“Oh.” She’s smiling with so much effort. “That’s so thoughtful.”
“Oh.” I wave the air. “It was only twelve bucks.”
We are so cringey. I barely know what to do with my hands. She turns and busies herself with the rest of the cooking.
“So, did you want red?” I ask her.
“I’m okay,” she says. “Did you?”
“I’ll just have water.” I watch as she slices scallions, and the rhythmic motion of it—the scratchy sound—soothes me.
“Remember when you wanted to take over Mom and Dad’s restaurant?”
“Yeah,” she says distractedly. “What a nightmare that would’ve been.”
I open a cabinet. It’s completely empty. “What do you need?” interjects June.
“Water glasses.”
“It’s this one.” She points at the cabinet over the sink. I grab two from the four in there, fill them with tap water, and set them on the bar. “Thanks,” she says.
“Want me to do the rice?”
“Sure.” She turns, opens the drawer behind her, and hands me a flat white paddle. There’s a tiny rice cooker on the counter by her fridge. It’s small and cheap and doesn’t match the other gleaming appliances, but I’m surprised she even has one. She hands me two blue bowls.
We both make shit rice, at least according to Mom. We never add enough water and never bother to soak it the way she does. The trick is to add enough water so that it just about meets the first line on your ring finger. Even still, we both eyeball it and get it wrong. I open the steaming lid, digging around the cooker to break it up.
I scoop her two lumps because it’s bad luck to give someone a single scoop and then portion out a tiny clump for myself. I don’t think the luck thing counts if it’s yours.
She inspects my meager bowl. “I had a late lunch.” She frowns briefly and hands me the ladle so I can serve myself. I spoon a little. I can probably get away with two pieces of tofu. The sauce is thickened with cornstarch and glistening with oil. She fixes her plate, grabs kimchi from the fridge, which we add to our bowls with chopsticks. I pause at the white barstools. “Those make my ass numb,” she says. I follow her to the couch.
I warm my hands on the bowl and take a small taste. It’s amazing to eat something hot for once. I haven’t had home-cooked Asian food in forever. I take another bite. “This is really good.”
“Right?” she says. “I had such a craving this morning. You sure you don’t want more tofu?”
“No, I’m good.”
We eat silently.
“Do you have roommates?” she asks after a while.
“Just one.”
“How’s that going? Is she cool?”
I think of Jeremy fucking that woman in my bedroom. I nod a few times. Something must have passed across my face because she stops chewing. She lifts her sock-covered foot off the floor and pokes my haunch, hard.
“It’s a dude, isn’t it?” she asks with her mouth full.
I pull my chopsticks out of my mouth.
“You’re living with a boyfriend, aren’t you?” I have never been able to lie to June. She also has this way of rolling her eyes without rolling her eyes.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
She chortles.
“Who’s on the lease—you or him?”
“It’s fine,” I tell her quietly. “He’s leaving soon.”
“You broke up?”
“No, we didn’t break up. We can’t break up because it’s not like that.”
She makes a rumbly noise in the back of her throat as I stare at my food. “Well,” she says, shaking her head. “At least you’re consistent.”
I set my bowl down on the mirrored coffee table harder than I’d meant to.
“He’s not on the lease.”
Truth is, I’m not either. There is no lease and it’s some guy called David Buxbaum’s name on the apartment because I’m living in a rent-controlled illegal sublet, and I still get his jury summonses.
“Okay,” she says.
Again I sense the math in her brain, the deepening of the wrinkle between her brows, but she lets it go. I’m staring down at my bowl when her blue cotton foot creeps back into my sight line and prods me again. This time on my arm.
I glare at her. She keeps nudging me, smiling as she pushes her bowl toward me. She wants me to get her seconds. “With more kimchi, too, please,” she says sweetly.
“Ugh, fine.” I roll my eyes, getting up. “I need sauce anyway.”
