Chapter Text
BORA
Angels are watching over you.
The more time passed, the more she heard it all around her. It might have something to do with how Catholicism and Christianity were becoming more prevalent. Well… it was either religion or the increasing amounts of shady people trying to con her into joining a cult. She was too smart to fall for any of it, though. If anything, she could con them right back. Into what, though?
If there was something watching over her, Heo Bora was dead sure it was anything but angels. It just didn’t make sense, did it? If angels watched over her, why did her father die when she was a child and why did her mother develop an alcohol addiction not too long after and why did she herself develop a nicotine addiction at the ripe age of thirteen? She could go on—why did her mother also die, unsurprisingly due to her—you guessed it—alcoholism, and leave her orphaned, free for Child Services to take in, right until they let her go when she hit age eighteen, leaving her orphaned once again. Most orphans only got orphaned once, but she got it twice. The angels must really love her.
Really, if anything, it was an alien. Rather, it was a secret shaped like an alien. And it was something of an open secret. Her guardian angel was an alien, which was actually a secret, which might not even be a real secret because it was an open secret—what did this nice mixture make?
The other thing watching over her was a little girl—a devil, if you will. Not a real girl, just an image she conjured in her head every so often, when she wondered what it would be like to feel thirteen forever. The little girl sometimes looked older, if she dared play the What Does She Look Like Now? game. It was a dangerous game, because it mostly ended with her reliving her one year of genuine, true, blissful peace of her twenty-two years of life. And that was dangerous; she shouldn’t spend her life trying to get out of it.
At the end of the day, her angel did watch over her. Maybe the woman at Child Services and the cult-recruiters on the roads were right. Her angel, the gray alien with a shiny, green (metal) baseball cap, stood on one shoulder while her devil, the spectacled little girl of maybe thirteen years, stood on another.
Today, her alien was resting. After a whole week of standing guard, they were bound to get tired. Her alien was resting, and the fourth bitchy lady of the day dropped her basket onto the counter. By instinct, Bora turned a slow glare onto the woman, whose lips and nose twitched at the expression, but stood tall regardless. In fact, she narrowed her eyes, and curled her lips. “Who do you think you are to look at me like that,” she snarled, then looked Bora up and down. She scoffed under her breath and muttered something to herself, and it sounded suspiciously like Whore.
Heo Bora was generally a sweet person. Not because she was just genuinely nice and kind and sweet, but because being nice and kind and sweet always served her well. “What the fuck did you just call me?”
“I want to see your manager,” the woman returned without missing a beat.
“Alright, hag, what the fuck’s up? You said you wanted the manager, well, here I am.” She was not the manager.
Then the hag stormed out without paying for a single thing. Thankfully, she didn’t take anything either, so Bora had no reason to chase her. She let out a yell of frustration in the direction of the glass door and threw the items she was about to start checking out into the basket. Now she had extra work. Fuck that hag.
If only I could have a fucking cigerette right now. Just one. She grumbled words to herself, mostly curses, none coherent. I should start working outdoors or something. Somewhere I can smoke whenever I want…
There were two loaves of bread in the basket, which she shoved back into place in the bread shelf of the Bread, Dry Goods, Noodles aisle. Next: the cold coffee cans. There were so many of them—if trying to buy caffeinated drinks in bulk was illegal, this woman would be thrown in jail. The first to be reported for the crime too, Bora would personally and willingly walk into a police station and write down a report containing an alarming amount of details.
Fucking senile bitch called her a whore ? And for what, her silly tattoos, most of which she’d gotten on impulse whenever she received her paycheck, and her loose tank top? (Which was more offending, the fact that it was a tank top, or the fact that it was loose, she couldn’t tell.) Was she showing a “whorish” amount of skin? Bora glared at the refrigerator, her reflection, visible against the dark-colored cans, glared back at her. The urge to chuck a can at the glass and walk out was very strong.
Now, to put back in their places the one and only shitty snack in the entire snack aisle, peanut butter cookies. That woman was all sorts of odd. Bora pushed the three boxes back in place, contemplating her genius idea to walk out.
Unfortunately for her, somebody else came in. (The glass door didn’t make noise, and neither did the newcomer, but she’d been working at this convenience store for at least a year now, and really, if you had been working at the same, dull place for at least a year wouldn’t you notice how the air changes when the warm air from the street came breezing in with a customer?) But now this meant she had to work. For money. So she could keep affording her discounted rent.
