Chapter Text
Jimin is thoroughly, fully, one hundred percent sure and convinced she’s living through a statistical anomaly.
See, there are eight billion people on this earth. Out of those, several millions identify as lesbians or bisexuals. Out of those, a generous fraction are single. Out of that fraction, a solid number are at least mildly attractive, geographically available, and not completely unbearable character-wise. By every law of probability, Jimin should’ve kissed at least one of them by now.
But since the only law that applies to her is Murphy law, she hasn’t.
Jimin isn’t unlucky in love, because the word “unlucky” suggests that the universe occasionally tries to throw her a bone, then snatches it away for sport. Unlucky in love sounds chic, tragic, and ultimately, well, movie-esque: missed connections, rain-slick streets where someone turns the corner two seconds too early, needledrops, sad montages and loud, obnoxious, semi-profound confessions of love that lead into rejections.
No, that’s not Jimin’s case.
There’s a difference between being cosmically jinxed and just simply… Invisible. It might sound dramatic, but only until she can thoroughly explain the tragedy using life examples and numerical, purely statistical expectations. Then it becomes “oh woah, man, you just might die alone, sorry” type of sad.
She knows she’s attractive. This whole “women don’t see me” argument isn’t insecurity speaking, god forbid, — she has mirrors, critical thinking. She has strangers who tell her so, unsolicited, in bathroom lines and DM requests. Objectively speaking, she has the kind of face that belongs on huge paintings that fill a whole wall in cool, fancy museums centuries from now. She should not be struggling, ever.
And yet.
Okay, it’s not like women don’t notice her completely — oh, they do, everyone does: dogs, kids, married men, married women, birds, mice, rats, all sorts of beings with clean souls and working eyes. But women focus on the wrong thing. They look at her and see a painfully straight girl, not even a fun one, just the kind who goes fake gay in college for aesthetics, because whatever happens in college your daddy paid for, stays in college your daddy paid for. They see her as a permanent fixture of heterosexuality, some kind of ambassador: a genetically engineered straight woman that will grow up to be a majestic wife for a mediocre looking man with whom she will have at least three kids and family pictures that will upset others purely by existing so perfectly.
It’s not her fault she’s pretty and dresses well. Her style is a product of revolution against the overall tastelessness of her peers: because, no offense, really, but she’s simply better for not wearing oversized-shaped something every day. Bring it to her lawyer, if you want, but Jimin will gladly plead guilty for the crime of being too stylish.
Overall, the insinuation is insulting, because she has a long, long list of receipts: six years of repressed catholic school pining (a rude cliche and an overestimation, she confesses, because her parents don’t really care who she kisses as long as she won’t die alone, and Jimin herself always knew, gay or not, she was closest thing to perfectection anyway), an impure tumblr history she prays never leaks, and the kind of archive of unconsummated crushes that should qualify her as a reparations recipient. Where’s her money for crying over Anne Hatheway’s marriage in 2012? Will she finally get her payment for watching all Jodie Foster movies? Yeah, all 50 of them, including the one where she’s dead and a failed baseball player carries her ashes to the seaside.
And yet, in practice, despite being beautiful, smart, and visibly progressive enough to be seen as gay, she’s like a fire alarm everyone treats as a drill. Nobody believes the danger is real, and she hopes someday it will somehow karmically catch up to them, but, like, in a small way: they will lose their wallet, or drop their phone into toilet, or maybe, twenty years from now, they will see her and her beautiful wife and realize how wrong they were for not trying to fight for her heart.
Every time it happens, Jimin can pinpoint the exact moment where women’s perception tilts away from her, despite her using the best flirting method to exist (her face). It’s in the split second smile that doesn’t stick, in the way their shoulders settle back into neutrality; she watches their attraction and her chances dissolve in real time, like raccoons watch cotton candy melt in water when they decide to wash it. The methods are right, it’s the nature that’s wrong.
That hurts her ego more than outright rejection, because it denies her the dignity of being a risk. She deserves to be someone’s what-if, someone’s right person at the wrong time, someone’s reference while listening to older modern baseball albums.
So, she documents these little failures, half compulsively, half methodically. Her notes app is a catalogue of sexuality erasures and all the day-to-day lesbophobia she faces. The titles read pathetically, like little letters from a deep state war no one else but some paranoid grandmas and her know is happening:
— SHE SAID I LOOK LIKE I ENJOY TAYLOR SWIFT. (????)
— SHE ASKED IF I WAS WAITING FOR MY BOYFRIEND. IN A GAY CLUB. (I WAS IN JEANS!!!!!!!!)
— SHE TOLD ME I WAS “VERY WOKE” FOR WATCHING A PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE THREE TIMES IN THEATERS. (Which, actually, the second worst thing anyone told her after that one monologue where her dad indirectly implied that she will die alone, sad, and a virgin. Which is, okay, a dramatic retelling, because he just said that she should try to talk with more girls, and maybe he even tried to set her up on a date with a girl from church, but the sadness in his eyes when she came home during winter break and told her parents she’s still not seeing anyone except her dweeby roommate was unbearable and seemed almost rooted in homophobia.
Anyway, can you even imagine how fucking hard it was to find an obscure French lesbian movie in Korean cinemas? Can you, actually? She made Minjeong — aforementioned dweeby roommate — drive nineteen kilometers on a rental moped after discovering on a spot that, apparently, one out of two theaters that was supposed to premiere a sad little gay movie was permanently closed. After absorbing that comment fully, she sobbed into Minjeong’s shoulder for so long and with such intensity that her spine ached for a week afterward. Minjeong, faking gracefulness as if she’s getting paid by her parents for it, never mentioned it again.)
The accumulation is unbearable. It makes her laugh when she reads it back, the way a bad diagnosis can feel like relief. At least it has a name. At least she knows what to call it.
Involuntary celibate, but less devious than any musty incel. Ergo, a femcel.
Lesbian with a beautiful face and even more gorgeous, marvelous, kind, sweet, immaculate soul, who cannot, under any circumstances, get laid.
This is not incompetence either. Jimin is socially fluent, almost to a fault. She can deflect, charm, make a room feel lighter just by giggling. Her problem is structural, architectural: she is built wrong for recognition. If she was shorter, maybe. If her voice was rougher. If she owned fewer dresses and skirts. If only sugar didn’t dissolve in the water.
