Chapter 3

chapter 3

The city isn’thow I’d left it. The light’s dipped and it’s getting loud. There’s an urgent thrum that crackles. It’s that disorienting feeling as you leave a movie theater in Midtown and the skyscrapers with their LED lights come at you.

New York is an ambush.

Outside feels IMAX.

Plus, drunk New York is the shit. I love drunk New York. It glitters with potential. It feels like gambling.

“June?” asks the driver when he rolls down the window.

“Sure.” I don’t bother correcting him and get in. It’s a black SUV with its own atmosphere. I wonder if I’ve been given an upgrade or if June only commissions Uber Blacks. I hailed one once, on accident, all the way home during a surge, drunk and cross-eyed, treating myself to not-Pool. I felt rich. When the eighty-dollar charge showed up the next morning, I cried.

It’s not fair, I think, as we crawl up First. New York nights are for anyone other than family. Still, my saltiness eases as I lean and stare out the tinted window. It’s a miracle that I get to stay here. This place commands total dedication or it will eject you. I really would rather die than go home.

New York’s never been for lightweights. It takes a tax. Eloise was chill if you related to a six-year-old asshole living at the Plaza, but that was never the romance for me. Give me the Hotel Chelsea any day. Growing up, I’d moon over Tumblr pictures of Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Basquiat, Daang Goodman, Anna Sui, Madonna hanging out like it was no big deal. Diane Arbus’s haunted children. Tavi, a literal child, front row at New York Fashion Week on her own merit. Max Fish. Lafayette Street. That the cofounder of Opening Ceremony was a Korean girl, Carol Lim.

There were promises here. A young, loose-limbed Chloë Sevigny plucked from SoHo retail to star in that movie Kids. Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Timothée Chalamet all going to the same fucking high school. That’s the energy.

I love it all so hard, but just as much, I love that the guys at my deli know my coffee order. That I know to avoid an empty subway car as confidently as the closed mussel shell in a bowl.

The car stops.

I even love how it takes sixteen minutes to get to June’s house in a taxi and thirteen if I’d just taken the F at Second Avenue. Nothing makes sense and it’s perfect.

I have a vague idea of where June lives, but I’m unprepared for the glass turret. And that her apartment and my school are separated by 1.5 long blocks.

The lobby is as silent as a museum, with recessed lighting, dark walls, and enormous artwork bigger than a life-size floor plan of my entire apartment. There are tasteful sitting areas and hardcover art books on the coffee table that are ripe for stealing by anyone other than the people who can afford to live here.

As I wade out onto the gleaming marble, approaching the front desk, I hold my right heel high to keep the tinny clack of the exposed nail in my worn-down boot sole from ratting me out as poor.

“You sisters?” asks the younger doorman in a pale-gray uniform when I speak her name. Feels racist even if it’s true.

He’s dressed as if manning the bridge of a spaceship. All high collars and embroidered insignias.

There are two door dudes. Both white with brown hair. One young, one old. I wonder if younger door dudes grow up to be older door dudes. Or if you need one of each at all times.

“Can you just tell her I’m here?” I’m annoyed that I’ve been summoned. Annoyed that I’m related to someone so basic they’d live in a testament to architectural phallic inadequacy. Even one with a Chipotle a block over and a grocery store literally inside the building.

They let me by. I pass the mailroom and a mixed-race couple wearing matching puffer vests with a shih tzu. I barely have to glance at their faces to know he’s white and she’s Asian.

My ears pop in the elevator.

June works in hedge funds. Which means she devises high-stakes gambling schemes for despots and oligarchs, and this is what she gets for her soul.

The overheads in the hallway light up when you approach. It’s cool. Also creepy. Like the type of building that tries to kill you when the security system becomes sentient.

Thirty-four F. Two floors shy of the penthouse. It’s petty, but I’m happy that there’s at least something for her to work toward. I stand outside her door for a moment. If she didn’t know I was already here, I’d leave.

I ring the doorbell. Wait. Hear nothing. Wait for another moment. Ring again—nothing. I knock.

“I’m coming,” says June tersely as she unlocks the door.

“Sorry,” I say just as she opens it. We stand there.

“Hey.” Absurdly, she seems surprised to see me. She’s changed. Now she’s wearing a pale-gray silk bathrobe, the diamond of her neck and chest exposed. It’s strangely sexy. A TV booty-call outfit.

“Hey.” I clear my throat to not giggle from the awful awkwardness. “I’m here.”

“Come in,” she says, leading me into the kitchen behind her.

There’s a formalness neither of us can shake. I take forever removing my shoes. I don’t recognize any of hers except the sad clogs I saw her in earlier. There’s a pair of shearling boots similar to ones I’ve been eyeing, but they were over a hundred bucks and I’m willing to bet these are fancier.

