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“—chae, c’mon. you gotta wake up.”
there’s pressure at her shoulder. it’s the only thing she can feel for a long moment, trapped in the haze between sleep and something else.
“seriously, hey, yoonchae.”
the way her name tumbles out, a little annoyed but mostly not, brings her closer to consciousness than the fingers digging into her shoulder had.
the world around her starts to solidify—flickering fluorescents (sophia would call the lighting obscene), the tired hum of her laptop propped open beside her; megan’s fading pink strands tickling her neck as she leans in close, trying to whisper yoonchae awake on the quiet floor of the library.
right. the library. she groans, a warning before she peels her cheek off the desk. in front of her, megan tilts dizzyingly.
“okay,” the other girl nods, palming yoonchae’s forehead. she’s brushing hair away, equal parts gentle and rough. yoonchae’s head rocks back a little, but then again, she’s not trying very hard to resist. “we’re going back. pack your things.”
yoonchae ignores the order, just momentarily. she taps at her trackpad, squinting against the brightness of the screen as it presents her half-finished essay.
“i didn’t finish,” she murmurs, scrolling on the document like it might reveal the three more pages she needs to hit the minimum word count.
megan knocks her hand aside and saves the document before shutting the laptop.
“you’re just gonna have to come back to it later,” she says. she’s not being careful with her volume anymore now that yoonchae’s awake. “it’s like two in the morning.”
“it’s due—”
“sunday at midnight. you have so much time.”
megan slides yoonchae’s laptop into her backpack, reaching for the headphones discarded next to an empty can of some loopy-lettered energy drink stolen from the case beneath dani’s bed.
yoonchae watches numbly. she’s pretty sure megan hadn’t been in the library with her that night. in fact, she’s almost certain that she’d gone out with lara and adela if megan’s story from earlier is anything to go by. red-rimmed eyes and leopard print. adela’s hands palming megan’s stomach possessively. platonically.
but here she is, bare-faced and drowning in too-big sweats and a hoodie that looks like it might be manon’s, shoving yoonchae’s belongings into their proper pockets in her backpack.
“how was, um…” she trails off awkwardly, realizing she has no idea where they might have gone.
she tags along on their nights out sometimes, but she usually sticks close to manon, who’s much more likely to find a quiet corner of the party to chat with her friends (and on the not-so-rare occasion, sneak outside to pass around a blunt that yoonchae will pretend to sophia that she’s never put between her lips).
megan shrugs. her hair is still kind of glittery. yoonchae knows from experience that if she reached out to touch, it would be soft between her fingertips, even after a night out.
she doesn’t reach out and megan doesn’t lean closer.
“boring,” she finally admits. “i’ll tell you more if you come back with me.”
yoonchae blinks. megan’s got her backpack on her own shoulders now. she’s not sure when exactly that happened. it feels a little foolish to stand without her bag, but she’s too sleepy to argue it back onto her shoulders.
“i’m coming,” she says needlessly.
she’s already following megan towards the stairs.
the library is eerily quiet, lights flickering on as they pass. three levels down, yoonchae still hasn’t seen another person. they leave out the weird side door that dani insists they always go through when she’s with them because she doesn’t want to risk seeing people she knows working at the front desk.
outside, the wind is biting. yoonchae tucks her hands into her pockets and doesn’t try to offer megan her jacket.
she feels a little guilty about this. megan hardly sleeps on a normal night but now here she is herding yoonchae back to the dorm like she’s a stray cat.
“um,” she chokes.
megan swings left hard, nearly making yoonchae stumble into a patch of shrubbery. she catches her around the waist, brief, and opens the door for her; they’re cutting through the medical building.
“we ended up at some dive,” she sighs as the wind slams the door shut behind them. “i don’t even know the name. it was disgusting. a guy kept trying to buy lara drinks, but he must’ve been like thirty.”
“ew.” yoonchae wrinkles her nose in solidarity.
megan smiles.
“bet you’re glad you didn’t come, huh?”
which is technically true, and also not. yoonchae would’ve hated trying to fake her way into the bar, smushed protectively between lara and megan but standing taller than them both. but she also kind of hates that she didn’t get to see the flush that always rises high in megan’s cheeks when she drinks.
“did you have water when you got back?”
megan drifts closer, fiddling with the chest strap of yoonche’s bag. it’s one of those hiking backpacks, sturdy canvas and adjustment straps criss-crossing endlessly. she bought it after she lost an entire notebook of chem notes to the rain in her first semester.
“i didn’t really drink,” she replies.
the hydrocolloid patch on her chin is peeling. yoonchae wants to press the pad of her thumb against the edge, gently, because she knows how angry megan gets when she loses them before they’ve done their job.
these were too expensive to just
jump off my face like that.
“stop staring,” megan tells her, ducking her head self-consciously.
“i’m not,” yoonchae says helplessly, right hand closing around the empty air where megan’s had been just moments earlier.
later that night, she dreams summer. she dreams heat.
she dreams clothes sticking to her skin and the soles of her feet growing warmer with every step. she’s walking in the middle of the street. on either side, apartment complexes rise so far up into the clouds that she can’t make out their ends. smaller houses are squished between them, balancing precariously atop one another. a yellow house atop a white house atop a blue one, shuddering under the weight of it all.
their windows, all of their windows, are darkened except for pinpricks of light. eyes blink back at her, glistening in the dusty dusk.
her shoulders ache, stiff with sunburn. the straps of her tank top are chafing her skin, but she can’t stop moving. she’s chasing something, or being chased, or both.
she hears her name whistling on the wind between the buildings, hushed murmurs that could belong to anyone.
she wakes up sweating and choking on dust.
she tries not to cough. manon is hovering at her bedside.
“hey,” manon whispers, scrunching her nose apologetically. “do you have any cold medicine?”
yoonchae’s brain is still fuzzy with sleep. she props herself up on one arm and glances around the room. it’s mostly dark; weak dawn light filters in through their less-than-effective blinds. her backpack is still by the door where megan had dropped it when they got back, and megan herself is sprawled on top of her covers, fast asleep.
she can’t see lara beneath the mound of blankets on the top bunk, but she’s pretty sure the older girl is still asleep too.
“time ‘s it?” she mumbles, passing her free hand through her hair.
manon’s face, tight with worry, softens a fraction.
“around five,” she replies. “i’m sorry, i know you got back late. dani’s just been coughing all night and we’ve barely gotten any sleep.”
the scratchiness in yoonchae’s own throat suddenly feels a lot more intense. she swallows hard and nods, brain finally catching up to what manon is asking her.
“under the bed,” she instructs. her bed is lofted a few feet off the ground to allow for more storage space in their cramped triple. “the plastic drawers. middle one.”
manon’s face disappears from her view as she crouches down, and yoonchae hears the drawer slide open and shut. pills rattle and manon pops back up with a sheet of mucinex tablets.
