Chapter Thirteen
JUNIE
Hazel and I have a queso protocol. It predates the Chupacabras, it predates Dallas, it goes back to a kitchen in Waco and a mother who believed processed cheese was a food group and grief counseling in one, and the protocol is this: the big bowl comes out for exactly two occasions, celebrations and interventions, and you don’t find out which one you’re at until the chips are gone.
Hazel got the big bowl out on a Tuesday.
“We celebrating?” I asked, professionally casual, already scanning for exits.
“Sit down, Junie.”
Intervention.
She’d built the whole spread, queso with the good chorizo in it, the pickled jalape?os, chips still warm from the H-E-B bag in the oven trick, and she sat across from me at our little table in her scrubs from clinicals, hair up in the bun that means business, and let me eat in peace for exactly four chips before she opened the file.
“I watched the Denver footage,” she said.
“There’s no Denver footage. Denver was a mixup, nothing happened in Denver, why would there be footage.”
“The road diary you posted. The bus arrival thing. Twenty-two seconds, you’re walking backwards filming Mason doing his little wave.” She loaded a chip like a slap shot. “Nineteen seconds in, Saint says something off camera and you laugh.”
“I laugh at everything. It’s my brand. I’m the sunshine, it’s on the tin.”
“Junie.” She put the chip down, which in the protocol is serious.
“I’ve been watching you laugh professionally for two years.
I know the whole catalog. There’s the client laugh, the meeting laugh, the man-explains-hockey-to-you laugh, there’s the one you do with a little head tilt when an athlete says something you’re going to have to edit around.
I can bill by your laughs. And nineteen seconds into that video there’s one I hadn’t heard since Waco, and you didn’t cut it, which means you didn’t NOTICE it, and that’s when I got the queso out. ”
“It was a funny thing he said.”
“What did he say.”
“He said,” and I heard myself do it, heard the temperature change, the way you hear your own voicemail voice, “the hotel in Denver had a medical supply convention, and there was a whole thing with the cots, forget it, it’s not transferable, you had to be there.”
Hazel sat back and looked at me the way she looks at a chart that confirms the diagnosis.
“Two years,” she said, “you’ve been doing the bit.
Since the podcast. The optimized Junie, the fifteen-second Junie, exits while it’s still fun.
You do it at work, you do it at parties, you do it HERE, Junie, at this table, with me, you’ve done the bit at me while crying, which as your sister and a future medical professional I want you to know is horrifying to watch.
” She pointed a chip at me, gently, the way you’d point a chip at a wound.
“You’ve stopped performing. Do you know that?
Somewhere around February you stopped. Except here’s the thing, and eat something because you’re about to do your face. You only don’t perform around him.”
I did my face.
“The diner videos where you think you’re off camera. The bus. The tunnel clips other people post. Every frame of you anywhere near that enormous sad Norwegian,”
“Swedish. Minnesotan. Swedish-Minnesotan.”
“see, THAT,” she said, “that correction, that’s her, that’s Waco Junie, she comes out for HIM, and meanwhile I get the brand account.
I get sunshine at my own kitchen table. I’m not mad, June.
I’m doing the thing you pay nursing school forty thousand dollars to learn how to say gently, and I’m saying it with cheese because that’s our house style: the fake dating is the realest thing in your life, and the real life is the performance, and at some point the paperwork on that is going to come due. ”
The queso steamed between us. Down the hall a neighbor was practicing what had to be the bass line to something.
“There’s a rule,” I said, finally. “Rule 7. No real feelings. I wrote it. It’s load-bearing.”
“Load-bearing for what?”
And I opened my mouth to answer, because I’d written the clause, I knew the load path, it was engineered against a very specific collapse, the one where I become a lot again, at scale, to a man I actually cannot afford to be a lot to, and the answer was all there in my mouth in order and I looked at my sister and what came out was:
“I don’t remember.”