“Do you want anything?” she asks, padding over to the brushed-silver fridge. It’s the kind with an ice machine and water right in the door. The cabinets are skinny and white, and there’s a matching kitchen island with two barstools that separates the kitchen from the rest of the living room.

“Water?” She looks over at me. “I have sparkling. Wine?”

It takes everything for me not to roll my eyes. I feel as though my sister’s masquerading as a dynamic careerlady from a Hallmark movie. I want her to cut the shit immediately and tell me what’s going on.

“Yeah, I’ll take a glass of wine.” Mostly I want to see what happens when I ask for one. We’ve never had a drink together.

That’s when I remember her ID in my wallet. Fuck. This is a trap.

I walk farther into her apartment, into a morass of tasteful beige and oatmeal furniture. The entire back of her apartment is glass, and her view is spectacular.

“Red or white?” she asks.

“June,” I deadpan. “It could be fucking blue. I don’t care.” Across the way, in an office building, I watch two women separated by a cubicle type into black monitors. I wonder if they’re friends. Or if they’re locked in an endurance contest to see who leaves first. I wish I had binoculars.

I never get to be this high up, and it’s wild how June’s New York has nothing to do with mine. Sort of how some people’s news is the opposite of yours or how their phone configurations are alien even if the icons are the same. Part of me is proud that she gets to have all this—knowing that we come from the same place and that she’s earned it. Another part of me wonders if she’s secretly Republican.

I take a seat on her tufted beige couch, staring at the matching love seat. I’ve never met anyone in New York whose living room can accommodate two sofas.

She hands me a glass of white wine. “The red’s nicer,” she says.

We both look at it. I can never tell if she’s fucking with me.

“I couldn’t find the bottle opener,” she explains, and sits down across from me. I feel like I’m in therapy.

I turn the wineglass in my hand. I’m tempted to snap the delicate stem in my fingers. If she brings out a cheese board and throws on smooth jazz as the lights dim, I’ll bolt.

“Thanks,” I tell her, taking a sip. It tastes like grass. “Your place is nice. That’s how I guess you know you’ve made it, right? When nothing’s IKEA.”

“Yeah,” she says, with an anemic little chuckle. “Thanks. And you’re still in…?”

“Windsor Terrace.”

“Is that Queens?” I watch her for any hint of a joke.

“Brooklyn.”

June tilts her head. “Right, you live out by that cemetery.”

“It’s closer to the park.” She’s definitely spying on me. I’ve never told her where I moved to. I couldn’t risk her telling Mom I slept near corpses. I take another sip of wine. “We have a park in Brooklyn, you know. It’s older than Central Park. Plus, they didn’t raze a Black-owned neighborhood to build ours.”

June knows everything there is to know about a handful of subjects. On everything else, she’s wildly indifferent. For the longest time June said “intensive purposes” and not intents and purposes, claiming I was the asshole for correcting her because everybody knew what she meant.

“So, you’re good?” she asks. I’ll give her two more questions before I break.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Good. Work’s good. School’s good.”

“Mom was saying how last semester—”

“Last semester was last semester,” I interrupt. So that’s what this is. Mom’s guilted her into checking up on me. Fucking narc. Firstborns are the goddamned worst. “This year’s better. There was this one teacher, Hastings, total pervert—he really had it in for me. And everyone who was on my group project was an absolute nutcase. Flakes and drug addicts basically. This semester’s…” I wave her off.

“I hated group projects,” says June sportingly. “Always ended up doing everything on my own.” She takes a sip from her water glass. I briefly wonder if she’s pregnant.

Fuck. That would be so weird.

“Yeah.” I sit up straighter and set my wine down on the broad, mirrored coffee table. “And my job’s going well,” I continue. “Honestly, it’s much better this year. It’s fine.” I hate how defensive I sound. Having a genius for an older sister, who scored a full ride to Columbia, has not been optimal for my professional self-esteem. “Look”—I cross my arms—“it’s fine. Tell Mom to calm down.”

June winces and shoots me the stink eye. See, there. That’s the June I know. “Who said anything about Mom? I’m the one asking. You’re smart when you focus. I’m tired of people giving you a pass because you’re emotional.”

I stare at her long and hard. She’s like Mom when it comes to mental health stuff. June thinks anxiety is for pussies. That you can banish it with intestinal fortitude. According to her, depression is laziness that can be fixed by high-intensity interval training and caffeine.

“What do you want, June?”

She sits up and leans in. I lean in too. Monkeying her.

“I’m sick,” she says.

“Yeah, well, what kind of sick?”

“I have cancer.”