Yolk(2)
I glance at Jeremy, who’s paused with his fork raised to his mouth. “What time is our thing?” he asks her.
“What thing?” It’s out before I can think.
Rae’s eyes flit to Jeremy’s and skitter back to me.
They let my question hang in the air like a smell.
“Oh, don’t worry,” I recover, smiling stiffly. “I have plans.”
“No, come!” exclaims Rae, squeezing my forearm for emphasis. “God, I’m so awkward.” She laughs at herself ruefully. “It’s just an intimate gathering at a dear friend’s home. It’s a safe space, so I have to make sure it’s okay.” Her eyes narrow meaningfully, placing an open palm on my leg. “But if it’s a no, I hope you can respect that it’s nothing personal.”
“Honestly,” I tell her, convinced that all her friends are sylphlike and terrifying. “I have to leave right after this.”
Jeremy pushes his plate away. I hand him my water before having to be asked. His eyes dart past me to beetle all around us. Party eyes. Shiny. Hard. Roving for people to say hello to. I get it. I love New York precisely for this reason. The culture. The vibration. The relevance. The crackly frisson of opportunity. When we first met, it was this gleaming, hungry aspect of him that I liked best. His magnetism was contagious, especially when he motormouthed at you about his grand plans. You felt like you were on his team.
He pulls his sunglasses out and cleans them with my napkin. Not so long ago he was beautiful to me. Partly because he’s tall. Not even New York tall but objectively tall. Over six feet. But it was his ambition that drew me to him. I’d never met anyone who could talk at that pace. It was astonishing. But now, I can see him how others might. His straw-blond hair and skin tone blend his features together in a vague soup, blurring an already uncertain chin.
But then he’ll say something so quintessentially, winsomely New York that I’m scared to let him go. And he knows everyone. From models to door guys. Once we ordered weed to the house and it turned out he played basketball with the delivery dude. When they gave each other a pound, I was so envy-struck I could barely speak. It doesn’t help that on the rare occasion Jeremy introduces me to his friends—their eyes glaze over in disinterest.
Jeremy calls himself a poet. And a performance artist. But, for him, neither of these things particularly mean anything, and combined they mean even less. Mostly he focuses his efforts on a literary magazine that I’ve designed pages for but never seen in real life. In short, he’s a bartender at Clandestino over on East Broadway. I try not to think about how much money he owes me. And how we shared a bed for months and then stopped.
The only time I don’t hate him is when I think he’s mad at me.
“I’d rather die than go home,” I say to no one in particular.
chapter 2
“Be right back.”
I get up, grab my wallet, and thread my body through the crowd by the bar. I swallow hard, guts curdling. I feel callow and gullible and unspeakably sad. I need to forget how, at an earlier point in the day, I’d dressed as though my loose plans with Jeremy were a date.
“Hey, Mike.” I up-nod the bartender, weirdly a near dupe of Jeremy but with a pornstache and more tattoos.
“Hey, baby, what can I get you?” I’m heartened that he seems to remember me without Jeremy as a cue.
“Vodka soda. The cheap kind.” I always get my drinks separately. I’m too poor to split bills at the table. “I’m going to need to see an ID, babe.” I hand it over, and he gives me a heavy pour. “You want to keep the tab open?”
“You can close it out,” I tell him, sliding him my credit card. “Thanks.”
He hands me a sweating glass. Part of me already doesn’t want it. I take a sip right where I stand, ignoring the glares and pointy elbows of couples waiting for their tables. The drink’s strong. And thoroughly disgusting. I feel it work immediately.
I pocket the credit card and fake ID. It’s funny how no one ever notices that the names don’t match. And that the photo isn’t my face. Partly it’s that they don’t expect criminals to look like me, an Asian art student dressed in black, but it also confirms a horrible suspicion: that no one’s ever looking at me. Really looking.
I’m staring at the halo of her before recognition kicks in. There she is, in the mirror behind the bar. Like an apparition. A Japanese horror movie. I want to laugh, I’m in such disbelief. She pushes through the crowd, scanning the clustered bistro tables by the front window, openly searching their faces. When she falls out of frame, I almost turn my head toward her but hesitate—superstitious—thinking that she won’t be there. I lift my hand to my lips, watching my reflected self do the same, confirming my own presence as she double backs toward me. Now we’re both in the mirror, and still I don’t face her. She has different hair—shorter—but it’s ludicrous how enormous her gourd is. Even without our nursery-rhyme names—Jayne and June—you’d see how we belong to each other. Our heads are twinned in bigness.
The joke goes that I practically slid out of Mom after she’d pushed June out. Even after the two-and-change-years between us. Normal-size heads look as though they’d orbit mine, and my sister’s is even huger. The other joke is that June, eleven days late, at eleven pounds and two ounces, hadn’t wanted to come out at all. She’s like one of those parasitic eggs that hatch on a caterpillar, casually eating it for sustenance, using it for shelter without any sense of imposition. If June had her way, she’d have kept growing and worn Mom like a hat.