“So Dad coughed up his liver today,” my sister, Vivi, says.

“Again?” I ask.

We are in the kitchen of my parents’ home, sweeping the fragmented shards of my mother’s hip bone from the floor. She was cooking, and distracted, and her thoughts had wandered to the recreational gymnastics she had loved as a girl. Her hip is sensitive—“You have a very thought-reactive skeleton,” the doctor told her—and imagining gymnastics meant the hip wanted to twirl and snap and stretch, and it did. All over the kitchen floor.

This happens a lot. “Why can’t you control your thoughts?” my father nags her, constantly. “Everything grows back in a few days, and it’s not your problem,” my mother counters. At night, she lays back in her bed, hip-less or shoulder blade-less or spine-less, and dials the reality TV loud enough to drown out my father’s snoring from his separate bedroom.

“Isn’t this the fourth time this month?” I ask Vivi.

“Yeah,” she says. “But he thinks it’s maybe good, as long as it regenerates. So he can keep tabs on the health of his liver. He inspects it every time it comes up.”

“How much has he been drinking?” I ask.

“None, as far as I know,” she replies.

“Did you get a look at the liver?”

“No. He’s a squirrelly fucker. He wrapped it up in his jacket, like, immediately.”

We deposit the hip shards in the tin can my mother reserves for these incidents. It is a recycled red bean paste can. If you lean in and sniff, you can still smell the red bean paste. There is a larger tomato sauce can for larger bones. That can has been around longer and the tomato sauce smell has washed out. I have considered buying my mother a special bone bag, a medical-grade one lined with regrowth powder to speed up the regeneration process, but I know it would likely sit, unused, in the bottom drawer of her nightstand where she keeps all the gifts she receives and promptly forgets.

I sometimes feel like the more useful the gift, the less she cares; last Christmas, Vivi bought her a beautiful set of mahjong tiles etched with blue and pink lilies. “To play with your friends,” my sister had pitched, because my mother hosts a game every Saturday night. I look over to the mahjong table in the living room now. It is still littered with the sticky, generic green and white tiles my mother has owned since before my birth.

“Do we need to stay over?” I  ask     .

It is the question we have both been holding in since we arrived. The twenties—late for me, early for my sister—is an awkward phase for parent-child relationships. It is the muddle of the role reversal, from child as dependent to child as leader, caretaker. The last thing we want is to make our parents feel coddled, but we have the strength of youth, the know-how of modern technology, the advantage of native language in this country. Even if my mother brushes off every attempt to help her with her blankets and her loose bones, and my father grunts and “forgets” to swallow the pills we obtained for his high blood pressure, it is better—safer?—if we stay. Just so we can properly tuck her pillow under her neck when she is asleep. So we can crush and dissolve the pills in his Coca Cola.

And yet. I look out the window. We both had to drive over an hour to be here. It is night, black and velvet, the shade of curtains in a speakeasy, the sleeve of an evening jacket, the taste of that third espresso martini. We cannot keep staying. We have lives in the city. Vivi has a girlfriend who has flown halfway across the country to see her, who is only here for another day. I have to feed my cat, and I want a drink.

“We should stay,” Vivi says, and she gives me a look.

“Fuck,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Fuck,” I say again.

“I can take the air mattress,” she says.

“You better.”

Not that the futon couch is a significant improvement, but at least it doesn’t deflate slowly as you sleep, until you are basically lying on a plastic sheet on the hardwood floor when you wake up. We unpack the air mattress in the living room and then sit together on the couch to watch it inflate. It barely fits in the space between the TV and my father’s coffee table, the one he built from the cheapest wood he could buy at Home Depot; he was on a carpentry kick maybe ten, twelve years ago?

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. And, “I hope the air mattress fan thing isn’t waking the parents up.”

“They’re usually dead to the world after organ stuff,” I say. “We’re fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You wanna sleep or do you want to talk?”

***

Vivi started dating her girlfriend, Alanna, about three months ago. They met online, but not through a dating app. There is this forum called BodyTalx for people with abnormal organ issues. Vivi has been reading the threads for years, but only made her first post—something generic and supportive, Vivi is paranoid about sharing her own problems on the Internet—six months ago. Alanna replied to it.

