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There are some people who always knew what they were, what they always would be. The daughter who always dressed in her dad’s police uniform. The boy with a lisp who put makeshift tourniquets on his stuffed animals. The kid who pressed their face against the window every time the firetruck came past. Maybe they stared at photos of New York and dreamed of living amongst the skyscrapers, or amongst the red painted double deckers of London. Maybe what they wanted was a cabin in the woods, where the air smelled like pine trees and the only sound was the trickle of the river and the song of the birds. Books piled on your windowsill, toy cars kept in a special box under your bed that you hold when you spend the last few cents of your paycheck on petrol to get to school.
There are some things you just know.
What does Minjoo know?
She’s thirteen and Jihoon is fourteen. They’re lanky and small but Jihoon’s voice has begun to crack and break, rumble in his throat like thunder. His palms are broad and when he holds her hand she feels dwarfed by him, when he hugs her she feels small. It’s not the worst feeling in the world, to be honest. She feels small, but she feels safe. Jihoon has always protected her.
“I’ll miss you Min,” he says, on the eve of his graduation, when the warm night air curls around them and the storm clouds swell with rain. She hugs him fiercely tight, never wants to leave, and he just laughs, always laughs, sympathetic, warm, everything she’s ever needed. It’s just like middle school, all over again, when Jihoon had left her once before, but now she needs him more than ever.
Minjoo comes home for the summer and she’s taller than Jihoon now, all awkward limbs and broad shoulders, her voice just as cracked as his, her hands engulfing his. She feels like her skin has betrayed her and Jihoon just holds her hands and tells her she’ll be okay. He introduces her to Soonyoung, who does a drum fill at the mention of his name, to Seungcheol, who’s built like a rugby player and has a smile that makes her think of sunflowers. He introduces her as Minjoo, not Mingyu, and although Seungcheol and Jihoon exchange glances, there’s nothing more said of it. She sits behind the keyboards and tinkers away, stays up late at night with Jihoon while he rearranges tracks and sends them to idol companies who never mail him back.
Her life changes and stays the same all at once, and she doesn’t want summer to end.
Just as she prays for her hips to broaden and her voice to rise, so also does she pray to never have to return to school, to never return to lying in her bed and crying herself to sleep, or having the teachers rap her knuckles when she paints her pinky finger sky blue.
Only girls do that they tell her, and she wants to scream back at them that she is a girl.
She is, she swears. She’s always been a girl, dressed in high heels and dresses that don’t fit over the span of her shoulders. She won’t stop growing and everyone stares at her and she wants to fight. She wants to do something, tear her skin off and hope it’ll grow back again the way she’s always wanted it to.
She is a girl, she is a girl. If she writes it enough times it’ll come true, if she pleads to the skies enough times it’ll come true. If she paints her nails right and just believes, it’ll come true.
Jihoon buys her a pair of shoes for her birthday, strappy sandals with no heel that fit her like a glass slipper. She cries when he hands her the box, when he buries his face in her chest and says it’ll be okay, that he hopes she likes them.
“You’ll always be my girl,” he says.
Three weeks after she turns eighteen she fills a prescription in East Seoul, away from her home and her school, praying no-one will recognise her as she stuffs the pills into her bag. She’s still 187cm tall. She still has hands like dinner plates. Her chin is scratchy with stubble and her chest is still flat. The bottles rattle as she turns them over and over in her hands and she can’t quite believe this is her life.
Jihoon waits for her. He always has. He sleeps on her shoulder on the subway, tells her she’s the best woman he’s ever known. He waits for her to grow and soften. He waits for her as high school ends and the summer swallows them.
In the summer of her eighteenth year on this Earth, Minjoo kisses a boy for the first time. He’s sweet and foreign, smells like cigarette smoke and oil paints and she thinks she might be in love, just for the briefest of moments, in love with his smile, the way he lets his hair down and all the thin muscles under his taut skin, in love with the way his mouth moves when he tells her she’s beautiful. He calls her a princess and runs his hands through her hair, kisses her until she believes him, touches her with hands lithe. His voice is soothing, like mint drops on her tongue, and she wishes this could last forever, that he won’t return home in two weeks and leave her with the Seoul raindrops and Jihoon’s dusty studio.
In the summer of her eighteenth year on this Earth, Minjoo kisses a girl too, behind a record store in Daegu. She’s tiny compared to Minjoo and it scares her, reminds her of how much of an other she is, how strange this body still feels to navigate. The girl pecks her on the cheek as a goodbye and tells her there’s a plan for her in the stars, to just find the moon and follow the light home. It sounds poetic in the moment but makes little sense in the morning, though that doesn’t deter Minjoo from taking it to heart.
Minjoo doesn’t like to mark her life with the big milestones, prefers the little ones like Jihoon breaking his arm fighting for her or the time she thought a raccoon was a chihuahua and had to get a rabies shot for the bite it delivered. She doesn’t like the big milestones, but it’s momentous when she paints her nails bright pink, the same nails she’s always had, giant hands and giant feet. She smooths down her hair and Jihoon grins at her from the side of the bed, kicks his feet in the hospital chair where they barely touch the ground.
“That gown is very becoming of you.”
It’s blue and white, striped and stiff, starchy and smells of bulk purchased laundry powder. It folds in awkward angles and makes her look like a misshapen blob, manages to be even less flattering than her school uniform ever was.
“Thanks,” Minjoo says, letting the sarcasm drip through her voice. “I picked it out myself.”
“Like the prom queen you are.”
She blushes the colour of a rose and Jihoon laughs, pushing her buttons, making her happy even when her heart is racing from the nerves.
“There’s no going back now,” he says. She smiles, warmth unfurling like the first petals of the spring.
“I know,” she says. A nurse peeks her head through the curtain, tells them the surgeon will be through soon. Minjoo nods, and she feels angelic. “Isn’t it beautiful?”