The forums, so many of them, call it Femme Issue. After discovering that many people who live in those sites and own an “expert” or “admin” badge have families and degrees, their expertise became instantly less valuable to Jimin. So instead, she calls it The Curse, because she likes things to sound cinematic. She imagines herself as a main lead of a grainy black and white French film: the woman everyone wants but no one touches. Oh horrors.
In reality, she’s just a university student with a collection of expired lip glosses, a sexual resume that could fit on an invisible sticky note, unwashable peanut butter stain on her sweatpants, and allergies to multiple animals she loves. What did she do to humanity in her previous life to deserve such suffering in this one, genuinely?
The same forums recommended haircuts. Apparently androgyny is the only currency lesbians respect. A mullet, a wolfcut, god, even bangs. But Jimin has taste. She won’t sacrifice her face shape for visibility, and if the only path to recognition is looking like you’re in an indie band from Portland, then perhaps she will remain unkissed.
Her roommate, Minjeong, naturally, has a wolfcut. She gets a free one every other month from a wannabe hairdresser who would drop her panties in a heartbeat if Minjeong even suggested that she might be interested in a one-time fling. Jimin pretends not to notice the irony: Minjeong has the haircut, and the posture, a grape flavored vape girls pretend to like, and the half-smirk that says she is only one day away from proposing with a diamond ring. Women notice her. They orbit. Eventually, they lean in.
And it kills Jimin.
Not because Minjeong sits on forums. No — if anything, Minjeong is suspiciously indifferent when her flings turn their backs. In reality, she doesn’t watch astrology TikToks, doesn’t actually keep crystals on a windowsill. Her Spotify wrapped is half moody electronica and half video game soundtracks. She is, objectively, an emotionally stunned geek behind the closed doors. And yet, girls line up to project significance onto her, in thin shirts with no bra underneath.
Their living situation doesn’t help. Two rooms (one is gloomy and suckish, other is amazing and regularly sunlit), one kitchen (fridge is separated in two: top shelves filled with jock, protein stuff, but fruits and flavored water are neatly stacked on the bottom), one bathroom (on the sink, Minjeong only belongings are a toothbrush, toothpaste and a cleanser, and other million little bottles are Jimin’s). Thin walls. Lots of girls in Minjeong’s room, zero in Jimin’s. They are in each other’s space constantly. Minjeong spends hours on her laptop with headphones in, with a tiny crease on her forehead that suggests either focus or existential despair. Jimin, on the other hand, performs her suffering — ranting about systemic lesbophobia, narrating her misfortunes to the air. Minjeong rarely interrupts. When she does, it’s with surgical precision. A single, deflating question, the one your parents usually ask to bum you out just for the sake of it:
“So… unnie, do you want them to think you’re gay, or do you want them to kiss you?”
That one ruined Jimin’s whole week — does she want to be perceived as a cool, non-straight girl who has some struggles or simply loved? She had to actually lie down.
But of course she came back, like she always does, with more complaints, more rants, more elaborate strategies for proving herself to the world. Which is how on Friday night, sprawled across their tacky carpet, tipsy on a fucked up version of sex on the beach Jimin half-assed by mixing together an absolut Minjeong’s fling brought for her, liqueur, and chunks of unripe orange, she had her great revelation.
A podcast. Astrology, but for sapphics. Which is all astrology.
The idea emerges fully baked, like Athena from Zeus’ head: If women won’t believe her in person, she’ll create a digital record. They will know her as Jimin The Dyke before they know her as Jimin A Beautiful Straight Lady. It's something undeniable: her voice, archived, declaring its cultural allegiance to sapphism. A gay outsource.
Minjeong doesn’t even glance up from her laptop. “Astrology?”
“Yes, Minjeong-ah, astrology. Lesbians love astrology. It’s a demographic fact. You of all people should know it.”
Minjeong ponders. Her face changes from one expression to another, then onto the third — which is Jimin’s personal record of Minjeong’s emotions she evoked by one statement — before she finally nods. “That’s true.”
“Perfect! You will be the skeptic. Every podcast needs an asshole.”
The plan is flimsy, idiotic, almost insulting in its simplicity — like, woah, if all genuis ideas are so easy to come up with, she might get a Nobel prize before her thirties. Jimin is electrified. She can already picture the cover art, a twitter account, DMs from strangers, that girl in a seminar — the one who thought she was inviting her to coffee in a gal pal way — stumbling upon the podcast and realizing, belatedly, that she was gravely wrong.
Minjeong just shrugs. “Okay, unnie.”
That’s it, agreement secured with no resistance whatsoever. No negotiation, just a simple shrug, like she has been expecting Jimin to hatch some doomed scheme and is relieved it finally arrived.
Later, when Jimin lies in bed replaying the moment, she tries to tell herself it was just a whim, another rant turned hobby. But there was something in the way Minjeong agreed — with no hesitation and no disbelief, but steady assent instead.
And if Jimin’s curse is that no one ever believes her, then maybe the real tragedy is that Minjeong always does.
Statistically speaking, relationships don’t make people that happy.
A 2020 longitudinal study from National Institutes of Health tracked marital satisfaction across two decades and found the curve of happiness almost identical to the one for people who never married at all. Both groups peaked in their twenties, - who doesn’t peak in their twenties? — dipped in their thirties — that’s a point where the honeymoon period wears off for lovebirds — and then evened out to the same baseline of dull but stable contentment. In other words: being in love, not being in love — both eventually collapsed into the same lukewarm median. She found numbers oddly comforting.
Her beig on this field, though, suggested that even she wasn’t immune to stupid human habits and cravings, because women are way more comforting than numbers could ever be.
Minjeong played tennis the way most people typed on a keyboard: not particularly gracefully, but at a steady enough pace that it counted as functional, even though nerds would still shame her for that. She wasn’t bad, exactly — her serve cleared the net, her returns had a bite when she bothered — but she always felt faintly bored while doing it, like she was enduring sport rather than enjoying it. Her expression gave away nothing except the occasional frown at her grip. The court was pristine, the sun was too sharp, and she didn’t even like tennis. She liked being the kind of person who played tennis, because those people seemed impossible to disappoint.
And also: girls in skirts. God, the skirts. God, the girls.
Her brother’s voice came tinny through her Airpods, like judgment from above. “You sound winded,” he said.
“I’m playing tennis.”
She could almost hear his brows furrow. “You play tennis now?”