Alanna is Frozen, one of the more common abnormalities. Her organs never leave her body. She does a lot of activism within the abnormal organs community, but she is not in-your-face about it. She replies to posts on BodyTalx if she has helpful information, or she organizes meet-ups for people in the same city. But she also works full-time as an in-home aide for a wealthy elderly couple, whose care routine—baths, massages, infusions, PT—makes what Vivi and I do for our parents seem piddling. I admit, I do not know much more about Alanna beyond her work and how she met Vivi. She seems like a good person.

This is the third Frozen individual Vivi has dated. I think she has a type.

For a while, we thought Vivi was Frozen, too. She turned twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and still no internal body parts had shaken loose or slid, inopportune, to the floor. My father, who had struggled with liver permanence issues since he was in his twenties, told Vivi to consider it a blessing. “It’s a pain in the ass. Just look at your mother.”

When Vivi was sixteen, she stayed after school on a February afternoon for physics extra help. Her teacher, Mr. Halstone, was a pudgy white man in his early fifties. He had a cookie jar on his desk that was always filled with snickerdoodles, and he brought emotional support stuffed animals for his students to put on their desks during exams. He was Vivi’s favorite teacher.

There was another student at extra help that day, but they left earlier than Vivi. So for about an hour, it was only Vivi and Mr. Halstone in that half-lit classroom, the blackboards streaked with eraser marks, chalk dust floating in the air, her sneaker squeaking as she ground its sole into the gray tile floor, him at his desk grading papers, her working on a test revision, questions and answers occasionally flicking  back and forth between them.

At around 3:45 PM, Vivi heard a squelch. She looked up. Mr. Halstone sat motionless in his chair. His normally ruddy cheeks were pale. There was something red and pulsing on the desk before him; it was the only flash of red amongst paper white, pen black, textbook blue, wood brown. “Mr. Halstone?” Vivi asked. She went to him. As she approached, she realized  the red pulsing thing, shining wet, spider-webbed with arteries and veins, hiccuping through little tubes, spasming, was his heart.

“Oh,” Vivi said. Heart separation was rare. Vivi had never seen a heart out in the open like this.

When she told me the full story, years later, she confessed that she had always felt an urge toward organs. Every time an intestine unraveled in a coffee shop, or a stomach bulged free at Thanksgiving dinner. “It’s like a scent,” Vivi said. “Or like when you get into someone’s car and they have music playing but it’s turned way down low, and all you want to do is turn it up a little, just so you can hear what song it is, because you’re sure you’ve heard that song before.”

She had always wanted to get closer, she said. Of course, you cannot lay hands on someone else’s organs unless they are family or they need assistance, so Vivi had kept her urges to herself. But suddenly, that day in that classroom, she could reach out and touch. Mr. Halstone’s heart, presented on a platter of student exams. Fresh blood oozed from little pink valves, soaking through her classmates’ answers. She inhaled, iron and ecstasy. She exhaled. She felt an overwhelming sense of shame. She had never felt so hungry.

“Something about the heart,” Vivi told me. “No other organs affect me so much that I can’t control it. I guess it’s symbolic. The heart is like, the most of a person. And knowing it was his heart. Someone good? I just—”

She said she could not help herself. And when she was done, the slimy taste of flesh still lingering in the back of her throat, her teeth sore from all the chewing, she saw his phone, face up on his lap. Text messages from his wife. The first, a half hour ago, right before his heart separation: She was at the hospital, they had found something in one of her breasts, please don’t panic. But could he meet her at the hospital? And could they get takeout for dinner afterward, maybe KFC?

And more recent:

Could he let her know he’d seen the message?

Was he still at school?

Was he on his way?

Checking in again to see if he was on his way?

His body was so still, his stare so vacant. Vivi felt shame turn to panic. Organs only regenerated if the source matter was still around. What did it mean if his source matter was gurgling in her gut, acid and bacteria breaking it down—was she going to digest and shit out his heart the next day? Had she killed him?

