Yolk(96)

“Is he here?” I turn my head toward the bedroom.

“Is who here? What the fuck?” she shrieks.

I’d read somewhere that there are only nine pints of blood in a human body. I try not to stare, but I need to know if I’m looking at enough blood to overflow one of those plastic-handled milk jugs. There’s so much of it ribboning around her in the water. The coppery tang, the sediment, I can almost taste it.

“It’s just me,” she says, and then sighs. “He left. We were going at it until we both realized I was perioding all over the place. It was gnarly. You should have seen him—his dick looked like Carrie, and I thought he was gonna pass out.”

“You scared me!” I tell her. “You left the door open.”

“He probably did. You should have seen him break out.”

“Jesus.”

I push open the door to the bedroom and check out the crime scene. June’s mattress looks like an abattoir.

“Never trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn’t die,” she says ruefully. “I thought I might be having cramps. But I’ve also been in such consistent pain, it’s hard to tell.”

I watch my sister let the old water out and refill the tub. As the water runs clean, I see her naked body for the first time in years. She’s sitting with her knees tented. From above I can see that her abdomen is swollen, but her limbs are thinner. Spindly. “I can’t wait for all this shit to be over,” she says.

“Is this a cancer thing?” I inch into the bathroom from the hallway.

“No,” she says. “My period. It’s gotten so much worse. It comes every three to four months and arrives like some plague.”

There was always an Old Testament quality to June’s periods growing up. Mom’s was the same way. Mom never gave us the Talk as it related to sex, presuming that someone at school had it handled. But she did pull us both aside when our periods came to remind us that a woman’s body was a burden and that nice underpants were a waste of money.

“Jesus, it’s fucking metal.” There’s a silty ring of scarlet around the tub. “You look like you’ve been making kimchi in here.”

She chuckles and then groans. “Stop,” she says. “I feel horrible. I can’t even tell you how many blood transfusions I’ve had this year.”

I had no idea it had become this bad.

She lifts her hand out of the water and stares at her fingers. “I think I’m still drunk.”

I tiptoe through the blood droplets and sit next to the tub on the bathmat.

“I refuse to buy adult diapers.” She closes her eyes dopily. “It’s like a miracle if I don’t soak through a super-plus tampon and a pad in between subway stops.”

“Yeah, but”—I gather my legs in my arms—“when’s the last time you took the subway?”

“Fuck you,” says June, smiling through gritted teeth. “God, you should have seen me at work. Trapped on the toilet in between meetings. I went to the bathroom so much, this analyst had the nerve to intervention me. She thought I was a cokehead, which, let me tell you, everyone would have been way more okay with.”

June runs more hot water, and when her hand rests on the lip of the tub, the dewdrops from her fingertips are pink. My sister’s insides are outside of her, and a flutter of panic takes hold of my heart.

She closes her eyes, grimacing.

I can’t tell if the dampness of her face is sweat, condensation, or tears. She looks a bit like Mom then. I didn’t think either of us looked like her, but I see it now. I shouldn’t have left her alone.

“Wait,” she slurs, leering at me. “Did you and Patrick bone?”

“June.” I roll my eyes, but I can tell I’m smiling.

“Oh my God.” She splashes her hand excitedly. “Does his girlfriend know?”

“They broke up.”

“Suuuuuure,” she says, shaking her head before exhaling noisily. I’m touched that she’d ask about it when she’s clearly in pain.

“Want me to wash your hair?”

My sister doesn’t say anything. I hold my breath, embarrassed suddenly to have asked.

“Yeah, okay,” she says, finally opening her eyes.

We clear out the dark water and fill it again. I detach the shower nozzle, testing the temperature as she leans, tilting her head back. Her black hair tendrils out. My sister wipes the water away from her eyes with the heels of her palms. I grab the good shampoo. The Frédéric Fekkai travel bottle that I brought over. I lather her head with the tips of my fingers, with enough pressure that it feels good but carefully so I don’t get soap in her eyes. When her face crumples and she starts crying noiselessly, I keep going without another word.

My sister and I have been tormented by our bodies in different ways. A few weeks before the end of June’s last year of high school—one random Thursday—she leaked all through her leggings. Most of the semester was over. Senioritis had settled in for the upperclassmen; finals were a week out—the days were protracted and dull. It was almost as if people were waiting for something to happen. And this was particularly inviting.

A disparate number of factions—the popular kids, her advanced-placement adversaries, the kids who owed her money for snacks, even Holland and the burnouts—joined forces against my sister. For someone playing such a minor role at school, she incited so much collective cruelty. She’d been sitting in some genius IB course, and when she stood up, it was a Saw movie on her ass.