soap.

“Man, when’s the last time I had your mapo tofu?” I rinse my bowl and hand it to her. “Probably high school.”

“It was high school. Couple months before I left for college.” She takes a long, pensive sip of water.

That’s when I remember too. She’d made it for Dad. As a consolation. And how on that lonely night, the three of us barely ate any.





chapter 11


I’m clutching the still-warm Tupperware on my walk to the subway. Cancer must feel like such betrayal, knowing that somewhere deep in your body you’re manufacturing tiny bombs that detonate and catch fire.

I barrel down the stairs to the train.

June doesn’t look sick. She always looks that way. Piqued. She has resting antagonism face. If there was visual evidence of frailty, all of this would be more believable. It’s not as if I don’t know how mortality works, but for June it doesn’t track. It’s that absurd cognitive schism where when somebody dies, all the thunderstruck dummies go, but I just saw them. The totality of death is inconceivable. It’s intolerable that you’re completely, utterly, irrefutably alive, filled up with decades of inside jokes, goofy facial expressions, all the love of your family, and then not.

It’s also so weird that any news of death makes you almost immediately think of yourself. I’m determined to know how I’ll feel when June dies. I want to be able to see it, touch it, taste it so I can make sure I’ll survive.

The smoke of my breath on the subway platform seems like it should be warm, but it isn’t.

Fuck. Juju is going to die.

One: black-haired girl in a red toggle coat.

Two: the kind of laughter that seeks an audience.

Three: trash can with a LITTER STOPS HERE sticker—torn.

Four: movie poster with a Sharpied mustache.

Five: another puff of my breath.

One, two, three, four, five. Onetwothreefourfive.

She’d better not die. She’s nowhere near done.

One, two, three, four, five.

June’s first word was “milk.” Mom was convinced she’d read it off the formula canister as an infant. That’s weird too. Like death. One or zero. Words have no meaning, and then boom—reading. My first word was “cow.” I’d heard Mom telling someone on the phone that it was June’s first word and I wanted ours to be the same. That makes my brain itch. How babies go from gurgling lumps to spies in one day. Illiterate and then illuminated.

June was always precocious and was conscripted into dirty-diaper duty the moment she could be mobilized. Ferrying the clean and scuttling the shitty, the sun rising and setting behind her bobbling head. Thinking about June as a baby makes my heart hurt. Every picture of her as a kid is of her laughing. And most of them are blurred—she could never sit still.