Sobbing, she grabbed his phone and texted HELP to his wife. Then she grabbed her backpack and ran from the room, through the maze of halls, out the front doors of the school. She could barely find her car in the parking lot, and then it was drizzling as she drove home, the roads were slushy because it had snowed the night before. By some grace, she did not crash. I remember her charging through the front door and collapsing on the couch, my mother screaming and asking if she was hurt, where had all the blood on her face come from? And Vivi explained that she had hurt somebody else, and my father guided her through deep breaths and declared there was no use panicking yet. There were no cameras in the classroom or at school. Mr. Halstone might very well be fine. I was put in charge of Googling whether organs regenerated after they were ingested. My mother helped Vivi to the bathroom. Vivi stepped into the shower fully clothed. The last traces of her crime peeled in red flakes off her chin and dissolved in a swirl down the drain.

Mr. Halstone lived, in the end. I guess source matter is still source matter, even if it is floating in chunks in someone else’s stomach. I think his wife called the police and when they saw the blood stain where his heart had sat, they assumed it had already regenerated. No one caught Vivi. No repercussions, even, except that Mr. Halstone quit teaching and she had to finish her year of physics with a terrible substitute. Vivi never saw him again. There was a rumor around the school that his temper had changed. Mood swings, people said. Almost like a teenage girl. He became some sort of Tumblr addict, but I never managed to find his account.

Our parents took Vivi to a couple specialists, changing the story slightly to say she had eaten my father’s heart. No useful insights. It was considered a one-off, perhaps desperation on the part of a clearly Frozen child who wanted to shed organs like everyone else. Or it was the father, right? Perhaps Freudian. Our parents told her to keep it secret, to be grateful no one knew and to never do it again.

“Were there other times?” I asked.

“Two. Both exes.”

Rarely does someone else’s heart just appear in front of you. Falling in love is one of those few, belly-up moments.

***

“Her heart was just out on the dining table yesterday,” Vivi says. She lies on the now-inflated air mattress, limbs spread eagled and dangling off the sides. “I had to make up some excuse about law school stuff and basically run out of there.”

I sit slouched on the couch. “Does Alanna know?” I ask. “About…”

“No. She thinks I’m just Frozen.”

“Hold up,” I say. “I thought Alanna was Frozen.”

“Oh. Yeah. She thought so too.”

“Oh. Wow. Um.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was like. But I guess we’ve heard of cases like this? Where someone just needs to feel, um, safe enough or something?”

I stare at Vivi. She stares back. I feel bad and I know she also feels bad, but maybe it is because of how bad we feel that we both start laughing.

Vivi  rolls herself away from me. Her knees curl to her chest. She shakes. “This isn’t funny,” she manages. I am too busy biting my lip to keep the noise down to reply. I do as she has and close into a ball, forearms around shins, thighs against breasts.

“Oh god,” I finally say, raising my face to gulp air. “This poor woman.”

“I know,” Vivi cries. “She feels safe? With me?”

“She’s in the wolf’s den.”

“She literally could not be less safe.”

“Well, I mean, you could be an ax murderer. Like you’re not going to kill her—”

Vivi sits up. “It’s basically the same thing,” she says.

“What do you mean? Mr. Halstone’s having a great time on Tumblr—”

“Cherry! Oh my god! You are literally the worst.”

***

I am not very good in dire situations.

When I was thirteen and Vivi nine, my father was hospitalized for his liver impermanence. The maximum time the human body can work around a missing organ is eight hours. Most organs regenerate within an hour. We were approaching hour ten. My father’s skin, normally that pasty eggshell shade common to Chinese computer scientists, had yellowed with jaundice. He had struggled on the walk from his bedroom to the car, needing to pause twice to catch his breath. I could tell by my mother’s shrill tone that she was scared, even though the words that left her mouth were “girls we have nothing to worry about and we’re going to the hospital in case there’s something wrong, everything is fine,” and “Jesus if you just didn’t eat so much fatty meat this would not be happening.”

Vivi cried the whole drive to the hospital and all the while my mother and I spoke to the lady at the check-in counter—my mother spewing rapid Chinese, me doing my best to translate. But Vivi did not cry the same as the other children in the waiting room, whose wails and sniffles were loud, whose panic was mucus-thick and running down their faces. Vivi stood quietly; you would not even know from her posture that she was upset, only if she turned toward you and you could see the flush of her cheeks and the tears that beaded on, then dripped from her lashes. Anime-style tears, I remember thinking; I was going through a Naruto phase.

