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you are one person out of two and so am I.
but we don’t like each other much
— COLLECTION OF MISSED CONNECTIONS
Last week it was Jungeun at the crack of dawn. Jinsol swore up and down that she saw it happen, watched the whole thing from her bedroom window while halfway through her morning makeup routine. One moment Jungeun was watering the azaleas on her front porch, and the next—an electric shift in the air, a saturated shade of light, a hollow ringing in the ears, and Jungeun was gone, the watering can spilled over the veranda, her front door still swaying slightly ajar in the breeze.
“But did the heavens open, like they say?” Yeojin wanted to know. “Did she manifest a halo before she left? Was there any trace of ash where she stood?”
“I dunno,” Jinsol said. “That’s when I kinda stabbed myself in the eye with my eyeliner pencil by accident, so I missed the finer details. But I saw it happen, definitely. I was there.”
She was the closest the town had to an eyewitness since Chaewon had walked into Yerim’s runaway bike while crossing the street last year, the streamers still fluttering on the handlebars. (“Her wicker basket was full of sprigs of lavender,” Chaewon had confessed to Hyejoo that night, their heads huddled close together under the cover of their blankets. “They scattered all over me when I collided with her bicycle. It felt almost like a blessing.”) And since Chaewon was long gone, too, this made Jinsol a minor celebrity for a while, Yeojin demanding to know all the facts and Jiwoo clinging to Jinsol’s arm tearfully going on about how happy she was for her beloved best friend. As though ascension were something that rubbed off like the shine of a coin, passed through the hand: the currency of closeness.
“She’s jealous,” Sooyoung said apropos of nothing that night, taking a puff of her cigarette, and then taking her time blowing the smoke back out into Hyejoo’s face. “She and Jungeun used to swear they’d go together or not at all.”
Hyejoo paused on her way to her front door. For a moment she thought she’d misheard; that Sooyoung was just talking to herself. Though they lived in neighbouring houses, they were years apart in age and scarcely spoke. But she seemed to be awaiting a response.
“Why would they do that?” Hyejoo asked once the smoke had passed between them. “They must have known it would never come true.”
Sooyoung shrugged. A few embers flicked off the end of her cigarette and landed on the wrong side of the picket fence, in the yellowed grass of Hyejoo’s front lawn. Still burning. Hyejoo toed her school-issue Mary Jane over the ashes and snuffed them out.
“Sure,” Sooyoung said after another long drag, voice scratchy with smoke. “But it must have felt powerful at the time.”
“What? Pinky promises and blood oaths?”
“Giving yourself over to somebody else,” Sooyoung said. “Being beholden to each other. And believing it all the way up to the end.”
“It’s not an end,” Hyejoo corrected, the words well-practiced in her mouth. “It’s a beginning.”
Sooyoung made a noncommittal noise in response and stubbed out her cigarette on the white wood of the fence. The hissing steam left an ugly scorch mark in the peeling paint.
Over on the other side of town, Jinsol was telling everyone who would listen about the azaleas. How they flourished over the lip of Jungeun’s empty house, blooming tenfold through neglect and without water. A miracle; an omen; a message from Jungeun herself. Jiwoo took one of the pots home, cradled in the crook of her arm, and placed it in the centre of the altar at the foot of her bed. The flowers withered down to the root by morning.
Nobody knows the rhyme or the reason, though the theories are plenty. If you sleep with a tooth under your pillow or sage hanging over your head. If you take a vow of silence for three days; two years; twenty. If you sacrifice a sparrow. If you skin a hare. If you throw a handful of salt into a well—or was it dirt into the river? If you cut off a lock of hair and braid it, burn it, bury it. If you believe it. Oh, if you believe it.
The facts tell a different story. On a mild rainy day in November, Jeon Heejin excused herself from sixth period math class to go to the washroom. She never returned, and searches afterward found the stalls empty, the reflections unmoving in the mirrors. A single faucet was dripping steadily into the sink. She was the first. An entire year later Haseul disappeared between the refined sugar and the canned tomato aisles at the grocery store, bruised apples spilling out from her overturned basket. Vivi went that winter right before her end-of-term performance showcase was set to start. The packed auditorium waited the whole night for her to show, watching the dust motes dance in the spotlight, a concentrated beam of her glowing absence. Following a lapse of three months, it was Yerim on a spring afternoon, and an unprecedented mere twelve hours later Chaewon went in the middle of her sleep, halfway through a dream. Since then, silence. Since then, nothing.
