Yolk

chapter 3
The city isn’t how I’d left it. The light’s dipped and it’s getting loud. There’s an urgent thrum that crackles. It’s that disorienting feeling as you leave a movie theater in Midtown and the skyscrapers with their
LED lights come at you. New York is an ambush.
Outside feels IMAX.
Plus, drunk New York is the shit. I love drunk New York. It glitters with potential. It feels like gambling. “June?” asks the driver when he rolls down the window.
“Sure.” I don’t bother correcting him and get in. It’s a black SUV with its own atmosphere. I wonder if I’ve been given an upgrade or if June only commissions Uber Blacks. I hailed one once, on accident, all the way home during a surge, drunk and cross-eyed, treating myself to not-Pool. I felt rich. When the eighty-dollar charge showed up the next morning, I cried.
It’s not fair, I think, as we crawl up First. New York nights are for
anyone other than family. Still, my saltiness eases as I lean and stare out the tinted window. It’s a miracle that I get to stay here. This place commands total dedication or it will eject you. I really would rather die than go home.
New York’s never been for lightweights. It takes a tax. Eloise was chill if you related to a six-year-old asshole living at the Plaza, but that was never the romance for me. Give me the Hotel Chelsea any day. Growing up, I’d moon over Tumblr pictures of Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Basquiat, Daang Goodman, Anna Sui, Madonna hanging out like it was no big deal. Diane Arbus’s haunted children. Tavi, a literal child, front row at New York Fashion Week on her own merit. Max Fish. Lafayette Street. That the cofounder of Opening Ceremony was a Korean girl, Carol Lim.
There were promises here. A young, loose-limbed Chloë Sevigny plucked from SoHo retail to star in that movie Kids. Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Timothée Chalamet all going to the same fucking high school. That’s the energy.
I love it all so hard, but just as much, I love that the guys at my deli know my coffee order. That I know to avoid an empty subway car as confidently as the closed mussel shell in a bowl.
The car stops.
I even love how it takes sixteen minutes to get to June’s house in a taxi and thirteen if I’d just taken the F at Second Avenue. Nothing makes sense and it’s perfect.
I have a vague idea of where June lives, but I’m unprepared for the glass turret. And that her apartment and my school are separated by 1.5 long blocks.
The lobby is as silent as a museum, with recessed lighting, dark walls, and enormous artwork bigger than a life-size floor plan of my entire apartment. There are tasteful sitting areas and hardcover art “Red or white?” she asks.
“June,” I deadpan. “It could be fucking blue. I don’t care.” Across the way, in an office building, I watch two women separated by a cubicle type into black monitors. I wonder if they’re friends. Or if they’re locked in an endurance contest to see who leaves first. I wish I had binoculars.
I never get to be this high up, and it’s wild how June’s New York has nothing to do with mine. Sort of how some people’s news is the opposite of yours or how their phone configurations are alien even if the icons are the same. Part of me is proud that she gets to have all this knowing that we come from the same place and that she’s earned it. Another part of me wonders if she’s secretly Republican.
I take a seat on her tufted beige couch, staring at the matching love seat. I’ve never met anyone in New York whose living room can accommodate two sofas.
She hands me a glass of white wine. “The red’s nicer,” she says. We both look at it. I can never tell if she’s fucking with me.
“I couldn’t find the bottle opener,” she explains, and sits down
across from me. I feel like I’m in therapy.
I turn the wineglass in my hand. I’m tempted to snap the delicate stem in my fingers. If she brings out a cheese board and throws on smooth jazz as the lights dim, I’ll bolt.
“Thanks,” I tell her, taking a sip. It tastes like grass. “Your place is nice. That’s how I guess you know you’ve made it, right? When nothing’s IKEA.”
“Yeah,” she says, with an anemic little chuckle. “Thanks. And you’re still in…?”
“Windsor Terrace.”
“Is that Queens?” I watch her for any hint of a joke.
“Brooklyn.” June tilts her head. “Right, you live out by that cemetery.”
“It’s closer to the park.” She’s definitely spying on me. I’ve never told her where I moved to. I couldn’t risk her telling Mom I slept near corpses. I take another sip of wine. “We have a park in Brooklyn, you know. It’s older than Central Park. Plus, they didn’t raze a Black owned neighborhood to build ours.”