“thank you so much. we can pay you back,” she offers.
yoonchae collapses back against her pillows, unable to combat the wave of exhaustion that comes over her now that she’s fulfilled manon’s request.
“‘s fine,” she mumbles into the fuzz of the teddy she likes to pretend she doesn’t have. “just save me one.”
she’s slipping back into a doze before she can hear manon’s response.
manon is yoonchae’s favorite study buddy.
she doesn’t dislike the others. sophia is always willing to proofread a paper or quiz yoonchae on terms for anatomy. dani’s great for late nights at the library. megan too. she’s perfectly content to sit next to yoonchae for hours after she’s finished her own work (or, at the very least, put it aside for the time being) and scroll on her phone. when she studies with lara, the other girl gets up every twenty minutes, but she always brings yoonchae back a drink or a snack, so she can’t really be that upset about it.
but still. manon has always been yoonchae’s favorite.
the older girl approaches her schoolwork calmly. yoonchae has practically memorized her routine by now.
it goes like this: they sit down at a table in the library. manon pulls her computer out and sets it down in front of her without opening it. then her water bottle. finally, her headphones, but she doesn’t put them on yet.
instead, she gets out whatever book she’s been reading recently, and thumbs it open. sometimes she only reads for fifteen minutes. others, hours will pass before she opens the computer.
yoonchae isn’t really sure what that’s about, but she likes the way manon’s shoulders are almost always relaxed while she works. she doesn’t draw them in tightly like yoonchae catches herself doing.
“take a lap, yoonchae,” manon always murmurs when she senses yoonchae getting frustrated with her work. “find yourself.”
she hadn’t understood what that meant for a long time. she’s still not certain she fully gets it. there’s a lot of things about manon she doesn’t fully get. like how manon never seems to fall behind on her work even though her computer is almost always plugged in on her desk by nine. or how she comes back from breaks looking refreshed and not at all anxious to start school again.
she thinks what manon might be telling her to do is just breathe.
“you already know what i’m going to say,” manon says.
yoonchae has been sighing over the last few pages of her paper for nearly an hour without making any progress.
“i can’t take a lap,” she protests quietly. “this is due soon.”
the library on a saturday is nearly empty. she’d been surprised manon had even agreed to come with her, especially knowing that sophia and dani were planning to head into town to go shopping that afternoon. megan had still been out cold by the time they left the dorm, face smushed into her pillow in a way that made yoonchae’s chest squeeze a little. the stuffed fox that megan’s mom had sent her after a particularly rough couple of winter weeks was laying on the floor, and yoonchae had wasted a few minutes tucking it carefully back under megan’s arm.
“i thought it wasn’t due until sunday,” manon hums, flipping a page of her book. she’s taken off the dust jacket, and yoonchae can’t make out the title looping down the spine. it’s probably something classic, something that dani would call a snoozefest.
“i have to start studying tomorrow,” yoonchae replies. she presses her knuckles into her eyes. “i have exams.”
“we all have exams, hon. well, maybe not lara. or dani, actually.”
“i need to start studying tomorrow,” she repeats, quieter. mostly to herself.
she has four written midterms and one portfolio for the studio art class she’d managed to cram around her exercise science requirements. the amount of work looming ahead of her makes her stomach turn. with her eyes still covered, she can’t see manon, but she can feel the older girl’s gaze on her.
“do you want advice or just ears?”
“i have ears.”
she knows manon will take this to mean advice, please.
“you only have as much time as you have. no more 2 am stints at the library. come to dinner with us every night. let megan talk you into doing normal kid stuff with her. you know what the nice thing about midterms is?”
“what?”
“that they aren’t finals.”
yoonchae is kind of expecting more than that, but manon tucks her nose back into her book without another word.
her computer screen has gone dark in front of her. she taps at the trackpad insistently, annoyed when it takes three tries to get the device to wake up.
she doesn’t have time for this. she doesn’t have time for anything, it feels like.
sinking her teeth into her bottom lip, she lowers her fingers carefully to her keyboard. if she types too aggressively, manon will lift an eyebrow at her. slowly, she starts typing again. words march steadily in neat rows. she breathes out evenly through her nose.
she can feel manon looking at her again, but she thinks this time if she were to glance over, she’d see something like approval on manon’s face instead of concern.
at night, the ice gathered every few steps on the sidewalk gleams under the streetlights. this makes it easy to avoid, unless there are no streetlights. then yoonchae has to step carefully, hands drawn out of her pockets to brace herself if she slips.
the wind is biting and she hasn’t been able to feel her ears or the tip of her nose since she stepped off campus. beneath her jacket, she’s only wearing a thin shirt, but she’s still damp under the arms from stress, body running uncomfortably warm as she treks further and further away from the school.
she’s a little embarrassed in the aftermath of her outburst. or, in-burst, maybe. really, the only bursting going on was her through their dorm room door.
she shoved it open a little too harshly. lara and megan had watched with wide eyes as she flung her backpack onto the floor next to her desk and spun on a heel to march right back out again. she thinks one of them might have called her name, but she pretended not to hear it and let the door slam behind her.
yoonchae feels foolish for the display now. exams are happening for everyone. not just her. she thinks of sophia, gently prodding at her over dinner a few nights ago.
how many exams do you have, yoonchip?
four. and one portfolio.
oh, that’s a tough load. i remember i had three
in one day when i was a freshman.
so, it could be worse. she knows it could be a lot worse. it just doesn’t feel like it could. she’s not sure how much worse it could get before she would keel over and her body would shrivel up when all the icky swirling that’s always going on in her stomach spreads out into her limbs.
even though it’s the middle of february, most of the houses she walks past still have christmas lights lining the eaves or wrapped haphazardly around front-yard trees. homesickness hollows out her chest as she tries not to stare too hard into the brightly-lit front rooms. even though her family lives in a three-bedroom apartment in seoul and these houses look nothing like that, she finds herself wishing desperately that going home was as easy as turning a corner.
every turn she takes that doesn’t—by some cosmically implausible act—reveal a towering apartment complex that she could navigate with her eyes closed makes the emptiness in her chest feel a little more suffocating.
in her pocket, her phone buzzes at random intervals before falling silent again. she can’t bring herself to fish it out.
the wind whips and yoonchae sniffles hard, blinking back tears that might be from the weather or might not. she tucks her nose into the collar of her jacket and breathes out. in her pockets, her hands are curled into fists so tight she worries they might be stuck like that.
by the time she finds herself breathless at a dead-end street, her whole body is trembling.
she stares into a copse of darkened trees.
she imagines two dozen yellow eyes blinking back. the air in front of her swirls, her vision adjusting and readjusting.
she imagines two dozen eyes with teeth and turns her back, bracing herself for a strike that never comes.
megan is wheeling on her before she’s even regained feeling in her cheeks.
the other girl’s eyes are a little shiny, but whether it’s from anger or tears or both, yoonchae isn’t sure. she tries not to let the leftover tremble in her hands from the cold show as she unzips her jacket slowly.