Until Jungeun, fourteen months later; Jungeun who leaves behind an inheritance of azaleas, a hum of anticipation in the air, and her name on the lips of everyone who so much as happened to have once borrowed a hair tie from her wrist, passed her by in the hall, sat in class three rows behind the bounce of her high ponytail. These fragments of collective memory strung together by degrees of separation like beads on a rosary: all that remains of the girl, before she became a divine event.
Those, and the sightings, of course.
“I saw her in the school parking lot,” Yeojin whispers confidentially over the phone. Her voice rings out in Hyejoo’s bedroom; she’s on speaker, phone buried in the sheets as Hyejoo sits on her bed and paints her nails. “And Jinsol says not to tell anyone, but she caught a glimpse of Jungeun’s face in the fog of her bathroom mirror after her shower.”
Hyejoo blows gently over her thumbnail, painted black. “Are you sure you didn’t just mistake somebody else for her?”
“I’d know her anywhere. She had that red ribbon in her hair and she was standing by her old parking space, leant up against the pole. Like she used to, you know? Whenever she was late and killing time waiting for the next period to begin.”
“It could have been anyone.”
“She’s watching over us,” Yeojin insists.
Watching for what? Hyejoo wonders, but doesn’t ask.
“Hey, unnie,” Yeojin says. She lowers her voice again. “How’d you like to go?”
Hyejoo carefully screws the topcoat lid back onto its bottle. “What do you mean?”
“You know. Haven’t you ever thought about it?” Yeojin sighs, a sound both chastising and wistful. “I wanna go on my birthday. Right in the middle of the party, after I’ve made my wish. Like a wind blowing out my birthday candles. It’d be perfect, right? Like a movie scene!”
Hyejoo can envision it in her mind’s eye, cinematic and stirring. Which means it’ll never happen like that. She’s never seen it for herself, but she knows the stories can’t possibly measure up to it. She also knows that isn’t what the stories are for, so she says, “Yeah. It sounds nice.”
Later that night when she goes to take out the trash Sooyoung is lingering by the fence between their houses again. The sun has set, but the lit end of her cigarette bobs up and down in the dusk: a dead giveaway. Hyejoo nods at her as she passes by, expecting to be ignored. But Sooyoung nods back at her, eyes lidded and gaze dark through her lashes. She doesn’t say anything, so Hyejoo doesn’t either.
Hyejoo wonders if Sooyoung’s seen Jungeun around, too. In the red of a ribbon; the swish of a ponytail. Or any of the others—Haseul, beloved president of her graduating class, whose placid smile still beams down at students in the school hallway where her photograph is eternally framed, or Vivi—weren’t they friends, once upon a time?—or even Chaewon, who used to annoy her to no end by always begging for a smoke. “I just want to try,” she would say, leaning over the top of the fence and ignoring Hyejoo’s grip on her sleeve trying to tug her back down. “Just to see what it’s like.” Sooyoung never said get your own, never said maybe when you’re older. Just ignored her, leant up against the trunk of the apple blossom tree in her front yard, and waited for her to lose interest in her wheedling; waited for her to leave. But Chaewon always came back, equal measures curious and stubborn. Up until she didn’t.
Something about the memory of her, perched on the fence and refusing to let go, gives Hyejoo pause. Emboldens her to speak. “Hey, unnie.”
“Hmm?”
Hyejoo means to ask. She really does. But the arch of Sooyoung’s eyebrow is already unimpressed, and the words dry up in her throat. Was Vivi ever her friend, anyway? Was such a thing possible? Can Hyejoo remember a time when Sooyoung wasn’t standing here in the shade of the blossom tree, alone and unyielding? She borrows a different question instead. “How would you like to go?”
