Yolk(83)

“I didn’t want the fucking pulled pork. And I didn’t want to pose for fucking pictures in the middle of a store.”

“Okay,” says June, eyes wide.

“Can we just go?”

“Are you serious?”

I nod. Mute. Tears are fully streaming down my face to comingle with my leaking nose. I check my Trader Joe’s tote for a napkin, a Kleenex, anything, but there’s only a bobby pin and a dusty dime.

“Yeah, okay, fuck it,” she says, and ditches our cart, steering me out by the elbow.

We trudge side by side for a block while I blindly search my pockets. My hand closes on the folded sheaf, pulling it out halfway before realizing what it is. I blow my nose on a mile-long CVS receipt.

A spitefully attractive dark-haired couple crosses the street in front of us. They have a baby. The man’s sipping from a reusable coffee cup. He’s wearing a lean black suit, with a BabyBj?rn strapped to his chest. She has a blunt haircut under a blue beanie. And wearing an oversize camel coat, yellow clogs, she’s clutching wildflowers wrapped in butcher paper. “Why do men always go for that type?” asks June, just as I was thinking that she definitely carries tissues in her purse. “The ones that look like they come with the picture frame?”

“Because men are trash,” I say as we speed up to overtake them.

“I just don’t get Patrick’s girlfriend,” says June.

“You think that’s his girlfriend?”

“Amal fucking Clooney back there?” June snorts. “Of course that’s his girlfriend. Staying together while she’s in the Peace Corps? That’s a sunk-cost move. That’s at least two years deep. Plus, you don’t go to Trader Joe’s unless you’re in it. It’s grocery IKEA. Everybody knows that. You have to be prepared to fight. That’s long relationship territory. Like, we’re talking picking people up from the airport. That’s not even healthy. That’s codependent. You shouldn’t ever go to Trader Joe’s with anyone you plan on having regular sex with. That’s what the Whole Foods hot bar is for.”

I close my eyes. Watching her talk, cheeks puffed up, the way she orates with that smugness, as if she knows everything about everything. She makes me crazy.

“I know you and that idiot roommate-boyfriend weren’t going to Trader Joe’s together, am I right?”

I glare at her. The closest Trader Joe’s to our apartment was on Court Street. It was a proximity issue, not an intimacy issue.

“Well, did you?”

I glare at her.

“See,” she says triumphantly. “This is why I’m such a beast at my job. I know fucking everything about the human condition.”

“Oh, yeah?” I shoot back. “Is that why you were fired?”

The barb pings off her without a mark. “Let’s get Thai food,” she says.





chapter 38


I wait until she’s asleep to put on makeup. I watch my lips curl over my teeth as the lipstick glides on. The muscle memory of it is quieting. The placid, faraway place that made the rest of high school bearable. Hours of YouTube makeup tutorials prepared me for the rest of my life. I learned exactly how to appear indestructible. Impenetrable. Paint as armor.

I’m strangely calm. I’d let my guard down with Patrick, and that was my fault. I should have remembered: Everyone is disappointing.

June says that however badly people treat me, I treat myself worse. She doesn’t get that there’s a certain logic to it. When I had my wisdom teeth pulled last year, I couldn’t stop rooting in the metallic socket, dislodging the blood clot with my tongue, exposing all the nerves. The pain had been so stunning and clear. It was both precise and expansive. I like that I could control when that zip of agony coursed through my head. It made everything and everyone else so quiet.

My hands sweep the brush across my skin. I’m looking at myself looking at myself into infinity. I could be anyone. I love how all girls’ mouths look the same in the mirror. The more we put on our faces—highlighter, bronzer, brows, cat’s eye, contoured, carved, concealed, and accentuated—the more we resemble one another.

I need a certain type of night. It doesn’t matter where. The kind that doesn’t affect you beyond the indescribable relief, the scratching of the itch, the bloodletting because you don’t have to remember any of it. None of it counts. I have no use for consequences.

I loot the tequila from June’s kitchen cupboard and help myself. It’s golden in my throat. I text the easiest person to see, to talk to. The worst idea. It’s as if I’m watching me from a distance.

He calls, and I’m thrilled by the immediacy of it. The thrust of intrusion. “What are you doing right now?” he bellows when I pick up. It’s loud where he is and he’s drunk. He always calls when he’s drunk. “Meet us,” he says before I can answer. The restaurant is noisy behind him.

I could walk there, I tell myself. It will give me plenty of time to change my mind. But in the next moment, I’ve arrived at the neon sign. It’s a tractor beam. Bright Lights, Big City. This Tribeca corner is mythic. It’s on the opening credits of the best seasons of Saturday Night Live. It feels like Christmas in my heart. It’s perfect.

I glide through the door, unzipping my men’s nylon flight jacket so that it slides off one shoulder. I’m wearing what amounts to lingerie. My earrings are big enough to ward off predators. The interior is a movie. I catch the eye of several people as I walk in, feeling their gazes graze me. I’m grateful for the ambience. It’s easier to be practically naked in dim conditions. The amber glow given off by the globe pendant lamps casts the chatty, upturned faces in a warm, appealing light. Total Toulouse-Lautrec territory.