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 flocking 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.”
I don’t exist in his story.
I never do.
chapter 12
The next moment, I’m at our door. A glitch of dissociation. He’s home. I hear the muffled sounds of his laptop and his huhuhuh chuckling as I slide my key in the lock. I steel myself. When I open it, he’s on the couch, ass to the pillow I put my face on, watching his computer, which is hooked up to my Bluetooth speaker.
“Jeremy.” I toss the keys on the kitchen counter with too much force. They slide straight into the sink. I set my sister’s Tupperware on the stove. He shoots up, his basketball shorts drapey on his chicken legs. He lays his laptop beside him, out of the way. I know he’s using my Netflix account. I should have kicked him out when he asked for my password and canceled his subscription without talking to me first. If they show you who they are, believe them. What more fuckery did I need than his smiling green avatar on the landing page?