Chapter 15

chapter 15

Oh my God.What did I ever do to him? Honestly, what kind of psychopath sets read receipts on? I’m scandalized and confused. I’m running up to Twenty-Eighth, the wind flying in my hair, zigzagging through pedestrians, hands jammed in my pockets. It’s cold. Freezing. I don’t remember the weather turning at all. I feel sort of high. Is Patrick rude? Deranged? Did he do an OS update and something went weird? Jesus, forget it.

Cancel Patrick. What a weirdo.

I’m in a flopsweat when I take my seat in Sociology. The fog at the small of my back dampens the waistband of my sweats. I look around furtively. I’m convinced people are watching me, judging me for my breathlessness, thinking I’m out of shape. The room is hushed. I’m in a row toward the back, but with the stadium seating, I can see kids going over their notes. I check my gCal. There’s a quiz.

I flip open my notebook. The reading was on scatterplots and distribution, basically how to interpret data sets and deduce correlations. The lecture was depressing yet faintly reassuring. It was about how humans compulsively categorize information because we need the illusion of control. Sorting scary, unfathomable variables like infant mortality rates by relating them to economics makes us feel safer. That if we can predict it or draw a little line, we’ll be protected from, at the very least, feeling stupid.

It’s why randomness is unacceptable. Why organized religion is a salve. It’s far more palatable to think of a divine order. Why conspiracies are easier to stomach over psychopaths making a rash decision that alters the course of history.

But then you have people who seem to know what they’re doing at all times. My favorite thing about June is that she mows through life with purpose. To me, nothing she does seems random. And when I’m within her reality distortion field, I feel like I know what I’m supposed to do too.

I’m only in New York because of June.

Ever since I can remember fashion’s the only way I can organize facts. I know when World War II ended, because Dior’s New Look was two years after. And I have a photographic memory for Marc Jacobs’s 1993 grunge collection for Perry Ellis, including how it got him canned. Ask me anything about why the Antwerp Six are so influential, and how I’m obsessed with its most elusive and iconoclastic member, Marina Yee, not solely because she’s Asian.

Even still, it was June who kept sending college catalogs to the house, addressed to me with no note, since we weren’t technically speaking.

June who filled out the paperwork for tuition assistance with her home address so I could qualify as in-state.

June also partially answered the application essay of how technology and media had affected my life.

But I couldn’t let someone who only listens to movie soundtracks speak for me entirely.

I responded to the other essay prompt, the one she’d never be able to answer, the one about art and culture. I wrote about Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. It was the first movie I’d ever seen without any white people that was part of the Criterion Collection. It was that or the lesser-known movie Hyo, a word that non-Koreans can barely pronounce, a term that means “duty” or “filial piety,” this super-slavish devotion to doing well by your forebears, to do your parents’ bidding, often at the cost of your own dreams.

Everybody condemned the Danny Song casting. He’d just shot a superhero movie and critics presumed he’d be ill-suited for a micro-budget film about a Korean brother and sister in Oklahoma trying to keep their Chinese restaurant afloat after their parents are killed in a car accident. It had a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, which stunned everyone. It was produced, directed, and distributed by Korean-Americans and felt so distinctly Korean-American that it had never occurred to me that anyone else would relate to it. When I watched it, I knew I had to get out of Texas.

I’d considered applying to the design program. I’d gone as far as creating the mood boards, sketches, and sewn the garment projects but chickened out at the last minute. The jacket I’d made fell lumpily across my chest since I didn’t have a dress form and the cheap, chintzy fabric I’d ordered was all wrong.

I got in without declaring a field of study and it felt like a miracle. When I found out, by myself, after school, screaming and jumping in that hot, sticky house, I picked up the phone to tell June. But I chickened out on that as well.

I overheard Mom telling her on the phone a few weeks later. I closed the door to my room, face burning. But the next time June was home, I left the bath towel for her on the bed, the one we always fought over because it was the biggest and softest. And I reminded Mom to make rice without red beans because June hates them.

When I get out of the quiz, I see Cruella sharing a string cheese with her Chihuahua on a park bench. It’s as if they were waiting for me, vivid and sunny, both dressed in yellow.

Life is random, I think. Data sets are fine, but mortality is random. Cancer is random. But seeing Cruella and her dog today feels like good luck somehow.

Instead of dicking around at McDonald’s for a coffee, I go home to my sister. I want to finish cleaning her fridge. Maybe do her laundry. I need to know how her doctor’s appointment went.

I run the long block, darting through the people with their heads bowed over their phones, earbuds glinting. I want to make June a cup of tea. Gather the remotes and phone charger and place them in her lap. I want to look after her in some way. Let her know I’m aware of what she’s done for me.

By the time I’m at her building, I feel stupid for sprinting back. Recalling that she wanted space. I press my ear to her door, nervous. I hear nothing. It’s cold, inert, and mute. Six inches of titanium or something crazy. It strikes me how even rich-people keys feel different, the way they glide in without catching or requiring any tricks of wriggling to turn.