The hospital staff saw to my father right away. Organ emergencies are considered extremely deadly, especially a vital organ like the liver. At the time, we did not know that. As we sat in the waiting room, my mother fingered the thin silver cross she wore on a chain. She was not Christian, but many of our Chinese family friends were. She liked the idea of wearing a talisman—even better if it invoked a deity that our community considered benevolent—and she had also mentioned that the cross paired nicely with most of her outfits. “Be grateful,” she whispered to Vivi and I. “Nanhui Auntie and her husband sat for almost three hours here before they would see him for his eye problems. We are very lucky.”

It was almost 9 PM by that point. We had school the next day. I must have had a test, because I had brought a textbook—geography?—to the hospital and was trying to read it. Vivi was asleep in the chair next to me, her head heavy against my shoulder.

“One of you should be a doctor,” my mother said. “Your father has such bad habits he will not get healthier.” I kept quiet. I felt Vivi wake up beside me, but she also said nothing. My mother went on. “And we wouldn’t have to wait like this. Or pay the hospital. Maybe both of you should be doctors.”

She looked at us, waiting for a response. I said, “Maybe you should be a doctor.” She had studied biology before she married my father, before he had moved them across the world to America where he had a job lined up and where all of her education—top of the class in high school, bachelor’s degree—was rendered useless. Her potential was a sore point in our household. It was late night, I was simultaneously tired and on edge, I was looking to provoke.

To my surprise, she did not anger. “It is too late for me,” was all she said. “If I was twenty years younger, maybe.”

Vivi, sensing a melancholic shift, quickly offered, “I’ll be a doctor.”

“You don’t even know what that means,” I said. I poked at a hole in the knee of her tights, which were dirty cream and dotted with black flowers.

“I know what a doctor is,” Vivi said. “They make sick people better.”

“You have to go through so much school to be a doctor,” I retorted. “You don’t even like—”

“It’s a very noble profession,” my mother said. “You’ll be a good doctor, Vivi.”

Vivi gave my mother a big toothy smile. My mother smiled back.

Fifteen minutes later, the attending called our family in. Vivi and my mother rushed ahead. As I packed away my study materials, I noticed a long sliver of ivory on my chair. I bent to peer closer, but felt my left side squeeze in on itself. I looked again at the object on my chair. One of my ribs had fallen out. “Cherry!” my mother called. I shoved the rib between the pages of my textbook and threw everything in my bag. I ran after her.

This was only the third time I had ever shed a body part. The other two had been my stomach and my esophagus, both common organs, both food-related incidents. I did not know what it meant to lose a rib. I could not remember hearing of anyone losing a rib before, although I was sure there were stories, basically everything had been lost by someone at some point. I wanted to tell my mother but then we were in my father’s hospital room.

“He’s stable for now,” a nurse was saying. “But we’ll keep him overnight to monitor. It’s unlikely, but there’s a chance the liver will reject. Sometimes these situations are akin to organ failure. It’s not an issue with regeneration, but with the organ itself.”

“What is she saying?” my mother asked me. “What does that mean?”

My father groaned from his bed. On a tool cart next to him was a metal tray flecked with purple gunk and green powder: liver residue, I presumed, along with the regrowth powder and whatever else they had lathered on it. Vivi was holding his hand. I ignored the hollow, stretchy feeling in my side where my rib should be. I did my best to translate for my mother and then walked to my sister.

“Do you think Dad will die?” she asked.

I had no idea.

“We need to do everything we can to help him not die,” Vivi continued. “I’m not gonna sleep tonight so I can watch him. Or maybe we can take turns not sleeping. But I think Mom’s really stressed, so I don’t think we should make her take a turn.”

None of that makes a difference, I thought. I reached out and squeezed her elbow.

“And we need to be better,” said Vivi. “I’ll do the dishes every night. I know Dad hates dishes. Maybe you could help Mom cook dinner more? And we should help Dad with yard work whenever he asks.”

She was crying again. I could tell that this time was going to be ugly, so I tucked her face into my chest. I felt her mouth open in a silent scream, a puff of hot air through my sweater.