Hazel, to her eternal credit, did not spike the chip. She just slid the bowl toward me, closer, like a defibrillator, and said, “Yeah. That’s what the queso’s for.”
Later, after she’d gone to bed to sleep the sleep of the diagnostically correct, I sat on my bed with my phone and did the thing I do instead of feelings, which is audits.
I audited my camera roll. Strictly professional exercise, I told myself, content inventory, March backlog, I even opened a spreadsheet first as an alibi.
Since January 14, the day Beyoncé the ring light died for our sins, my personal camera roll, not the team account, the PERSONAL one, contained two hundred and fourteen photos.
I counted. Then I sorted. Then I sat very still.
Nine were postable. Content-adjacent, planned, the ring light memorial (rest easy, Solange reigns now), a taco flight, the SUNSHINE 00 kid, my own good hair day. Nine.
Two hundred and five were him.
Not thirst traps, I want that noted for the record, I am a professional, there was no committed photography.
It was worse than that. It was: Saint reading a naval disaster paperback with Tuna asleep on the chest protector.
Saint holding a coffee cup with both hands like it was a baby bird.
The back of Saint’s head in the tunnel. Saint’s hands, just his hands, taping a stick, seventeen photos, SEVENTEEN, apparently at some point in February I had documented a man taping a stick like it was the Zapruder film.
Saint mid-quarter-mug-turn. Saint failing to not smile at something Dot signed.
A blurry one from the bus, Denver, dawn light, his hand, and I knew exactly which hand and exactly why, and I put the phone face down on the comforter and stared at my ceiling, which had no deposition for me, because the ceiling thing is his.
Two hundred and five. Nobody takes two hundred and five photos of a colleague.
There’s no folder in any content strategy on earth called “colleague, miscellaneous, 205 items.” Hazel hadn’t needed the camera roll.
Hazel had needed twenty-two seconds of a road diary.
The evidence was so far past a preponderance it was doing a victory lap.
And I lay there on top of the covers, doing the one thing rule 7 was built to prevent, feeling the whole load-bearing wall of my entire post-Dallas architecture do a thing walls should never do, which is hum, and I was still lying there at 11:40 when my phone buzzed with a DM to my personal account, which almost nobody has, and I picked it up smiling, because at 11:40 there was really only one person it would be, and read receipts run both ways, and I’d learned to love a lit window.
It was not the one person.
Deacon Vale: cute stunt. very on brand for you. drinks? for old times?
I sat up so fast the alibi spreadsheet fell off the bed.
Three sentences. Eleven words. And I want to describe exactly what they did, because it’s important to the file: they worked.
Two years of new city, new job, four million followers, seven words in a Nashville scrum defending me to the entire continent, one hand over a pillow wall in Denver, and eleven words from a podcast studio in Dallas walked into my chest like they still had a key.
Cute stunt. Meaning: I see the machinery, I always see your machinery, you were always machinery.
Very on brand for you. Meaning: a lot, like a LOT, in business casual.
Drinks. Meaning he wanted something. Deacon never once in his life bought a drink that wasn’t a deposit on something.
Here’s what optimized Junie did, and I watched her do it, from about a foot outside my own body.
She did not scream. She did not wake Hazel, who was one wall away, big bowl still in the sink, a sister who had literally hours earlier laid out the entire pathology over cheese.
She did not text Saint, whose window was lit, whose read receipts had been on since 2023, who had once answered a heckler with forty-one saves and seven words.
She did not tell Coach Barb, or Rich, or the committee, any of the people who had, without my noticing, become a building around me.
She took a screenshot.
Filed it. Named the file, even, “DV 3.11, do not answer,” like a professional, like a systems person, like a woman who handles things, because that’s the oldest wiring in the house, older than the brand, old as Waco: when a thing is heavy, you carry it quietly, so that no one can ever say the weight of you was a lot.
Then I turned off the light and lay in the dark, in fours, with two hundred and five photographs and one screenshot, and told absolutely no one.