“I told you already,” she lied, hitting a ball too flat so it skidded into the net. His tone sounded too judgmental, like he was about to call her gay as an insult, and not with a homophobic connotation. It’s not like it would be her first time to get hit by a sentiment close to “queer” or a “fruit basket” by him; she came to accept that it was just his way to say ‘you dyke too close to the sky, Minjeong, they are going to get you’, and she learned to treat it not as an attack, but a warning. “You just forgot.”
He made a doubtful noise. Minjeong pictured him standing in the barracks, stiff-backed, phone in one hand, the same way he’d hold a rifle, and regretting wasting his truly limited, extremely valuable free time on his punk of a little sister. He had never been good at sounding casual. “So, what’s the point of tennis? The main goal?”
“What’s the point of army?” She shot back, without even thinking it through. She was not about to explain him a simple set of rules she learned — he is not a target audience. Involuntary, it made her imagine her brother in a tennis skirt. Ew.
“That’s not fair.”
“No, exactly, oppa — it isn’t. Life isn’t fair.”
She lobbed a ball, missed, and let it bounce away. It was easier to keep talking if she didn’t have to run after it. If her brother saw the sheer lack of effort in Minjeong’s everyday life, he would probably call her a lazy dumbass.
Her brother didn’t take the bait. He rarely did. They had grown up with her throwing conversational grenades across the living room, only for him to sit in the blast radius and nod solemnly, like she was conducting a research on explosions and he was mildly happy to be the test dummy. “Be serious. Your angle — what is it?” He finally asked.
“My angle?”
“You only do things with an angle. Signed to haidong gumdo with me for Haidilao gift certificates. Learned to play guitar to get easy grades from your music teacher. Basketball was for the girls. And volleyball. And bowling. And… fencing, probably. Looking back, guitar too,” he sighed, finally sounding a little defeated. “What’s tennis for?”
Minjeong bristled, mostly because he was right, but also how dared he insinuate that all she does in her life is for attention. “For muscle,” and girls. God dammit.
That earned a long pause, the kind her brother perfected to make her feel slightly embarrassed for lying: not disappointed enough to be moral, not amused enough to be brotherly, just long enough to make her feel like an idiot and hurry to fill the gap herself. Luckily, no person in the world (except maybe for one) could make her feel like an idiot. So instead of a stuttering, she filled it by launching a serve that landed wrong. Good thing that no one except the ball tossing machine was watching.
The truth was, Minjeong respected him enough to not lie to him outrightly. She had grown up shadowing him, learning how to tape her fingers before sparring because he did, how to polish her shoes because he did, how to appear in control of one’s breath even when running laps felt like drowning because he did. He was everything their father wanted: calm, obedient, permanently aligned to duty, tall, and, fortunately, not a damn nerd. And she wasn’t exactly disobedient; just imaginative in a slightly annoying way. She saw the trap early, the one where being good at something meant never being allowed to leave it behind, where being perfect demanded even more perfection.
He’s also the reason she’s so good at keeping a straight face when lying about liking palm readings and tarot spreads.
She hit the ball again, harder this time. It ricocheted back with a speed that made her shoulder sting. Heck yeah, effort.
“Anyway,” she said, because filling the silence when you’re already in a winning position was preferable to being examined in it, “I think I’m going to start doing yoga.”
Another pause. It was somehow similar to the day when she confessed to him that she likes girls: recognition in a ‘oh, your gay behavior makes sense now’ way, rather than expected supportive acknowledgment. Both times, her brother sensed the fact that the conversation they are about to have will shift his perception of Minjeong, and both times, it made his silences and intonations feel more intentional than usual. It’s his own version of conversational baits Minjeong was accustomed to. Also, it feels like he’s about to call her ‘queer’ in a very old-fashioned way again.
“Yeah. For flexibility.” Which was true. But also because the girls in her literature elective seemed to like men who could say ‘vinyasa’ without sounding like they were white or sneezing or both. Minjeong wasn’t stupid; she understood the ecosystem. And maybe that was her whole issue. Her life philosophy, in miniature: be serious about what matters (school, part time job, chores), be unserious about everything else (crystals, astrology, whether “Tame Impala” was a person or a band)
The problem though, — the contradiction — was girls.
Seduction was… theater. A subtle form of lying. She didn’t like lying. But she did like women. And women, unfortunately, liked theater.
So Minjeong learned to fake it. Not in a gross, shallow way. Not like pretending to be a “bad boy” (she’s not) or posting gym selfies (which she does visit, since girls also like toned forearms). No. Her version was stranger, more tactical: learning just enough about cosmic signs to casually say: “Oh, you’re a Gemini Moon. Makes sense,” in that calm voice, like she’d seen the outcome of these words replay in front of her for a million lives. It’s quiet competence misapplied — just enough to look like she cared, just enough to make laugh, to make them trust her. People always believed her. She’s got the right face for it, the tone of someone who’s constitutionally incapable of being unserious. For the girls, it was a worthy trade off: you can’t be short and slightly boring, not in the current dating market — to compensate for her whooping 163 centimeters of height, the least Minjeong could provide is a likable personality.
She didn’t consider it manipulation, not exactly. It was… bridging. A translation of her tendencies into something that read as soft, approachable, dateable. Hot as fuck, too.
The irony lies in the fact that competence, in her mind, is the opposite of sexy. Competence is socks that match, a laptop backed up, a serve that lands on the line nine times out of ten. It’s stability, reliability, predictability — nothing that girls look for in their one night stands. Basically the opposite of Jimin, who’s the epitome of effortless attractiveness. Reality is cruel, though, so Minjeong is stuck in a position Jimin wants almost desperately, without actually enjoying it that much.
It was funny, in a way Jimin would never find funny, that none of the girls Minjeong brought home ever saw her as a threat. They all had clocked Jimin instantly: the cute hair clips, the pastel skirts paired with neat sweatshirts, the accidental femininity that made her look permanently adjacent to some boy’s attention rather than, even theoretically, to the center of Minjeong’s. And they’d relaxed, even if sometimes Minjeong looked at Jimin more than at them. Oh, a lovely straight-passing roommate! The human equivalent of a coat rack, or non-fancy Ikea-esque table. Absolutely nothing to worry about.
Minjeong could still picture the first time it happened: some girl with glossy hair and a tote bag full of incense, laughing at something Minjeong didn’t intend as a joke, barely nodding at Jimin as she passed. Jimin had stiffened like she just got cut in line. Later, she’d snapped about it in a roundabout way — must be nice, having everyone assume you’re the only option. Minjeong hadn’t laughed then, even though she could’ve. She just thought it was strange, and a little precious, that Jimin cared about what strangers assumed. That she wanted to be seen, always, even if it meant to be seen in that competitive, adversarial sense, like a homewrecking bitch.