“Am I ever going to meet this asshole?” she calls out from the living room. “I guess it’s pointless to ask if he’s white.” I add more rice to both our bowls in silence, along with kimchi. I dump a fuckton angry scarlet chili shards into June’s bowl. I’m annoyed at my sister, but I’m aware that something’s loosening between us.
“Here you go.” I hand her the bowl before sitting down, smiling just as sweetly.
“What’s his name?” She picks up a whole pepper with her chopsticks and sets it on the chrome top of the coffee table.
I eat my food.
“Let me guess—it’s Tyler. Ooh, no, it’s Tanner. Oh, what’s up with that guy Chase Rice? Isn’t he on a TV show? How perfect is that name for a white dude who only fucks with Asian chicks?”
She sets another chili beside the first one. I get up and hand her a paper towel torn in half. Even in such a nice house, June’s a slob.
“So, what’s up? Like, cancer-wise?”
June raises her brows. “Cancer-wise?”
I just wanted a change of topic.
“Got my pathology report,” she continues, extracting more peppers.
“And?”
“They referred me to a gynecologic oncology surgeon.”
“And?”
“I’m gonna go see them.”
Gynecologic oncology surgeon. I glance down at the gloopy red-brown sauce in my bowl. “When?”
“In the morning.”
She’s not smiling anymore, utterly focused on her napkin. It’s why she called me. It’s why she wanted home-cooked food.
“Wait? You have surgery tomorrow?”
She sets her bowl on the table and doesn’t immediately respond.
“June?” Everyone in my family does this, gets really pissed off or shuts down when you ask them a question they deem too personal.
“June?” I ask my hands quietly. My nail polish has chipped off except on my thumbs. I try another tactic.
“Where’s the appointment?” I ask conversationally, pretending to take another bite of food.
Past her head, on top of her pale wood credenza, on a shelf below the TV, I see the pastel-colored DVD case from the Gilmore Girls box set. The familiar sight makes the tightness in my chest catch at my throat.
“Everything’s on the Upper East Side,” she says finally. “Total fucking schlep. And I hate when they take the FDR.”
“Take the Q.”
“I have cancer. I’m not poor.”
I choke a little.
My phone lights up on the coffee table. Jeremy again. Her eyes flit over to it, so I flip it over.
“We’re just talking tomorrow. Going over the biopsy results.”
I wonder if I’m supposed to go with her, but I feel stupid asking after all this time. She probably has friends she’d rather be with. People she’s close to.
“Thanks,” I tell her. She looks up at me as if I’ve said something stupid.
“Will you do something for me?”
I plonk my bowl down in my lap and nod solemnly.
“Can you just go the fuck to school? Please? I know that boy problems”—I wince at the wording—“are a lot for you, but don’t get distracted.” She sighs and closes her eyes for a beat. It’s painful to see how annoying she finds me. “Focus in class, do well, and over the next few weeks, or even months, try not to give Mom and Dad anything to worry about.”
I glance up at her. “Do you really think it’ll be months?”
She sighs again. I’m insufferable. “I don’t know, Jayne.”
“Okay.” I keep nodding.
“You’re so smart when you make the effort,” she says, and instantly my eyes well up. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear her say. Just not in this context.
“I’ll never be as smart as you,” I tell her.
June picks her bowl back up and laughs. “I didn’t say you were anywhere near as smart as me. Just…” Another loud exhale. “I’m smart in ways that make me stupid in others. I’ve made so many fucking mistakes, Jayjay.”
My throat tightens.
“You’re going to be okay though, right?” I hear the warble in my voice.
“What do you want me to say?”
I want her to tell me the day, the hour, and the exact minute when she’ll die. And I want her to go away so I can start preparing for it now with zero new memories because I have enough that I’ll miss.
She gets up. The conversation is over. When I stand, I’m struck again by the heft of it. My sister has cancer.
I follow her into the kitchen. From behind she’s so small. There’s so little of her to invade.
She stoops to start loading her dishwasher. “Siri, play The Graduate soundtrack,” she calls into the room.
I snicker, I can’t help it. “Have you ever even seen The Graduate?”