“you can’t do shit like that,” megan says lowly.
yoonchae kicks her shoes off. they’re dripping with slush, the toes soaked clean through. her socks are wet. megan still has her shoes on, weirdly, which means they’re the same height. it feels weird not to have to dip her chin slightly to look megan in the eyes. she swallows and realizes she doesn’t have the words to respond.
lara hovers nearby, one hand outstretched like she means to hold one of them back but she isn’t sure who’s more likely to lunge.
“i was just walking,” yoonchae finds herself saying.
she tugs her gaze off of lara and lets it fall on megan again. she resists the urge to step back. megan’s always complaining about how doe-y her eyes are, but yoonchae likes them. sometimes, if she’s mid-rant and she makes eye contact with megan, her brain stalls out and she forgets what she was saying.
are you guys gonna—are you—um—
now, megan’s eyes are narrowed. not so doe-y.
“it’s below freezing outside. you’re barely wearing any layers. you didn’t answer your phone,” megan hisses, shaking her own device between them.
“i was—”
“walking, yeah. you said.”
annoyance sparks up in yoonchae’s chest. the emptiness from before burns a little hotter. megan couldn’t possibly understand. megan could probably plunge into the winding neighborhood streets nearby and if she walked for long enough, and turned enough corners, she’d probably end up at home.
“it’s not my job to tell you where i am all the time,” she fires back.
megan’s mouth twists prettily. her lip gloss is a little smudged around the edges. if they weren’t arguing, yoonchae wouldn’t think so hard about reaching out to fix it.
“i was worried about you, yoonchae.”
“i was just walking.”
“at night, in the cold! you were being reckless.” megan jabs a finger out at yoonchae’s chest. “it was stupid. and dangerous.”
as cold as she’d been just minutes prior, yoonchae’s almost certain her face must be flushed now from heat. her whole body feels warm. there’s a restlessness in her hands that she’s beginning to recognize as anger and embarrassment licking at the tips of her ears and something else, something deeper that’s pressing at the base of her throat as she watches megan’s teeth snap.
“you think i’m dumb enough to let myself freeze to death?”
lara’s hand edges into the corner of her vision. she doesn’t need to look to see the expression on the older girl’s face. she can feel it burning into the side of her head.
“i think you’re stubborn enough to,” megan spits.
her hands fly directionlessly between them, jade bracelet slipping towards her elbow. yoonchae tries to suppress the instinctive flinch.
“okay,” lara tries, honey-slow. “let’s maybe take a step back. yoonchae needs to shower and megan—”
“it doesn’t matter,” megan interrupts, shaking her head. she fixes her gaze on yoonchae. “it’s fine. i don’t actually care. you’re grown. you can do whatever you want. maybe just consider texting me back next time so i know you aren’t fucking dead.”
her voice breaks over the last word and it kills whatever protest had been building on yoonchae’s tongue. she feels her mouth open and close soundlessly as she watches megan stalk over to her bed, throwing herself down against the pillows. she curls in on herself and yoonchae suddenly feels guilty, almost more guilty now than she’d been homesick, and she turns to lara a little helplessly.
“give her a minute,” lara says softly. her eyes are gentle, not at all like megan’s had been. she looks yoonchae up and down, appraising. “i meant it. you should shower and get ready for bed. we could all use some rest, i think.”
“I was just walking,” she whispers.
she’s not sure who she’s trying to convince.
lara nods, measured as ever.
“i know. we were just a little scared. we knew you were probably okay. we just didn’t know if you were okay, you know?”
yoonchae remembers finding megan’s phone discarded on her bed after a night out and the whirl of panic that ensued when dani realized megan hadn’t come into the building behind her.
she nods once, curt. she thinks lara might want to tell her that she’s okay okay, but she’s never been very good at lying in the dark.
“sorry,” she mumbles instead.
lara’s eyes flick over to megan’s bed.
“i know. i mean, it’s okay.”
by the time yoonchae gets out of the shower, a careful quiet has fallen over the room. she can hear manon and dani giggling about something through their shared wall, echoing through the bathroom doors—one open, one closed. every now and then, dani’s laughter is interrupted by a fit of coughing that makes yoonchae’s throat ache in sympathy.
megan is still curled into her pillows, but yoonchae can see the dim glow of her phone on the wall, so she knows the other girl is awake. lara sits at her desk, headphones clamped over her ears as she fiddles with a sound-mixing software that gives yoonchae a headache just to look at.
she gets ready for bed gingerly, afraid to shatter the fragile calm. megan’s bed creaks as yoonchae is fumbling with the cap of her toothpaste, and when she looks up again, megan is hovering a half-step behind her.
“can i…” she falters awkwardly, and yoonchae just nods, shifting so megan can crowd in next to her at the sink.
she jams her toothbrush in her mouth and tries not to stare at the slope of megan’s nose as the other girl squeezes toothpaste onto her own brush. she mostly fails, and megan catches her eyes in the mirror knowingly.
yoonchae scrubs at her back molars a little harder. she can feel warmth radiating off of megan where their bare arms threaten to touch. it’s nice after being so cold earlier. even her shower had been lukewarm at best. she’d found herself shivering when she stepped out, bone-deep tremors that she knows from experience leave muscles sore the next morning if they go on for too long.
but megan is warm, and she shifts closer to yoonchae as they stand there brushing their teeth, pressing the whole length of their arms together.
yoonchae leans forward to spit and rinse. she debates reaching for her mouthwash, which sits in a drawer underneath the sink. she’d have to pull away from megan to get it, and she could probably just stand back up and move in close again, but maybe megan would rinse and spit and go back to bed, and yoonchae would be left to stand shivering in the abrasive fluorescence of their overhead lighting.
“stop thinking so hard,” megan mumbles around her toothbrush.
she leans forward to spit into the sink and yoonchae averts her gaze out of politeness. megan’s toothbrush rattles back into the cup she keeps it in, and then there’s a hand curling around yoonchae’s bicep and a weight on her shoulder. when she looks back to the mirror, she sees megan pressed into her side, eyes fixed firmly downwards.
“i’m sorry.”
she’s not sure which part she’s apologizing for. thinking too hard, or taking an emotionally fraught journey through the cold without telling anyone, or snapping her teeth at megan defensively.
megan turns her face into Yoonchae's shirt, arms coming up to wrap around her shoulders.
yoonchae feels her body choose for her before her mind can catch up—she hugs megan close, still watching herself in the mirror. she looks older than usual; about as old as she feels, for once.
one of her hands flutters up to the back of megan’s head, stopping just shy of touching.