And maybe that’s what made Minjeong soft about it, though she would never admit it. Because she always saw Jimin as Jimin, and she would never be mistaken for furniture by Minjeong. At least not from Ikea. She would be at least a very expensive antique clock, if anything.
She had explained her method to Jimin once, out of pity, when the two of them were supposed to be working on sketches but ended up sprawled across Minjeong’s bed in the glow of the desk lamp. It’s hard to say no to Jimin, admittedly.
Jimin, of course, didn’t understand, not really, but her envy and revolt had been obvious in the way she scowled. Minjeong had only shrugged, because how do you explain to someone as soft and earnest as Jimin that pulling girls isn’t a magic trick, but a cold-blooded set of calculations?
Maybe that’s why she didn’t use her knowledge on Jimin.
She could have tried, definitely. Jimin was already leaning in too close, always asking questions about Minjeong’s family, music, and sport teams with that wide-eyed curiosity that looked like flirting even when it wasn’t. But on the other hand, Jimin wasn’t a tactic — she was noise and gravity at once, something you didn’t manipulate, only endured. And anyway, even accounting for her desperation, she knew Minjeong well enough to never buy the act — she usually laughed at her serious face, mocked her “lines”, ruined her carefully rehearsed indifference with a roll of eyes and a huff. Minjeong let her. It was safer to be teased than adored, and maybe better.
In conclusion, she never chased her because chasing implied distance. And Minjeong, for all her talk of strategy and angles, was greedy about closeness.
“You don’t even stretch before games, Minjeong. You never cared about flexibility.”
“That’s different,” she said, grinning despite herself. “Yoga is… strategic stretching.”
He sighed into the dynamic, the sigh he reserved for a family member you couldn’t legally abandon.
“Don’t get hurt.”
She wanted to tell him she had never once gotten hurt doing something frivolous. Only during the objectively serious things — soccer games, karate tournaments, that disastrous season of basketball where she started a huge fight that resulted in various tissue traumas for multiple participants. But frivolity, apparently, was the only thing she was known for among her family.
Instead, she hit another ball and let the impact be her answer.
Agreeing to the podcast, in retrospect, was the best and the worst decision of her life. For one, it would make women catalogue themselves in Minjeong’s DMs without her having to leave the dorm. For two, if this somehow miraculously worked, it means she won’t have to go to book club meetings ever again. In general, people already thought that she was cool-ish, and this might cement it and make the image larger.
The fact that Jimin would be there every recording was… incidental. At most, a convenient byproduct — a socialization with someone who never saw her naked is always good for contrast.
Either way, Minjeong doesn’t bet on success. Podcast would make a tiny beat of sense if Jimin actually knew anything about stars and how their positions affect humans, but no. Of course not. Which completely ruined the game for Minjeong — she had no edge if her target didn’t even know the rules of the performance; she couldn’t bullshit her story if she had nowhere to spin the yard from. It was like training to dismantle a tank, then finding out the battlefield only had bicycles.
The dreadfulness of the situation was amplified by their relationship outside the purely professional agreement. She couldn’t imagine the podcast not going the same way as every other interaction they ever had, because Jimin genuinely seemed to enjoy teasing her, watching her squirm, finding the solemn cracks where Minjeong’s calm exterior frayed. And, as with everything else in their relationship so far, Minjeong let her. She let her because Jimin’s laughter was sharper than her best executed serve, and because irritation felt dangerously close to fondness, and because she invited the humiliating thought that she just enjoyed being toyed with long ago.
“Why are you quiet?” Her brother asked suddenly, making Minjeong shake her head.
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
She watched the ball roll towards her, sunlight glancing off the white paint right into eyes. She bent and scooped it up.
“…Strategy,” she said.
“Good.” He didn’t press. He never pressed. Minjeong smirked faintly, bouncing the ball again. Strategy. Sure.
“Okay,” Jimin said, flipping her notebook open across the desk they shared in the studio. They had a free afternoon, which in architecture terms meant they were simply postponing their collective death by drafting deadlines that were imminently approaching. Tomfoolery, as always, comes first. “We need: microphones. An interface. Headphones that don’t make us look like DJs from strip clubs that play Mr Worldwide over and over. Software that doesn’t crash. And, uh, a place to record where no one can hear us talk about how lesbians are actually in charge of the moon, both sides. We both know it’s not true, but for the sake of queer liberation, we have to push the narratives. But carefully. Remember Haseong? Applied math major?” Minjeong hummed without looking up, hand scribbling something diligently. “Well, they got him. Poor dude got expelled for…” she made air quotes, “promoting conspiracy theories. All he said was that Americans never landed on the moon! That’s not even batshit crazy, like, come on — he’s a STEM guy, he obviously did it for the charts, not arts. You know his heart wasn’t actually in it.”
Minjeong sat opposite her, twirling the mechanical pencil between her fingers now that Jimin sidetracked again. Her face was in its usual neutral, polite-listening expression, except Jimin knew that the little wince she made meant that she was about to say something vaguely condescending.
“So, basically,” Minjeong said, “you’ve made a shopping list with words you either don’t really understand or just unsure of their purpose. And, like, no matter which location we choose, college could still track us. Since that's the point. Being famous figures in gay circles.”
See! It was super condescending. She’s right but annoying about it, and Jimin won’t indulge that. “I understand everything perfectly,” she parried, tapping her pen against the page. “I just don’t feel the need to burden myself with… technicalities. That’s your job.”
“My job.” Minjeong raised an eyebrow, which — unfairly — made her look cool rather than cranky. And cute. Kim Minjeong is a cute guy. “I didn’t agree to be your podcast engineer.”
“You didn’t disagree.”
“That’s not legally binding.”
Jimin sighed. “Look. You’re the only person I know who reads manuals and even has fun while they’re at it. You play guitar, you set up amps for your nerd band friends, you probably know what phantom power means. If I do it, we’ll end up recording on a toaster that costs 400 bucks. You don’t want that, I don’t want that, my dad definitely doesn’t want that. But if you do it, we’ll sound like an indie lesbian duo who got invited to record a Tiny Desk concert even though our label is small and poor. If this podcasts thingy doesn’t go well, we will start a singer-songwriter band. Win win!
That got the faintest twitch of a grin out of Minjeong, because not even monks are safe from enjoying a good ego-stroke. Usually it was a problem — Minjeong’s whole thing was that she didn’t like to give anything away unless it was by design.