Sooyoung doesn’t have to ask what she means. Her incredulous stare pins Hyejoo in place. “Is this the kind of game the kids are playing these days?”
Hyejoo drops her gaze to the ground. Remembers a spark there, burning. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” she says. “If you’ve never thought about it.”
It’s a trick question. Either way, she gets her answer. She can feel Sooyoung’s eyes on her, and holds her breath expectantly.
A long moment passes between them.
“Quietly,” Sooyoung says. “Like rain.”
Hyejoo is silent.
“Oh,” she says, after a while.
Sooyoung narrows her eyes. “That’s it? I answered you, didn’t I?”
Over her head, the slender branches of the blossom tree cast a net of shadows over her face as though the mesh of a lace veil. If it weren’t for the spark of her cigarette, Hyejoo wouldn’t be able to see her expression at all.
“Yeah,” Hyejoo says. “It sounds nice.”
Back inside, she watches the end of Sooyoung’s cigarette through the screen door for a long time, still flickering beyond the fence; watches it set the haze of her breath aglow, and then burn out.
She runs into Hyunjin at the convenience store. Comes out with a bottle of sparkling water in hand and heads for the bicycle rack only to find her plastering a poster up onto the graffiti-specked wall. Hyejoo freezes despite herself, and it must be this abrupt pause that alerts Hyunjin to her presence, that compels her to turn around and see her standing there.
“Oh,” Hyunjin says, and that’s all she says before turning back around and continuing to smooth out the corners of the poster flat against the concrete. Like Hyejoo isn’t the threat she was expecting.
Hyejoo mumbles a polite greeting and walks over to her bike. She doesn’t look at the poster Hyunjin’s busying herself with. She already knows what it’s for. The town is entirely papered with them at this point, all the telephone poles and signposts and mailboxes converted into prayer shrines. Still, as she’s fumbling with her bicycle lock, she can’t help herself.
“Yeojin says she’s seen Jungeun unnie in the school parking lot,” Hyejoo offers.
Hyunjin grunts. Doesn’t respond.
“Like when people used to spot Vivi unnie at the roller rink.” Still nothing. “Do you—I mean, that’s good news, right? Don’t you think?”
Hyunjin gives the poster a final once-over before stepping away and turning back around. Hyejoo hasn’t seen her in a while; she’s outgrown her adolescent comeliness, the face that neighbourhood aunties used to praise as understated in its beauty. That’s the type of girl next door whose allure will surely creep up on you, they promised—back when they still used to acknowledge her existence, that is. Now Hyunjin’s grown thinner, leaner, face gaunt and skin pale. All that hasn’t changed is in the eyes: still observant as they ever were. Unflinching in her gaze.
“Do I think it’s good news?” Hyunjin repeats, tilting her head slightly. Sheaf of posters cradled in her arms. “That everyone’s seeing things that aren’t there? Falling into their own fantasies? What do you think?”
Hyejoo toes her sneaker against the asphalt. Her shoelace is coming undone. “They could be telling the truth. We still don’t know how it works.”
Hyunjin doesn’t blink. “There is no it. This isn’t a thing. Shouldn’t you know that by now?”
“I just thought maybe you’d find it hopeful—”
“There’s nothing hopeful about believing in something fake,” Hyunjin snaps. But once she’s said it, the sharpness seems to fall away from her expression, as she shakes her head and turns to leave. “You wouldn’t understand. You just let her go.”
Hyejoo stays motionless, one leg over her bike, long after Hyunjin’s walked away. On the wall, Heejin’s radiant face smiles back at her, expression almost loving under the MISSING headline lettered in bold. As Hyejoo watches, a corner of the poster comes unstuck from the concrete; lifts up in the languid breeze. It flutters like a wave. A long-lashed wink.
This late in the summer there’s nothing really left to do, so Jinsol throws a party one night out of boredom and the whole neighbourhood flocks to her street like moths to a flame. Hyejoo doesn’t mean to go, but she can hear the commotion from her bedroom window, sash thrown open in the stifling heat. Sounds of shrieks and laughter, incandescent in the night. She presses her forehead against the cool wood of her desk and wonders, idly, if Sooyoung will be there, too.