“me too,” megan mumbles against her skin. her breath is hot, warmer even than her skin. yoonchae wonders if she’ll dream about burning up again tonight.
megan and lara hug all the time.
but yoonchae’s never seen megan twist her fingers into the back of lara’s shirt like this.
she thinks pinwheel sun rays, spinning in and out of sight. she thinks about a million beady eyes staring her down in the dark. she thinks about home and going there.
she thinks about closing her eyes and tucking her cheek down against megan’s soft glittery hair, and does it. it smells like arguing in a dining hall and body spray lingering in stairwells.
she finishes her essay without fanfare.
she determines once that it’s done that it wasn’t really the essay keeping her in the library for all those sleepy, helpless nights.
after pressing submit on the assignment, she sits and stares at her computer screen for another twenty minutes unmoving.
exams loom in the near future. she hasn’t started reviewing for any of them. she still feels like she’s trying to get a handle on her professors’ teaching styles. she’s puzzling together a picture that will, unhelpfully, only be finished as she’s wrapping up her finals in a few months.
she shifts in her chair, wiggling her toes inside her shoes. they’re still crusted with white from the salt that cakes the sidewalks in the winter, hanging onto the reminder of the cold even though the tops of all her notebooks have spring semester scribbled across the top.
megan must have cleaned her shoes over their winter break. or gotten new ones in the same style and walked around so much that they ended up looking just as beaten-up as the originals without all the mud and salt. yoonchae’s been meaning to ask her.
how do you get your shoes to look like that?
what?
no white.
i bought them in blue.
yoonchae blinks, biting back a snarky reply to no one. someone sitting nearby clears their throat so loudly she hears it through her headphones. it reminds her of the lingering scratchiness in the back of her own throat.
she takes a few pulls from her water bottle. she thinks of her first ever round of college midterms, her and megan crammed into one chair in the overcrowded library as manon and sophia bickered softly in front of them about vegetarianism.
megan, what is a pill that is hard to swallow?
cold medicine. those tablets are huge.
yoonchae had watched dani’s brows furrow as she leaned over from her spot on the other side of megan.
no, she means—
i was joking. i know what she means.
it’s something you don’t want to admit
to yourself, yoonchae. but you have to.
that’s what makes it hard.
like how good hamburgers come from unhappy cows.
yep. and how dani’s coffee is leaking all
over her notebook right now.
and, well. not a perfect example, but dani had leapt to her feet squealing and megan turned to yoonchae with a small, secret smile, and yoonchae had wanted to tell her that she was glad they’d both drawn the short straw of sharing one of the five chairs they’d managed to secure for six people.
she ended up not saying anything. the words felt sticky in her throat, and she’d left to fill up her bottle at the drink fountain.
in her pocket, her phone buzzes. she startles, knees knocking into the bottom of the desk she’s sitting at. there are five people who can bypass her do-not-disturb setting.
Mama
Dad <3
Meine Schwester
RA Sophia Laforteza
and now, most recently:
Megan Meiyok Skiendiel.
she doesn’t have to look to know which name will be lighting up her screen. the phone buzzes three more times in rapid succession. she can almost predict the texts:
[4:13pm] yoonchaeeee
[4:14pm] where ru?
[4:14pm] come home plsss
maybe she does pack her things a little quicker than usual. she loops her headphones around the handle of her bag instead of tucking them back into their case. she nearly forgets to zip the smallest pouch that holds all her pens.
someone breaks into hacking coughs as she’s pushing her chair in. she tries not to think about it too hard as any kind of sign.
“d’you wanna come home with me for spring break?”
“god, yes lara, you have no idea how much i want that,” manon says seriously, leaning across the table to twine their fingers together.
dani’s bottom lip pushes out a little, and she pokes at a few wilted green beans hanging out on her otherwise empty plate. sophia’s mouth curves into a tiny smirk. she offers her own hand to dani, who rolls her eyes and takes it anyway.
yoonchae watches all of this as she’s trying to chew a stringy bit of meat into something that won’t be a choking hazard to swallow. across from her, megan is scrolling lazily on her phone. half of her plate—maybe more—is untouched. not that yoonchae can really blame her for that. their dining hall food is notoriously disgusting. but, still.
she stretches a foot out beneath the table to hook around megan’s ankle. she barely gets a twitch of the brow return. next to them, lara is gushing about her hometown, and manon is nodding along excitedly like she hasn’t been there twice before.
vaguely, yoonchae wonders where sophia will go, or if she’ll go at all. she knows the older girl only left campus for two weeks during winter break, returning almost a whole month earlier than everyone else, claiming RA duties they all knew didn’t exist.
she tugs harder on megan’s ankle. she sees the corner of her mouth tighten; she’s annoying her.
“yoonchae,” megan finally mumbles, dragging her eyes up off of her phone. “what?”
“it will get cold.” she nods at megan’s plate pointedly.
lara’s abandoned her spiel about home to ask dani a million questions about atlanta and how many concerts she’s been to. sophia and manon have moved on to talking about something else. yoonchae isn’t really sure. she’s too busy watching megan.
“it already is,” the other girl replies.
“you’ll get hungry.”
megan just shrugs and shifts awkwardly in her seat. she doesn’t go back to her phone, but yoonchae can tell she wants to. she wants out before yoonchae can press too far. she does this sometimes—shorter and shorter responses until there are no words at all and the conversation stalls out right before something tender.
“i have a gift card,” yoonchae tries. “for doordash.”
megan’s mouth twists again, but this time it looks like she’s biting her cheeks to keep from smiling. her eyes are doing something weird and shiny. outside, the streetlights are bright and yoonchae keeps catching their halos at the corner of her eye.
“okay, yoonchae,” megan says, and yoonchae knows this to mean they’ll hole up giggling in a common room to pretend they don’t have homework as they wait for an order.
she gives up on toughing out the chunk of overcooked meat still on her plate, now that she knows there will be something better.
the worst part is that she hasn’t realized what’s happening while it’s happening.
if that’s a terrible cliche, fine. yoonchae can handle a cliche. she’s gotten used to sophia’s endless stream of -isms:
time will tell, yoonchae. trust me.
every cloud has a silver lining,
you just have to find it.
better late than never, i always say.
so, yeah. yoonchae doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s mostly happened. until she’s sitting upright in her own bed with megan’s hair fanned out across her lap, watching the slight rise and fall of megan’s chest instead of the movie playing softly on her laptop.
sophia’s been on them about not waking megan up if they find her dozing in the middle of the day. yoonchae feels wrong, now, trying to urge megan awake and into her own bed. they’d barely gotten halfway through their movie, but she knows megan has an early exam in the morning, and yoonchae will have to sit for her own shortly after.
better to just let her rest.
yoonchae’s head feels heavy on her neck. her throat is dry, but she’d have to stretch to reach her water bottle, and she doesn’t want to risk jostling megan. she sniffles once, absentmindedly tracing a thumb underneath megan’s eye.
across the room, lara is a lump of blankets. she’d climbed up into bed uncharacteristically early, mumbling something about dani and her hacking.
the ginseng packets under yoonchae’s bed are still untouched. she keeps forgetting about them. she considers trying to ease out from under megan to grab one, but megan makes a puppyish little noise in her sleep, and she immediately abandons the idea.
she puts her hand back on megan’s cheek, rubbing her thumb back and forth until the other girl’s breathing slows again. where their skin meets is fiery. yoonchae’s stomach bottoms out when megan shifts to press her nose into her stomach.
she tips her head back against the wall, trying to ignore the ache in her spine and her head and her throat. in her lap, megan’s head is a soothing, suffocating weight. yoonchae dips a hand into dyed pink hair to keep her there, and lets her eyes slide shut, writing and rewriting equations in her mind. every few variables, she inserts megan beaming up at her and has to start all over again.
she wakes up to someone’s shampoo bottle clattering to the ground in the shower. she groans before she can stop herself, and hears someone chuckle quietly nearby.