Professors loved her because she turned in neat, rational projects without fuss. Other students in the program loved her because she was nice in that steady, dependable way. Jimin sometimes wondered if Minjeong ever got tired of being The Reliable One. Probably no. She seemed to thrive in it.
Jimin, by contrast, thrived on curated disorganization. Okay, maybe she didn’t thrive on it, but despite it: she had long ago accepted that she was the type of person who went off on tangents in group critiques, who forgot rulers, who showed up to presentations with lipstick slightly smudged and hair immaculate only by luck (and genes, don’t forget about her legendary genes). And that’s what people both loved and loathed her for. She just prioritized things differently. Like: beauty first, clarity second, deadlines third.
This ying yang thing wasn’t just poetic, it was also an exceptional marketing ploy that you could almost hear saying: ‘hey girlies, check out this watergirl-fireboy-eqsue podcasters, we know you loveee that shit’.
“I do know what phantom power is.” She sighs and nods. “Okay, I’ll get it done. What about the name?”
Jimin looked in her notebook: she wasn’t writing down the shopping list, it was a neat sketch of a staircase. Minjeong would probably start suffocating if she went ten minutes without drawing a staircase.
A year back, she learned that Minjeong could only draw things with rigid logic: floor plans, sections, exteriors. When Jimin had begged her to attempt a dinosaur, it resulted in a sad creature that looked like it was engineered in autocad. She laughed until she cried, which earned her the silent treatment for three days.
Still, she caught a doodle of a little cartoon sun in the bottom of the page, which Jimin took as a proof of influence; even people like Minjeong sometimes wanted to make something with no clear function. How poetic.
Architecture wasn’t supposed to be about purpose alone — or at least not for her. What she loved about it was the promise that you could build something that would outlast you, something that would hold people who wouldn’t even know her name. She liked how the smallest design decisions could tilt life one way or another. If you angled the window wrong, someone wakes up grumpy for fifty years. If you angled it just right, their mornings felt holy.
She had fallen in love with buildings because she grew up in a happy one. Her parents’ house was beautiful, with a too-small kitchen where sunlight always hit at six in the morning during summers, with a living room full of board games, with halls adorned with pictures and doors framed by matching plant pots.
Her mother used to prop the windows wide open using the sticks Jimin was assigned to find, and so the whole house smelled like wood and leaves, and the sound of her father’s radio playing jazz and gospel carried from the balcony.
It taught her that walls weren’t always just cold, rigid things: they also held the sound of her father’s warm laughter when he came home early from work and loudly suggested to order food together, the soft murmur of her mother’s prayers in the kitchen, the little thuds of her own feet running upstairs whenever some brilliant idea popped into her head.
She was an only daughter in a big house, spoiled with gentle love: extra servings at dinner, a new hair ribbon on easter, her dad saying that mass was beautiful if only because she was in the pews, her mom teaching her what self-respect actually meant.
In short, Jimin fell in love with buildings not because they were grand, but because they could be kind.
That was the part she never admitted out loud, because it sounded too earnest. She disguised it in vanity, in complaints about deadlines and how boring walls were compared to people. She wanted Minjeong to think she was careless. She doubted that Minjeong actually did.
“Name is simple. Something ironic. Something that lets people know we don’t actually believe astrology is real but we are still authorities on it. Like true politicians.”
“You don’t know any astrology terms.”
“Thats the point, my padawan.”
“You want people to think we are frauds.”
Jimin grinned, propping her chin in her hand. “Bingo, Minjeong-ah. People love frauds. They are charming. No one wants a real fucking astrologist on a podcast, that’s just laughable. Or sad. Our target audience aren’t people who eat shit just to feel validated by their own smartness, like ‘oh I can’t believe these chicks really believe in this bullshit, I’m an Ozymandias in comparison to them’. Nope, absolutely no. Our target audience wants girls who sound cute while talking about Venus being in retrograde. That’s us, Kim Minjeong.”
Minjeong didn’t answer immediately. She was frowning at her sketchbook, which was the same thing as listening innately in her language. Jimin had known her long enough to decode her silences.
It wasn’t like she and Minjeong became best friends immediately. Despite a one year age gap, architecture and resident assistant threw them into the same dorm, same projects, same deadlines, same late nights in the studio, same room where they watched god-like westerns, until one day it became unthinkable not to be calling each other gay and pathetic over coffee. She thought of Minjeong as a friend who never had dramatic declarations (because she’s emotionally constipated, Jimin suspected) but proved loyalty by small, undeniable acts — lending her a charger, reserving her a seat somewhere where a professor can’t see her snooze, carrying her bag on the way home without making a show of it, calling her a stupid loser for trying to intimidate residential jocks, and yet saving her from their wrath anyway. Jimin trusted Minjeong to tell her if her eyeliner was smudged before a presentation, Minjeong trusted Jimin to keep things from ever getting too bleak. And lying to her non-girlfriends to evade commitment, too, which pained Jimin a little — lying to beautiful girls and women alike felt sinful.
Minjeong looked up at last. “Fine. But if we are doing this, we’re not calling it something obnoxious like Sapphic Venus.”
“That’s actually brilliant,” Jimin nodded, scribbling it into her notebook in block letters.
“Oh hell no.”
“It’s iconic.”
“It’s obnoxious. And terrible. And too queer. Jimin, I don’t want people to think that I’m the type to go on pride parades while wearing rainbow suspenders.”
“It’s okay, I’ll buy soda to soothe your bruised manhood.”
Minjeong squinted at her. “You’re obnoxious.”
Jimin leaned back in the chair, impossibly smug. “And yet. You love me. You love me more than you love your street reputation that conveniently leaves out that you’re 160 with a cap and have an adorable face. Women only know you as a charming, cool guy, but you will sacrifice it all for me and the Sapphic Venus.”
Minjeong shook her head, muttering something under her breath that Jimin chose to interpret as agreement, even if it sounded awfully close to ‘I hate this annoying virgin’.
She grinned. That sort of reaction is why Jimin liked her. While most people scrambled to defend themselves when Jimin teased them, Minjeong just let it slide. She let Jimin’s jokes hang in the air, heavy as the incense, until it faded, and the biggest reaction you could get from her is a complaining (complimentary) whine. It was both cool and adorable, and both seemed like underrated qualities in her.
But Minjeong, for all her objectively good traits, didn’t really register in Jimin’s head as dating material.
