Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first thing Kotone learns about Hsu Nientzu is that she exists.

“It’s nice to meet you,” says Kotone, dipping her head into one, deep nod. She’s untried at this business of greeting new members, because she and Yeonji were their own little duo, and their experience in getting introduced to the others means she’s only ever been the fresh meat getting flung to the lions (except the lions in question are perfectly nice. Bad analogy). In a way, then, this is the first time she’s had to take the lead.

Or so she thinks. Whoever Nientzu is, handshakes and eye contact come naturally to her. She takes it all head-on with a toothy smile. “It’s nice to meet you, too. But you can just call me Nien — that’s the stage name they’re giving me.”

“Oh, okay.” No one else has a stage name, though Kotone supposes it all has to start somewhere. “Nien, then.” She nods again, awkwardly. “I look forward to working with you.”

Something about that gets a short, huffing laugh out of Nien. She stares at Kotone for a moment, lips turned up at the corners in what might be amusement. “Do you… remember me?”

Kotone blinks. “Sorry, have we met before?”

“Girls Planet,” says Nien. “You know.” She sings a bar of something that could be Oh My Girl’s “Dolphin”, but it’s too off-pitch to tell. “That?”

It takes Kotone a beat too long to realize she’s making fun of herself. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” she says, before a slow and clotting guilt oozes its way into her emotions. She braces for the truth. “We weren’t on a team together, were we?”

“Oh, no, no,” says Nien, waving her hands. “Never. I got taken out in the second round.”

“Ah.” Kotone doesn’t know whether to be relieved or confused.

“Don’t worry about it. I didn’t stand out much.” Nien catches her eye and winks. “But hey, you tell me if anything’s changed.”

Who is this girl, who Kotone doesn’t remember but who remembers her in turn? Who is she, to brush off being forgotten and joke her way past it anyway?

When Kotone first met the other members, she felt excitement and purpose, sure, but anxiety most of all. She couldn’t understand how she was supposed to measure up to any of the girls standing before her, never mind ten at once. She was struck with the sudden notion of wondering why it was her, and why she was one of them.

Time has dulled the bite, but only just, and seeing Nien altogether devoid of such hesitation stirs up something Kotone can’t name and isn’t certain she wants to sit with.

“You—” she starts, but she’s beaten to the punch.

“Is that really the time? I gotta get to my lesson,” Nien says, standing up and pushing her chair back. The metal legs screech harshly against the tile floor. “Grammar! So fun.”

It’s like lightning jumping from one wire to another, and Kotone finds herself taken aback at the speed of it all. Still, she catches herself enough to say, “Good luck. It was nice talking to you.”

“You too.” Nien grins as she slips out the door. “See you soon!”

“Yeah,” murmurs Kotone, “see you.”

The second thing Kotone learns about her fellow member, the newly christened Nien, is the extent of her metaphorical résumé.

People talk, and it’s a given, but since Kotone’s social life consists almost entirely of the managers and the company staff and the shop stylists and, now, twelve other girls, there’s not much she couldn’t hear if she tried.

The stint at Girls Planet is obvious enough. Turns out Nien attended a performing arts high school and was a trainee for a couple of years, too. She might not be the most experienced member on the block, but she’s no novice, either.

The little green sprout of envy only has time to pop its head through the soil before Kotone yanks it out and snaps the root between her fingers.

It might be true that hard work is the only advantage Kotone has, and it might be true that Kotone had to teach herself the knocks of celebrity life, all on her own, but it’s not as if there’s anyone to blame. Her path was just different, and there’s not much more to it.

Yet sometimes, she still can’t help but wish that wasn’t the case.

Maybe she would have liked to be at an agency before this one. Maybe she would have liked a coach, a director, no matter how difficult. But thinking as much feels like a disservice to the other girls, and so Kotone keeps it to herself. She’ll practice until she drops if that’s what it takes.

After all, the industry can smell weakness, and the only thing more hated than an idol who held hands with a girl three years ago is an idol who complains. Kotone refuses to be that kind of burden. She refuses to be a burden, not even a little bit, not in any way, shape, or form. If she keeps her chin up, if she dedicates herself in each and every one of the right ways, then maybe one day, it won’t matter anymore.

All this to say: it’s no one’s fault but her own — and it’s certainly not Nien’s, who she has yet to really even talk to.

It just feels, more often than not, that Kotone has had to heave herself up step by step on earnest ambition alone, and when faced with someone rumored to be the full package, comfort isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind.

The third thing Kotone learns about Nien is — well. There isn’t a third thing so much as a plurality of things, many of them, all at once.

It should be a recipe for disaster: two near-strangers and a camera (salt and pepper to taste). But somehow, Nien’s open-mouthed laughter and total lack of shame drag something out of guarded parts of Kotone’s chest and into the light. There’s no space for shyness or reservation, not here.

What Nien doesn’t know yet of vocabulary and convention, she more than makes up for with the sheer boldness of what she’s willing to talk about. She likes to eat. She’s not afraid of anything. She can scrape her knee and get up smiling while blood gushes from the wound.

And oh — how could Kotone forget — she’s a liar.

Kotone first notices when Nien fills out her skill chart. She claims that both her dancing and sense of humor “ain’t bad”, and leaves it at that.

Bullshit. Word had it that they were getting another member in the dance line, and if Kotone’s split sides are any indication, Nien is as witty as they come.

Then she shrugs and says: “I tend to be pretty quiet, you know…”

It isn’t like Kotone to forget her self-imposed place, but the audacity finds her on its own. “As if. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

It’s so quick that she almost thinks she’s imagined it — surprise, a microscopic widening of the eyes, before Nien goes right back to acting like she’s been in on the joke all along. Her body language says, That’s right, we’re all friends here. The curve of her mouth says, I’ll get you next time.

Banter is kept solely for those Kotone knows well. It’s not something she does with just anyone, much less a person, essentially a coworker, who she’s had all of two conversations with.

And it is most certainly not supposed to send a chill down her spine.

She’s stumbled upon something she wasn’t supposed to come across, and she pointed it out when it wasn’t ever meant to be known. Nien is nice enough to let it slide in the presence of that all-seeing lens, but the message between the lines is clear: Stay out.

Nien says something funny. Kotone still laughs.

She doesn’t know what surprises her more, then: that Nien has made it past her walls, or that she, by nothing other than accident, has discovered that Nien has them, too.

Dahyun says Nien is “pure” and “a comic relief character”.

“Right, but,” says Kotone, hovering around after vlog filming, “there’s got to be something more, right?”

“We just met her,” says Dahyun. To her, everyone is either a good friend or one in the making. “I didn’t know you so well when you first moved in, either.”

Kotone doesn’t have an answer to that. But I’m not hiding something, she can’t say. But I’m as straightforward as it gets.

“Besides,” Dahyun remarks, like it isn’t a slap that lights Kotone’s cheeks up red, “isn’t Nien the most talkative when she’s with you?”

The other members are, likewise, no help at all. Kotone tries to find out what she can, in little pokes and prods and what feels like the occasional big mortifying concession of admitting that she does, in fact, have something broadly defined as “interest” in Nien, but nothing of use comes from her endeavors.

From Nakyoung, excited: “She’s a good roommate! She did my dishes yesterday!”

From Yooyeon, half-awake: “She wants to go bungee jumping? Really?”

From Kaede, serious as all get-out: “Hm. She’s a good dancer, and she works hard.”

So when, one morning, Nien comes over from the next-door apartment and asks if anyone wants to get delivery that night, Kotone is in before she even understands what she’s agreeing to.

Pizza for dinner? Sure. An entire day of one-on-one with Nien? Not what Kotone signed up for, and yet, in a way, exactly what she wanted.

It’s too windy to be proper for April going into May, but they tug on their hoodies and brave the chill, knowing their relative lack of fame is doing more to obscure their identities than any baseball cap or pair of sunglasses ever will. To kill time, Nien takes her to a bakery where they sell cheese bread and wraps the paper bag under her arm on the way home.

“I didn’t think you’d say yes,” says Nien, when they’re waiting at a crosswalk.

Kotone looks up at her. With a black beanie and matching face mask concealing everything but her eyes, Nien is even more cryptic than usual. Not to say that she isn’t expressive — Kotone knows exactly what face she’s pulling at any given time, but even so, there’s a barrier behind a barrier, a disguise within a disguise.

“No one else was interested,” says Kotone. “I felt bad.”

Nien lights up, only less warm and fuzzy and more like the glow of an airplane seatbelt sign coming on, promising to throw Kotone for a loop. “You did it for me?”

“Well, I like pizza, too,” Kotone is hasty to add, “but only once in a while. It’s not very good for you.”

“Ohhh,” says Nien, like she’s taken in some ancient wisdom. The walk signal shines green, and she steps off the sidewalk while shooting a look over her shoulder. “You’ve got a lot of self-discipline.”

Kotone has to scurry to catch up, her short strides evening out at three to Nien’s two. “We’re idols.”

“And people,” she thinks she hears Nien say, but it’s lost over the traffic.

“What was that?” asks Kotone, legs pumping, out of breath.

“It’s cold,” answers Nien, long brown hair flowing in the breeze, over her face, over the one narrow window to her eyes. “Let’s get inside.”

Kotone is fixing a piercing late one night when Nien walks in behind her, catching her attention in the studio mirror.

“Hey,” says Kotone, absentmindedly. Her face is turned to the left, trying to figure out which bit of metal isn’t sitting quite right in her ear. “You’re up late.”

“I left my bag in here,” says Nien, flicking on all the lights. Kotone winces, both at the sudden brightness and the way her sweat-soaked forehead must be reflecting every fluorescent bulb. “What are you doing here, sitting in the dark? You’ll never be able to see what you’re doing.”

“It’s fine.” Kotone knows her piercings by touch alone. “I’ve had these in since forever.”

That doesn’t seem to be what Nien is asking. “You were dancing?”

“Oh. Yeah.” In silhouette, because that’s what Kotone does. Break herself down into individual pieces — vocal, rap, dance — before putting them back together again, building and molding and shaping herself up one small step at a time. Closing the gap between the person she is and the person she should be.

“Why?”

“I learn better that way,” says Kotone. “I can’t rely on how I look or what my face is doing, just where my body is in space. It forces me to just be… me.”