If the customer was another asshole, both their days would quickly be taking a nosedive.
She won’t let another person make her day worse without making them feel at least twice the negativity.
And again, unfortunately for her, the customer was a quiet girl. Maybe the same age as her. Bora had never seen her here before, meaning she was either new to the area or just passing by. She couldn’t tell which she preferred.
Short hair in a bob, bangs, glasses. Full lips, a casual outfit. She was just a pretty girl.
And Bora has seen pretty girls too often in her twenty-two years of life to be so captivated by this one, and yet…
The shelves were just short enough that Bora could watch Pretty Girl turn to frown at the empty space in the walkway. She kept eyeing it as she backed away from the spot. Weirdo. Bora made her way back to the counter.
After narrowing her eyes at the floor-slash-shelf one last time, Pretty Girl sped to the snack aisle, quickly grabbing the same peanut butter cookie box Bora had just shelved, and then to counter, unceremoniously dropping coffee cans—the same ones the bitchy woman had in her basket.
Bora checked her out quickly. “Would you like a bag?” The girl was distracted by yet another empty spot. Does she see ghosts? Fun story to tell my viewers tonight, I guess.
Then she blinked herself back into the present, and hastily and nervously grabbed a pack of cigarettes. Huh. Interesting-er by the second. “This too,” she squeaked out, and judging by her expression, she didn’t mean to speak so softly.
BEEP. The stupid sound was louder than anything else in the store. “Would you like a bag?”
The answer came brisk and curt. “Yes.” A beat. “Please.” She took the plastic bag of her goodies, muttering out a thank you.
Their eyes met over the counter when she looked up, just before Bora looked away from her figure. Her breath caught in her throat. The girl looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She gulped, tightened her lips into a smile-not-smile and rushed out.
Bora spent a few more seconds with her hand out, frozen. Maybe she was the deer.
By the time she’d pulled herself away from the moment, the memories were already trying to replay themselves in her head, clear as day:
A spectacled girl… Shoulder-length hair… A rooftop… School uniforms… The smell of her cigarette in the charged atmosphere… “Hey, we’re in the same class, right?”
JIHYO
“Have you considered,” Sehee said, “that you might be a lesbian?”
It wasn’t completely out of character for her to say something so baffling and illogical, but the illogic still baffled Jihyo all the same.
How could she be a lesbian? By definition, lesbians liked women. Did she like women? Probably not; if she liked women, she wouldn’t have ended up with Lee Siguk.
“Couldn’t that be a possibility?” Sehee insisted, because she was nosy and liked to say things, often without thinking. It was a fatal flaw. Nothing intentional or born out of malicious intent, Jihyo was sure, but a flaw nonetheless.
“I’m with Lee Siguk,” Jihyo deadpanned.
Sehee scoffed derisively. “Yeah, I know.” Then her eyes traveled to her hands. She pretended to inspect her nails for a second before saying meanly, “Do you even like him?”
“I think he wants to marry me. At some point.” It wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t even half an answer, but it was all she had. They’d been dating for two years now, of course she liked him. No one could be with someone they didn’t like.
“Do you want to marry him?” Before Jihyo could answer, she added, “Honestly, I don’t care. It’s, like, if you want to marry him too that’s good, I guess, because you’re a young woman and you should probably get married in like five year’s time, but I’m just saying, don’t tie yourself down to the first person you’ve ever dated.”
“Right. Thanks, Sehee-ah.”
Sehee was about to cut in, but closed her mouth again when the name rolled out of Jihyo’s mouth. Oh Sehee liked it when Jihyo called her by her name, and sometimes Jihyo had to use it to her advantage.
Later in the evening, after all her classes, Jihyo sat down with Hyungwoo, the third of the three friends she’d made in her four years of university. She reiterated her entire conversation with Sehee back to him.
“Wait, wait, how did the conversation start?” he cut in.
“I already told you. Because she asked me if we had a ‘sex life’ and I said, Yeah, of course , and she asked how it’s going so I said, It’s fine. And when she kept pushing I said that we actually had sex yesterday and as usual, I just laid there while he, you know, did his stuff.”
