Yolk(68)

“Don’t be ridiculous. Drink this.” She holds a mug under my nose as if its contents stop time. It’s murky and smells somewhere between nuts and feet. “Chaga mushrooms,” she says. “For your skin.” She reaches out and pats my cheek, not with affection, but as some kind of diagnostic probe. “You look… puffy. Your unlucky ear is sticking out more than usual.” Only one of my earlobes is attached. I forget which is the unlucky one.

I touch the liquid to my lips without drinking. It’s the game we’ve always played. Later I’ll tip it down the sink and feel bad when she tells me how much it cost and how far it’s traveled. Mom’s love language is to scrutinize and criticize all the physical attributes that you’re most sensitive about. I glance at my sister, willing my clairvoyant mother to detect June’s cancer from the size of her pores or the sheen of her hair.

“I thought the food was getting cold,” I remind her.

Halfway through dinner, Mom leaves the table and emerges from the garage with a store-bought pie in a black plastic tray with a domed lid. “Happy family!” she announces, as if collective birthdays are a thing that’s commemorated by eating pie. “They had blueberry, but it wasn’t as beautiful. And at least it isn’t pumpkin. What a disgusting pie.”

“You just don’t like nutmeg,” says Dad.

“I got the last one,” she says, presenting it with as much pride as if she’d made it. “Kim Theresa says that all H-E-B’s get their pies from the same place as some expensive restaurants.”

“Happy family!” says June, smiling at me.

“Happy family to you,” I sing, and June actually laughs.



* * *



My sister snores softly on my bed above me. I’m lying on the mat on the floor since June pulled rank because her room is filled with restaurant supplies. I stare at Patrick’s text and send him a thumbs-up that I’ve arrived safely. I then send him the cowboy smiley because I’m feeling chatty.

The woolly stuffiness of the room presses up against my skin. I get up quietly, monitoring June for movement, open my desk drawer, and remove the flat-head screwdriver. I check her again, then step out and quietly close the door behind me.

The thermostat in the hall is set to 84 degrees.

I switch on the bathroom light, blinking furiously in the mirror. This is the mirror in which my face looks most disgusting. I’m almost sure it’s not all in my head. I once googled that unflattering mirrors are an empirical scientific phenomenon. They bulge under their own weight, making you appear shorter and wider. And this one, my childhood one, the one I studied most intently during my formative years, distorts all the time.

I’ve stared in this mirror until I can’t see myself. My face loses meaning. My eyes have been wet and ringed red, lips slick with spittle, cheeks swollen and purple. There have been so many nightmares in this place, but I’m grateful not to ever think about most of them. How I’d sit in the bathtub crying silently. Doing everything silently. It was the only room where the door locked. My bedroom door gave way if you shook the handle and shoved.

I stand on the lip of the tub, steadying myself with a palm to the ceiling, unscrewing the metal air vent with my other hand. The cover swings down, held in place by a screw. I reach inside. My fingers brush against a familiar shape. I clutch the bundle of small hardback notebooks and an old packet of cigarettes. I sit on the bath mat with my legs crossed and flip the blue box open and bring them to my nose. The filters smell exactly as they should. Like raisins. And something else. Something acrid. I tap the box upside down against my palm, and a half-smoked joint slides out.

Tucked between the notebooks, there’s a stack of folded-up yearbook pages that I’d ripped out of the copy in the library. We all pillaged the school copies. Yearbooks were a fortune at $75 a pop, and most of us couldn’t afford them.

I unfold the first page. It’s been handled so much, the creases are worn white. It’s one of my few pictures of him. Him being a dirty-blond boy with hair in his eyes. Him being Holland Hint, the destroyer of hearts, the decimator of self-esteem, the great love of my life, poised in a rare display of academic engagement. He’s wearing safety goggles and a lab coat. Gangly, head hanging.

In the background, you can make me out staring as if willing him to turn around. It’s the only picture of us together. Listed next to my name in the appendix of our yearbook are the three pages where I’m featured, and this is one of them. I was mortified. I never asked if he noticed. By the time it came out, we’d returned to not knowing each other.

I slide off the string from around the bundled notebooks. I grab the ribbon bookmark tail sticking out of the bottom of one and flip it open.

“Why is June such a fucking spaz?” I’d written in red pen.

My greatest fear in high school was that I would be like her, like my older sister. June and I were never in middle school together but even still I felt stupid for not anticipating who she’d be in high school.

I knew she was a hard-boiled dork at home. And it was the consistency that scandalized me. In the hallway, at her locker, she made no effort to stifle her braying laugh. She’d roll out of bed and throw on worn leggings and a sweatshirt without any thought. She was indifferent to makeup trends, the right jeans, vanity backpacks that hung just so. The only people who dressed as carelessly at school were the super-popular boys who were gods in their hoodies. But they could get away with it. June couldn’t.