There was always an Old Testament quality to June’s periods growing up. Mom’s was the same way. Mom never gave us the Talk as it related to sex, presuming that someone at school had it handled. But she did pull us both aside when our periods came to remind us that a woman’s body was a burden and that nice underpants were a waste of money.
“Jesus, it’s fucking metal.” There’s a silty ring of scarlet around the tub. “You look like you’ve been making kimchi in here.”
She chuckles and then groans. “Stop,” she says. “I feel horrible. I can’t even tell you how many blood transfusions I’ve had this year.”
I had no idea it had become this bad.
She lifts her hand out of the water and stares at her fingers. “I think I’m still drunk.”
I tiptoe through the blood droplets and sit next to the tub on the bathmat.
“I refuse to buy adult diapers.” She closes her eyes dopily. “It’s like a miracle if I don’t soak through a super-plus tampon and a pad in between subway stops.”
“Yeah, but”—I gather my legs in my arms—“when’s the last time you took the subway?”
“Fuck you,” says June, smiling through gritted teeth. “God, you should have seen me at work. Trapped on the toilet in between meetings. I went to the bathroom so much, this analyst had the nerve to intervention me. She thought I was a cokehead, which, let me tell you, everyone would have been way more okay with.”
June runs more hot water, and when her hand rests on the lip of the tub, the dewdrops from her fingertips are pink. My sister’s insides are outside of her, and a flutter of panic takes hold of my heart.
She closes her eyes, grimacing.
I can’t tell if the dampness of her face is sweat, condensation, or tears. She looks a bit like Mom then. I didn’t think either of us looked like her, but I see it now. I shouldn’t have left her alone.
“Wait,” she slurs, leering at me. “Did you and Patrick bone?”
“June.” I roll my eyes, but I can tell I’m smiling.
“Oh my God.” She splashes her hand excitedly. “Does his girlfriend know?”
“They broke up.”
“Suuuuuure,” she says, shaking her head before exhaling noisily. I’m touched that she’d ask about it when she’s clearly in pain.
“Want me to wash your hair?”
My sister doesn’t say anything. I hold my breath, embarrassed suddenly to have asked.
“Yeah, okay,” she says, finally opening her eyes.
We clear out the dark water and fill it again. I detach the shower nozzle, testing the temperature as she leans, tilting her head back. Her black hair tendrils out. My sister wipes the water away from her eyes with the heels of her palms. I grab the good shampoo. The Frédéric Fekkai travel bottle that I brought over. I lather her head with the tips of my fingers, with enough pressure that it feels good but carefully so I don’t get soap in her eyes. When her face crumples and she starts crying noiselessly, I keep going without another word.
My sister and I have been tormented by our bodies in different ways. A few weeks before the end of June’s last year of high school—one random Thursday—she leaked all through her leggings. Most of the semester was over. Senioritis had settled in for the upperclassmen; finals were a week out—the days were protracted and dull. It was almost as if people were waiting for something to happen. And this was particularly inviting.
A disparate number of factions—the popular kids, her advanced-placement adversaries, the kids who owed her money for snacks, even Holland and the burnouts—joined forces against my sister. For someone playing such a minor role at school, she incited so much collective cruelty. She’d been sitting in some genius IB course, and when she stood up, it was a Saw movie on her ass.
Kids from class cornered me, wanting to know if I’d heard. The friends whose demeanors had cooled after the Holland Hint debacle flooded my phone. All day people had been throwing tampons at my sister and sticking maxi pads on her locker. They’d printed out Japanese flags and taped them on her back, on her bag, even on Mom’s car, that she’d borrowed. They told me gleefully, telegraphing what until then I hadn’t known was common knowledge, that they’d witnessed my shame about my sister and presumed us enemies.
It’s true that since my first week, I’d memorized her schedule, bobbing and weaving to avoid her flight patterns, but other than rolling my eyes and writing in my journal, I never told anyone.
Stomach in knots, I hid in the library at lunch. My cheeks burned as I made my way to fifth period, shuffling, eyes downcast, until a huddle of senior girls I barely knew but certainly knew of beckoned me over in the hall. “I just had to tell you,” said the most beautiful one as I held my breath, “that you’re nothing like her.” She smiled at me, as if she’d provided clean drinking water to countless future generations of my third-world family. And honestly, that’s how I’d felt. It was as if my tattered reputation, my indiscretions were pardoned in that moment.
I chose not to defend her. Craven gratitude suffusing my body with loose-limbed relief as I loped away. She’d brought it on herself, I reasoned. I didn’t choose to be related with June, besides which she’d thrown me away. I was furious at her for getting accepted to school in New York and clearly planning to leave.
All day, I’d steered clear of the bathroom, afraid of what I’d overhear, but between fourth and fifth period I couldn’t hold it any longer. I’d run into the ladies’ room, when moments later June came in after me. I saw her through the crack of the stall, face pale with blotches the color of live coals high on her cheeks, and held my breath. I gathered my feet up so she wouldn’t recognize my shoes and watched as she looked at herself in the mirror for a while. Her eyes seemed hollow, unseeing; she seemed genuinely bewildered.
She got in the stall next to mine. The one I was always careful to avoid. The one that called me names on the left-side partition. I prayed that she hadn’t seen me, that she couldn’t sense me, and barring that, I hoped she would not speak. I told myself that it was for her benefit, to save her the humiliation, but so much more of it was that I wanted no part of her anguish. She cried so hard, the dragging, chest-racking sobs seeming to rise from some elemental, rooted pain. I sat there, eyes glued shut, feeling as though my body were trembling along with the bathroom stall doors, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Mom was gone. It was just the two of us. And still I’d forsaken her.
I rinse her hair out. Apply conditioner, working through the knots carefully.
“At least this part will be over after the surgery,” she says. “The bleeding.”
“Yeah.”
“And then I can move on to the next part,” she says, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hand. “The menopause, the fatigue, the shitting, and the vomiting.”
I hand her a towel for her face. “If I had to, I would probably wipe your ass.”
She laughs. “I’ve wiped your ass so many times. That’s all I did for two years.”
“I’ll give you two weeks.”