“Oh?” Hyungwoo sat up. He raised his eyebrows and nodded, like he just figured something out that Jihyo hadn’t yet, and sipped his coffee. “Do you… usually do that?”
“Yes? I said that’s what we usually do?”
“And do you enjoy it?”
He was therapy-ing her. Questioning her the way therapists do. It was off-putting to know what he was doing but he was gentle and something about him just made her trust him. He’d always seemed trustworthy to her, like he could keep her secrets. Something to do with him wanting to become a child psychiatrist, she supposed.
She thought about the thing that watched her during some of the most intimate moments of her life—when she and Siguk kissed for the first few times, everytime they had sex, that one time she tried watching porn because she’d heard it stimulated people. The thing was an alien, with comical body proportions and a strange accessory: a green baseball hat. It had haunted for as long as she could remember, and sometimes she wondered if it was because she was committing acts of sin, being with a man, but she had never been religious, and that couldn’t have been it.
She has yet to figure it out.
She said honestly, “Not particularly? But I’m sure that’s normal.”
It was true she didn’t know a lot about sex. She didn’t know a lot about the male genitalia. She didn’t know what exactly people meant when they talked about enjoying sex, especially when she overheard her fellow female university peers talking about their own sex lives with their girl friends. But sex… It was just a normal thing that happened in relationships. It was just part of the normal, usual timeline of a relationship, and she’d learned to accept that, even if she didn’t quite get why she had to let a man’s penis enter her just because they were in a relationship.
Still, that was only normal; she didn’t want to spend any more of her life being the weird girl. She got enough shit for it as it is.
Hyungwoo noticed her tone getting defensive and changed the subject: “Why’s Sehee being like that anyway?”
“That’s what I’m saying, fuck if I know. She’s been acting like a bitter ex-girlfriend ever since we started dating.” She added, “Not to Siguk, to me.”
He nodded slowly but said nothing. After a pause, “I have no idea what’s going on either. She’ll come around soon.”
“It’s been two years,” Jihyo reminded him.
“She’ll come around soon,” he repeated, tone placating and gentle.
She immediately felt her urge to fight calm, and had to admit to herself that he would probably become a great child psychologist.
“Alright, thanks for listening. I gotta go.”
“Straight home?” he asked, because he was caring like that.
“No, I’m stopping at a convenience store first.”
“Be safe,” he said with a pat to her head, and walked away with a small wave.
For reasons unknown to herself, Jihyo found herself sliding open the dirty glass door to the store from the previous day, instead of going to the ones near her university or home. All these stores are exactly the same, though, so I won’t be missing anything , was an excuse she gave herself, though it did nothing to explain why she went out of her way for it, lengthening her journey back home.
It was just a nice change in scenery.
Or it must be the girl at the counter. She’d never met anyone like her. Wild, curly hair dyed auburn, tattoos sprinkled all over her arms, nails painted a dark, holographic polish.
Something in her lit up when she saw the same girl at the counter, her feet propped up on the counter. Her hair was styled the same, cascading down her back and over her shoulders, and her tattoos were the same. Jihyo noticed that this time she was wearing a black graphic tee with a rocket on it, her sleeves rolled up just the slightest, and the blue-green boots. She looked the complete opposite of Jihyo.
“Can I help you with something?” she exhaled, shocking Jihyo out of her reverie.
“No, I’m alright.”
She didn’t even need anything from the store, but she bought two packets of instant noodles and one pack of cigarettes.
The girl smiled to herself when Jihyo dropped the items onto the counter. “Would you like a bag?” She sounded nice.
“No,” Jihyo said again, “thank you.”
Then the girl surprised her. “Did you just move to this neighborhood?”
“Uh, no— Just some errands.”
“These errands?” she jerked her chin at the products.
“Uh, sort of…”
“See you around,” the girl smiled.
Jihyo burned with the urge to ask for her name. Her phone buzzed just then, the screen lighting up with a notification from K-Talk— Guk . When she looked back up, the girl had looked away, already sitting back down and scrolling through her phone with a bored expression.
Outside the store, her alien waited for her. For the first time in her life, it tilted its head at her, and despite the features staying unchanged, she had a feeling it was disappointed in her and that it pitied her. She took in a shuddering breath for courage, and walked in the direction of home, its large eyes drilling holes into her back.