Not because she wasn’t pretty — she was. She had the face that somehow stayed photogenic even in bad lighting, the kind of posture that made you realize she had grown up in the presence of men who ironed their jeans, showered twice a day and demanded the same from her. But prettiness, despite its overall importance to Jimin (who can’t really blame her for being a little shallow and a lookist?), was the least of it. Plenty of girls were pretty. Minjeong’s prettiness was… neutralized, she supposed, by her whole Minjeong-ness.
She reminded Jimin of a dog. Both a puppy and a huge, fluffy labrador at the same time. Not a sleek, scary looking greyhound or a prissy, annoying, always barking poodle, but the adorable, lovable by default, fluffy guy that sprawls across the entire couch without asking and drools on your lap if you sit close enough.
Dependable, a little shameless, occasionally sulky if you don’t feed it attention, but fundamentally a creature you trusted. And you don’t date your dog. You live alongside it, tolerate its presence, feed it, tease it, sometimes throw a ball at its head for fun.
Which was why Jimin never bothered to think of Minjeong as a romantic possibility. It felt absurd — looking at your roommate after she ate half a bag of family sized shrimp chips while watching old Aphex Twin music videos and thinking, yea, I’d like her to take my virginity. Absolutely no.
Besides, she was a whore. If she tried to put it
without any unconscious misogyny, she would say that Minjeong was an unserious person in the realm of love, but that PC editorial change would also be less accurate. Everybody knew it — Jimin knew it, Minjeong’s brother probably knew it, random women in the architecture department definitely knew it. Minjeong’s flings rotated in and out of their shared dorm with the efficiency of subway trains in first world countries. She never bragged about it, tried to never make it into a big scene, but the evidence, unfortunately, was obvious: new names in her texts, new scents clinging to her hoodie, lets-make-up bouquets sent to their door.
Jimin loved her weird, transactional, geeky friend. She would probably cry if she imagined ever tasting her spit.
Shopping with Jimin was one of those things Minjeong learned to approach with soldiery patience. You had to pace and brace yourself for a 30 minute detour around the diary aisle or, honestly, any section of the shopping area. Not because Jimin was indecisive or tried to catch a better bargain — nope, not at all — but because she gave the impression of someone who could change her mind at any second.
She’d walk into the store, narrow her eyes, point at exactly what she wanted with a kind of regal certainty that made sales staff stand up straighter, but then she’d usually ask five questions anyway. Just to confirm the world still revolves around her, Minjeong suspects. Funny part — it absolutely does.
It was 2:17 pm on Saturday, and Jimin was crouched on the floor of some electronic store that was nearest to their dorm.
“Do we need the one with the little foam thing on it?” Jimin asked without looking up, hair falling over her face. Effortlessly cinematic, naturally beautiful, all in the ways that made Minjeong equally mad and proud.
“Pop filter.”
“Yea, that. Do we need it?”
Minjeong considered. She could give Jimin a thorough explanation about plosive sounds, about how the human mouth was a chaotic air generator, about how sound engineers devoted their lives to making “p” sound bearable on the mic. There’s been a rebellious streak in her life where she considered just flipping all of her family off and running away to become a DJ. She would call herself something vaguely postmodern— DJ absolute shit or DJ I’ll put a random deconstructed and unargumated drop in the middle of this beautiful progressive-classical IDM arrangement just to piss y’all off anyway enjoy the word vomit and the said nerds would use wonky abbreviations on forums to make snarky remarks like: “Tf lol you don’t know who DJ IPRDAUDTMOTBPCAJPYO is? And you didn’t even listen to their ‘unnamed 69’ project? That's weird, I thought they were super mainstream!”
Ultimately, Minjeong decided against it. She quit smoking weed for a month, sold her Octatrack to some 30 year old guy, and aced her exams. Life, sometimes, leads you in astonishing directions, and sometimes, you have to physically choose to turn on the road of dull corporativity instead. All it took was her mom — the sweetest, the most patient woman on the globe — wincing when she heard one of Minjeong’s songs. Not everyone could handle industrial IDM.
She glanced at Jimin’s face— intent, pretty, still focused like she was actually, seriously trying to understand all of this. She shook her head. That would kill the mood.
Show too much of your knowledge and you come off like an ignorant mansplaining dickhead. Show just enough, and people thought you were effortlessly clever. Minjeong preferred to walk the line, and Jimin preferred to trust her with “yes” or “no” answers.
“Yeah,” Minjeong said finally. “You spit too much.”
Jimin snapped her head up, visibly offended. “Excuse me?”
“Not like, gross. Just. Phonetics.”
“You’re disgusting.” Jimin grimaced, but there was a faint smile on her face anyway. She put the mic back and grabbed another.
Minjeong remembers how once, her brother texted her at midnight asking about her day and ranting about his bunk bed neighbor who can’t stop crying when he’s jerking off, and it’s even more annoying since he’s on the top. She was on the outskirts of Seoul with a positively drunk Jimin, who insisted on walking home 10 kilometers instead of ordering a taxi where she would, quote ‘totally puke on your lap and it will make the driver mad’. She typed him back with one hand, holding Jimin steady with another. His reply was immediate:
You’re spoiling her.
Now, Minjeong tilts her head, following Jimin’s bun-shaped figure as she crouches again to inspect a row of neon-colored headsets with a word GAMER splattered across the head band. No, spoiling was a wrong word. Spoiling had bad connotations, it implied excess, waste, making something essentially worse by encouraging self-centered behavior. What she did with Jimin was more like strictly necessary maintenance. She kept her alive, on track, happy, well fed. And if she enjoyed being the one Jimin defaulted to, it was purely because ninety percent of the time the situations Jimin dragged her into were funny as fuck.
The rest ten percent were less entertaining, obviously. On the way home, Minjeong was focused on keeping the shopping bags from cutting off blood circulation to her fingers, and trying to prevent boxes from scraping her legs.
Jimin, of course, carried nothing but her huge ego. And three liters of coke Minjeong politely asked (Jimin never forgets to remind her who’s paying for little treats) her to grab.
Minjeong, in a moment of spiritual weakness, offered to take all the stuff, since the equipment was a bit too expensive for negligence. Jimin hadn’t argued, which was its own kind of trust— just not the sentimental one. Sentimentalism is for weaklings and what Minjeong liked is practical trust that said “yeah, you’re a strong jock and I respect your manhood.”
“Remind me why we didn’t order all this online?” Minjeong asked, shifting the straps from one hand to the other.