Nien tilts her chin in half of a nod. She might say something, but she doesn’t.

“Ah — got it.” With a sigh of relief, Kotone turns away from the mirror, newly free of the sore, irritating tug in her ear. “Just flipped up weird. See?”

“You sure have a lot of piercings.” Saying this, Nien considers her own ear, which, Kotone notes, is its own pretty little minefield of jewelry and steel. “They look good.”

“My mom would disagree,” says Kotone with a shrug. “She made me swear off them for a couple months back in high school.”

“Hey,” interrupts Nien, “should I get more?”

Kotone balks, then gives her a once-over. “Where?”

“Septum,” says Nien, without missing a beat.

“What?” Kotone laughs before she realizes Nien isn’t laughing along with her. “No way. Where did you even learn how to say that in Korean?”

“You don’t think I’d look good with a septum piercing?” Nien pouts. The degree to which she’s kidding, as with anything she does, remains unclear.

“It’d be… different,” Kotone cedes. She stares at the space between Nien’s nose and upper lip — nothing lower. “It’s hard to imagine.”

“Then eyebrow.” Nien raises one, as she is wont to do. “You can’t tell me that wouldn’t look good.”

There’s something challenging in there, confrontational in a way that Nien has never been before.

“You can’t,” says Kotone.

“Says who?”

Says — god, Kotone doesn’t really know. Says the company. Says the internet. Says a thousand faceless people who only have criticism to give.

But the voice in Kotone’s heart, the one that was convincing and rebellious enough to put a needle through her ear in the first place, says:

“If anyone would look good, it’d be you.” As if like a prayer. A dying breath. Her chest tightens, and Kotone might be the first person to ever drown on dry land.

Nien is none the wiser. “That’s right,” she says, smiling with all her teeth on display. “My birthday’s coming up. Gift idea?”

And that’s as much as Kotone can take. “You wish.”

One last night before they pack up and leave, the company tells them. Kotone thinks about celebrating with an early shower and a lazy evening in bed.

She gets as far as saying as much to Yooyeon before a voice spears through the thick plating of their “soundproof” door.

“I’m going for a walk!” it shouts. “Who wants to come with me?”

Yooyeon looks like she’s already lived a thousand prior lives, each more exhausting than the last. “Do you want to take it, or should I?”

“I got it, unnie,” says Kotone, already moving towards the entryway. “You go ahead and wash up first.”

Nien takes her to the banks of the Han River, insisting that they stop at a street vendor for takoyaki and grilled chicken on a stick. Then they bring their snacks to the concrete steps and sit, listening to a busker strum his guitar and croon a soft, old song.

It’s like a scene out of a movie. It’s not, obviously — but Kotone’s seen enough of them to know.

“Nice night,” she says, just to have something to fill the space.

“Sure is.” Nien tears a mouthful out of her chicken and mulls over it, thoughtfully. “Can you believe they’re moving us all away from this?”

“We can’t stay in that old place forever,” says Kotone. “What would they do with all the new people?”

Nien says it with the utmost confidence. “Dig out some tunnels, stick ‘em down there. They wouldn’t even need to hire anyone, because they already have all of us! Don’t you think we’d get so much work done?”

“Oh my god.” Kotone makes a face, and, torn between disappointment and some strange, frustrated ache, she lets it slip. “You’re so stupid.”

She doesn’t really believe that. If anything, Nien has a sharper edge than anyone else in the group, one that would never be caught dull or lacking. That’s what Kotone means, what maddens her so — Why act dumb if you’re far from it?

But Nien just laughs. “I’m telling you, I’m great with a pickaxe.”

Hook, line, and sinker. Kotone folds. “You’re entitled to your opinion, but I prefer the humble shovel myself.”

The whole thing is absurd. Kotone hates that she’s so easy to please, but even more than that, she hates that she cares about how Nien conducts herself at all. It shouldn’t be any of her business. In the bluntest way of putting it, it isn’t.

It’s nothing. It’s natural, she tells herself. She’s only looking out for a fellow member.

“Can I have some takoyaki?” asks Kotone, motioning at the box in Nien’s hand.

“Sure.” Nien does not, like a normal person, pass it over. She instead picks up a piece between two toothpicks and dangles it in front of Kotone’s mouth. “Say ahhhh.”

“Come on,” says Kotone.

“Ahhhhhh,” repeats Nien, eyebrows raised, mouth wider.

Kotone obliges, going in for the bite. Before she can close her mouth around the prize, though, Nien yanks the takoyaki away, and her teeth snap on empty air.

“Hey!” Kotone protests. She shoots Nien a dirty look, but for what, she isn’t even sure — of all the things she feels, surprise isn’t one of them.

“What’s wrong?” asks Nien, so genuine that Kotone almost believes her. “Why aren’t you eating it?”

“You little—” Kotone takes box and toothpicks both from Nien’s hands and claims the takoyaki for herself. Between too-hot, doughy chews, she grumbles, “I’m never hanging out with you again.”

“Loud and clear, boss.” Nien’s grin is brighter than the stars, pale as the moon. “Just the two of us, same time tomorrow.”

Nien is right.

They move from Yeouido to Namsan, their two apartments and Gapyeong’s three collapsed and combined under one big, happy roof. Fourteen girls. Certainly not anything close to fourteen bathrooms. It is, in a word, chaos.

Kotone is happy enough to share, but these days, Jiwoo, her new roommate, is out early and back late for the survival show she and Seoyeon are on, so there’s not much to concern her in the meantime. Her lack of occupation doesn’t go unnoticed for any longer than a moment.

“Let’s go out again,” Nien says, arms already pulled through her hoodie. “I want to see what’s nearby!”

Forget Yubin spamming the group chat about being bored, or Nakyoung wandering through the hallway with nothing better to do. It’s Kotone’s lucky day. It always is.

“At least let me get changed,” she says, already reaching for the closet.

The night is warmer than it’s been all week, but Kotone still shivers, huddling close to Nien as they walk down the block. It’s not that different from their old neighborhood, she thinks, with its convenience stores and shuttered garages, but a change is a change, and nothing is quite where she expects it to be.

Exhibit A: in the middle of everything sits a reconstructed Joseon dynasty village. Next to the familiar practicality of the surrounding urban sprawl, its curved, heavily-shingled rooftops and thick wooden pillars look more than a little out of place.

“What’s this?” asks Nien. She steps through the gate without waiting for an answer. “Oh, Tone-chan, come quick! We have the whole place to ourselves!”

That they do. The shadows are navy interspersed with green and gold, the spare light emanating from streetlamps reflected in the leaves of trees. Nien’s footsteps betray her excitement atop the concrete: thump, thump, squeak.

“So cool, don’t you think?” Nien turns, waiting for Kotone with hand outstretched. “Wanna go see?”

Something inside Kotone’s chest, then, falls in line with Nien’s rhythm. Thump, thump, squeak. “Sure,” she says, trying not to sound so strangled. She crosses the threshold, and she takes her hand.

So Nien marvels at dusty period prop and cobweb alike, and insists that Kotone pose for the camera behind a photo stand-in of an ancient nobleman.

“You make a handsome prince,” says Nien, showing her the picture.

Prince-Kotone stares back from the screen, decidedly not handsome at all. She’s babyfaced and a little too self-serious, like a boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.

“I look ridiculous,” says Kotone, waving the image away. She takes out her own phone and points to the stand-in. “You do it instead. It’ll suit you more, anyway.”

Nien looks at her. “No way,” she says with a grin. “Me? A prince? I couldn’t.”

“Oh, please. You’d have girls falling at your feet, and you know it.” Kotone doesn’t know why she says it — it only makes her smile go wobbly, only knocks her tone of voice off an uneasy ledge. Her attempt to save face isn’t much better. “Just look at the way Chaeyeon follows you around.”

“Aw, Chaeyeon’s just nice like that,” says Nien. “Not like you.”

Kotone stops short. She feels something leap into her throat, before she swallows it back down and replaces it with a snort. “What are you on about?”

“Chaeyeon’s a simple girl. She’s all ‘do first, think later’.” In the unfamiliar dark, Nien is hazy, blurry, an old photo taken too long to expose. “I like that with you, it’s push and pull. You need someone to twist your arm, even if you wanted it all along.”

As a celebrity — a small-time one, but one nonetheless — it’s part of Kotone’s job to be capable of looking nice. She knows how to dress herself and brush on the right amount of makeup, how to smile with her mouth closed and at what angle and in what light.

So choosing an outfit is an important task, but it’s one she could do in fifteen minutes and on even less sleep. Dressing for a day out, on a Friday morning, in this part of town, should be nothing.

But — she’s going with Nien. For vlog content, yes, and for the third time in a week, too, but somehow she finds herself agonizing over how she looks to someone who’s seen her pour cereal over the bowl and onto the floor.

“Pick something, will you,” grouched Jiwoo three hours ago, who’d gotten up at the same time as her for fundamentally more important reasons. She’d been nodding off into her palm when Kotone finally held up a pleated skirt and a t-shirt.

“This?” begged Kotone.

“Looks great. Eleven out of ten.” Jiwoo could have been talking about a dead fish, for all she could bring herself to care. “Now can I please go catch my van?”

The Kotone of the present waits outside Nien’s door, heart pounding in her ears. She can hear Nien humming something to herself as the tap runs, and further away, Kaede, asking where she put the TV remote last night.

Kotone knocks. The door swings open.

There’s Nien, still brushing her teeth, mouth foamy and white as she gurgles, “You’re here!” In the background, Kaede sits on the edge of her bed, eyes glued to the cooking channel.

“Morning?” tries Kotone.

“Morning,” Kaede answers for Nien as she ducks out of the way to go spit.

Then they’re taking the elevator to the ground floor, Nien toothpaste-free and Kotone with her pulse mostly under control. Nien nudges her with her shoulder and stage-whispers, “You look nice.”

There’s a little flutter that jumps into Kotone’s chest at the delight of her efforts paying off, but she pushes it aside just as fast. Under control, she reminds herself. “We’re… wearing almost the exact same thing.” Light blues, high socks. Easy-breezy.

“So we’re matching.” Nien takes both of her hands and swings them playfully. “It’s a couple outfit!”

