by Elena Zhang

You were talking about the quarterly projections for your startup the third time that day while I slurped on a mango lychee boba tea you bought for me, plastic cup sweating in my hand, golden syrup coating my throat, making me suspect it wasn’t 50 percent reduced sugar, probably no lychee mixed in either, when a black tapioca ball shot up the straw and lodged itself into my esophagus, and as my face blushed strawberry and I tried to gasp for air, you sighed, “That’s just so you, Tess. Always with your mouth open and never with anything to say.”