June knows everything there is to know about a handful of sub jects. On everything else, she’s wildly indifferent. For the longest time June said “intensive purposes” and not intents and purposes, claiming I was the asshole for correcting her because everybody knew what she meant.
“So, you’re good?” she asks. I’ll give her two more questions before I break.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Good. Work’s good. School’s good.”
“Mom was saying how last semester-”
“Last semester was last semester,” I interrupt. So that’s what this is. Mom’s guilted her into checking up on me. Fucking narc. Firstborns are the goddamned worst. “This year’s better. There was this one teacher, Hastings, total pervert-he really had it in for me. And everyone who was on my group project was an absolute nutcase. Flakes and drug addicts basically. This semester’s…”I wave her off.
“I hated group projects,” says June sportingly. “Always ended up doing everything on my own.” She takes a sip from her water glass. I briefly wonder if she’s pregnant.
Fuck. That would be so weird..
“Yeah.” I sit up straighter and set my wine down on the broad, mirrored coffee table. “And my job’s going well,” I continue. “Honestly, it’s much better this year. It’s fine.” I hate how defensive I sound. Having a genius for an older sister, who scored a full ride to Columbia, has not been optimal for my professional self-esteem. “Look”-I cross my arms-“it’s fine. Tell Mom to calm down.”
June winces and shoots me the stink eye. See, there. That’s the June I know. “Who said anything about Mom? I’m the one asking. You’re smart when you focus. I’m tired of people giving you a pass because you’re emotional.”
I stare at her long and hard. She’s like Mom when it comes to mental health stuff. June thinks anxiety is for pussies. That you can banish it with intestinal fortitude. According to her, depression is laziness that can be fixed by high-intensity interval training and caffeine.
“What do you want, June?”
She sits up and leans in. I lean in too. Monkeying her.
“I’m sick,” she says.
“Yeah, well, what kind of sick?”
“I have cancer.”
chapter 4
My mouth snaps shut. I vaguely sense that I’m smiling. It’s a
horrible tic. A placid little placeholder while my brain catches up. “What?”
My scalp prickles. Everything else is numb.
Cancer.
My sister is going to die.
I wonder if in a few years this will have been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Or if things get worse. If this moment defines me as an adult, I need to know right now by how much. My sister died, I imagine myself saying. My sister died. Well, my sister died. I wonder if a sister dying is worse than a mother dying. I’m deciding it is.
I imagine the viewing. I’m dressed in a vintage Dior suit I don’t own. My sister’s gleaming casket on the pulpit above us, me turning to Mom, her unseeing face wild with grief as Korean hymns swell around us, the flower-perfumed air coating my throat. Fuck. can see, feel, and hear when I catch myself losing it.
My lungs expand with as much air as I can hold.
I make it as far as my sister’s lap. Her hands are gathered there.
My gaze retreats, skittering to the window behind her.
Christ, this is unbearable.
My therapist, Gina Lombardi, says I need to name five things I I tap the cool glass in my hand with a nail. Black socks against cream carpet. Fuck.
I yank my attention and force it to land on her face. I’m trying not to blink. I’m momentarily terrified that I might yawn.
“I might have cancer,” she says crisply. “I’m pretty sure I have cancer.” My sister nods several times with grim finality. As if it’s settled. As if she decides what’s cancer. “I have cancer,” she tries again. “I just don’t know how much.”
“What?” I rise to my feet. She stands too.
I pound the rest of the wine, tilting my head way back. “So, do
you have cancer or not?” I can’t feel my arms. “Well,” she says. “We’re still hoping it’s something else. Like endo or PCOS.” I don’t know what any of these words mean or who “we” refers to.
“So, your doctors think it might not be cancer.” “They’ve been telling me it’s not cancer since I was eighteen. We thought it was polyps or fibroids or-”
“But they think it’s cancer now?”
“They’re looking into whether it’s cancer.”
I sit back down. She does the same. “Um. Is it, like, I had a weird pap smear, or are there clusters of shadows all over the X-ray or what ever the scans?” I’m running through every episode of Grey’s Anatomy I’ve ever seen. A searing sensation rises into my chest as I stand. My heart is liable to burst out of my sternum. I grab my phone. “So, you’ll let me know when you know more?”
She nods. “I’ll walk you out.”
We don’t say anything in the elevator.
I almost pat her arm but don’t. I breathe through the rolling panic, watching the elevator display change as we hurtle toward the ground, trying to exhale without making a noise.