“It is not.” Kotone can’t stop thinking about twisted arms and her heart, like a window pane. “Why is that always your first thought?”

They go back to the village and over to a brunch place. They horse around for the camera, and Nien feeds her a bite of croissant off a fork. Kotone hesitates. Then she, dizzy from the sun, doesn’t know any better than to lean in and linger on that fleeting, flaky taste.

“Good?” asks Nien, taking the fork back, lips closing over the same metal tines.

Kotone needs water. A long, frigid sip of it. “Yeah.”

The manager drives them back to the apartment complex and sees them as far as the elevator before bidding them a flat goodbye. The steel doors shut with a clunk, but Kotone’s finger doesn’t get much further than hovering over the button for her floor when Nien slots her palm in between.

“Wanna see my room?”

“I’ve already seen your room.” And Kotone has. Everyone has. Room tours are a rite of passage for any move-in day, even if the rooms are all but identical. They’ve all already taken turns peeking their heads in and oohing and aahing over the color of the sheets. There’s nothing else to see.

“Kaede left an hour ago for practice,” says Nien.

Twist my arm. Kotone is nothing if not predictable. “Okay,” she says.

Nien — and Kaede’s — room is oddly bare. They’ve only been here for a few days, so it shouldn’t be out of the ordinary, but all the other members have already loaded their beds with plushies and started tacking photos to the walls. This, meanwhile, looks like the living space of someone always ready to leave.

“You can sit if you want,” says Nien, gesturing at her bed.

Kotone looks at the rumpled covers, yellow as a buttercup. She sits.

Nien opens the fridge and pulls the top off the freezer box. She selects two ice cubes and brings them over, standing in front of Kotone as they melt in her hand.

“It’s hot in here. Ice?” she asks, taking the first one and putting it in her mouth. Crunch. Swallow.

“No thank you,” Kotone says slowly.

“Are you sure? It’s good ice.” Nien creeps closer, knees pressed up against Kotone’s own. A cold droplet falls from her fingers onto Kotone’s thigh. “I’ll give you ‘till the count of three. One, two…”

“Who just eats ice like that?” asks Kotone, over the rush of blood in her ears.

“Not you, apparently.” And then Nien tries to put the ice cube down Kotone’s shirt.

Kotone isn’t proud of the yelp that leaves her mouth as she squirms and thrashes, trying with dubious success to bat Nien’s arm away. Nien gets close, the cold, wet glide of her fingers ghosting over the nape of Kotone’s neck, but Kotone refuses to go down without a fight. Her wrist smacks into Nien’s shoulder. The ice cube goes flying into the corner of the room. Nien loses her grip, and her balance.

“You—” starts Kotone, once she’s opened her eyes. She looks up, and loses her nerve. “…You.”

Kotone is on her back, sunken into Nien’s sunflower-yellow sheets. Nien leans over her, impossibly near, hair long enough to tickle Kotone’s cheek. If Kotone were only to reach out, to cup Nien’s face in her soft hands, she could run a thumb along her bottom lip, she could part them with her own.

“You’re prettier up close, Tone-chan,” says Nien, and oh — how can something so sweet still hurt so badly?

“Not fair,” says Kotone. Her voice is a choked, shameful confession. Her heart is crumbling under its own weight; she thinks she might cave from the inside out. “You’re not being fair.”

Nien doesn’t seem to understand. “Life isn’t fair.”

“It could be.”

“It won’t.”

“Fine, then,” whispers Kotone, “if you care, even a little bit, even any amount, at all — at least pretend.”

Gentle fingers tuck Kotone’s hair behind her ear, dragging themselves down the backs of her piercings. Nien takes her by the collar, and closes the gap.

Kotone is crying in the company break room.

She finished one of her late-night practices to find a fan letter waiting for her on Fromm, innocent enough in its opening: I’ve been following you since your Girls Planet days, it said. You were a contestant I sincerely believed in.

What a mistake it was, then, to get her hopes up.

It went on to say: I’m starting to change my mind. It said, in a thousand different ways: You’ve done nothing but disappoint. It called Kotone an undeserving hypocrite; it called her lazy, insufficient, naive.

Kotone knows this isn’t the first of its kind. Seoyeon showed her, once, with a defiant laugh. Can you believe this? Yooyeon used to get them, too — and Chaeyeon, and Hyerin, and, and, and. It was always going to be her turn someday.

That doesn’t stop Kotone from taking it to heart. She doesn’t know how not to, and she never will. How else is she meant to reckon with the fact that she’s responsible for the breadth of her own ability, that’s she’s self-made in every limitation and in all the flaws of her own unsteady hands? Through the dark and the blurring lines of her tears, she composes a reply.

I’m sorry, she starts.

Thank you for loving someone like me, no matter for how long, even if I am always lacking. I never wanted to disappoint you, and I’m so, so sorry that I have. I promise to work harder. I promise to become someone you can be proud of. I promise to never take you for granted, and I promise, I promise—

There’s the snap of footsteps, the turning of a knob. She doesn’t have time to hide her face.

“Tone?”

In the doorway, the white light of the hall flooding in behind her, is Nien.

“I thought you went home,” struggles Kotone, trying to dry her eyes, to shrink away. “Why are you still here?”

Silly to even think of asking, really — Nien isn’t the type to explain herself. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing,” says Kotone.

“I know you. You don’t cry over nothing.” Nien steps inside and shuts the door, and with it, extinguishes the light. She moves through the shadows to sit close by Kotone’s side.

Kotone feels the thrum of skin on skin. She holds out her phone. “It’s this,” she eventually admits.

Nien takes a moment to read the letter, impassive. Then she scrolls to the half-written reply, and in one swift motion, highlights the entire thing and deletes it.

“Hey!” Kotone jerks away, cradling her phone like a hand trawled over hot coals. “What did you—”

“Don’t.” Nien holds her gaze. Her eyes are adamant enough to stop the world in its tracks.

“I was working on that,” Kotone says anyway. She can feel the tears threatening to start again, springing from a place of equal parts shock and betrayal. “How could you?”

“You were making a mistake.” There is no humor in Nien’s voice, no drama, no nerve. “Once you start giving them any piece of yourself, you’ll never be able to stop.”

“But they’re right,” Kotone insists.

“They aren’t. Not ever.”

“I’m not as good as I need to be yet,” says Kotone. “I’m not someone who deserves their love.”

Nien looks at her, incomprehensible. If this is anger, if this is care, if this is anything close to the impulse that spurs her to pull Kotone close when she thinks they’re alone, then it has yet to make a home of her face. She leans in and says, “You’re already more than enough.”

Something Kotone doesn’t have time for lodges right and sharp between her ribs. She shakes her head. “Don’t tell me you’ve never felt this way before.”

The walls around them seem to bow under the weight of an uncomfortable silence. Nien doesn’t answer for a long, long time.

Kotone almost thinks to apologize, but finally:

“The person ‘I’ am,” says Nien, reaching out to brush a tear from Kotone’s cheekbone, “doesn’t need to change a thing about the person that I am.”

There was once a series called Girls Planet 999. It boasted twelve episodes, seven original songs, and nine finalists from a pool of ninety-nine contestants. And of these ninety-nine, there was once one named Hsu Nientzu.

They don’t call her that anymore. Kotone would know.

There are compilations online of each contestant’s parts on the show, easily available to anyone with an internet connection and a curiosity of the cat-killing nature. Nientzu’s has fifteen thousand views and lasts a mere fifty-five seconds. That’s all it came down to: weeks of grueling effort for less than a minute in a program that could not care less about her success.

It could be worse, Kotone supposes. She looks at some of the other contestants, and she shudders.

In the dim orange of her apartment, though, quiet and warm with the lights turned down low, Kotone checks and checks again. Even if she’s already been told that Jiwoo won’t be home for another four hours, it never hurts to be sure. One last look at the calendar says nothing to prove otherwise, so with some satisfaction, she resists the urge to glance back over her shoulder and taps on the thumbnail of Nientzu’s smiling face.

Fifty-five seconds. One girl. The story that unfolds before Kotone is both utterly new and so grievously familiar as to wound.

Nientzu is bright-eyed, earnest, damningly inexperienced. Laughably bad at singing. Ultimately no one of note.

She never stood a chance, but she loved it, wanted it, and gave to it everything she was. Her smile was real; her enthusiasm, more so. She didn’t know yet that acting any different — that acting, at all — was an option.

The video ends, and Kotone is left staring at her reflection in the darkened screen.

Nientzu is not the person Kotone knows.

Nientzu is not someone Kotone has ever known at all.

Kotone can’t see Nien the same way, after that.

She knows just as well as anyone that a few degrees of separation between an inner life and the limelight is little more than a reasonable boundary, but she can’t understand the sheer adherence Nien has to drawing those lines in pen. Faceless fans are one thing — Kotone longs to be another. She’s shared with her multiple homes and eighteen-hour days and the tender shape of her mouth. If that isn’t enough, then what is? And if that won’t ever change, then why can’t she stop the distraught little animal running itself ragged in the wheel of her heart, sniveling, What about me? I’m different, so what about me?

Nien, for all her cunning, pays no mind to the desperation chained to Kotone by the ankle. She continues to move through life in her cheerful, disingenuous way, and Kotone has no choice but to come along for the ride.

It’s the way Nien texts her goodnight. It’s the way she smiles like there’s some secret only the two of them know. It’s the way she catches Kotone’s eye in the studio mirror before tilting her head back for a drink, letting the light glisten on a single, perfect droplet of sweat as it slides down her neck and into her shirt.

(It’s the way she kisses her, once more, over a score for “Event Horizon” in the vocal practice room furthest down the hall.)

This is wrong, says the voice in Kotone’s head, as she stares at Nien’s turned back in sorrow and hunger. Idols don’t have feelings and they don’t have feelings for each other. She knew and understood and accepted this in the name of her dream, but still, she asked—

She asked Nien to pretend.

Shortly after midnight on the second day of June, Kotone goes to Nien’s room and finds the door ajar. Through the gap, she can see Nien sitting at the table, brow furrowed in concentration, writing something on a notecard.

Kotone knocks on the doorframe before peeking her head inside. “Are you busy right now?”