“That’s boring,” Jimin said, not slowing down. “Also, we would get too distracted and buy everything wrong. Plus, this way we bonded, spent less on delivery, and now saving even more money by taking a nice walk.”
“I mean, online selection would be bigger and we could’ve bonded over not sweating.”
Jimin stopped to look back, brow raised. “Are you sweating?”
Minjeong frowned. Yes, actually. “… No.”
“Good. Then stop complaining, crybaby.”
Yeah, sure, Minjeong rolled her eyes. Jimin could’ve just said that she wanted to go out, but no — having a weak excuse for everything, small and big, was Jimin’s whole shtick.
They passed an architecture building on the way back, still lit from inside. Someone was sitting in the corner studio; Minjeong recognized the girl behind a blue laptop with a boygenius sticker as her… Semi-ex-almost-sorta-girlfriend. Aka the side chick. The horrible posture and a rainbow pin on a backpack were really giving her away. Minjeong winced and turned away.
“Do you think if I asked they would let us record there?” Jimin asked, nodding towards the building.
“They would let you record in the Saint Peter’s basilica if you smile wide enough. Doesn’t mean we should publicly embarrass ourselves.”
Jimin grinned at her. “You think I’m charming.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Jimin hummed with satisfaction at the obvious deflection.
Minjeong adjusted her grip on the bags, and the box banged against each other — a physical reminder that this ridiculous venture was now materially real. Okay, Jimin paid with her dad’s credit card, but nonetheless, commitment was sealed: they had microphones, cables, pop filters, a lamp that might explode, and exactly one functioning brain cell between them on any given day.
Jimin finally slowed her pace to match Minjeong’s, kicking a pebble down the sidewalk. “You do realize we’re actually doing this together, right? Like, this isn’t a drunk idea anymore. We can’t blame it on the sex on the beach I mixed.”
“I noticed.”
“What if it’s bad?”
“It will be bad.”
“Helpful.”
“Do you really need my reassurance? It will be funny-bad. You know that people like that.”
Jimin chewed her bottom lip, seemingly satisfied with an answer. “You’re weirdly calm about failure and public humiliation.”
“I’m your roommate.”
“Woah. Rude.”
The streetlights flickered on, and Jimin’s face turned amber. Minjeong looked away before she could think anything embarrassing about it. Physical strain made her soft, and softness invited weird sort of tenderness she always harbored for Jimin, the person, not Jimin, the spectacle.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and it was between the girl she went out earlier this week, or her brother. He would ask about her day, she’d tell him it was fine, he’d say something sarcastic about her wasting her golden twenties and scholarship on “talking into microphones about stars in a homo way.” Which, honestly, was a fair game. But Minjeong loved all the little, human detours her life had, like musical career aspirations, and at least she wasn’t stuck in a bureaucratic hell as a slave for a country that didn’t give two shirts about her.
Inside their dorms, Jimin dropped Minjeong’s coke on the couch and turned to her. “You’re gonna set everything up, right? We should record the first episode tomorrow.”
“Obviously.”
“See? You’re such a good teammate.”
“I hate that word.”
“Teammate?”
“Good.”
Jimin giggled, then yawned, then laid down on the couch next to Minjeong coke like she was the one doing the whole heavy lifting. Fraud.
Half-asleep, she mumbled: “You know, we’re gonna be so famous.”
“Mm,” Minjeong hummed, plugging in the interface. “For sure.”
“Like… the first lesbians to get a million girls in one day.”
“Definitely.”
They were doomed, obviously.
“We are so fucking unlucky, man.”
Minjeong wasn’t even sure how the racket ended up in her hand that afternoon. After they were done with recording and editing, she entrusted Jimin with uploading, and moved to planning on how to finish the model of a bridge, then maybe drafting some elevations for a project everyone else was dragging their feet on. But Jimin had texted her with a dramatic string of keyboard smashes and doom-inducing cries for help like ‘meet me at the court with your pass in 20 mins or I will literally drink bleach, its NOT a joke.” And Minjeong, thrilled by the possibility of running Jimin into the ground, went without asking anything.
Her swing cut the air, the ball bouncing with a clean pop.
Across the net, Jimin groaned. “We didn’t even last twenty-four hours! Do you understand how humiliating that is? Our podcast career — canceled right after it started, by some geeks on twitter. Since when people are such snowflakes, Minjeong-ah?”
Minjeong exhaled. “Maybe don’t say it like that. You sound like a conservative.”
“I don’t care! It’s a generation of pussies.” Jimin whacked the ball, too hard and too angled, sending it into the fence. “I didn’t even say anything offensive! I could’ve, Minjeong-ah, really, I think all of them are fucked in the head for believing in dumb stuff like stars positioning.”
“You said scorpios shouldn’t date women under 165,” Minjeong reminded her.
“That was literally satire,” Jimin snapped, bending to grab the ball. “People are so damn literal. They wouldn’t know what humor is even if it bit them in the ass. Or unless we label it like brands label laundry detergents for kiddies.”
“Or unless it’s actually funny.”
“Shut up, Mr. Smartass. And now I do actually think that short lesbians shouldn’t reproduce with scorpios.”
“You’re five-four and you want to marry Anne Hatheway one day. You know when her birthday is, right?”
“Duh. And Gwendoline Christie. But I’m hot,” Jimin says, brushing hair off her face before serving the ball. “So it’s different. And not that serious! They really wrote threads and google docs on us. Like, multiple. Someone said we are “queer content farmers.” What does that even mean?”
Minjeong shrugs. “Maybe it’s somehow linked with you posting the link in seventeen unrelated groupchats.”
“That’s marketing.”
“No, unnie, that’s hubris.”
“Oh, as if you don’t love it when I’m hubristic. It makes you feel morally superior.”
“Intellectually, too,” Minjeong parried, watching Jimin run for the ball. “You shouldn’t act like we didn’t deserve it.”
“Who cares!” Jimin’s racket clattered as she hit the ball into tennis heaven. She whirled around, pointing at Minjeong like she’s looking for a brand deal with Ace attorney. “The whole point of astrology is pretending that you know things that you just possibly can’t. It’s pseudoscience, for God’s sake. You think those girls on Tumblr with pastel charts and moon earrings from aliexpress know planetary mechanics? No! And they don’t even care — they just say the stuff that sounds right. We should’ve lied better.”
Minjeong caught herself surpassing an involuntary smile — just a barely-there twitch of lips. She hated giving Jimin the satisfaction, sometimes, but she physically couldn’t help it. “You mean you should’ve lied better. You talked ninety percent of the time.”
