Yolk(24)

“Okay,” I tell her. “With the gynecologic oncology surgeon.” I hear myself recite the words carefully, as if reading.

“Yeah.” She checks her pockets for her keys and then holds on as if she’s forgotten something.

I want to ask to go with her, but I’m watching myself not do it.

“Um, when are you done?” I ask instead.

“I don’t actually know. Juju’s first cancer, so.”

I feel stupid for having asked. “But like—” My voice breaks.

She glances over with the door cracked.

“Do you want me to come? With you? To the place?”

“Why?” she says in a withering tone. “No.” She shakes her head briskly. “Don’t you have class?”

“Yeah, but…” I get on my feet and shrug. “I could come. And help you or whatever.”

“Honestly,” she says, raising her brows. “You’d just stress me out.”

“Fine.” I blink back tears.

She sighs and tries again. “I need to process. Give me a little space, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

She’s punishing me for being here. I know she is.

“Um,” she says. I hold my breath, wondering if she’s changed her mind. She pulls a set of keys out of a drawer, dangles them, then sets them on the counter. “The top key’s squarish.”

I nod.

“Don’t lose them. It’s, like, two hundred bucks for the outside one.”

“Got it.” My nose stings. The full weight of the indignity hits me as the door shuts.

I lie around staring at my phone dejectedly and then finally go to the bathroom to fix my face. I open June’s medicine cabinet to an avalanche of tampons. Gathering all the plastic-wrapped bullets from the floor—since my sister uses OB like it’s 1954—I quickly dismiss the niggling unease of how my period’s been missing for the better part of a year. I open the under-sink cupboard to find a large plastic bag of hotel toiletries, including two pairs of terry-cloth slippers in cloth drawstring pouches. There are also countless individual packets of Advil and NyQuil. And a half-used ring of birth control pills.

I miss my sister, I realize. I feel cheated out of the past four years. In the span of time we were becoming adults and I had so many questions, we barely spoke. I return everything, put on eyeliner, and head back into her kitchen to open her fridge.

I know a pathology when I see one. June’s always been a slob, but these are multiple cries for help. I drag her trashcan close and throw out everything I’d set my sights on last night. I continue snooping in the kitchen. Every cabinet is filled with random garbage. The shelf beside the stove, the one where I’d keep spices, features a packing-tape gun, a roll of toilet paper, and a tennis ball.

The ball reminds me of the first guy I hooked up with in New York. I knew it was damaged that I slept with three random guys in barely a week when I arrived, which is why I don’t think about it. He wore Gucci moccasins, the ones with the fur, and had a single mattress on the floor of his room. The only other objects were a flat-screen TV and a candy-colored tangle of video game controllers. He had zero toilet paper, and as far as I could tell he washed his hair with bar soap, but he owned a brand-new tennis ball in the cabinet under the sink. I have no idea why.

I squeeze June’s tennis ball.

I pad into her bedroom. It’s sun-drenched and girlie. Tall, high, huge bed with white sheets and a pale-lilac reading chair in the corner. The closets cover the entire wall beside the bed. The mirrored panels remind me of my mom’s closet, but June’s are smudged with fingerprints. When I slide it open, there’s a handful of suits in dry-cleaner bags, an overflowing laundry hamper, and a shelf with stacked T-shirts. One of them, a tie-dyed Lord of the Rings tee, I recognize. When June first left for college, I was constantly hiding her stuff under my mattress to rescue them from Mom’s church donation pile. On her visits home, I’d wordlessly stow them in her suitcase before she left. I draw the heathered cotton tee to my nose and sniff deeply, expecting to invoke our old house, June’s old Clinique perfume, anything, but it smells of laundry detergent.

In her living room there’s a credenza below her TV. Inside is a row of encyclopedias. I look around to confirm—there are no other books in the house.

I stoop down to pull one out. Thankfully, they’re not conjoined decoy book spines that are featured as an aesthetic choice in the homes of asshole people. The navy hardback’s dusty as hell. I flip to a random page.

“Fernweh. Noun. Origin: German. Translated as wanderlust but more literally, far woe. Or, far pain. Longing for a distant place. Could be characterized as a homesickness for somewhere you’ve never been before.”

I’m struck by how I feel this way about New York even though I’m here.

Back in the kitchen, I fling open another cabinet door at random. Inside is a single wineglass. Beside it the wine key I brought. I open every cupboard and the dishwasher to verify what I feel I already know. That the wineglass she offered me was the only one she owns. There’s something so distinctly broken about this that it squelches a muscle deep in my body.

I check my phone. If I leave now, and run, I’ll be on time to class. Instead of putting my shoes on, I sit on the floor and text Patrick.

Last 10 yrs