Nien looks up, then brightens. “Tone! No, not at all. Come in.” She stands to let her into the apartment. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.” Upon speaking it aloud, Kotone suddenly feels herself grow nervous. “Sorry, I don’t have anything prepared. Just — you know. It felt right.”

“Thank you,” says Nien, and she seems to mean it. “To tell the truth, I was really hoping you’d stop by.”

Kotone freezes. The apartment is a black hole, a pocket of space unto itself, too large and too small for her to be alone with Nien. She can’t hear anything save for, somewhere, behind the bathroom door, the muted sounds of a running shower — almost certainly Kaede.

Nien flashes her a grin, and Kotone is, at once, very, very, aware of how close they are.

“You gonna buy me that eyebrow piercing?” jokes Nien.

“No,” says Kotone, and without knowing what she’s trying to accomplish, continues, “I had something else in mind.”

“I’ll bite.” Nien takes a finger, presses it to her bottom lip. “Is it something that goes… right here?”

The kiss is too easy. Kotone knows by now how to stand on tiptoe until her mouth fits against Nien’s, and she does just that in the darkened kitchen of the apartment Nien and Kaede share. It’s as disorienting as the first day they met. It’s the gun above the mantle finally gone off, and more.

Instead of relief, though, Kotone can only taste bittersweet doubt in the back of her throat. She wonders if Nien feels the same way, if Nien has ever felt anything at all.

She wonders if this, too, is just for show.

Enough. With tears in her eyes, Kotone places one gentle palm on Nien’s chest and pushes her away. It feels like digging blunt, reluctant fingers into her own heart; it feels like splitting a blood-red pomegranate down through the middle.

“This isn’t you, is it?” she asks, slowly.

Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t déjà vu: Nien is surprised, but only for a moment. Disarmed, but never defenseless.

Hurt — and this, to anyone, is as clear as day, as a sharp fragment of glass — but she’s more than used to dealing with it.

In that moment, Kotone wakes to the realization of just how big of a mistake she’s made. She watches the gates close and lock by her own hand.

Nien, at least, doesn’t give her the grace of going so easily.

“Ha,” she says, “you don’t know the half of it.”

In the month that follows, Kotone can’t stand to be seen with Nien. She can’t stand to be seen with anyone, really, much less by anyone, and so she gets put on unofficial hiatus.

No vlogs, no schedules, no promotional activities. Unspoken: You have four weeks to get it together.

Kotone spends most of that time practicing, late at night, when no one else is there. She doesn’t dance in the dark anymore. She starts turning the lights on, letting herself get a good look at the absolute mess reflected back at her.

All this time, she’s prided herself on diligently pursuing her dream, on becoming the kind of idol who is always sincere, always honest, always real.

She looks in the mirror and sees the makeup she couldn’t leave her apartment without. She sees the tasteful curl of her hair and the pearly white veneers of her scowl.

Nien might lie, but at least she doesn’t pretend not to.

Kotone hates herself so much she could scream.

She lets the days pass from within the studio and the small box of her room. During the few moments in between, she has to wade through ebullient, waist-high waters to find solitude once more. The members practically bounce off the walls around her, pressing her buttons in new and creative ways. It’s an endless deluge of how are you and where have you been and can I borrow your iron? It saps at the patience she already doesn’t have.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” says Dahyun, reaching out without asking, “but what conditioner do you use? Your hair is always so soft!”

“Oh, I can’t sleep at night,” groans Hyerin. “Yeonji and Soomin have way too much energy. Can you tell them to quiet down?”

“Hey, you know that Jiwoo and Seoyeon unnie’s show comes out tomorrow, right? Please,” begs Yubin, “can you go buy some chips for the watch party?”

Kotone can’t imagine that they haven’t been told about her break. Maybe it doesn’t compute that she also needs a break from them, or maybe it’s possible that the company really hasn’t done its due diligence, but there’s only so many times she can keep herself in line.

A week slips through her fingers, then another, then another. Kotone spends as little time at the dorm as she can get away with.

One night, though, she gets back late, hoping to wash up and crawl under the covers without so much as eye contact with anyone else, and she steps out of the elevator to find Chaeyeon standing outside her door instead.

“Hi,” says Kotone, trying to be nice. They’re the same age; they’re on even ground. Chaeyeon is the only person who, in theory, doesn’t need any further incentive to meet Kotone where she’s at, and beyond that, it’s no crime to be here. “Waiting for someone?”

“Jiwoo,” says Chaeyeon, as if there would have been any other answer. This is Jiwoo’s room, too, after all, and Jiwoo and Chaeyeon are, well — Jiwoo and Chaeyeon.

“You can come in and wait for her there,” says Kotone, never slow enough to hold back and give way. “I don’t mind.”

So that’s how Chaeyeon ends up sitting at the little surface that can’t decide if it wants to be a desk or a table, how a kettle ends up on the stove to boil water for tea, and how Kotone ends up not in the shower, not in her pajamas, not in bed.

“Oolong or mint?” asks Kotone.

“Mint,” says Chaeyeon. Belatedly, she adds, “You didn’t have to do this. Really, thank you so much.”

“It’s nothing.” Kotone offers a tight smile through her exhaustion, and if Chaeyeon notices, she doesn’t say so.

“Oh! Let me help get the cups.”

Chaeyeon rises and goes to open the cupboard, taking out one plain white mug and then one of the ugliest cocktail glasses Kotone has ever seen. The pressure in Kotone’s head squalls at the same frequency as the kettle. She’d forgotten it was in there.

“What is this?” howls Chaeyeon, all sheepishness soon forgotten in the face of the admittedly ridiculous thing in her hand. It might have been a fish, once, or at least a glassblower’s sad attempt at one, or a manufacturing error that was never meant to make it onto shelves.

It also just really, really looks like a butt.

“Nien’s idea of a joke,” answers Kotone. And like all of them, it’s stupid, and that stupidity only pulverizes Kotone’s emotions into one gruesome, whirlwind slurry. A few weeks ago, she might have rolled her eyes to hide the color in her cheeks. Now all she wants to do is cry.

Chaeyeon, at least, looks to be having the time of her life. “This is the best thing ever, seriously. And you just had this sitting around?”

“You can have it, if you want.” The faster it leaves Kotone’s life, the better.

“Oh, no, no, I couldn’t.” With almost comical fondness, Chaeyeon puts the glass back and replaces it with a different, thankfully normal cup. “It would be wrong to take a gift for you. Nien’s so funny, though.”

“Of course.” A total riot.

And here, Chaeyeon turns to ask a question not so much loaded as it is a fistful of gunpowder to the face. “She really likes you, doesn’t she?”

If only Chaeyeon knew.

“No.” Kotone doesn’t say, Not any longer, or, More than I ever thought she would. All she replies with is, “How could anyone?”

The smile doesn’t leave Chaeyeon’s face, but something at its edges turns frozen and awkward. “What are you talking about?”

“You heard me,” mutters Kotone. She lowers her head, unable to look Chaeyeon in the eye, and the bitter words spill off her tongue before she can think to control them, before she can realize what they reveal about her own inconceivable failings. “Putting me in this group was a mistake.”

It shouldn’t be anything so noteworthy — and yet Chaeyeon, who has known Kotone for half a calendar year and has every right to treat her like the outsider she is, takes it like a blow to the ribs. She’s either too naive for this line of work or too good for this world — either way, a bleeding heart. “You don’t really mean that,” she says, words thick with concern. “You can’t.”

Funny she should mention that. If anyone would know the rules of the game, it’s Kotone. Her whole world is made of can’t and don’t and not where they can see you. She lives and breathes for the lofty roles expected of her, but this isn’t one of them. This is personal.

So for the first and only time, Kotone loses her temper with Chaeyeon. She gives in to the anger she so carefully keeps metered, keeps mellow, and she roars, “What do you know about what it’s like!?”

Kotone expects her to shrink. This is Chaeyeon, after all, who’s confrontational only in that gaudy, clownish way, and in her mind’s eye there’s something like wilting and breaking into nervous laughter before turning tail. But — this is Chaeyeon, and Chaeyeon, she’s forgotten, is the last person she should ever underestimate.

“I know,” Chaeyeon says, meeting Kotone’s eyes with a grieving sympathy that lances straight to the heart. “I really do. Maybe more than anyone should.”

Oh.

And — right.

This, coming from someone who has seen the ugliest faces reality has to show, is no empty condolence, and Kotone suddenly can’t decide between apology or plea. She’d forgotten, and guilt garrottes what little rage she made the error of showing. Her poor, ill-brokered decisions with Nien can’t hold a candle to everything that Chaeyeon has lived through.

No, she really isn’t fit to do this at all.

“Why?” asks Kotone, feeling the wave of despair crash ashore and take her under. “Why do you do this, then? Why do any of us?”

“I can’t answer for you,” says Chaeyeon, “but performing is all I know.”

“I don’t feel like I’m performing,” says Kotone. She can’t cry in front of Chaeyeon. She can’t. “It’s me. It’s only ever going to be me.”

Chaeyeon doesn’t talk down. She’s not patronizing or overstepping; she’s the same as ever, but even so, the gap between their respective accomplishments is as clear as day. “It’s me, too, when I’m on.”

Maybe it’s just the difference between fifteen years of experience, and zero. “Sometimes, I wish it wasn’t.”

“But what else would you do?” asks Chaeyeon. “When I say performing is all I know, I mean it’s the thing I do best, but can you imagine?” She lets out a small laugh. “No one can pretend all the time. It’s not healthy.”

A cold lump, hard to swallow and all-too-familiar, finds its way to the back of Kotone’s throat. “If you say so.”

“And besides,” says Chaeyeon, “nobody’s that good at lying.”

Kotone almost finds it funny, because it seems Chaeyeon doesn’t know Nien at all. Then again, evidently, neither does she.

She thinks about coming clean to Chaeyeon, about admitting to the one thing that eats at her more than anything else. It’s either that or continue facing this alone — and no matter what, the only way out is through.

But Kotone falters, and the kettle on the stovetop catches her eye instead. “You said mint?”

Chaeyeon may be kind and, in a way, wise beyond her years, but she’s still as easily diverted as ever. She smiles and slides her cup across the countertop. “Mint would be wonderful.”