“sleep well?” megan asks, voice pitched gentler than yoonchae was really expecting.
it’s gentle enough that she finds herself telling the truth instead of rolling her eyes.
“i don’t feel good.”
the scent of megan’s perfume washes over her and she can tell by the way the air shifts that the other girl is crossing the room towards her bed. she clenches her eyes shut tighter. at some point during the night, she’d ended up horizontal. she wonders where megan had shifted to before she’d slipped silently out of yoonchae’s bed; whether she’d waited until the morning or made her escape the moment she’d realized what had happened.
something soft brushes against yoonchae’s forehead, briefly at first and then lingering for a long moment.
“you feel a little warm. and we know dani’s been sick,” megan says close to yoonchae’s ear. “manon told me she borrowed some medicine from you.”
“not borrowed,” she mumbles, still unwilling to open her eyes.
“what?”
“you don’t borrow medicine. dani can’t give it back if she uses it.”
megan snorts. pain blooms at the corner of yoonchae’s temple suddenly and she knows without having to look that megan’s flicked a finger out at the side of her head. it doesn’t hurt that badly, but she’s tired and sore. instead of wanting to shove megan back playfully like she normally would, she feels pressure building behind her eyes.
she covers them with one hand, unwilling to let herself cry over something so small. the silence between them feels taut and awkward. megan hasn’t moved from her spot beside yoonchae’s bed. she’s going to be late for her exam if she doesn’t get a move on. yoonchae can tell by the lack of banging from the floor above them that it’s well before seven in the morning.
just as yoonchae thinks the dam is about to break, she hears megan sigh through her nose and the air shifts again as the other girl bends forward. megan presses a gentle kiss to her temple, smacking her lips quietly, and the shock of it startles yoonchae’s eyes open.
megan’s already halfway back across the room, but she’s calling over her shoulder:
“c’mon, we can go to breakfast and you can have a bunch of orange juice to fight off the sickness. then you can come back to bed.”
she says nothing of the fact that she’ll have to forgo sleeping in favor of a last-ditch review session before her afternoon exam as she clambers out of bed. the cold air sends a chill down her spine, but megan seems fine in her tank top and shorts.
they fumble around the room and each other as they get ready. yoonchae doesn’t even bother waiting for the bathroom—where her wardrobe got exiled to when they realized their room wasn’t big enough for everyone’s to fit—to open up in order to get dressed. she sneaks a hoodie out of megan’s wardrobe instead and tugs on the jeans she’d been wearing yesterday.
lara finally emerges from the bathroom in her towel as yoonchae is brushing her teeth, smiling brightly.
“good morning, beautiful,” she chirps.
yoonchae scrubs at her teeth a little harder—she’d never expected cleaning her teeth to be so crucial to the college experience—unsure if the flush in her cheeks is from seeing lara in nothing but a towel or from the compliment. she hasn’t gotten used to either of those things just yet.
“why are you up?” she asks once she’s gotten rid of her mouthful of toothpaste.
“i have an exam,” lara says.
yoonchae starts to turn and catches a smooth expanse of skin shining in the pre-dawn lamplight. she freezes and shifts her gaze down to her socks. they’re mismatched. one has little cherries. the other, tiny seashells.
“what class?”
she remembers manon saying just days earlier that lara might not have any exams. it makes her feel even sillier for how distraught she’s been lately, how many hours she’s spent alone in the library. everyone else has midterms too and they’re not spiraling out about it.
“vocal performance. it’s a technical showcase.”
the door to the bathroom opens again and megan steps out, jeans still unbuttoned and shirt hanging off her neck. yoonchae has to work a little harder to pull her gaze away from the skin that curves up from the calvin klein lettering on megan’s waist to the same lettering tracing a line above her ribs. she doesn’t do it quick enough to miss the way megan’s abdominal muscles flex as she wiggles her arms through her shirt sleeves, and she feels a little dizzy.
concern knocks around in her stomach. her fingers twitch, eager to touch. she swallows hard.
“you have to sing at this hour?” megan is saying, oblivious to yoonchae’s traitorously wandering eyes.
“yeah,” lara sighs. “it’s my own fault. i wanted to get it out of the way early on in the week. me and manon fly out on thursday.”
yoonchae tries to run through her mental study guide. she turns back to the sink, closing her fingers around the faucet.
hypercapnia. hyperlipidemia.
behind her, megan’s belt jingles as she loops it around her waist. sometimes yoonchae borrows that one. she likes to run her fingers over the little silver studs. she’s always catching herself reaching out to megan when she’s wearing it, like she’d be allowed to press her fingers into megan’s hips to ground herself.
myoglobin. hemoglobin. fibrosis.
she’s straying away from her study guide now.
“yoonchae?”
she tries to inhale through her nose like manon would tell her, but the air gets stuck. it comes out sounding more like a sniffle instead, and she chokes, coughing over nothing.
“woah, hey—”
megan’s hand lands on her back, rubbing wide circles.
“you weren’t kidding about not feeling good,” she murmurs, too kind, and yoonchae feels her muscles twitch defensively.
she tries to say i’m fine and what comes out instead is this:
“i have to study for my test.”
megan and lara speak at the same time.
“you studied all day yesterday, honey—”
“—oh shit, my test is in half an hour—”
the hand on yoonchae’s back leaves, which kind of makes her feel even worse, and she hears megan scrambling around the room shoving things into her backpack.
“yoonchae, hey.” a hand on her waist this time, pulling gently. she turns, the tip of her nose nearly brushing megan’s. she suppresses another cough. “good luck on your exam, okay? you’ll do great.”
“you too,” she rasps, and barely manages to keep her composure until the door slams shut. she doubles over in a coughing fit, squeezing her eyes shut against the stars that begin to form in front of her. when she’s able to open her eyes again, the little pinpricks of light whirling around the room make her feel like she’s staring into the night-darkened forest again. there are eyes on her, this time, but they’re lara’s and they’re openly concerned.