On the ride over she gets at least three mosquito bites and a newly born blister on the side of her foot. When she turns the corner, she blanches at a formless shape looming before her; it takes a moment to recognize it for the azalea bush at Jungeun’s front porch, long overgrown in her wake, lurching skyward as though meaning to follow after. The clusters of petals yawn open like mouths. Just what is it that makes it grow like that, Hyejoo wonders: hunger, or loneliness?
Beside it, Jinsol’s house is pulsing like a heart. Light pours out from the windows, bathing the neatly manicured lawns in white gold. People are gathered together in twos and threes; the most dangerous thing, Hyejoo knows, is to be left without witness. She leaves her bicycle sprawled sideways in the yard, tires still spinning. Climbs up the walk to the front door and collides into Yeojin.
“Unnie! You’re here!” Yeojin’s face lights up. Her eyelids are smeared almost carelessly with glitter. “C’mon in—I’m so happy you came!”
“Where else would I go?” Hyejoo says, but it’s lost in the din as she lets herself be pulled by the wrist into the house, crowded with moving bodies, music a living tremor in the walls. They pass by a couple making out in front of the staticky TV, a rowdy game of spin the bottle, a clear bowl with a single blue fish flitting through the water, and only when they finally duck into the kitchen does all the noise go muted like a fuzzy blanket’s been thrown over their shoulders. As Yeojin pours her a glass of Diet Coke, Hyejoo examines the photographs pinned to the fridge by star-shaped magnets: Jinsol and Jungeun sticking their tongues out in front of the bathroom mirror, giggling in the front seats of Jungeun’s car, posing with matching ice cream cones. Hyejoo studies Jungeun’s face in all of them, gaze always seeming to be fixed at a point beyond the camera, glassy and distant. She runs a finger over the film, traces the memory of Jungeun’s slanted grin. Was it in her already, back then? If she looks, can she find a sign in the vacant glint of her eye? The bared white of her teeth?
“...never see you around anymore,” Yeojin’s saying, voice raised slightly over the faint roar of music. She wipes at the rim of the glass where she’d overshot and spilled soda, then sucks her finger into her mouth. “Summer’s almost over, and we’ve barely hung out at all.”
Hyejoo takes the glass Yeojin offers her. “Sorry,” she says, and means it; she feels a pang of fondness at seeing Yeojin like this, bright-eyed and loud-mouthed, a vibrant shimmer of colour amidst the blur of everything else. “I guess I just haven’t been feeling well, lately.”
Yeojin’s arm shoots up, the back of her hand pressing against Hyejoo’s forehead, cool to the touch. The beads of her bracelet clink together on her wrist. She’s wearing a new perfume, Hyejoo thinks; an overpowering, flowery sort of fragrance. “You do feel kinda feverish. Are you all right, unnie?”
Hyejoo feels herself list forward slightly, sagging against Yeojin’s hand, the single point of contact between them. “I hate it,” she admits in a savage burst of honesty, one that surprises even herself. “All anyone ever talks about is—who’s gone, or who’s going to be next, and nobody does anything anymore, we just sit around waiting and I can’t stand it any longer—”
Yeojin pulls away her hand, and Hyejoo cuts off abruptly, as though she’d taken her voice with it.
“Unnie, that’s the point of waiting,” Yeojin says softly, a slight wrinkle to her nose as though confused. “It’s supposed to feel like this.”
Hyejoo stares at her. “Like what?”
“Like you can’t bear it.”
Hyejoo’s throat is dry. She raises her glass to her numb lips and tilts her head back. It hurts to swallow.
“Sometimes,” Yeojin says. Her hand is still half-lifted in the air. The naked fluorescent bulbs hanging overhead cast her face in sharply angled light. “Sometimes—I just think—if it happened to you, and I’d have no way of knowing, because sometimes you just do that, you just disappear, and I’d just have to go to your house and find you gone—”
Hyejoo tightens her grip around the cold glass of her drink. “It’s not going to happen to me.”
Yeojin’s mouth opens in a shocked, round o, her eyes widening. “Of course it will! It’ll happen to all of us. It has to!”
