“I thought the food was getting cold,” I remind her.
Halfway through dinner, Mom leaves the table and emerges from the garage with a store-bought pie in a black plastic tray with a domed lid. “Happy family!” she announces, as if collective birthdays are a thing that’s commemorated by eating pie. “They had blueberry, but it wasn’t as beautiful. And at least it isn’t pumpkin. What a disgusting pie.”
“You just don’t like nutmeg,” says Dad.
“I got the last one,” she says, presenting it with as much pride as if she’d made it. “Kim Theresa says that all H-E-B’s get their pies from the same place as some expensive restaurants.”
“Happy family!” says June, smiling at me.
“Happy family to you,” I sing, and June actually laughs.
* * *
My sister snores softly on my bed above me. I’m lying on the mat on the floor since June pulled rank because her room is filled with restaurant supplies. I stare at Patrick’s text and send him a thumbs-up that I’ve arrived safely. I then send him the cowboy smiley because I’m feeling chatty.
The woolly stuffiness of the room presses up against my skin. I get up quietly, monitoring June for movement, open my desk drawer, and remove the flat-head screwdriver. I check her again, then step out and quietly close the door behind me.
The thermostat in the hall is set to 84 degrees.
I switch on the bathroom light, blinking furiously in the mirror. This is the mirror in which my face looks most disgusting. I’m almost sure it’s not all in my head. I once googled that unflattering mirrors are an empirical scientific phenomenon. They bulge under their own weight, making you appear shorter and wider. And this one, my childhood one, the one I studied most intently during my formative years, distorts all the time.
I’ve stared in this mirror until I can’t see myself. My face loses meaning. My eyes have been wet and ringed red, lips slick with spittle, cheeks swollen and purple. There have been so many nightmares in this place, but I’m grateful not to ever think about most of them. How I’d sit in the bathtub crying silently. Doing everything silently. It was the only room where the door locked. My bedroom door gave way if you shook the handle and shoved.
I stand on the lip of the tub, steadying myself with a palm to the ceiling, unscrewing the metal air vent with my other hand. The cover swings down, held in place by a screw. I reach inside. My fingers brush against a familiar shape. I clutch the bundle of small hardback notebooks and an old packet of cigarettes. I sit on the bath mat with my legs crossed and flip the blue box open and bring them to my nose. The filters smell exactly as they should. Like raisins. And something else. Something acrid. I tap the box upside down against my palm, and a half-smoked joint slides out.
Tucked between the notebooks, there’s a stack of folded-up yearbook pages that I’d ripped out of the copy in the library. We all pillaged the school copies. Yearbooks were a fortune at $75 a pop, and most of us couldn’t afford them.
I unfold the first page. It’s been handled so much, the creases are worn white. It’s one of my few pictures of him. Him being a dirty-blond boy with hair in his eyes. Him being Holland Hint, the destroyer of hearts, the decimator of self-esteem, the great love of my life, poised in a rare display of academic engagement. He’s wearing safety goggles and a lab coat. Gangly, head hanging.
In the background, you can make me out staring as if willing him to turn around. It’s the only picture of us together. Listed next to my name in the appendix of our yearbook are the three pages where I’m featured, and this is one of them. I was mortified. I never asked if he noticed. By the time it came out, we’d returned to not knowing each other.
I slide off the string from around the bundled notebooks. I grab the ribbon bookmark tail sticking out of the bottom of one and flip it open.
“Why is June such a fucking spaz?” I’d written in red pen.
My greatest fear in high school was that I would be like her, like my older sister. June and I were never in middle school together but even still I felt stupid for not anticipating who she’d be in high school.
I knew she was a hard-boiled dork at home. And it was the consistency that scandalized me. In the hallway, at her locker, she made no effort to stifle her braying laugh. She’d roll out of bed and throw on worn leggings and a sweatshirt without any thought. She was indifferent to makeup trends, the right jeans, vanity backpacks that hung just so. The only people who dressed as carelessly at school were the super-popular boys who were gods in their hoodies. But they could get away with it. June couldn’t.
It was still dark out when we waited for the school bus that first morning. There was another kid at our stop, and the three of us stood in silence. The bus was quiet when we got on, everyone still half-asleep. There was something adult about how subdued it seemed. I was convinced they could hear my galloping heart. I followed my sister into the aisle. When she beckoned me to sit with her a few seats from the front, I was shocked. When she asked if I knew where to go for first period, I could feel their eyes on us. She was so loud. It was as awkward as if she had burst into song. I heard whispers and giggling. I wanted to shush her when she asked if I had money with me. The rules were so clear, yet I could see June had no idea.
I saw how she walked by herself into school, past the clusters of kids catching up after summer.
I hadn’t known that other sixteen-year-olds vaped surreptitiously into their lockers all wearing white Air Force 1s and white sweatshirts.
I hadn’t known that they spent all vacation at their food service jobs or at summer school while June was mostly at home taking online classes.
There was so much I didn’t know.
Juniors were glamorous in a way June wasn’t. They were cultured. They knew when to smile and how to smile so they still looked mean. They knew where to buy lipstick that looked like gloss but was somehow matte. And their earrings bore evil eyes of various sizes. Every single junior girl other than my sister wore shirts that stopped exactly half an inch above their pants. Without exception. And they knew all the dances but laughed goofily through the choreo as if they didn’t.
I was ready to learn it all.
And I learned to see June the way they did.
I learned to sit in another seat near the front of the bus.
I learned to leave campus for lunch because pretending not to see her in the cafeteria seemed cruel.
She had friends, I told myself. They were just friends no one else wanted.
The journal entry’s from freshman year. “She needs to grow up! This is not okay.” I flip a few more pages.
“She needs to wash her hair at least 3x a week.”
“Tell June not to talk so much.”
“Tell her not to laugh when no one else finds it funny.”
“Make her stop selling candy.”
Ours was a football school, and twice a year, our star cheerleaders sold candy for fundraising. June had taken to selling rival, cheaper, better candy at exactly the same time. She also regularly sold Hot Cheetos because we didn’t have them in the vending machines. It was bad enough that my parents worked in restaurants. I lived in constant fear that kids would talk to me about my sister the Cheetos girl. I didn’t have anywhere to hide. There were only six Asian kids in a school of two thousand.