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When she came home, she found eight ducklings in the bathroom sink. The other girls were nowhere to be found.
Of course it was more complicated than that. Sooyoung left the dorm at 7 am. She'd been too angry to think it through: she just needed a walk, a break, a little time to cool down, but it was too early for there to be anything to walk to, and she'd forgotten her sunglasses. So she went to the grocery store, and tried not to think about it.
No, she didn't. Not really.
It had been a stupid fight. It always was, especially when they were tired, especially in the morning, especially lately. Even as she navigated the empty aisles of the market, trying to duck her face out of anyone's view, she knew. Her part was as bad as anyone's —
Except it wasn't. It wasn't fair of anyone to expect her to keep her mouth shut about someone's jackass boyfriend. It wasn't fair of Yoona to play the sympathy card, to turn those big wet eyes on everyone. It wasn't fair of Taeyeon to say she was just jealous or to remind her of how long it'd been since she had a boyfriend, wasn't fair of Yuri to wrap a supportive arm around Yoona's shoulders when she herself had expressed the same sentiments two days ago, on their way back from school.
What else? It wasn't fair of Sunny and Hyoyeon to sleep through it all. It wasn't fair of Jessica to be somewhere else, and it wasn't fair of Seohyun to never ever take sides. It definitely wasn't fair of Tiffany to act like their noble, peacemaking savior all the time. She'd caught Sooyoung on the stairs on her way out to say, "Well, if you're going to make her cry, of course no one's going to take your side." Like it had been intentional. Like Sooyoung, and not the dick boyfriend, was the one who woke up every morning and thought, Today's a good day for making Yoona cry.
She'd bought a bag of oranges, after she wandered up and down all the aisles. She couldn't think of anything else she wanted. She'd carried them around the dorm with her as she wandered through every room, not understanding how they could have all evacuated the apartment in the fifteen minutes she'd been gone. When she got to the bathroom, she dropped them on the floor.
There was a spring where all of Soojin's pocket money went to a sidewalk sage who loitered up and down the shopping street around the corner from her middle school. Sooyoung couldn't understand the compulsion. There was a woman on that same street who made the best hobbang Sooyoung had ever tasted, and Sooyoung couldn't understand how her sister could walk past twice a week for nothing — for potentialities.
Sooyoung only saw the woman herself once — she must have been seven. Soojin said she'd piggyback her halfway up the road if they could just stop, and while she fiddled around her her bag for money, Sooyoung stared.
"Hmm," said the woman, staring back between greedy glances at Soojin. "You're a live one." She ran her fingers along Sooyoung's arm before she had a chance to yank it back. "Don't wish too hard for anything."
"How could anyone say that to a little girl?" their mother asked, horrified, when the story spilled out at bedtime. "I want you to wish for everything, Sooyoung. Wish for the whole world, if you want it."
That was the end of their psychic.
Somebody's phone rang, dragging Sooyoung back to reality. She didn't find it the first time, but the phone kept ringing and ringing until she found it on the kitchen floor. The screen was cracked. Tiffany was going to be upset about that.
She had seven missed calls. It was tempting to snoop more than that, to scroll through Tiffany's text messages, check for bad selcas. Normally she might. But normally Tiffany was never far enough away from her phone to give Sooyoung more than fifteen seconds alone with it.
Somebody wanted Tiffany, somebody missed her. That was true of every last one of them. They'd congregated in the kitchen at dawn for a reason. They had nail appointments and photoshoots and recording sessions. It was only a matter of time before the manager came beating down the door, looking for them, wondering why no one was anywhere. What would she tell him then?
She didn’t want to deal with it. Instead, she found the biggest pot in their kitchen, and scraped all eight ducklings out of the sink.
The Chois were dog people, not bird people. It was bred into them somehow. In childhood, her stuffed toys had all been dogs: her favorite, of course a big black bulldog, Bokshil, who she'd dragged around everywhere until the morning she'd woken up to find him wet.
Too young to go through a more than perfunctory deductive reasoning process to discover why (it wasn't raining, and she hadn't dipped him in the bath), she'd taken him downstairs to the first adult she could find: her father, in the kitchen, halfway through his solitary dawn breakfast.
He took the animal from her without much thought, but he flinched at the sight of her hands, blurred red.
"Sooyoung, is that blood?" He rubbed at his own stained fingertips. "Your blood?"
"I dunno," she said. He put the dog on a table while he checked her small body for wounds, but found nothing raw. The closest he came was a scab on her shoulder. "Mommy said I could take the band-aid off," she told him when he stared at it a little too long.
"Of course you can," he said, eyes back on the stuffed dog.
"He's even wetter now, Daddy," said Sooyoung. He had his own small lagoon of blood around him, and just the sight of it made Sooyoung feel like crying from the stress of it all, from her father's unusual unease and the loss of the toy, which she felt, already, even though she could still see it.
"It's like it's bleeding by itself," her father said, disbelieving.
"Did he fall down?"
"No," her father said. He was opening the knife drawer. "Do you want to say goodbye?" he asked, brandishing one.