“i’m fine,” yoonchae says before lara can speak. “i’m fine.”
megan would see right through her. she thinks lara does too, but the older girl doesn’t push like megan would. she just nods and turns back to her wardrobe, glancing back over her shoulder every few seconds.
yoonchae leans over the sink again and tries to breathe.
her head is still spinning a little by the time she sits down for her own exam that afternoon. megan had texted after hers.
[10:39am] checking in
[10:39am] text me when ur done
[10:41am] ily chae
and the thing is, megan tells all her friends she loves them. she tells them all the time. yoonchae double-tap hearts the message and silences her phone, trying to run through her study guide again. she hadn’t gotten much of a chance to study like she’d planned. sophia had made her come to breakfast and then manon had asked her to go for a walk, and well. most her morning had been wasted on burnt eggs and manon wrapping her own scarf around yoonchae’s neck when she’d sniffled one too many times in a row.
the TAs are beginning to pass out scantron sheets. she has, maybe, five minutes before she has to really focus. her phone is heavy in her pocket—it should really be in her backpack, but dani tells her no one really follows that rule.
it would only take a few seconds to tap out a few letters.
she thinks: hypercapnia. hyperlipidemia. hemoglobin.
lara quizzed her over an early lunch, while yoonchae was really still full from breakfast. she ate anyway, because she doesn’t want lara to start worrying about her eating habits on top of megan’s.
you really know your stuff, yoonchae.
i don’t think you need to be worried.
i’m not worried about my test.
it had really only been a partial lie.
a half-sheet of paper lands in front of her, ugly turquoise and taunting. she flips it sideways, penning her name, lecture section, and the date onto their lines robotically.
down in the front of the lecture hall, one of the TAs is hollering instructions. she barely hears them. her ears are fuzzy, clogged. she should’ve had a ginseng packet before they left for breakfast that morning.
a packet thuds on top of her scantron. DO NOT WRITE ON.
she has, approximately, an hour and fifteen minutes. she takes one last cursory glance at the clock on the wall, pushes pink dye out of her mind, and presses the tip of her pencil against the letter B.
her father tells her over the phone that she doesn’t sound so good.
she shrugs even though he can’t see her, hearing the polyester shell of her jacket rustle. the cold of the bench she’s sitting on is beginning to seep through her jeans.
“it’s windy out.”
바람이 많이 불어요.
he sighs into the phone, and she half expects him to tell her the same. it’s very windy there too, and she should expect to bring a coat when she comes home.
“we were thinking, yoonchae,” her father starts, and she feels that swirling in her stomach, the one that’s been constant since she scared everyone half to death just by walking, creeping up into her chest. “it might be best if you stay at school for the break.”
she doesn’t say anything. she might be mishearing. it really is windy outside, and the branches of the trees overhead keep clacking together.
“one week is so short,” he continues. “and the flights are expensive. your mom, she has a work trip. it would be no fun.”
she sniffles once, hard.
“i miss home,” she whispers.
“what was that, yoonchae?”
“okay,” she says instead. “i understand.”
“you are such a good kid.” her father sounds proud. she presses one coat sleeve over her eyes. “you are doing so well there.”
“thank you. i’m working hard.”
“yes,” he replies. “keep it up.”
he must lose connection, or something, because the line cuts off a few moments later without another word, and yoonchae isn’t willing to believe he’s suddenly chosen not to tell her he loves her like he has on every call they’ve had since she touched down in the states.
the next gust of wind nearly blows her over. her nose is running fiercely, and her throat aches from inhaling cold air for too long.
she still has three exams.
she doesn’t realize she’s bracing herself until she gets back inside and her shoulders ache.
she ends up in bed. the chill from being outside on her phone call with her father doesn’t subside even after twenty minutes of being inside, and the ache behind her eyes only gets worse the longer she squints at her computer screen trying to study.
so, yoonchae ends up in bed. jeans on, hoodie tugged up over her head. her skin feels tender. she tries not to move. she thinks she might doze off at a point, the ache in her head fading to something fuzzier, christmas lights twining themselves tight around her body.
she’s almost at the end of a long sidewalk when someone’s hand lands on her shoulder. she’s lucid enough to know that’s what it is, but her consciousness doesn’t want to leave the sidewalk just yet. she’s almost at the end, where a sharp left turn will take her somewhere she wants to get. she’s so close.
“yoonchae,” someone murmurs. “hey, c’mon, babe.”
she groans. she only has a few more sidewalk tiles to go. her own name is drifting on the breeze again.
“yoonchae.” a little firmer. the hand on her shoulder tightens.
it’s too much. the sidewalk starts fading away. she tries to move faster, but her eyes are opening without her consent, and the light. for all that sophia is always mumbling about it, she can’t come up with a word harsh enough to describe the lighting in her room right now. the overheads must be on.
“you need to take medicine,” dani is telling her.
dani?
she must say it out loud by accident.
“yeah, babe. sit up, okay? you need to take this. then you can sleep some more.”
dani’s hands guide her upright, and yoonchae blinks blearily down at the older girl. she too looks worse for wear, hair frizzing out of a messy ponytail, dark shadows hanging under her eyes. yoonchae hasn’t heard much coughing coming from the conjoined room lately, but maybe she just hasn’t been listening as hard.
her water bottle lands in her lap, still shut tight. she fumbles with the cap while dani watches. it takes a few tries, but her clumsy fingers finally hit the release latch right, and the top springs open. she takes a precursory sip. it hurts going down. shit.
“here.” dani drops two tablets into her hand.
they do look like hard pills to swallow, now that she’s looking at them. megan had been right, even if she had been joking.
she takes them one at a time. dani nods encouragingly beside her.
“good job,” the dancer says, and yoonchae wrinkles her nose at her annoyedly. “do you need anything else?”
yoonchae realizes she’s sweating, a stark and uncomfortable contrast from the full body chills of earlier. she shakes her head, though, because the idea of getting up to change sounds worse than sitting there on fire.
dani nods, but she doesn’t move. yoonchae wriggles out of her hoodie and hands it to her, just to give the other girl something to do. her shirt is damp with sweat, and she gets a chill at being exposed to the air. gingerly, she lies back down and shuts her eyes.
she feels dani’s hand brush against her forehead.
“i’m gonna come back and check on you,” dani murmurs. “get some more rest.”
yoonchae wants to thank her, but her mind already feels fuzzy again. she wonders, distantly, if she’ll end up back on the sidewalk as she drops off to sleep.
“—gan, no, you’ll wake her up.”
yoonchae isn’t sure who her is, but she’s pretty sure whoever it is wouldn’t have been able to sleep through that biting tone. behind her, the bed dips, and a wave of cinnamon and coconut crashes down over her. or, at least, she thinks that’s what it is. she can still hardly get a breath in through her nose.
she’s facing the wall, she realizes, and she risks cracking one eye open to assess the lighting in the room. it’s dim, and soft. she must’ve slept straight through into the evening. she might have to go to dinner alone, if no one thought to wait up for her.
“she’s in jeans,” someone else whispers, much closer.