June’s flipping through a Vermont Country Store catalog in the kitchen. Back in pajamas. I knock belatedly, feeling stupid.

“Hey.” I pointedly return the keys to her drawer.

“Hey,” she says, not looking up from the gift guide.

I study her for any news. I can’t even tell if she’s had blood drawn; her sleeves are pulled over her knuckles. It’s maddening how withholding she is. And she’s barely looking at the Corn Chowder set or the Summer Sausage basket as she’s turning pages.

Hanging up my coat, I make sure that my suitcase and bags are stacked behind the couch at an angle you can’t see from the front door.

“School was good,” I offer. “I, like, went.”

I shuffle into a spare pair of her house slippers. “So, how was your thing?”

“You know what’s weird?” she asks me, shutting the catalog.

“What?”

I reach across the counter to grab her forearm, partly as a joke, and when she doesn’t withdraw, I really begin to freak out.

“They talked to me for, like, an hour,” she says. Her eyes are glassy, and that groove between her eyebrows bites in deep.

“Okay,” I say. “Did they do more tests?”

She shakes her head. “No, it was just… I met my doctor. My special cancer gyno. She seems fine. Her engagement ring seemed a little excessive but whatever. I guess we’re going to run more tests. They want an MRI. Or I guess I want an MRI. I think I’m not supposed to eat beforehand, but they scheduled it for two p.m., so I’m going to be fucking starving….”

“What happens after the MRI?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll schedule the surgery.”

“Is that what they said?”

“Pretty much.” I can tell she’s barely listening. She grabs the catalog again and rolls it up tight.

“Okay, but what’s weird?”

“What?”

“Is the two p.m. MRI the weird part?”

“Huh?”

“You said, ‘You know what’s weird?’ ”

“What’s weird?” she asks me, scowling impatiently, as if I’m the one being distracted and annoying.

I slowly exhale the breath I’ve been holding. “That’s how you started this conversation, June. You said, ‘You know what’s weird?’ ”

“Oh,” she says, waving my attention away. “It’s not even that weird. I just can’t believe I was in there for an hour, because I don’t remember anything she said. I feel like I just watched her mouth move for sixty minutes.”

I tug on my lip. My nose fills in anticipation of tears. I don’t know what to do. Or what to say. I feel like leaving immediately, calling Ivy and getting drunk. But I also know that people who “do the work” would stick around. I wish I wanted to.

She shuffles over to the couch. I make myself follow her.

“I feel so dumb that I didn’t bring a notepad.” She gives her head a slight shake. “Once the doctor left, the nurse told me everything over again, but I don’t know if I retained much of that, either.” Her eyes track back and forth as if she’s scanning her memory. “I should have voice memo’d it.”

This doesn’t sound anything like my sister. My coding math-brain sister. I hate it.

“Jesus, June.” My voice cracks on her name. “I told you I’d come.”

She kisses her teeth. “Whatever, I’ll record it next time.”

“When’s the MRI?”

“Next week.”

“I’m coming.”

She shakes her head. “It’s an MRI. I just lie there.”

“Well, I’ll sit there.”

“That’s the other weird part,” she says with a faraway expression. “There was this pregnant woman in the waiting area. She was huge. And she was Asian. But with bangs. It felt like some kind of fucked-up psychology experiment.”

I glance down at her coffee table. The rug underneath needs vacuuming. I hear her sniff. We’re not big criers in our house. Once, a long time ago, Dad burst into tears, and June and I just backed away from him as if he were plutonium. We couldn’t even make eye contact with each other for the rest of the day.

The silence hangs horribly between us.

“Do you want to watch Gilmore Girls?” I ask.

“Yeah, okay,” she says. June always wants to watch Gilmore Girls.

I make her start on season two, when Jess appears. June likes Dean, which is all you really need to know about her even though I’m a Logan apologist, which makes me emotionally unwell. It’s weird—we’ve only ever watched from season two to six.

When we were kids, we’d watch Gilmore Girls and Friends on a loop. Dad bought a TV/DVD combo player on sale from Costco, and we’d made him buy the box sets because we didn’t have cable. Everything we owned was from Costco. It’s where June’s movie soundtrack obsession started. Mom bought her the Cruel Intentions soundtrack, and we listened to that on a loop for a year.

“I can’t believe she doesn’t just go with him,” I muse when Jess tries to get Rory to follow him out the window.

“I can’t believe the little poser steals Lorelai’s beer when Luke saved his homeless ass,” says June pointedly.

We both love Paris. Total personality disorder.

I don’t even check my phone until Dave leaves Lane because Adam Brody’s turncoat ass went to The O.C.

Patrick’s texted me back. It’s a string of emoji.

Korean flag.

British flag.

Highway.

Cactus.

Palm tree.

Camera.

Laptop guy.

Money flying away.

The little dude bowing or doing push-ups.

Then he goes: I’m shit at brevity. And emoji. I can give you a long synopsis if you’d like.

I try to wait until morning to respond. That way he’ll know that I read it too, that fucker. But I break.

Use your words, I tell him.