She turns to me. “You know I haven’t.”
“It’s a classic.”
“I’m good.” She leans over to pop a Cascade pod into the machine. “Who has time for whole movies? I’ve seen clips. I love the soundtrack. I get the idea.”
It takes every ounce of restraint not to fight her again on this. She switches on the dishwasher.
“I can’t believe you have a dishwasher,” I tell her, genuinely impressed. It’s like having a backyard in New York. “And that you use it.”
“I know,” she says, smiling, leaning up against the counter with her arms crossed. “Every time I run it, I imagine Mom shitting a brick.” Our parents have a dishwasher in Texas, but they only use it as a drying rack. June once modeled an elaborate graphic to prove how much more water was wasted doing dishes by hand, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Mom would have an aneurism if she found out detergent pods were even a thing. She dilutes dish soap.
“Man, when’s the last time I had your mapo tofu?” I rinse my bowl and hand it to her. “Probably high school.”
“It was high school. Couple months before I left for college.” She takes a long, pensive sip of water.
That’s when I remember too. She’d made it for Dad. As a consolation. And how on that lonely night, the three of us barely ate any.
chapter 11
I’m clutching the still-warm Tupperware on my walk to the subway. Cancer must feel like such betrayal, knowing that somewhere deep in your body you’re manufacturing tiny bombs that detonate and catch fire.
I barrel down the stairs to the train.
June doesn’t look sick. She always looks that way. Piqued. She has resting antagonism face. If there was visual evidence of frailty, all of this would be more believable. It’s not as if I don’t know how mortality works, but for June it doesn’t track. It’s that absurd cognitive schism where when somebody dies, all the thunderstruck dummies go, but I just saw them. The totality of death is inconceivable. It’s intolerable that you’re completely, utterly, irrefutably alive, filled up with decades of inside jokes, goofy facial expressions, all the love of your family, and then not.
It’s also so weird that any news of death makes you almost immediately think of yourself. I’m determined to know how I’ll feel when June dies. I want to be able to see it, touch it, taste it so I can make sure I’ll survive.
The smoke of my breath on the subway platform seems like it should be warm, but it isn’t.
Fuck. Juju is going to die.
One: black-haired girl in a red toggle coat.
Two: the kind of laughter that seeks an audience.
Three: trash can with a LITTER STOPS HERE sticker—torn.
Four: movie poster with a Sharpied mustache.
Five: another puff of my breath.
One, two, three, four, five. Onetwothreefourfive.
She’d better not die. She’s nowhere near done.
One, two, three, four, five.
June’s first word was “milk.” Mom was convinced she’d read it off the formula canister as an infant. That’s weird too. Like death. One or zero. Words have no meaning, and then boom—reading. My first word was “cow.” I’d heard Mom telling someone on the phone that it was June’s first word and I wanted ours to be the same. That makes my brain itch. How babies go from gurgling lumps to spies in one day. Illiterate and then illuminated.
June was always precocious and was conscripted into dirty-diaper duty the moment she could be mobilized. Ferrying the clean and scuttling the shitty, the sun rising and setting behind her bobbling head. Thinking about June as a baby makes my heart hurt. Every picture of her as a kid is of her laughing. And most of them are blurred—she could never sit still.
I couldn’t either. In our small, high-rise apartment in Seoul, way up on the eighteenth floor, I’d open the window and climb out. Lowering myself into the fish-tank-sized concrete flower bed by the kitchen, the small, square tiles biting into my dimpled knees. Finally, free of that cramped flat, I’d blink into the breeze. The first time I escaped, my father had stalked out as far as the parking garage, confounded. The second, June found me, and we were both yelled at as Mom cried. Another time, when we visited a family friend’s house, on the twenty-second floor, I wedged my head between the balcony railings as an experiment and was trapped there by my neck. My father had to negotiate my narrow shoulders, my warm, compact torso, and my pudgy, squirming feet through the balusters, where I soared in the abyss before being pulled back over the handrail to safety. It was by some feat of kid proportions that I could get my head out but not back in without getting stuck by my ears.
