All this means I don’t do a damn thing, even when Ines emails how much she loved the music proposal I sent before my entire life went down the drain. I toss my phone down, unable to summon the motivation to reply, let alone reply enthusiastically.
I’m busy not thinking about any of these issues when there’s a knock at the door. Since it might be the delivery of another outfit designed for the sloth life, I force myself off the couch, where my body has stretched an indent in the leather cushions, and check the peephole.
Phoebe stares right back. “Open the door, Ari. I know you’re in there. I can smell the pizza boxes.”
When I do, she shoulders past before I even say hello, leaving me to close and lock the door behind her. Phoebe puts her bag of groceries on the counter and surveys the surroundings, gaze picking out the half-empty takeout containers, balled-up socks, and open laptop, then lingering on the empty bottles of wine. I have no defense. It looks bad, the portrait of a woman who has 100 percent lost the plot.
Because it is in fact the apartment of a woman who has at least 96 percent lost the plot.
“How did you get through security?” I finally ask.
“I have my ways,” she says. “It smells like a raccoon’s ass in here.”
“How would you know? Been hanging with a lot of raccoons?”
She doesn’t dignify my feeble retort with a reply, instead marching to the kitchen, where she pulls out a bowl and a fork and then opens the container of precut fruit she brought. The sweet smell of pineapple spills out, and the corner of her mouth turns up when she hears my stomach grumble.
“Here.” She shoves the bowl over, and I take a bite, my salivary glands aching with the first taste of freshness I’ve had in days. While I eat, she rummages under the sink for a garbage bag, fills it with trashbefore she even leaves the kitchen, and then grabs another to tackle the living room.
I want to talk to her but can’t find a way over the wall of our fight.You don’t bleed, ever. You don’t know yourself at all.A rich tide of unwarranted bitterness rises in me toward Jihoon. It’s his fault I’m here, unsteady and confused, instead of powering my way to a corner office. Lousy Jihoon came into my life with his lousy heart-over-head ideas and damn it.
I watch Phoebe work and try to excavate the words stuck in my throat, that I’m sorry. Are they the hardest words to say? Better or worse than sayingyou’re important to me?
Better or worse than sayingI love you?
“Spit it out. You’re giving me a headache.” Phoebe cracks a pizza box in half to fit it in the bag.
“Spit what out?” I can’t help falling into my old defensive pattern.
“Ari.” Phoebe doesn’t look up as she moves around the living room, as if I’m a wary animal she doesn’t want to antagonize with eye contact. “Say it.”
At Yesterly and Havings, I had to hold my bow carefully and calculate the impact and the meaning of each word before releasing it. Now the words tumble out inelegantly, like a child emptying a box of blocks onto the floor.
“I’m sorry for what I said, Phoebe. I’m sorry I wanted to hold on to my anger more than I wanted to be a good sister. I should have reached out instead of blaming you for doing the same thing as me.”
Her eyes have widened with every word. “That wasn’t what I expected.”
I’m panting from the effort of getting all that out. “What’d you think I was going to say?”
“That I’m a failure who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” When she looks at me, her eyes glimmer. “I know you and Dad think there’s something wrong with me because I have no savings. No home. No ambition to be the best.”
I want to protest that I don’t think that at all, but she’d know it was a lie. Instead, I say, “It’s different from how I live.”
“That doesn’t make it bad. You were partly right the other day. I might be scared to settle down, but what you don’t get is that I wouldn’t change my life at all. I love moving around and meeting new people. It’s how I am, and it might not be what Dad wants or what you respect, but it’s my life. Not yours and not his.”
I feel worse. I let my envy—because now it’s clear what it was—block me from the joy she has in living how she wants. I could have been part of that, too. I could have visited her. I could have widened my horizons, but I wasted all that time. All those experiences. All thatlife.
Phoebe doesn’t move from the living room, where she works the edge of the garbage bag between her fingers, the plastic stretching thin and almost splitting.
She doesn’t look up. “You like being the good girl, with all the praise and the head pats.” Her smile twists as she drops the garbage bag to the ground. We both ignore the boxes that spill out. “You needed me as a foil. Can’t have a good girl unless there’s a bad one.”
I’m a horrible person, because she’s right again. She’s kicking me when I’m down, but I deserve it, and this needs to be said. I let myself think she was a mess to make myself feel better. I’m so arrogant.
You don’t bleed, ever. You don’t know yourself at all.
This is why. Because it hurts when you have to dig deep.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I don’t how to break this habit.”