Something sour curdles in Hyejoo’s gut. Soda fizzing over. “Why?”
Yeojin looks at her like she’s lost her mind. “Because it’s better than the alternative.”
“What?” Hyejoo sets her glass down on the countertop. “Living?”
“No,” Yeojin says. Something awfully young to the certainty in her voice. “Staying here.”
Hyejoo’s palm is wet from the condensation on the glass. She wipes it on the leg of her jeans. Across from her, in the cramped space of the kitchen, Yeojin looks barely like the girl Hyejoo’d grown up with, hair up in buns, braces studding her gap-toothed grin. No. She looks closer instead to the serene gleam of Jungeun’s smile in the photographs on the fridge. Neck poised and head held high, crowned with light. Even her skin seems to have a hardened, pearly sheen to it. A glow.
It’s lily, Hyejoo thinks, suddenly. The scent. She smells like lilies.
“You said it yourself, unnie,” Yeojin says. Glitter caught in her eyelashes. “There’s nothing left. There’s nothing here for us, not anymore.”
Hyejoo’s hand balls up into a fist. “I don’t care,” she says. “At least it’s real.”
She barges out of the kitchen, past Yeojin and the bottle spinning circles on the floor and the lazy drift of the fish in its bowl. Shoulders open the back door, emerging into the yard, and crashes into somebody already standing there.
“Sorry,” Hyejoo says, squinting through the dark as she lets the screen door slam closed behind her; the porch light must be broken. She’s half-expecting Sooyoung with her lonely cigarette, so she blanches in shock to see Hyunjin instead, frozen still but for the shuddering of her shoulders as she cries, the sound ugly and foreign and loud in the muffled silence of Jinsol’s backyard.
“Unnie?” Hyejoo feels wrong-footed, like she’s stumbled into a wrong room by mistake. “What’s—what happened? What’s wrong?”
“I saw her,” Hyunjin says between great heaving gulps of air, wracked by full-body sobs. “I saw her, just now, I saw her—”
“Who?” Hyejoo’s hands hover about her, feeling both the helpless need to comfort and the hesitance to touch, for fear of something breaking. “Who did you see?”
“I saw Heejin,” Hyunjin gasps, and Hyejoo’s blood runs cold. “She was right here.”
From inside the house arises the sound of shattering glass, and a resounding cheer in response. Hyejoo flinches at the burst of noise. Hyunjin doesn’t. She stares at Hyejoo, tears still running down her face, and says, “She was right here. I came out for some fresh air and I looked up and she was standing right here, watching me. She was still wearing her school uniform and she looked just like she did on that day when we made plans to skip out on class and meet in the school bathroom and I opened every stall to check but she wasn’t there...”
Her voice trails off into silence. Hyejoo can feel an itch on the back of her neck, the telltale mark of a mosquito bite. Around them, the bushes in the yard sway back and forth in the stale breeze, leaves murmuring hushed and urgent.
“So it’s all real, then,” Hyejoo says.
Hyunjin stares back at her blankly.
“What did she say?” Hyejoo asks, seized with sudden expectation. “What did she tell you? Was she trying to come back to us? Was she in pain? All of it—is all of it just a lie?”
Hyunjin’s face twists abruptly in an expression so raw that Hyejoo is sure she will never be forgiven for having seen it. “She didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t even stay.”
Hyejoo watches Hyunjin’s fists clench into the ends of her sleeves.
“She smiled,” Hyunjin says, and she starts to cry again, soundlessly this time. “Like she was happy.”
From inside comes a call from Jiwoo, voice loud and carrying through the house: “Hey, where’d Yeojin go?”
Silence echoes in response, hollowing out the night. Over Hyunjin’s head, the busted porch light flickers on with a faintly buzzing hum.
The day Chaewon walked into Yerim’s bicycle, it was Hyejoo who picked her up from the clinic. “Just a graze,” Chaewon said, twin bandages arranged neatly over her left eyebrow, at the skin of her wrist. They walked back to Hyejoo’s house together, quiet the whole way home. Sooyoung was slouched in her front yard, under the blossom tree; her gaze slid right past the two of them. For once Chaewon didn’t even bother her for a smoke.