“That’s just my natural charisma and leadership. You wouldn’t get it.” Minjeong returned a shot down the line, making Jimin sprint. Quite entertaining, it was — Jimin always overcommitted, like instead of going through a humiliation ritual she was running for Wimbledon cup.
“You know what pisses me off?” Jimin moved on to another topic again, after sending the ball to Minjeong. “The queers have become the meanest, the shallowest, the dullest, the most lackluster people on this planet. Like, obviously not all, but you know who I’m talking about. The ones that need a label for everything, a playlist, a trauma monologue. And they still somehow manage to make it look boring. I mean, we both know that I’m not trying to be one of those people who says “I’m not like other gays”, but I’m just really not. This whole situation showed me it clearly.”
Minjeong stayed silent, letting the ball bounce once before returning it. Duh, of course she’s not like other anything. Jimin is one of a kind.
“And they are all so smug,” Jimin went on, pacing now, with a racket dangling in her hand together with her gestures. “We go to parties to relax after brainfucking day, and everyone is wearing a mesh top and quoting Audre Lorde out of context, and discussing how much they love Renee Rap just because she’s blonde, mean, and gay. It’s just bewildering, like — what do you people even do for fun besides flaunting how smart you are just because you realized that you like to kiss people of your gender and read books outside of school literature courses?”
She smacked a forehand too hard. “And they are always twenty-two-something and obsessed with ‘healing their inner child’. Okay, but have you ever tried getting a job? Or a hobby? Or stopping blaming your 40 year old dad for calling you an idiot after you failed extremely simple math exams in 7th grade?”
Minjeong shrugged. It was easier to let the storm pass.
“And, actually, I hate the ones who date you,” Jimin pointed at her. “No offense. But they are the type who tell EVERYONE they meditate regularly but spend three hours harassing you online by tagging you under deep-fake quotes because you told them ‘no’. The ones who buy crystals, name them, and use them as substitutes for friends because real people think they are insufferable. ‘My rose quartz told me to not text her first’. Oh, did it? Maybe your rose quartz should recommend you picking up sports for a change.”
Minjeong furrowed her brows, arms raised in a “what did I even do” way, but she caught Jimin’s next serve anyway. “Okay, but you do understand that it was our exact target audience? Like, you explicitly chose a topic that interests only people like that — pretty, sophisticated, vulnerable girls.”
“Yes! I’m a populist. An opportunistic one, at that! Sue me. But at least I’m aware that it’s bullshit. I’m just trying to get laid like a normal person, like you. But when I open my mouth, they think I'm proof that god has favorites and they’re not one of them. What's the difference between us? Why do you actually attract them by bullshiting?”
“I don’t attract anyone.”
“That’s a lie,” Jimin cut her off immediately. “You attract every bisexual, every lesbianc every sapphic, every unlabeled girl in a five mile radius. You made ‘quiet-but-smart-and-attentive-girl-who-
listens-to-Clairo-but-also-knows-how-to-build-a-birdhouse’ thing your whole shtick. It’s deranged! They eat it up.”
Minjeong hits the ball low, making Jimin chase it. “I do listen to Clairo. Her mastering is pretty competent for the genre. And I still don’t understand your complaint — you’re just mad they talk to me instead of you?”
“Of course I’m mad!” Jimin wheezed, catching her breath. “You don’t even like most of them — you just stand there, throw in a comment about some quirky art-pop girl and suddenly they’re already projecting their unhealed daddy issues on you. Meanwhile, I do a whole podcast and get cancelled. What’s the cosmos’ issue with me?”
Minjeong couldn’t possibly answer this question if she tried — it was hard to tell if Jimin was genuinely cursed or if it was way harder pill to swallow: maybe, just maybe, no one expected any depth from her, and the prejudice ran deeper the sweeter Jimin’s smile turned. Maybe everyone could feel earnestness in her soul, and that was too much of a combo — someone way too kind and way too pretty to bother.
She let the silence be Jimin’s comfort, and the match continued back and forth with sweat shining on their arms, and steady rhythm of rockets hitting the balls.
“Okay, but genuinely, do you think it was because I called Capricons boring? I admit, maybe I shouldn’t have said that part even though I do think they tend to be… you know, boring. And cranky. And mean, sometimes.”
“Your mom is a Capricorn. I’m a Capricorn.”
“Oh. Well… exemptions prove the rule? You’re both sweet, kind, and smart. But also a little boring. In a parental way.”
“Mm.” Minjeong hummed, retrieving the ball. She served again, slower this time, watching Jimin’s stance shift from embarrassment. She always noticed details, involuntarily — Jimin’s laces coming undone, the smudge of eyeliner on her hand from wiping away sweat repeatedly, the way she bit her lip before a backhand. A niche collection of tiny inefficiencies, ineffably charming. “At least when I’m overly emotional, it’s a sign that my period is coming. That’s just your whole Aries life.”
Jimin huffs, shaking her head. “Do you think we should apologize? Like, on a notes app? ‘We are sorry for saying Leos don’t deserve love’?”
“You’re not sorry.”
“Well, no. But I could fake it very well.”
“You’d enjoy it too much,” Minjeong smiles now, painfully aware of the beast of fondness purring in her chest. “It would just make people angrier.”
Instead of answering, Jimin finally collapsed on the nearby bench, fanning herself with her hand. Minjeong took it as a sign to start picking up stray balls, tucking them neatly into the hopper.
That’s when it happened.
A girl — tall, with a neat ponytail and sun in her smile — wandered up to their court from another court’s entrance. She looked barely out of freshman year, but still confident enough to stride right up to Jimin without any hesitation whatsoever, like a real samurai. “Hey,” she said, voice lifting. “I saw you play. You’re really good.” Minjeong squinted, because… not really. “Do you want to, like, get coffee sometime?”
Jimin blinked, sweat still shining on her temples. She froze for a second, then broke into a grin so bright it could blind Minjeong if it was ever directed at her.
Her first ever.
“Oh, uh, yeah — sure!” She scrambled for a phone, nearly dropping it in excitement twice. Numbers exchanged, laughter bubbling.
Minjeong watched the whole scene with the corner of her eye, with the neutrality she mastered throughout the years: when in doubt, repress.
Jimin was radiant, basking in her tiny triumph, clutching her racket like a bride’s bouquet. Minjeong blamed the tennis skirt. The damn skirt.