July brings with it heat waves and a move and a brand-new member.

Or — brand-new in the sense that she, obviously, has never been in the group before. To Kotone, she’s a familiar face, and then some.

Zhou Xinyu is no longer blonde, but she’s still gorgeous and she’s still tall. She’s spent some time studying abroad, and her consonants are as crisp and tasteful as the wings of her eyeliner. She greets Kotone with a perfume-scented hug, brushing past her cheek in a storm of sweet, short-lived florals.

Kotone has kept in touch with her here and there, and for a period of exactly fourteen minutes, she believes herself to be Xinyu’s closest bond. This, as with many oversights in Kotone’s life, does not account for Nien.

On the day Xinyu is introduced, she and Nien have the kind of reunion a poet could only dream about — Nien screams in delight, and runs, and flings herself into Xinyu’s arms, where they twirl in a beautiful, perfect, giggly circle, pressing their foreheads together and laughing about an inside joke and forgetting, generally, that there are other people in the room with them.

It’s kind of cute, at first. Weeks later, though, Nien and Xinyu remain inseparable. They go out to eat together and they have long conversations into the night, always in Mandarin, always just the two of them.

Kotone isn’t jealous. She didn’t redownload a language-learning app and try to memorize her nǐ hǎos and wǒ ài nǐs. She doesn’t need to be Xinyu’s best friend, and she definitely doesn’t need to be Nien’s. Nothing at all, in this great, wide world, is wrong.

So, yeah. Kotone isn’t listening when she passes Nien and Xinyu in the hall, and she doesn’t pay any special attention to whatever they’re talking about.

“T’ài k’uā chāng le—”

“Zhēn de, wǒ gēn nǐ shuō—”

“Aiya, tsěn me huì!?”

It’s probably something hilarious. Not that Kotone would know, because her understanding of Mandarin is essentially nonexistent — to reiterate, she’s not on the language-learning app and never has been — but she can’t help latching onto the two syllables that stick like sand between her teeth.

“Nientzu,” says Xinyu, in the middle of what must be the most interesting story of all time. It rolls off her tongue with ease, like it was always meant to be.

And — Nientzu to Xinyu, Nien to everyone else — continues along as if it’s only natural. She doesn’t correct her, she doesn’t take offense, she doesn’t balk at the mere suggestion. She doesn’t seem to notice that, for Kotone, the planet has ground to a halt on its ugly, brittle axis.

Kotone reaches her room and throws the door open, slamming it closed with her back and sinking against it to the floor. She covers her mouth with her hands to stop whatever guttural wail threatens to come out of it.

Nientzu, her mind repeats. Nientzu. Not a big deal. That’s her name, after all, isn’t it?

But that’s just the thing: there is a name that Kotone is not entitled to. There is something, someone, who no one may ever claim as theirs.

Or so Kotone thought.

For Xinyu, that someone is within easy reach. It’s not a question of how, then, for Kotone to go on living with the knowledge that she’ll never know who she really wants, how to cope with the futility of truth, but of what she has to do instead.

She’s already lost everything. She may well do it again.

And if Xinyu is any proof, any consolation, then it’s possible to see the cupid’s face and live to tell the tale.

For the better part of a week, and for a few hours into the fifth day of counting, Kotone has trouble tracking Nien down. She’s normally such a vibrant presence; she steals the spotlight of any room she’s in, but it seems she has no problem with becoming a ghost. Kotone shouldn’t be surprised.

Kotone, too, should know better by now than to ask the other members for help. If she were really one to learn her lesson, though, she wouldn’t be doing this at all.

“Soomin and I are going out tomorrow, want to come with?” asks Yeonji in one conversation of many.

“Um, sorry,” says Kotone, “I’ll probably be—”

“Looking for Nien?” Yeonji makes a face and goes back to tapping at her phone. “Come on, unnie, for real?”

Kotone stops dead in her tracks. “Who told you that?”

“Um, everyone?” says Yeonji with the most withering of teenage eyebrow raises. “You’re, like, kind of obsessed with her.”

No way Kotone can take this lying down. She burns up and sputters, “Am not.”

“Are too. Yooyeon unnie said you were asking about her, and so did Sohyun unnie, and also Kaede unnie keeps wondering why you’re always trying to come over. And last night Xinyu unnie was like, ‘Nien never told me she and Kotone were so close’, and everyone had to be like, ‘Ha ha, yeah, it’s kind of’—”

“All right, I get it.” Kotone’s heard more than enough, and if she lets it go on, steam might just start coming out of her ears. “It’s not like that, really.”

“She’s pretty,” Yeonji simply says with a shrug.

“No, it’s — I think she’s a really good performer, and that I can learn a lot from her. I’ve never seen anyone dance the way she does. She joined right after us, too, and we should stick together, right?”

Yeonji doesn’t buy it for a second. “I don’t care what your deal with Nien is, okay? We just never hang out anymore, and it kind of sucks.”

There’s a rare vulnerability in there, a genuine sense of forlorn honesty that Yeonji doesn’t usually show behind her mischief, and Kotone could kick herself for letting it get this far.

“I know, and I’m sorry,” she says lamely.

“You said you were going to take me out for bingsu.”

The even lamer response: “I mean, at least you have Soomin, right?”

“But you don’t even have Nien.” And ouch — Yeonji might still be a kid, but she sure doesn’t know how to use the gloves. The only consolation is that she’s probably oblivious to the gravity of what she’s saying.

“I’ll make it up to you,” says Kotone, already cringing at the emptiness of her words, “I promise.”

Yeonji shrugs. “Yeah, okay. If you change your mind about tomorrow, just let me know.”

It’s the kind of thing that makes Kotone wonder, not for the first time, if she should call it quits, but then she’ll see Xinyu, and she’ll remember the shape of her mouth as it closed around the forbidden fruit — Nientzu, Nientzu, Nientzu — and she’ll put her head down and forge on.

The payoff comes sooner than she expects.

Kotone is leaving a practice room after two hours of diligently scraping the rust off her rap skills, exhausted and drained from writing herself into a circle (I like you, scratch out, I’m sorry, erase — rinse, rewrite, repeat), only to run into Sohyun on her way down the hall.

“Hi,” says Kotone, trying to duck out of the way and go home without any extra fuss.

It doesn’t really work, because Sohyun wants to talk. “Hey — you sounded good.” She runs a hand through her hair, bashful despite her cool exterior. “You wrote that yourself, right?”

“Um.” Kotone never meant for anyone to hear her lyrics, and now she’s so embarrassed she could die. “Yeah, it’s not much right now, but I guess you could say it’s a work in progress.”

“No, it’s great,” says Sohyun. She pauses, unsure, before speaking again. “Have you thought about writing for some of our tracks before? Rap isn’t my strong suit, so it’d be helpful to have a second opinion.”

Kotone blinks, taken aback. It’s sudden, it’s unusual, and above all else, she’s not quite sure where it’s coming from. “I’ll think about it?”

“Cool. Yeah. I mean, you don’t have to say anything now. I just wanted to float the idea out there.” Sohyun smiles awkwardly. “It’s only fair to give you a heads up, right?”

This can’t be all she wants, but Kotone doesn’t know her like that. She decides not to ask. Even if she did, she wouldn’t know where to start. “No, I understand. Thanks.” She turns to leave. “Have a good practice.”

Kotone gets as far as halfway to the exit when, finally, the other shoe drops.

“And, hey,” says Sohyun, from some nebulous space behind her, “you didn’t hear it from me, but — everyone in our apartment’s going to be gone tomorrow night, except for Nien. She’ll be home. Just her.”

Kotone hates the way her pulse races at the very idea. She hates the way she’s so obvious and so helpless in one, the way she can’t want — can’t have — in peace.

But far be it from her to refuse. “Thank you,” she whispers, not strong enough to look back.

“Don’t mention it.” Sohyun, even from this far away, is undeservedly kind. “I’m rooting for you, okay?”

“Have you been avoiding me?”

Kotone had wanted her first words to be perfect. She wouldn’t be able to depend on any other chance at this, she told herself, not with the way Nien could so easily disengage, and not with the way news of her loss would spread like wildfire through the dorms. One wrong move, and it’d be seven years of guaranteed hell, so she had better make it count. Nothing desperate. Nothing that would remind Nien of the screwup she is.

Now that she’s here, though, in the foyer of Nien’s new apartment, ankle-deep in the other members’ shoes and faced with the real prospect of whatever comes next, she finds herself crawling back into old, familiar skin. Her heart outpaces her mind and the unthinkable falls off her tongue.

Nien just stands there, and considers it. “Have I,” she repeats, “been avoiding you?”

A memory of a stupid conversation about a shovel flits through Kotone’s mind. Morbidly appropriate — seeing as she’s so intent on digging her own grave. “Well, have you?”

Nien’s laugh is somewhere between a bark and a scoff, but she smiles all the same. “No, but now that you mention it, I guess we really haven’t been running into each other lately. Crazy how that can happen, isn’t it?”

And here Kotone thought she might be able to provoke some kind of reaction out of Nien. As unwise as she knows it is, it’d at least be some form of proof, no matter how ruinous, that this could be a conversation of equals, human to fallible human. But no. It’s just lies, one after another and all the way down.

“It’s not like you to come over,” remarks Nien, as if she were saying something about the time or the weather.

“I know,” says Kotone. “Please—” Tell me you know it, too.

This Nien isn’t the one who arrived on a windswept spring morning, isn’t the one whose affection she rejected in unceremonious fear. This Nien is yet another of a number Kotone can’t even begin to name.

And this Nien flashes an easy grin, unaware of any bad blood that might simmer between them. “Did Chaeyeon send you to borrow some sugar again?”

“No,” says Kotone.

“Well, I’m thinking about dinner soon. Want to combine our delivery orders?”

“I already ate.”

“Huh.” A small silence. “Just bored, or what?”

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

Even the most perfect mask can’t account for the confusion that flickers across Nien’s face, and no normal person would act this way, so why should it? Why, then, it asks, did you even bother?

Kotone sees no other choice but to take the leap. “I can’t pretend anymore,” she says. And without fanfare, without finale, without any of the catharsis she might have once expected: “I want you, or — I want to know you, and I don’t really care which.”