I considered my father. Lying on his back, with the bulk of him hidden under a white sheet, he was small. I imagined that sheet sliding up to cover his face, the heart rate monitor to his left flatlining. Pandemonium from the hospital staff, like in the TV dramas. A kind nurse helping my shocked mother sit down. And then the body being wheeled away, the stares from everyone in the hall and from other rooms, because they, too, saw the sheet over the head, they knew what it meant, they wanted to “check on us” but really they wanted to observe us in our grief, at our lowest, so they could reassure themselves that they were not us, or they could better prepare themselves to be us.

And a week later, a month later, our amputated family at the dinner table. My mother picking at her rice and Vivi doing the same. I would not have helped cook, because we would have been eating a lot of takeout. Day to day drama flitting through my brain, like which teacher pissed me off or who got cast in the spring musical, but the predominant sensation would be shadow. His chair would still be at the table. People at school would know me as the girl whose father just died. Uneaten dumplings from friends and neighbors would clog the freezer. I would wonder who I would become without a father. Without his demand for a hug after work each night, without his stories about his pre-technology childhood, without his lessons on how to be fierce, to be strong as men even as he warned us away from strong-looking men, without his screaming arguments with my mother, without his obscene academic expectations and his almost witchy cures—“Walk five times around the house and your stomachache will go away”—and his misogynistic taste in action movies, without his love that fluctuated, one day brooding and conditional, playing favorites; but sometimes he would take me, just me, on a drive around the suburbs, and we would grab McDonald’s, and we would not talk much but I would sense he cared for me, a care as vast and unquestionable as the sky.

And then I imagined myself years down the line, a veterinarian or a marine biologist, my two aspirations back then, successful, sociable, well-adjusted. Over cocktails with acquaintances in cheap bars, or dinner with dates at trendy restaurants, it would slip out that my father had died when I was young. “Oh shame,” and other standard responses. We would quickly but naturally move on to lighter conversation topics. And maybe my companions would notice a lingering stiffness in me, an unfamiliarity with male habits or a disconcerting hyper-independence, little traits they could chalk up to, oh, yes, her father died when she was young.

But that would be the whole of it. Standing by his bedside in the hospital, picturing my future without him, I was quite sure that, if he passed, I would eventually be fine. I felt reassured. I took a deep breath.

Abruptly after, I felt like a piece of shit. What kind of daughter was I? This was a moment to be helpful, to be optimistic, to be bargaining with God or whatever else was up there for my father’s health and longevity. He was not even sixty years old yet. Souls that left their bodies before sixty became duan ming gui. Short-life ghouls. They approached the bridge to cross into the afterlife and were turned away; they had not completed what they were meant to complete on Earth. Stranded between worlds, they haunted. I did not want my father to haunt. I did not want to be haunted by my father.

But I felt certain of my powerlessness. What good was my optimism? Or my bargaining? If he was going to die, he would die. If not, he would live. I was a thirteen year-old girl. I was scraping by in Kumon math. I had no idea how to calculate the price of my father’s life, how many good deeds amounted to the debt of his survival.

So while my mother and my sister peppered the nurses with questions, rearranged the pillows, fretted about home care routines and setting reminders for medication, promised to save piggy bank money for regrowth powder, I sat in the chair by my father’s bedside and stared at his hands, which were folded over his stomach. His nails were shaped like my nails. Thin black hairs sprouted from the back of each finger. My chest burned, but I was unsure if it was emotion or just my rib regenerating.

***

“What should I do?” Vivi asks. She stares up at the ceiling from the air mattress. From the couch, I stare up at the same ceiling.

We have sobered. No more laughing. We have decided to check on our parents at midnight, in half an hour. We should be trying to get some sleep, but it is one of those nights where the prospect of the morning makes us want to slow time down.

I feel a little dumb, a lot like a child. I feel like Vivi’s older sister. These were the identities I inhabited in this house, and every time I return here I default to them. And I remember that I was not a particularly devoted child, nor a role model older sister.

“Vivi, I’m the last person you should be asking for advice,” I say. Vivi is the one in law school, with the nice girlfriend and the stable routine in the city. I spent my teen years in a video game haze, scraping into college and wasting my early twenties on acne-ridden, racially ambiguous cover band drummers, most of whom never gave me the time of day. My marketing job barely pays my rent.

“Give it your best shot,” Vivi says. “I’m desperate.”

“What a ringing vote of confidence.”

