Yolk(58)

chapter 27


I pull my suitcase out from behind the love seat and fling it open. I can’t believe I’m packing again.

June kicks off her shoes, unhooks her overall straps, and leaves the pants in a puddle on the living room floor. She sits heavily on her couch with her eyes closed.

I grab my laundry from her dryer and sit on the floor with my legs crossed, dumping it out in front of me. The last twenty-four hours have felt like a year. I can barely keep my eyes open. I do socks first because they’re easiest.

“I got fired,” she says. Eyes still closed. “I didn’t get laid off. I found out in an office-wide email an hour before they told me.”

I stop folding.

She balls her hands and cracks her thumbs under her forefingers the way she always does.

At my eye level, there’s a book on her coffee table. It’s not an encyclopedia. It’s a small hardback. The spine reads When Breath Becomes Air. The title is familiar to me.

“They called security while I packed up my desk.”

I imagine her being frog-marched out of the building.

June leans over and picks up the book from the table. There’s a 30-percent-off sticker on the front, and the back shows a black-and-white author photo of a doctor in hospital scrubs. She starts tapping the hardback against her bare knee.

“They said I displayed a lack of understanding of the company culture,” she says, and then sneers. “Code for: my boss hated me.”

I hold my tongue. There’s no shortage of people getting laid off all over the world, but of course June’s firing is about a personal grudge.

“Believe me,” she says, bitterly. “It wasn’t about my performance history, that’s for damned sure. He was just mad that I wouldn’t suck his dick. Shit was fucking high school all over again.”

I don’t have the energy for this.

June’s voice shakes. “People hate me for no reason,” she says, doing that nodding thing again, as if she’s convincing herself.

Tap, tap, tap. She keeps knocking the book harder and harder on her kneecap. I remember it now, how the man who wrote it died. He was a cancer doctor who died of cancer. I want to grab it from her and fling it across the room. It’s maddening that she’d rather read about it than talk to anyone.

I make myself take a moment before I respond. “That sounds tough,” I tell her evenly. I’ve been hearing some version of this refrain my entire life. June’s always right. It doesn’t matter what it is—daylight savings, parking restrictions, the neighbor’s newspaper—everyone else is a chump and she’s right. It’s as if she can’t concede the statistical improbability of being correct 100 percent of the time. I peel my T-shirt off her towel, the static electricity crackling. I remind myself to get dryer sheets before remembering that it’s not my problem anymore.

“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.