She shook her head, misinterpreting the question. And then she watched as he expertly ripped through the toy dog with the blade, exposing mounds of wet crimson stuffing, and, in the middle, in miniature: a bleeding, beating heart.
There were fans that could rattle of the makes and years of their cars without a second thought, so Sooyoung took the keys to Hyoyeon's car, instead of her own. Maybe what they looked for was her telltale blonde head, not her license plate number. Maybe.
It was an easy theft. Hyoyeon's bag was on the coffee table, prepped for her early nail appointment. When Sooyoung shook it, there was a telltale jangle. She took they keys.
The ducklings were vocal about their distaste for being strapped into Hyoyeon's car, but they were small, and even their loudest of protests were guileless. When she was in the driver's seat, she addressed their pot.
"Maybe you're right," she said. "Maybe we shouldn't go. What do you think?"
The ducklings weren't silent, but they didn't offer anything of use to her either.
"Nobody else is mad enough to believe you're So Nyeo Shi Dae."
She peered at them over the rim of their seatbelted pot. She kept hoping one of them would do something different: that there would be one duckling that was particularly indignant about the use of this (her) car or that they'd all stay in telltale groupings, but even the ducklings themselves seemed to lack the ability to differentiate. How big were duck brains? Could they biologically contain the complex multitudes of identity that her groupmates had? What if she turned them back and they were still...
But she'd never turned anything back.
Maybe she was in love with Yundae back then, maybe she wasn't. Fourteen was ambiguous, somewhere between puppy love and the real thing. You had to remember it yourself, where you fell on the scale. Sooyoung couldn't. All she felt for Yundae anymore was guilt.
He walked her to practice three days a week. It was in the same direction has his hagwon, he said. (It wasn't particularly, but that made it even better.)
Everyone knew, because she couldn't keep her mouth shut. Because she didn't know how to tell him to please kiss her with her eyes and posture instead of her mouth, but maybe someone else did.
She didn't have the patience to learn. She kissed him.
Three months later, he said he was leaving. It wasn't his fault his father was being transferred, but Sooyoung felt angry, sick at him. He grew roots. His shoes split from the force of them.
She ran. She never went back to the park they'd been standing in. She was too afraid of finding a tree.
At the gas station, she counted seven ducklings. She nearly had a panic attack before she found the last one in the black seat. She scooped it in her hands and glared at it. "Don't think I don't know you're Yuri."
The clerk recognized her. He looked at her carefully as he rang her up, deciding whether or not to say something. "Not so much of a shikshin, then," he said, as she fumbled around for change to pay for her water.
She had a defensive rant saved up for comments like these, but she couldn't summon the will. "Not always," she admitted.
"So what are you doing out here?"
"I don't know," she said finally. "I guess I'm going east."
He squinted at her car, unsubtly trying to pick out an entourage. "Are you alone, then?"
Back on the road, she announced to the car, "You'd better find a way to change back. Nobody will believe you ran away. It's just not possible."
And then, despite herself, she started to cry. She'd never been by herself this long before. She'd never learned how to be lonely.
"If you had a superpower, what would it be?" asked Sungmin, eyes intent on the paper he was reading from.
"I don't know," said Sooyoung. "Maybe I'd have the power to make wishes come true."
"Other people's wishes?"
"No, my own."
Sungmin laughed. "That's cheating. Then you'd have the power to give yourself any other superpower."
"But say I don't," said Sooyoung. "Say I don't have any control over it? Maybe they come out wrong. Maybe I have to be careful not to want anything."
Sungmin's brow furrowed, the way it always did when he couldn't think of anything to say. This is the point where I should know to stop talking, some part of her brain said.
"People wish for things they don't want all the time," she said. "It'd be a terrible power to have."
"We can't use this," said the nearest script writer. "Don't you like to travel? We'll say you want to be able to teleport."
"No," said the other one. "No, she's funny. We have to give her something funny."
77 kilometers out of Seoul, there was a decaying white chapel, framed by a graveyard to the left and farmland to the right. If it was supposed to be part of a town, it didn't advertise it.
She pulled off the highway.
Was it appropriate to take ducks into a place of God? It didn't feel like it. She put them by the gate. "I know there's a nice pond over there," she said, squatting over them. "But I need you to stay in this pot."
The church lobby was empty, but clean. She found a note taped to the door to the inner chapel that seemed oddly trusting. "Visiting constituents in hospital. Back at 2. Take what you need."
She pulled the doors open, and sat down to pray.
Please.
A small man in a suit shook her shoulder hours or minutes or days later. "Sooyoung," he said. "Sooyoung, it's time to go home."
"I can't," she said. Her face was wet. "I can't."
"You can," he said. "I promise you can."
"I've ruined everything."
"No one person can ruin everything," he said. He pulled her out of the pew, leading her back through the doors. "It's time to go home."
It was afternoon, and the air was stifling. She'd let the day away from her. She took stock of herself. She felt brittle, but whole.
Her duck-pot was empty.