The room falls away. The world goes still. It’s just her and Nien, together, alone.

There’s a shift in the air, and Nien — finally, her Nien, who hurts and who remembers and who is the only one who can forgive her — says, “That’s what you want.” She leaves it on a half-formed inflection, somewhere between question and observation.

“Yes,” says Kotone. She could string her heart on a wire for the chance to make it so. “More than anything.”

“You didn’t need convincing.” Once again, Nien doesn’t bother making it clear whether she’s asking or stating a fact, and Kotone can’t take it.

“Why would I?” she cries out in anguish. “I’ve always known, and I think I always will, and I can’t wait around any longer for someone to give me permission. I don’t care what anyone says. I want this.” As she says it, something seems to collapse into place, and the weight of her realizations buries the last of her courage in a landslide. She lowers her head, voice small. “That’s how much I care.”

Nien smiles, and Kotone can’t tell if it’s being done out of pride or amusement or the utmost intention. “You’ve come a long way, Tone-chan.”

“Then,” Kotone dares to hope, “does that mean—?”

“Of course not,” says Nien.

Kotone’s panic turns her reckless. “No. Please, give me a chance. If you’ll let me have this, just this, then all I’m asking is for you to listen to me.” It’s one mistake, and then another. She watches the hood of the car crumple on impact, her foot still on the gas.

Maybe someday, she’ll be able to look back and find it funny.

“Nientzu, please—”

It’s immediate. The look Kotone gets could pin her to the wall.

“You don’t get to call me that,” says — Nien, decisively, and Kotone finds she’s never been in any place to argue.

“Okay,” she surrenders, meek as a lamb.

The silence that follows is tense, horrible, deserved. If Kotone could only let it, it would swallow her whole. She has always wanted to apologize. She doesn’t know how.

And she wishes, sick as it is, for Nien to be angry with her. To deign her worthy of an emotion, any of them at all.

Oh, how she wishes.

“So,” asks Nien, “how much sugar did Chaeyeon want?”

Under the rug, swift as second nature.

“A cup and a half,” says Kotone, “if it’s not too much trouble.”

The simultaneous blessing and curse of Kotone’s life is its unwillingness to stand still. One new girl isn’t enough, fate says with a shrug, so before she even has time to catch her breath, in comes another one.

Mayu, they call her, and Mayu she is. Upon first impression, she already promises to be less of a hurricane than Xinyu. She’s soft-spoken and quietly attentive, with an endearing fierceness that manifests itself in the strangest ways.

Case in point: her ability to read people is, to put it generously, hit or miss, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. A single week of dorm life and she’s convinced Yooyeon is some kind of secret casanova.

“She goes to university, right?” When it’s just the two of them, Mayu prefers Japanese, and Kotone has come to find solace in it, too. “Oh, she must be the most popular girl on campus.”

Kotone makes a face. “I don’t really think so.”

“Really?” Mayu seems genuinely shocked. “But — she’s so perfect.”

“Yooyeon is a loser,” Kotone says firmly. “She couldn’t date her way out of a cardboard box.”

It becomes apparent that Mayu has a lot of ideas about what kinds of people the other members are, and they’re fantastical to an almost unbelievable degree. By her observation, their group is full of supermodels and kid geniuses and professional balladeers. In reality, it’s closer to sixteen of the industry’s least coherent fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds rehomed to an agency whose own coherence has room to improve. Still, Mayu’s oddly charming naivety gives Kotone the urge to dote on her, and checking in becomes a decision, and then a habit.

“Are you settling in all right?” asks Kotone over breakfast.

“Ah — thank you for asking.” Mayu is nothing but whole-hearted. In other words, a welcome change of pace. “Yes, I’ve been fine.”

“It can’t be easy to adjust to the dorms.” Kotone knows through the grapevine that Mayu is more than capable of living on her own, that she could be working her part-times and getting a degree in something white-collar, something fancy. “I’m sure we’re a lot to handle.”

Mayu shakes her head. “No, no. I’m getting more and more used to everything now.” She pauses, thinking. “Well, I guess I knew I’d have roommates, but I have to admit, I couldn’t have expected it’d be like this.”

That sends Kotone right back to her favorite hobby: spinning the chamber and playing roulette. She’s more than aware who Mayu’s roommates are, but she’s trying harder than anything to keep her lessons learned. She has no choice but to tread with caution; she has no option left but to swallow the bitter pill of her reality. “How so?”

“They’re funny,” says Mayu with a half-embarrassed little smile. “Full of surprises. Kaede has such an innocent face, but she’s so tough. And Nien — well, I don’t really understand her, but I like her a lot.”

Yeah, thinks Kotone, I know the feeling. “She’s nice, once you get to know her.”

“Hmm, I guess.” Mayu, as it turns out, has surprises of her own. Her next words are so underwhelmingly mundane that Kotone almost forgets to recognize them for the bombshell they are. “She’s kind of a heartbreaker, isn’t she?”

Almost, of course, but not quite. Kotone chokes on the glass of water raised to her lips. “What? No,” she sputters. “What makes you say that?”

“I knew a girl like her in high school,” says Mayu, and at this, her cheeks turn the faintest shade of pink. “You’d better stay away,” she jokes.

Kotone isn’t going to read into it. She won’t. “Don’t be silly,” she says. “She’s not like that at all.”

“I mean,” Mayu implores, with that same constant, delicate confidence, “she doesn’t take anything very seriously, does she?”

Again, Kotone has to catch herself, and she allows herself but one step, and then another. “Sometimes I think she’s more serious than anyone I’ll ever know.”

The character that makes up Nien’s name is just that: Nièn, meaning to read, to study, to scold, to long for. To Kotone, it is nen, a word signifying feeling, memory, and desire. It is one half each of kenen — worry — and zannen — regret.

It is comprised of two smaller components. The character for now, like a gently sloping roof, shades the rounded, smiling strokes of the character for heart. It evokes presence and passion; it describes a range of emotions from fondness to immense pain.

Kotone couldn’t think of a better way to describe all that she is. Nien wears many faces, each more elaborate than the last, each equally true and false in their own particular ways. She fills Kotone with a hunger that she hasn’t felt since she first saw the glowing light of the stage and thought, That’s going to be me.

But with tzú, the hidden character dropped from her full name, there’s something Kotone can’t help but find impossible to ignore. Tzú, in Mandarin. Ji, in Japanese. Mercy, charity, love.

Forgiveness.

One modest syllable that softens and rounds out what comes before, severed from its partner like a ballast without a vessel. What, then, Kotone wonders, becomes lost in the process? Where does Nientzu end, and where does Nien begin?

Not that Kotone is superstitious — she’s never been one to pay these things much mind. Sometimes a name is just a name, and sometimes people meet for no reason at all.

Kotone’s own name is as simple as it gets: the sound of a koto. A song, plucked clear and bright, from thirteen pliant strings.

Kotone gets a new piercing.

This, in isolation, isn’t anything out of the ordinary. Her history and a cursory inspection of the sides of her head could be the first to tell anyone that, in a time of crisis, it’s all she knows how to do.

There have never been caveats before, though, save for the inevitably disappointed look on her mother’s face, and even that feels like such a distant memory. It’s something faint and faded and so much lower in stake. To say the least, things have changed.

Now Kotone has a face that gets a couple million views on YouTube and is downloaded onto a hundred thousand phones. She isn’t exactly supposed to change her appearance without express permission.

Of course, it isn’t a neck tattoo, or a slit eyebrow, or a buzzed, baby-fuzz scalp. It’s just one more tiny nub of metal through her cartilage. It’s nothing.

And if Kotone really believes that, then she’s gotten much more comfortable with believing her own lies than she’d like to admit.

Or, as Soomin puts it: “Dude, you’re in so much trouble.”

Subunit practices have already begun, even though they’re not set to debut for another three months. Kotone waves Soomin away from her face and says, “Quit it. I know, okay? I’m already worried.”

“Not worried enough,” says Soomin, leaning back into her stretch, “if you think they’re just going to act like everything’s fine.”

The eight of them are hanging around in front of the mirror, ostensibly warming up and waiting to get started, but there’s no mistaking the way their manager has disappeared from the room, phone in hand. It’s been twenty minutes. The choreographer still hasn’t arrived. No one’s been able to take their eyes off of Kotone since.

“You know,” says Kotone, a little too loudly, “if you wanted a closer look, all you had to do was ask.”

A couple members glance away. Mayu, bless her heart, pipes up with, “It’s not even that noticeable.”

No, not at all. Tell that to the fans who could pick her ear out of a homicide lineup.

It takes until the end of practice for the hammer to come down. Kotone waits like a prisoner at the gallows as they run formation after formation after formation, part of her mind always somewhere else. She wonders if they’ll call her to a conference room, or chew her out in front of everyone.

As it turns out, they don’t choose either. The group is dismissed from practice, and while they all say their thanks and get ready to leave, the looming shadow of the manager comes to drift over her like a cloud.

“Hey,” he says, broad shoulders blotting out the light behind him, “we’re not happy about what you did.”

Kotone looks up from where she’s kneeled, re-tying her shoe. It’s straight to the point, because she’s too level-headed to play dumb, because the company is well aware, because they’ll no doubt take whatever advantage they can get. She settles for, “I know.”

Around them, the other members haven’t noticed, or are pretending not to. Several of them slip out the door and down to the van.

“You’re lucky this is a small thing. Corporate’s decided to let it slide just this once, but you better be careful from now on.” The expression on his face doesn’t budge an inch. “Don’t let it happen again.”

Kotone thinks to feel ashamed. Then something slides into place like an optometrist’s lens — one, or two? — and Kotone’s world comes into perfect clarity.

She stands. She’s not quite tall enough to meet him eye-to-eye, but she rises with a straight back and set jaw nonetheless. “It’s my money,” she says. “It’s my body.” Her voice doesn’t tremble — her hands do it for her.

The manager blinks, caught off guard. He’s at a total loss, just briefly, before his face colors as if he might explode. Kotone isn’t supposed to be a troublemaker. None of them are — and yet here she is, biting the hand, biting back. He bristles. He won’t stand for this injustice. He opens his mouth, practically spitting flame, and… chokes.