“You literally just said you suck at advice.”

“Fine. My advice is: I think you should break up with Alanna.”

A long pause from Vivi. “I know,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows. Maybe I am not so bad at this.

“But, like,” she continues. “I don’t know. I’ve tried a lot to get to the bottom of this, right? I know most abnormal organ conditions are biological, but some are psychosomatic, I think, like Mom’s. So, you know, why would a person have a heart eating problem? And I’ve thought about what happens to the other person when I, um, do it. How they come out a little different, with traits that mimic me. I was going through my Tumblr phase when Mr. Halstone happened, remember? And then with Gino becoming super anxious—I was stressed out of my mind when I was dating him because it was college application season.”

I hated Gino. He was a senior at the local college—my local college—when he dated Vivi, who was a senior in high school. Gino and I had macroeconomics together. He asked a lot of genuinely stupid questions, like whether it meant something that the supply-demand curve was blue on last night’s homework versus the regular black.

“So I guess,” Vivi says, “the root of the heart eating comes from wanting people to be like me? To like me? And sometimes I wonder— Fuck. This is going to sound so cheesy romantic. But maybe there’s someone out there who wouldn’t mind? Who loves me or admires me so much that they’d want to— That it’d be okay. Or that it’d happen and the person would come back to me the next day and be unchanged. Because they’re already like me. Our souls speak to each other. Or something like that.”

I sit with what she says. I do not want to mention that, from my observation, her victims do not just change to be like her; they embody a more extreme, even demonic version of her. Where Vivi was stressed about college applications, Gino now has debilitating anxiety and had to start both medication and extensive therapy.

“People already like you,” I say instead. “You don’t need to eat their hearts.”

I reach out a hand to her. She reaches back. Our arms are too short to bridge the distance between us, so I twinkle my fingers. She twinkles back.

“I know, she says. I just wish it was that simple.”

I want to tell Vivi that she is so easy to love. Her open face, her generosity, the way she is always in motion, always trying to help. Look at my mother, boasting at her mahjong games that Vivi calls her every other day. Look at my father, who meticulously reads the health magazines Vivi leaves for him because he cares that she cares. Look at Alanna, who laid her heart out on the kitchen table this morning. Who I have never met, but who I can imagine. Dark hair, dark eyes. A strong jawline. A surprisingly soft voice when she tells Vivi, I’ve never felt this way before. It’s okay. If you want to eat my heart, chew it to bits and swallow it down, I would sit here and I would let you.

***

I was in love, once, with someone I now call DCR. Duan chang ren. Duan, the character for broken, for breaking. Chang, intestines. Ren, a person. My mother once told me that in Chinese, there are lots of ways to say lover. Dui xiang, which translates to “opposite half.” Qing ren, like “dear one” or “beloved.” I call him duan chang ren because this construction of lover implies loss. It means you have loved so viscerally that it has ripped you open. Your lover was a knife to the stomach. My intestines spilled out for all the crying I did in his wake.

We met unremarkably. What is worth knowing about the relationship is that, in those early days, I found it hard to sleep. Almost nothing disrupts my sleep. I sleep like there is nothing in the world worth waking for. So I was concerned when the cottony oblivion of sleep became replays of our interactions, over and over. How he rested his cheek on one palm while he was thinking about something, sunk into a couch at a coffee shop. How he was in medical school, which made him objectively smarter than me, but he still asked for my opinion on world politics, and science, and the stupid decisions his friends made. How he had talked to his mother and mentioned I existed.

“We should date,” I told him the next time we met up. “Or we should never see each other again.”

“Those are the only options?” he asked. His nose twitched, the way it did when he found something funny.

“I’m losing sleep over this,” I said.

“You’re not used to actually liking anyone.”

I frowned. “No. But you don’t have to put it like that.”

It lasted a year. Not that long, I know. I am not sure I was ready for it. Happiness can be very overwhelming. And destabilizing. The time—seconds, minutes, hours—it took him to text me back became a determinant of my mood. The sight of him in bed in the morning could convince me to skip work. The nights I slept alone, my insomnia persisted. Love, whispered some sappy residue from my teen years, the influence of rom coms Vivi had forced me to sit through. Isn’t it wonderful? To stay awake and think of him. But I was also short on sleep. And that loose rib from my childhood kept rattling free, it was always on my bedside table, sometimes I clutched it to drift off, there was always that burn in my chest.