That night they curled up together under the covers of Hyejoo’s bed, foreheads pressed together.
“Where was Yerim headed, anyway?” Hyejoo whispered. “With her flowers?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Chaewon whispered back, a dreamy light in her eyes. “She’s gotten where she needs to be. She’s so lucky.”
No, Hyejoo thought to herself, a private sort of selfishness. They were the real lucky ones. Yerim had blessed them after all, in taking the lightning strike for them, in their stead. She huddled closer, clasping Chaewon’s hand tight in her own, and thought it safe enough beneath the secrecy of the covers to fall asleep.
When she awoke in the morning Chaewon was gone but for the faint scent of lavender still clinging to Hyejoo’s hair. Outside the window, Sooyoung was in her front yard again. She was nursing another cigarette, and the smoke that rose into the air was the only trace of life that remained. But it dissipated far before ever reaching the crack of Hyejoo’s open window.
Sooyoung is there again by the time Hyejoo drags herself home, the night black as a candle wick burnt unrelenting through the hours. The sight of her incites a low sort of fury in Hyejoo, the type that has been kindling for a very long time. She wheels her bicycle up to the edge of the fence and says, “Why do you always just stand there?”
Sooyoung blinks slowly at her. Like she hadn’t been the one to talk to Hyejoo first, that other night. And as Hyejoo stares back, the faces of others flash before her: Yeojin, devoted. Jiwoo, desperate. Hyunjin, inconsolable. And Sooyoung, apathetic as the blossom tree standing in pointless vigil. Hyejoo doesn’t want to be any of these things, mirrored in any of their endless grief. She wants to be a shadow slipping out of sight. Out of reach.
But even more than that, she doesn’t want to be alone.
“You heard me,” Hyejoo says. “You’re always here, and I don’t understand what for.”
Sooyoung just looks at her. Cigarette in hand.
“What is it that you want,” Hyejoo says.
Behind Sooyoung stands her terrible empty house, the shutters open, rusted door hinges and sagging porch and all. It looks not unlike Hyejoo’s own. The grass of the lawn is beginning to yellow. Hyejoo stares through the darkened windows and wonders for the first time if Sooyoung has always lived alone.
“I don’t want anything,” Sooyoung says. It sounds like an unfinished sentence.
“I don’t believe you,” Hyejoo says.
Crumbs of ash drift downward from the end of Sooyoung’s cigarette.
“I don’t believe you,” Hyejoo says again. “I don’t think you want to go quietly. I don’t think you want to go at all.”
Sooyoung is still watching her, face blank. A moment passes. Another.
A slow smile crooks the line of her mouth.
“Okay,” she says. “You got me.”
Something races in Hyejoo’s chest; a quickening of the pulse. Something she’d forgotten. Like daring.
“I knew it,” Hyejoo says, unable to keep the cruel joy of vindication from her tone. “You’re not—you’re like me.”
The smile fades from Sooyoung’s lips. But it’s too late. Hyejoo’s seen it; she knows it’s there. She knows what’s real.
“I’m leaving,” Hyejoo tells her.
“So soon?” Sooyoung says, but Hyejoo sees through the condescension in her words to the stirrings of interest beneath.
“Right now.” Hyejoo tightens her grip on her handlebars. “I’m not going to wait around anymore. I’m going to get out of here and I’m not ever coming back.”
“Good for you.” Sooyoung leans her head back against the trunk of the tree, curving the column of her throat. She takes a drag on her cigarette, and in the dull light it strikes Hyejoo, for the first time, that it’s not so much indifference sunken into the drawn lines of her face as it is a blunt sort of exhaustion. Down to the bone.
“Come with me,” Hyejoo says, suddenly.
Sooyoung is silent.
“Come with me,” Hyejoo says again, overcome by a reckless nerve. A need. “You don’t have to stay here. We could leave, right now, and we could be in an entirely different place by sunrise. A new city. A whole world away from here, and this town could never reach us, never take anything away from us again.”
“I can’t,” Sooyoung says, not unkindly.
“Why not?” Hyejoo demands.
“Because at least here, they come back,” Sooyoung says. “This is the only way they can come back to us.”