It takes Kotone a moment to realize he hasn’t gone silent out of the goodness of his heart. She follows the gaze from his pale, bug-eyed face to none other than—

Nien, dressed for her own practice, a tote bag slung over one shoulder, at ease.

Kotone flinches. How long has she been there?

And, more importantly — just how much has she heard?

“Ah, looks like I’m a little early,” says Nien. “Should I wait outside?”

Whatever the manager meant to say, he coughs it back down with a scowl and nods acknowledgement at Nien. “No. Timing’s perfect. Start getting warmed up.” To Kotone, he motions towards the exit and says, gruffly, “Let’s clear out.”

Whatever righteousness Kotone felt earlier is now lost, gone, smoke in the wind. She ducks her head and does as she’s told.

But as Nien lets her by, she locks eyes with Kotone, and a strange, new look crosses her face. It could be inquiry, it could be doubt.

And in Kotone’s spiraling imagination, it could even be something like approval.

Nien’s subunit debuts to raving applause. The fan and press showcases go off without a hitch, their first-day album sales hit the highest numbers to date, and they take the stage at Music Bank before a sea of glittering lights.

Kotone spends all that time in a studio, preparing for her own debut, eighteen hours a day.

She replays the music video in the dark beneath her sheets. She dreams of piles and piles of dollar bills, each one stamped front and center with Nien’s grinning face.

The other subunit sings about confidence and self-love. Meanwhile, Kotone wakes before the sun so she can arrive on set in search of diamonds — beautiful, impervious, unattainable. If it weren’t the utter antithesis of funny, she’d laugh.

Has she always been that obvious, she wonders? Can friend and fan alike so plainly see that all she’s ever known is the chase?

Another filming session rolls around. It’s nighttime on location, and she and Yeonji sit in the schoolyard bushes between takes, playing with their prop flashlights.

Flick. On comes Yeonji’s flashlight. Then flick, and the beam shuts off. On again, off again, on, off, on, off.

“You know Morse code?” asks Kotone. Bright, circular afterimages dance in her vision, and she blinks hard, trying to press them away.

“No, I’m just messing around.” Yeonji shoots her a look. “Do you know Morse code?”

“A little bit. SOS, that kind of thing.”

“Bo-ring,” Yeonji laughs. “I mean, do you know anything cool?”

Kotone read a book once and did a camp in elementary. “If you do eight of the short ones in a row, it signals a communication error.”

The moon above is full and lustrous, but its glow doesn’t reach. It can only drown out the stars foolish enough to be close, and drown it does — heartily. Kotone sits down below on shadowed ground, untouched in her uniform the color of the cosmos, and keeps her face turned above.

“Hey,” asks Yeonji out of the midnight blue, “are you ever going to stop moping, or are you just waiting until it’s too late?”

Kotone tears her gaze away from the sky. “What,” she asks, in a voice so shaken she barely recognizes it as her own, “are you talking about?”

Yeonji sighs out through her nose. “You remember Nien’s leaving on tour next month, right?”

September will come, the leaves will start to turn, and Nien will board a plane to the other side of the world.

Yeah, Kotone remembers.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

“Okay,” says Yeonji, “but If you’re going to do something about it, do it now. And then?” She pauses and faces Kotone with a very grave expression. “Get off your sorry ass and come get that bingsu with me.”

It’s Nien who finds her first.

let’s get lunch! reads the innocuous little text, followed by a mascot sticker flashing the thumbs-up. Kotone would have to be crazy to agree, and even crazier to refuse.

This time, she doesn’t need any of her roommates’ help choosing what to wear. She throws on a t-shirt and makes sure her pants don’t have any holes in the knees, and then she’s on her way.

Nien is already waiting outside her door. “Where to?” she asks, in lieu of a greeting.

“Oh — I don’t know,” says Kotone. She’s jarred by the familiarity of it all, the way it feels like nothing has ever gone wrong. “I didn’t have anything in mind.”

“Well, think fast, ‘cause I’m letting you pick,” Nien says. At Kotone’s dumbfounded expression, she laughs, looking rather pleased with herself. “I promise, a hundred percent. It’s my treat.”

“I…” Eventually, Kotone hems and haws so much that Nien takes the wheel, holding out both of her fists like she’s got something wrapped in each.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” she says. “One, or two?”

The refrain is familiar, reminding Kotone of something she can’t quite place. She taps the back of Nien’s left hand and says, “Two.”

Nien flips her hand over and opens it, smiling wide, though of course she isn’t holding anything. “Ta-da! The new pho place down the block!” She leans in and beams at Kotone like she can’t believe her luck, like she wasn’t ever completely in control in the first place. “Perfect — I’ve been meaning to try it.”

“What was the other option?” asks Kotone, skeptical.

“Raiding Nakyoung’s instant ramyeon stash,” says Nien, “so trust me, this is way more fun.”

The weather outside is a welcome surprise, pairing the cheerful slant of the sun with cool, tempering gusts of wind. Autumn is already knocking on the door, and to Kotone, it’s a rare sight. Back in her hometown, the tail end of summer always meant a brutal swelter, a heat hot enough to bake, rippling mirages sucked from the black asphalt and slicked down the back of her neck.

Come to think of it, Kotone hasn’t felt that way since—

“—the last time we went out together,” Nien is saying. “Remember how fun that was? Can you believe how long it’s been?”

Since they kissed for the first time? Since Kotone’s life has been turned upside down, spinning out with white smoke streaming from the tires?

Their shoulders brush against each other as they walk side-by-side down the street, and Kotone has to look away, as if she hasn’t known Nien in a thousand other ways, closer and more radiant and infinitely worse.

“I can’t wait,” says Nien.

Kotone latches onto the shift in topic like a liferaft. “I thought you didn’t like pho?”

“I do,” says Nien. “I just like other Vietnamese food better.” She glances over her shoulder at Kotone, seemingly not fazed in the least. “Nobody makes it right, though, and that’s if they know how to make it at all. So pho it is!”

It, in a word, certainly is — the storefront is narrow, and the inside, even more so. From a pill-shaped speaker on the front counter, mellow lo-fi underscores the chatter from the kitchen. Kotone and Nien wedge themselves into a booth and attempt to place an order off the tiny menu taped to the back of the napkin dispenser, after which the bowls arrive in three minutes flat.

“Moment of truth?” asks Nien, snapping her chopsticks apart and heaping a hefty pile of bean sprouts and basil into her soup, followed by a glob of sriracha that turns her broth a vibrant red.

“I guess so. Oh, no thank you,” says Kotone, when offered the sriracha in turn.

Nien peers down at her bowl before looking over the rim at Kotone, amused. The steam dances in front of her face, turning her features wispy and unclear. “You don’t like spicy food?”

“No,” says Kotone. She squeezes a lime wedge into her soup, placing the spent peel on the edge of her plate. “Why waste my time on something that’s only going to hurt?”

“I think waste is a strong word,” says Nien. “What if it’s worth it? Or, what if you like it anyway?”

Kotone flattens her mouth into a tight-lipped frown. “Right. Who actually thinks that?”

“Ah, I wouldn’t know,” Nien says cheekily. “It’s never been spicy to me.”

With that, Nien chows down on a great big helping of noodles, her enthusiasm only matched by the pace of her movements. Kotone sits and watches, her own pho still steaming away.

A couple chews, then a swallow. Hold on, Kotone wants to say. Slow down.

“Well?” she asks.

“Hm!” Nien’s eyes light up. “Better than any restaurant back in Taipei,” she says, adding with a wink, “though my mom’s still the one to beat.”

This is the first Kotone’s ever heard about either of her parents. “Yeah, I bet.”

“I hope you can meet her sometime,” says Nien. “I think she’d really like you.”

As if Kotone could ever be introduced to Nien’s mother. As if Kotone could ever be folded into Nien’s life in the way that she’d like to be, to be allowed to see the full truth and nothing but.

“I wish I could say the same about my mom. She can’t even handle girls with dyed hair,” Kotone jokes.

She expects Nien to laugh, but instead, she’s faced with a silence so sharp it punctures Kotone’s lungs and leaves her gasping for air. It only takes one look to know that Nien, who’s never solemn, who’s never caught without a smile, who never tells the truth, isn’t kidding this time.

“Hey,” says Nien, “I don’t say that to just anyone.” She stares Kotone down, brown irises turning fearsome and fiery where they catch the light. “My mom is the most important person in my life. If I say she’d like you, then I mean it. And it means — I like you, too.”

Kotone can’t breathe. “What are you saying?” she whispers. And even quieter, so small she can’t be sure she hasn’t imagined it: “Why now?”

There is no answer that would satisfy her. If Kotone thinks about it for a moment too long, there may never be.

But all Nien says is, plainly, “I underestimated you, Kotone.”

No, no, no. That can’t be right.

What does Nien even see in her?

Kotone doesn’t have Sohyun’s thoughtfulness or Mayu’s sincerity. She lacks Chaeyeon’s conviction and Yooyeon’s blunt candor. She’s never been brave or brazen or by Nien’s side from the very beginning.

Kotone isn’t Xinyu, and she will never be.

She’s just the girl she’s always been, with twisted arms and crossed fingers and a claw-machine heart, reaching just to reach but never willing enough to have. Whatever she did to earn this, it isn’t nearly enough.

How cruel, then, to finally get what she’s dreamed of — crueler still to know it’s too good to be true. Fate is not so kind and Nien is not so simple. Maybe, in another universe, where Kotone was born special and extraordinary and, above all else, deserving, it could have turned out differently.

This Kotone, in this world, will never know.

“You’re important to me,” says Nien, “and so, I’ll tell you again. My name is Hsu Nientzu. I’m a Gemini and an O blood type. I was born on a Monday, and my favorite color is green.”

Kotone hears, but does not listen. She’s too busy, both in selfishness and self-loathing, and she peeks through the blinds to find that her greed is just as bottomless as it’s always been. She wants without sanction and she wants beyond reason; she wants her, she wants her. And oh, does she want, despite knowing where it can only lead.

But a lie told by two people is true to both.

How much further could she possibly fall, after every mistake, after every chance she’s let go of, to allow herself this?

Kotone faces Nien, eye to faithless eye.

“All right,” she says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

There’s something so insidiously nice about going on dates with Nien and calling them just that.

Nien makes for a good girlfriend, always brimming with ideas about where to go and what to do, and Kotone can’t resist letting herself get dragged along. It’s the big things — aquariums, amusement parks, bites of cake off the same spoon — and the little ones, too.

It’s the living room, with the lights off, watching a movie on Nien’s tablet and sneaking kisses under the blanket. It’s having her heart run over, each and every time, by the way Nien looks at her and calls her name.

It’s the horrible waking nightmare of how it’s all the same, and how, like a snake eating its own tail, it must end in the same cataclysmic way.

Kotone tries to be careful. Suspicion and distance are the sole defenses she has against her impending ruin, but when it comes to Nien, there’s woefully little she can do. It doesn’t feel fair to hold her at arm’s length, to keep her away when her outward effort is so sincere. A single smile is all it takes for Kotone to bend.

Nothing ever changes, then. Kotone is, and always has been, so, so easy to please.

Not that Nien is the one doing all the wheedling, because Kotone is more than a willing accomplice. She goes along with as many plans as she concocts. What else can she call her excuses, her texts to Nien in the middle of the night, asking if she has a spare minute, or two, or sixty? No less than half the blame lies with her, and not just, if she’d only be able to admit it.

It’s the kind of mess that keeps Kotone up at night, but every morning, the sun rises once more, and she’s back out the door and by Nien’s side. Then the moment she’s alone again, the thoughts rush in to fill the space like a dark and unrelenting tide.

She can’t play house with Nien forever. She doesn’t live in a bubble, and she isn’t the exception. There are built-in limits to how far they can take this, from time and emotion both, and if Kotone doesn’t end things soon, then someone else will do it for her — management, maybe, or merely Nien herself.

No, she can only keep her sight turned away for so long. Whether it’s on a plane or behind a mask, Nien will go, Nien will go.

The night before Nien leaves on tour, Kotone comes over to her room to watch her pack.

“Kaede’s out getting last-minute supplies with some of the others,” Nien explains, “and Mayu unnie went to the gym. She’s trying to get ripped before you guys debut.” A laugh. “I keep telling her she needs to move on from the five kilo dumbbells, but, you know. At least she’s having fun.”

A pearl blue duffel sits on the rug in front of the bed, its soft sides collapsed in on an empty center. Kotone feels much the same way, cratered-out and hollow and running on borrowed time.

“Are you excited?” she asks, more for her own distraction than Nien’s sake.

“Super,” says Nien. “America’s crazy, right? I mean, I’ll get to try a real hamburger.”

Here Kotone is, on the rumpled covers of the girl she thinks about more than anyone she’s ever met, already feeling the aftermath of devastation yet to come. She’s trying so hard to just barely hold herself together, and Nien is talking about hamburgers.

Stupid, so stupid.

Kotone shouldn’t have expected otherwise.

This time, she doesn’t have the will to call Nien out on it, and the realization only makes her more upset. She and Nien are already changing. She and Nien are already drifting apart.

“Hey.” Nien waves a hand in front of her face. “Anyone home?”

Kotone blanches. “Sorry,” she says, “I’ve just… had a lot on my mind recently.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” says Nien. She makes a sympathetic face. “Your subunit practices so much these days, huh? That stuff’s never easy.”

“It’s fine,” says Kotone. She pauses, trying to find an excuse, but each one is flimsier than the last. “After all this time, I guess I’m looking forward to it.”

“I can’t believe I won’t be here when your music video comes out.” Nien looks over with a pout, before finally taking a stack of clothes and shoving them in her bag. “I wanted to be the first one to leave a like.”

“That’s basically impossible,” says Kotone. “Besides, who would know?”

“I would,” says Nien. “And so would you.” She grins, all but ready to boast. “It’d be our little secret.”

Kotone, no matter how halfhearted, still feels something jump in her chest. “Don’t let the other girls know. They’ll get jealous.”

“So let ‘em.” Nien says with a shrug. “Can’t please everyone, Kotone, now can you?”

Maybe not, but — it hasn’t stopped Kotone from trying. Whether here or in the practice room, whether vying for audition placements or precious, slivered attention, she’s always wanted to be looked up to and adored. It’s maddening; it’s asymptotic. No matter how close she gets, it won’t ever be enough.

Even Nien, who has offered nothing short of an invitation up on a handheld platter, feels forever out of reach. Her warmth is so convincing and so thorough that it may as well be real, but Kotone can’t move past all the times it hasn’t been. She can’t bear the thought of falling once again. Maybe, in this, they were never meant to be.

Kotone sits, the unease roiling within, and doesn’t say a word. Nien takes in the sudden silence and changes course without hesitation.

“I heard about a game they play over in America,” she says. “It’s called ‘two truths and a lie’. You say three things about yourself and people try to guess which one’s fake. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

“Sounds a little dumb,” says Kotone, finally, choosing to keep her worries under the surface and hope the water stops bubbling before she can change her mind. “It’s not much of a game if it isn’t someone you just met.”

Nien laughs. “It can’t be as easy as you think. Let’s do it,” she says. “Let’s give it a try. See how well we know each other.”

What a way, then, to slaughter the illusion in cold blood. Why can’t Kotone keep this, hold the curtain closed, for just a while longer?

“You first,” offers Nien.

“My birthday’s in March. I used to work part-time in a noodle shop. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a basketball player,” says Kotone.

“Hey, come on,” Nien objects, “you think I don’t know when your birthday is? And a basketball player? At your height?” She gives Kotone a look, more teasing than reproachful. “That’s too easy. Try again.”

“Like what?” Kotone doesn’t know how to play games like these. “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me a story,” says Nien. “Try to trick me with something I wouldn’t know.”

“If you insist.” Kotone digs her fingers into her knees, racking her brain for secrets she hasn’t shared. It doesn’t feel possible for them to exist, not with the way she feels transparent next to Nien, but some part of her still wants to try. “After coming home from Girls Planet, I didn’t know if I was ever going to make it as an idol, so I thought about getting a tattoo. Just a little one, on the nape of my neck, but of course my mom said no. Not that it matters — I wasn’t old enough, anyway.”

“Of what?” asks Nien.

“A butterfly,” says Kotone, “for the symbolism, and, um.” She feels her ears turn red in embarrassment. “Because of LOONA.”

“All right, I’ll believe it.” Nien is confident. “That’s the truth.”

And it is. “I was a pretty good student. Nothing special, but I paid attention and I tried my best. I probably could have studied more, but I was usually dancing after school, so I didn’t really have the time.” Kotone presses her lips into a rueful smile. “My mom was always on my case about that, too.”

“You’re underselling this one,” says Nien, after only a brief moment of consideration, “because you’re smart but you don’t like to brag, but this is another truth.”

Kotone furrows her brow. “I’m really not that—”

“Yes, you are,” says Nien, “and you know it.”

She’s too good at this. She can see right through Kotone, right into her glass bones and display-case skin.

“So, what now?” asks Kotone. “You already know. You’ve already won.”

“Nah,” says Nien. “I’m still curious. Hit me with your best lie.”

Something senseless, something ludicrous: “In ten years, I think I’ll be married.”

Nien, true to her nature, lets a coy smile sneak over her face. “Well, you can never tell,” she says. “Anything’s possible, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Kotone is unable to look at her expression. “It’s your turn.”

As she says it, a sense of creeping dread sneaks into the back of her mind. She doesn’t know why it bothers her so much. Nien lies, and Kotone should be nothing if not used to it — so why is this any different?

A beat. “The funny thing is,” starts Nien, so naturally that, at first, it doesn’t even sound like part of the game, “when I was born, my parents thought I might have been deaf. I failed the screening three times in a row. They were almost going to move neighborhoods so I could be closer to a school for it, and I still took sign language lessons until I was seven, but it turns out the test doesn’t work right unless you’re calm and quiet.” She laughs. “Me? As a baby? Not a chance.”

It’s too specific; too sharp for the details to be tripwires. Kotone forgets to stop herself, and she lets her eyes drift to Nien’s face, taking in every inch of its unassuming, treacherous beauty. “Next,” she breathes.

“I’ve always wanted to be an idol,” Nien continues. “Ever since I was a kid, I saw those billboards, and I knew. You’ve heard of Tzuyu, right? And Shuhua? My friends and I used to cut class to go buy albums from the CD shop, and if one of us pulled their photocards, we all fought over it like crazy. I wanted to be the kind of person other people would do that for, so I auditioned. I trained. I’m here. This is the thing I’m always going to want most.”

Here, Kotone finds her shoulders trembling, whether in humorless laughter or quiet weeping, she doesn’t know. She won’t even need to ask to be sure. “Okay,” she says, “next.”

“And…” Nien trails off.

“And?”

“And,” says Nien, “I love you.”

Kotone’s heart stops, freighted with shock and shot through the middle. Inside her chest, it drops like a stone, plummeting straight past denial and bargaining to stage five, to acceptance, to resignation.

By the rules of the game, she is entitled two truths — no more, no less — and the process of elimination.

Now where has she heard that one before?

“So?” Nien gazes on, expectant, perhaps even hungry. “What’s the verdict?”

“Don’t be silly,” says Kotone. She can’t bring herself to be angry at Nien, and she never will. “I think we both know.”

Then, where Kotone expects a sly smile, a look too somber to be relief takes hold of Nien’s face instead, spreading from corner to corner like a bruising weight off her chest. “Yeah?” she asks. “How about it — the cat’s finally out of the bag.”

It doesn’t make any sense. Nien has nothing to apologize for. It’s kind, at the very least, to afford Kotone a hint of remorse, but she only has herself to blame.

“I didn’t think I’d ever tell anyone, but…” Gently, Nien turns to Kotone, so tentative as to be almost pleading. “It’s you.”

Nien, who is never afraid of anything. Nien, who never has to ask.

Nien, who is so far away and yet close enough to touch, with a silver tongue and soft lips separated from each other by gleaming white. And if such a masquerade has lasted them this long, then, surely, one more couldn’t hurt.

After all, Kotone is a creature of habit. She cups Nien’s face, and, mouthing along to a song she already knows, whispers, “I love you, too.”

Kotone lets herself believe the lie. She closes her eyes, and she leans in.