“i think she came right home and got in bed.” that’s dani. yoonchae can tell because half of the consonants come out rounded with congestion.
“you got her sick,” lara accuses.
yoonchae realizes with a strange flip in her stomach that all five of them might be standing by her bed, watching her. she cringes a little at the thought.
well, four of them. megan is in the bed behind her.
weirdly, that doesn’t make her want to cringe at all.
“megan, would you please leave her alone?” sophia is asking.
yoonchae thinks four months ago she would’ve wanted that too. but time has passed, and she hasn’t talked to sophia as much recently. she doesn’t really want megan to get back up again. she’s radiating warmth, which is nice, and she’s trailing her nails slowly up and down yoonchae’s lower back where her shirt must’ve ridden up in her sleep.
“i just want—”
“what would she want, mei?”
sophia’s got this weird gentlemanly streak. it’s nice, mostly. she’s careful with dani and manon. she makes sure that the rest of them are careful with everyone else.
it seems to get to megan a little and she pulls her hand away from yoonchae’s back. she shifts like she’s about to sit up, and yoonchae, still hazy with sleep and fever, feels herself reacting before she’s thought it all the way through.
she groans quietly, and feels more than hears the silence that jolts through the room. behind her, megan’s movement freezes.
she clamps her eyes shut again and shifts, rolling until she’s pretty sure she’s facing away from the wall. she can hear megan breathing shallowly, and shuffles towards the sound, moving until her face bumps against something pointy that might be megan’s collarbone.
maybe she sighs, half involuntarily, half for show. maybe she doesn’t, but either way, megan’s body relaxes again, and her arms come down around yoonchae, holding her carefully like sophia would probably want her to.
“new plan,” manon’s voice rises up, low and warm. “megan doesn’t move.”
yoonchae likes that plan a lot more. her body still aches, and the pressure behind her eyes won’t let up, and her body keeps shuddering with suppressed coughs, but it’s easier to slip back into sleep this time.
she doesn’t want to attribute that to megan’s hand tracing shapes on her back or the steady rise and fall of a chest underneath her cheek, but she might have to. these things happen, sometimes, without her realizing it.
she isn’t sure how long she sleeps for.
she knows that she wakes up twice with megan’s hands on her cheeks. once it’s to sit up and swallow more pills, blue this time instead of orange, and the other it’s because she’s been crying in her sleep. she’s so embarrassed by this that she flips to face away from megan, but an arm slides around her waist, and she’s being murmured back to sleep anyway.
embarrassing. or, not. she hasn’t decided yet. it’s not like she’s never done the same kind of thing for megan. she’s sat in megan’s bed until her spine locked up when the other girl woke up gasping from some nightmare she refused to talk about, waiting until megan’s breathing evened out to return to her own bed. once, she walked out of a lecture early to buy megan lunch and bring it all the way across campus to her because she was about to go into a lab without having eaten all day.
so they’re kind of on even footing here.
she wants to pinch herself just for thinking that. it’s not about footing, she doesn’t think. it’s about fighting and making up, and leaving the library, and ordering takeout despite the delivery fees.
“i’ll help you study,” megan assures when yoonchae does finally wake up for good the next morning in a panic, grasping blindly for her phone. “shower, and eat. then study.”
she’s so good at taking care of everyone except herself.
yoonchae still feels sick when she stumbles out of bed, but the double-digit hours of sleep and medicine tablets that people keep handing her have made it marginally more bearable.
“you’ll get sick,” she tries as she watches megan climb out of bed behind her. she’s not sure what she’s really trying to say. leave me alone, maybe. more likely: thank you for staying despite that.
“maybe,” megan shrugs. she reaches out to fix yoonchae’s shirt, pulling it down over her stomach. she adjusts the collar, flattening a palm out against yoonchae’s sternum when she’s done. “maybe not.
yoonchae realizes as she’s getting ready to shower that she’s been wearing a baby tee with a cherry printed boldly on the chest. she kicks it away and makes a note to grab something plain and boring out of her wardrobe for the day ahead.
megan does end up helping her study, but it’s manon who really commands the operation. she wheels a whiteboard up to their shared table and produces four different colors of marker from her backpack.
“write down everything you know. that way we only need to fill in the blanks.”
she obeys, and feels megan’s eyes on the back of her head as she does. the other girl has doses of cold medicine lined up on the table next to the notebook she’s pretending to study out of. times are scribbled surreptitiously in the margins of the page.
yoonchae doesn’t realize until the second set of orange tablets that make their way into her hands that the times are reminders for megan to proffer the medicine.
sophia shows up with food for megan and huffs when she realizes yoonchae and manon have forgotten to eat too. she leaves and comes back again with lara in tow, and they crowd around the table as manon takes yoonchae through one last round of review questions.
it’s more of a get-through-it kind of thing than anything else. yoonchae hasn’t had many of those in her life so far, but she’s starting to suspect that might be most of what life actually is.
“you definitely won’t fail,” lara says when yoonchae sinks into a chair to bury her face in her hands. she’s gone through more tissues in the past few hours than she could’ve suspected the library even had stocked. she knows she probably looks a mess—hair tugged up into an unsuccessful bun, glasses crooked on her reddened nose—but megan keeps gazing at her like she does the ocean.
“i know,” she replies, muffled against the hoodie she’s wearing that doesn’t belong to her. “i’m not worried about failing.”
she still hasn’t told anyone she has to stay on campus for break. her father paid the deposit that morning. she’d gotten the notification on her phone, once it was charged.
the way megan’s been quiet all day makes her wonder if the other girl had seen the notification too. she hasn’t heard anything about megan’s plans for break yet either, she realizes dully among the class terms and concepts still floating around in her head.
where are you going, megan?
same place we’re all going.
or, if megan was being her usual sunny self and winter wasn’t so hard for everyone.
where are you going, megan?
not sure! why, where are you? ooh,
we should plan a trip together for next year.
maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
“i’m going to make it up to you,” she says.
megan’s brow furrows as she finishes lacing up her second skate.
“what?”
yoonchae digs the tip of one blade into the rubber flooring beneath their feet. all around them, commotion. children stumbling around in their tiny ice skates, parents trying to catch pint-sized hockey players before they can barrel into their friends.
“that whole week,” she tries to explain without explaining. “you were there. and now this week too.”
megan doesn’t look any less confused. she scoots a little closer on the wooden bench. their knees knock together, and yoonchae doesn’t pull away.
“i don’t get it. sorry, yoonchae.”
“i’m going to—” yoonchae waves a hand in front of her. “be good too. to you. if you get sick, i’ll bring you medicine.”
slowly, megan's mouth starts to curve into a smile, and yoonchae thinks she might be getting somewhere, however clumsily.
“oh,” megan nods. “that’s nice to hear. i’m glad.”
she stands up, offering a hand to yoonchae. in their skates, yoonchae is back to being taller than megan, which feels correct.
she still hasn’t really said what she’s trying to say, but megan keeps their fingers twined together as they step out onto the ice, which feels pretty close to being good enough. a girl half their height whizzes by, and megan wobbles a little, giggling.