Hyejoo stares at her over the fence. Who is it that you’ve seen? she wants to ask. Who is it that you’re waiting for? Her throat tightens: How come I’m the only one who has still never seen anyone at all? But these questions sound unforgivably childish, even to her own ears, and she buries them back down with only a slightly bitter resentment.
Sooyoung shifts the cigarette between her fingers. “It’s not so bad. They say it’s like a relief, in the end.”
“I don’t care,” Hyejoo says hotly. “I don’t care what they say. I wanna stay here.”
“Thought you were leaving.”
“Not this town,” Hyejoo says. “On this earth.”
Sooyoung’s got that half-smile again. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Hyejoo says. “Right here. I wanna stay graceless, and stupid, and human on this ugly, cursed earth.” She hesitates. Takes a chance. “With you.”
“I haven’t got anything left,” Sooyoung says frankly.
“You’ve got yourself, haven’t you,” Hyejoo says. Feeling small, she adds, “And you have me.”
There’s a long lapse.
“Hey,” Sooyoung says. Straightening up, unfolding the slouch of her limbs. “Come here.”
Hyejoo stands her bicycle up against the fence. Takes hold of the splintery white-painted wood in her hands and climbs over it. Under the tree, Sooyoung beckons with a finger, and when Hyejoo walks up to her, she holds out her cigarette.
“Try it,” Sooyoung says, and Hyejoo recognizes the misplaced gesture for what it means. She takes it anyway. Brings the cigarette up to her lips and breathes in.
Sooyoung laughs when Hyejoo coughs, a sharp, bright sound. “Yeah, that’s about right,” she says. She settles back against the tree, looking amused.
Hyejoo blinks wetness from her eyes. It takes two tries to speak past the rasp of her throat. “It’s awful,” she manages.
Sooyoung gives a one-shouldered shrug. “You get used to it eventually.”
Hyejoo pointedly drops the cigarette onto the ground. Blades of grass curl up and blacken beneath the embers.
Sooyoung doesn’t seem to care. “Well?” she says. “You got what you always wanted, didn’t you?” She makes a gesturing motion. “Now you can go.”
Not me, Hyejoo wants to say, irritated. You’re mistaking me for Chaewon, because you regret it, all of it; never coaxing her over the wrong side of the fence and sharing with her the taste of smoke. Or else: You could be more than this, if you weren’t such a coward. You could be free, like me. Or even: I’m going to be just one more thing you regret, one more thing you're going to lose, and you’re just going to stand by and let it happen. Aren’t you? But living here for so long has taught her how to recognize a lost cause when she sees one.
She can be kind, too, she tells herself. She can be merciful. She leans forward on her tiptoes and presses a kiss to Sooyoung’s cheek.
“Goodbye,” she says.
She doesn’t look back, as she climbs back over the fence and gets on her bike and starts to cycle away. It’s difficult at first, her heart thumping in her ears, hyperaware of the clumsy efforts of her pedaling, but it gets easier the further she gets down the street, legs locking into a steady rhythm, growing accustomed to the bumps of the asphalt. Soon enough she’s almost gliding, her hair flying out behind her. She just has to make it over the hill, and over the next, and the next. Just as long as she keeps her eyes straight ahead and doesn’t look back.
She doesn’t quite manage it. Blocks away she finally gives in to morbid curiosity and turns to glance over her shoulder. At this distance, it’s impossible to tell which street is her own, which house, but she thinks she sees the faint glow of something burning in the distance. A tall, ragged shape. Like a tree.
She watches it for a long time, because it’s beautiful. And then she turns back around and pedals away, until the fire is only an afterthought, far off and long ago.
Hyejoo rides forward, into the slackening blue hour of night, and thinks to herself how funny it is, that nobody back in town will know she’s left. On her own terms, no less. They’ll all simply believe that she was the next to go, and they’ll make her immortal for it, her name joining the others, written into the everlasting, ever-loved ranks of mythology. A smile splits open on her face at the irony of it, the clever disappearing trick she’s pulled, wool over the eyes, and she pedals on, forward into the faintly growing scent of lavender.