Maybe my body saw it coming, even if I did not.

“It’s just…med school is so busy,” DCR said. We were in my kitchen. It was a Saturday morning. I had thought we were just making coffee. “And I need to really prioritize how I spend my time,” he said. “And it’s just… I mean, where do you see this going?”

“I see myself with you,” I said. “I didn’t realize anything was wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said quickly. “But don’t you feel it? It’s not quite right, either.”

“Explain.”

“See! That’s what I mean. You’re so… abrupt.”

He had known I was abrupt since the day he met me.

“And you’re so… I know your parents aren’t a great model of a relationsh—”

“Don’t bring my parents into this.”

“But they’re—”

“This has nothing to do with my parents.”

“Fine. Okay. You just seem distant. All the time. I feel like I only get so much of you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out sounding like a question.

There was more. About how he wanted someone open, gentler. I was interesting and dynamic, but he deserved to be with someone who let him in, who made him feel loved, and it was okay that I was not that person, but he was holding out for that person. And it did not mean that I was not enough, just that we were different. Too different.

“Tell me what to do,” I said. “What do you need?” Did he want more affection? I could be nicer to his friends. I could cook dinner on the weekends. How could I earn him? My desperation was a third person in that room.

“Nothing,” he kept saying. “There is nothing you can do.” I am still mortified.

And in the middle of my degradation—to make everything worse—I felt it slide up my throat. It pulsed. Its movement reverberated to my skull, an oncoming headache. I almost choked on it, and then it was plopping to the floor, small, it looked so small.

“Is that…” DCR said tentatively.

I could not speak for the aftertaste of iron and embarrassment.

“I’m flattered,” DCR said. “But. Um.” And he just stared at it. He had said “flattered” but I could tell he was not. He was uncomfortable. What a gauche display of vulnerability, I read in his eyes. He pitied me. He did not want me. In that moment, I thought about Vivi. I wished he were Vivi. That he might find my heart irresistible to the point of consumption. But instead he wrapped it in a towel. He helped me sit down. He placed it in my lap.

“I’ll text you,” he said. He walked out the door.

When I recovered enough to grab my phone, I blocked his number. I reverted to the drummers.

***

My mother is asleep. We turn the TV off in her room—she was watching Love Is Blind with Chinese subtitles—and dial down the AC. Vivi checks the contents of the red bean paste can, which we have placed on her nightstand. “She’s pretty much regenerated,” Vivi says. I nod.

We head toward my father’s room. We can hear his snores from the hallway. Vivi puts a hand on my arm to stop me. She leans against the banister to the stairwell and digs her toes into the stained carpet. Next to her pinkie toe is a splotch of green paint from one of my elementary school art projects. Hanging on the wall across from her is a blown up photo of the two of us as teenagers, hideous, braces and acne and home haircuts.

“This place still smells like it did in our childhood,” she says. I know what she means. Like cooking oil and water mold. The house is old. Our parents are getting older.

“Are you going to tell them?” I ask her.

“No.” She sighs. “It’s fine. I have it under control. I’m gonna break up with Alanna and that’ll be problem solved.”

I say nothing, but she reads the question posed by my silence.

“No,” she says.

“You’re going to have to tell them eventually,” I say. “They think the heart eating stopped after high school. And you’ll feel better if they know about the girls—”

She covers her face with her hands. Her nails are sharp and painted ice blue. They are beautiful. “Or I could just…not,” she whispers. “They have enough going on.”

“You don’t know what will happen.”

“What I hope will happen,” she says, “is that the heart eating goes away. And I end up with a man. Then they’d never have to know. And they can be happy.”

I can tell by the slump of her shoulders that she is exhausted. I touch her forearm. “C’mon. Let’s get through the night.”

We enter my father’s bedroom. He is sitting up—he has never been a good sleeper—and he smiles when he sees us. “Vivi,” he says, “I read that magazine you left me.”

“Really?” she says. She smiles back. “What did you think?” She perches on the edge of his bed to listen to him ramble. I grab a Coke from the mini fridge in the closet and discreetly crush in a pill.

Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors