I get to my feet, the rage swelling my chest. If we were younger, I’d be going after her hair, her clothes. I’d smash her head on the coffee table. There’s no way she’s turning this around on me.
She stares up at me from the couch.
“No,” I snap, balling my hands, searching for something hard to launch at her. My eyes land on the cancer book, but I can’t take the irony. “I won’t shut up. You don’t get to tell me to shut up. This is about you, not me. About how you’re fucked up.”
“You wouldn’t even be in New York if it weren’t for me,” she rages. “Who the fuck are you to tell me what’s not okay? Just look at your life. You have no home—”
June pushes herself up from her low couch, rising in her granny panties. She almost falters, and the whole thing would be funny if she didn’t have murder in her eyes.
“You have no home,” she shouts, sticking out her thumb, counting my faults. “School is bullshit because you’re too chickenshit to commit to a real major.” Her index finger snaps out, her hand a gun in my face. “And you have zero focus because every ounce of energy is spent alternately obsessing about your stupid body or chasing after some boy.” That’s three. “Where the hell do you get off coming to my doctor’s appointment with your smug stupid face and your dumb bag in some Tinder dipshit’s clothes…？”
“Your doctor’s appointment?” I counter, looming over her. It’s times like these that I love outsizing my older sister. “I went because you need help, you delusional bitch. You practically black out when you’re there. You said so yourself and now I know why. You just sit there pouting and rolling your eyes like you’ve been called to the principal’s office. That woman is trying to help you. I am trying to help you.” My throat strains from the effort.
“You?” she taunts. “You’re more help to me when you stay out of my fucking way. Christ, Jayne. Look at you.”
Her voice catches and she stuns me by bursting into tears. “Fuck,” she says, arms finally falling to her sides. “How are you going to help me?” At this she covers her eyes with her palms, shoulders heaving in heart-wrenching sobs. “I have literal fucking cancer but we both know… we both know that you’re sicker than me.”
I’m dazed. Blood is hammering in my ears. She’s always been conniving and ruthless—no one fights dirtier than June—but I’m thunderstruck that she’d turn this around to humiliate me. I wonder how far she’ll take it. Whether she’ll speak the words we both know she can’t take back.
“You’re fucking insane,” I seethe. I shake my head pityingly. I back away, almost tripping over my suitcase.
“Mom and Dad might be fucking blind, but I know,” she says in a low voice, gaze unflinching.
I hold my breath, willing her to shut up and spare me.
June sniffs hard and composes herself, wiping her cheeks roughly.
“Look,” she croaks. “Your part’s done. You can forgive me or not—I don’t give a shit—but I did it this way to protect you. All of you. My way is the only way it was going to be okay.”
“Yeah, well, what if you die?”
She blanches. “Wow, thanks a lot.”
“Seriously, what if you die?”
“I’m not going to die,” says June, catching her breath. “Besides, if I die, lucky you. I’m leaving you everything.”
I don’t even realize I’m crying until I taste salt on my lips.
“I’m not going to die,” she says again. Quieter this time.
“June.” I say it slowly. “If you die, then Jayne Ji-young Baek is dead. I’ll be dead at the hospital. They’ll file a death certificate in my name. I’ll be dead at school. New York City, New York State, the United States of America—they’ll all think I’m dead. Your will won’t matter. You’re the one who’ll be alive in name, June. It’ll be me and Mom’s dead baby who will be gone. I’ll be fucking trapped in some nameless purgatory. I’ll be some in-between ghost.”
June’s eyes widen. The color drains from her face. She really is so smart at a lot of things and dumb at others.
“Fuck,” she says.
“If you die, I die.” I spell it out for her.
“If I die, you die,” follows June.
She sits back down on the couch.
I take my place on the floor. All the piles of clothes blur in front of me. I fold a pair of her white underpants as small as they will go.
“You’d better not fucking die, June, I swear to God.”
For once my sister doesn’t have a response.
chapter 28
When I meet June at the Delta terminal three days later, I’m no longer angry. In fact, I’m no longer much of anything.
I hadn’t realized the extent to which I’d grown accustomed to my sister’s apartment until I went back to mine. This time it wasn’t just a dead roach that greeted me when I opened the door. It was a dead roach and the startling movement of a red baby roach in my peripheral vision. Until that moment, I hadn’t known roaches scaled walls. I watched as it hesitated at the perpendicular obstruction of the ceiling. But then it pushed ahead, hanging upside down, before clinging stubbornly for dear life, unable to move forward.
I’m nowhere near as determined.
I almost capitulate and apologize so I can return to June’s before remembering that I’m the one who’s mad.
That first night was death by a trillion cuts. I’d left June’s in the midafternoon when she fell asleep for a nap so we wouldn’t have to say goodbye.
Back at my apartment, the heat came on. Finally. Except I’d forgotten that the warmth I’d prayed so fervently for has no thermostat. Unlike at June’s, where there was a central command system operated by smartphone, which glowed blue with exactly your desired temperature, I had baseboards that encircled me in a ring of fire, and they were outside of my control. The exposed pipe in the living room that stands stupidly close to the only available outlet fills with steam, hissing angrily and scalding the tops of my knuckles whenever I have to unplug anything.
I didn’t sleep at all. I was tormented by a persistent, arrhythmic clicking in the radiator that was so loud, I found myself listening for it but managing to be startled awake by it each time.
By the morning, when my moldy shower curtain clasped my leg with cold, slimy insistence just as shampoo slid into my eyes, I cried. I sobbed ramrod straight, unable to lean against the tile or collapse to the floor in a proper cinematic meltdown because every surface seemed so filthy.
Jeremy’s comings and goings only added to the psychological turmoil. The second day, I didn’t leave school until late into the evening, completing all my homework in the library. I never knew when he’d be home, and I’d slowly open the door, searching for evidence of him. I scoured the room. He’d rearrange small things for maximum unraveling. A single mug that I’d left in the sink appeared on the counter. His vintage Lakers sweatshirt migrated from couch to chair.
In my sleep-deprived fever dream, I caught myself believing it to be the handiwork of a particularly lethargic poltergeist. But the lingering smell gave him away, Le Labo Santal 33. It was olfactory retribution for my ylang-ylang shower spray. It worked every time. I felt instantly, violently ill when I’d smell it. My head would whip around in a paranoid frenzy whenever I caught it on other people at school or on the street.