I couldn’t be reasoned with.
Until June threw the doll.
I can recall exactly how it felt when she took my sticky palm in hers, tottered me along the stretch of cool concrete hallway, the crackled pattern of the ground so close beneath my chubby legs, and rode the elevator down with me to see.
It was a porcelain-faced doll, a dark-haired girl in a plush, silken onesie with pom-poms down the front, like buttons, a clown costume, and she was utterly shattered. Her hollow china hands lay broken too. We peered into the conch shell interior of her face for secrets, but there was nothing inside.
She forced me to look up at our apartment window and then back down at the doll.
“Don’t ever hide from me,” said my sister, eyes dark and serious. She pointed to the wreckage, then prodded my tiny chest. “Or you’ll die.”
We took the doll, shards and all, and threw her away in a plastic bag and into the trash chute. We heard her mangled body whoosh and then thunk somewhere deep in the dark.
I was three; she was six. I never left her side after that. Even in Texas, where we moved later that year. Enormous, ridiculous Texas. Where everything was so flat you could feel all hundred and eighty degrees of sky at your shoulders. Where if you lay on your back looking up at the sky, it felt so heavy you couldn’t breathe. It was as if the horizon could crush you. There was nowhere to hide in wide, boundless Texas. No escape at all.
We never had a plan to forestall June’s death. Only mine.
Maybe she shouldn’t hide from me, either. Just in case.
The subway jolts to a stop.
I hug the container of tofu closer to me.
I blot the tears from my eyes with my hoodie sleeve and pull out my phone for distraction. I open up Instagram and it lands me right at Jeremy’s sunglassed face. God, June would loathe him.
I click through the slideshow he’s posted. Link in bio. Link in stories. Link everywhere. It’s an article about small-run zines. How New York, Seoul, London cool kids are flockin
g to printed materials and hand-selling them. Or else not retailing them at all and giving them away as limited-edition artifacts at parties. It’s incredible to me how much press you can get about something that barely exists.
So, this is what he needed the photo for.
I click to the article. There he is. Mugging for the entire city. He’s used a portrait I’ve never seen. I wonder who took it—it’s not credited. It’s his best angle, the three-quarter turn of the head. Where the generosity of the onlooker’s mind envisages both profile and direct aspects as more handsome than either truly are.
I scroll through the write-up quickly. There’s a sidebar with bullet points about all the people who have helped him. His mentors, a pair of famous brother directors I know he barely knows. Another rich-kid friend who’s larded with trillions of social media follows through twin careers of modeling and skateboarding. And Rae. Again. This time cited as his muse.
I’m sick. The next page is an entire story dedicated to her. Mostly photos. Of pale, ink-stained hands, eyes peeking behind pastel hair, chapbooks she’s written alongside generous bowls of turmeric latte, a tree pose with her hands up, nipples teasing the gossamer of her shirt, laughing. Every picture is striking. All featuring her avian body only just skirting nudity. There’s even a photo with her on the toilet. Another of a shower drain with pink water whirlpooling and a stanza as caption about moons and menarche.
A tidal loathing rolls through me. She’s so girlish, so delicate and quintessentially lovely that biological truths on her are blushingly seductive. Titillating and carnal. It’s a subversion that requires nothing from you. Arousal that makes you feel like a feminist. Sometimes the female gaze is just as systemically toxic the way it postures as provocation.
I’d so much rather they were fucking.
I’m shocked when I have no reason to be. I’m ashamed that I feel robbed. Contrary to everything he’s shown me, I’d thought that Jeremy would mention me. Name me. Obviously not as his girlfriend but at least as the brains behind the visual aesthetic. Thank me for the sleepless nights he’s hovered above me nitpicking as I made tweaks to his logo. Acknowledge me in any way for the lost time, the small hours when he brought me coffee with kisses and encouragement, when my rip of InDesign crashed, dropping fonts and losing layouts because he had a last-minute “ideation all-hands.”
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