“man, can you believe that?”
“some people are just born good,” yoonchae muses, echoing a sentiment she’s heard her father say time and time again. the translation must be a little rough, she thinks, when megan cuts her gaze at her skeptically.
“or they get good,” she hums, squeezing yoonchae’s hand. “c’mon. let’s get good.”
yoonchae isn’t really prepared for movement yet, but megan’s pulling her along anyway, and she braces herself as they start to glide across the ice. it’s easier than she was expecting, and different too. her fingers start to go numb after only two shaky laps around the ice, and megan’s looking at her worriedly again.
she’s mostly over her sickness now. she’d taken two exams on wednesday in a feverish haze and spent most of thursday sleeping. manon and lara had flown out while she was still asleep, and she’d maybe or maybe not cried about it.
whatever. friday had yielded one more exam and a rushed but finished midterm portfolio for her studio art class, and dani had packed sophia into her car to drive them all the way back down to atlanta for a week that night.
she’d been bracing—always bracing—all week for megan to leave too, but the girl had turned to her as they watched dani’s car pull around a corner with a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“so, what do you wanna do all week?”
“you’re staying?”
“yeah, duh. where else would i want to go?”
megan hadn’t, by some miracle, gotten sick. or, she hasn’t yet. yoonchae’s been keeping an eye on her. and an arm. maybe she’d found her way to megan’s mouth at one point too, half-asleep in front of a laptop movie.
that’s what she’s been trying to get at all day. she doesn’t want megan to think it was some kind of mistake, or something to be swept under the rug.
she wonders if megan’s realized yet that yoonchae keeps tripping over her skates because she’s too busy watching megan talk.
they have their takeout containers spread across the rug, ironically.
yoonchae is taking her duty (placed upon her both by a frantic text from sophia and her own good conscience) of making sure megan eats enough very seriously. in retrospect, she may have gone a little overboard, but she just wanted megan to have options.
they have every light in the room switched on except the overhead one. even the bathroom light casts a yellow triangle over the tiled floor, carved by the half-open door. without the hundreds of other students in the building, the dorms feel strange and eerie. megan had insisted more lighting would make things feel better, and yoonchae agreed, even though she's always preferred things to be a little darker.
“would you rather,” megan hums, tracing her chopsticks over her bottom lip thoughtfully, “have to bunk with dani and manon for a month, or get sophia to move in with the three of us?”
“can i pick neither?”
she plucks a piece of broccoli out of the container megan has cradled in her lap. it garners almost no protest, surprisingly.
“no,” megan replies, narrowing her eyes.
she hasn’t glared at yoonchae since the walk debacle. the further out they get from it, the more yoonchae understands why megan had been so mad. she’d gotten a taste of her own medicine when she’d come home from the gym to find the dorm unexpectedly empty, megan’s phone discarded on her bedspread. eerily familiar.
megan had just been in the bathroom, but still. yoonchae thinks she’s beginning to understand where the jolt of panic that flies through her when she thinks something might be wrong with megan comes from.
“then sophia can live with us,” she decides. “so we can keep living together.”
megan snorts. “we’d still be, like, one door down.”
yoonchae shrugs, a little self-conscious. she pokes at her rice bowl, trying to grasp a single sesame seed with her chopsticks.
“aw, c’mon,” megan goads. “don’t make that face. i’d pick the same thing.”
yoonchae has to bite back a smile. she puts another piece of chicken in her mouth instead and chews slowly, trying not to let her eyes go where they want to.
“my turn,” she declares. “would you rather have six midterms in one day, or never see me again?”
childish, maybe. foolish, definitely. effective?
also definitely.
megan breathes out through her nose and slides the food container off her lap, drawing her knees up into her chest.
“i think we should talk," she murmurs.
“i’ve been trying to talk all day,” yoonchae bites back.
her heart is hammering in her chest. the look on megan’s face isn’t exactly encouraging.
“woah, hey,” megan says, looking up suddenly. her eyes are shining a little, but she looks genuinely caught off guard. “what?”
“i spent all day trying to—” yoonchae makes another sweeping gesture, sending a few grains of rice flying. “explain to you! i was trying to tell you.”
megan’s expression shifts slowly, like she’s seeing something for the first time. her hands are suddenly jittery, tapping rapidly against the carpet.
“tell me what, yoonchae?”
“that i would—that i will take care of you,” yoonchae repeats, firmly. she knows there might be easier ways to say this, but she needs megan to hear exactly what she’s thinking. “and i will bring you medicine if you get sick, and be upset at you for going out into the cold without a jacket, and hold you when you hurt.”
she swallows hard. it barely even stings anymore, but her throat still feels thick around the weight of all her words. she knows it’ll be even harder to swallow if megan does something like sneer at her, or get up and leave, or worse, brush her off like it’s nothing.
megan does none of those things.
she leans forward, eyes big and gleaming. yoonchae likes cliches. she could probably fall into megan’s eyes, and get lost in them, and all the other hopeless sayings.
“do you know what i mean?” she says insistently, but she’s leaning forward too.
megan nods, bracing herself with a hand on yoonchae’s knee, and yeah—it’s brighter now than it had been a few nights again, but yoonchae doesn’t think that’s making things any scarier for once. she likes being able to see megan’s lashes cast tiny shadows over the tops of her cheeks.
“yeah,” megan breathes. yoonchae can feel the warmth of it ghost over her lips. “i know what you mean.”
two days later, yoonchae wakes up too-warm.
for a long moment, she thinks her sickness has made a resurgence, but she realizes quickly that the heat isn’t radiating off of her.
sprawled—as much as one can sprawl in a twin sized bed—next to her is megan, breathing thickly through her mouth. her cheeks are flushed pink, bangs sticking sweatily to her forehead.
and, well. she can’t say she didn’t see this coming.
she gets out of bed slowly, trying her best not to disturb megan. as she's crouching to rummage under her bed for the the boxes of cold medicine tucked away there, her fingers brush against waxy plastic packets. she tugs them out, watching as a handful of ginseng immune supplements fall to the ground around her knees. she'd gotten through her whole sickness without touching one of them. the korean lettering across the front sparkles in the morning sunlight. they remind her of home, and she takes in a long, gasping breath as she tucks one of them into the pocket of her hoodie and shoves the rest back into their box. she'll give megan one alongside the cold tablets.
it will feel strange, and good. she's mixing her worlds, just a little, in the only way she knows how right now. she thinks of her father's voice over the phone and tamps it down in favor of listening to megan breathe. she rests her chin on her bedrail, letting her gaze settle on the slope of megan's nose. she traces it over and over again with her eyes, until she no longer feels like bursting out of the room and onto the streets to turn as many corners as she can.
soon, she will wake megan up.
but not yet.