Archive of Our Own

“Ready?” says the nurse.

“Ready,” says Hara.

“This will hurt,” she reminds her, and then begins to push the joint back into place.

Hara puts all her effort into keeping up a decent face. Beyond the glass doors, a blur of doctors and nurses slide across her vision. Sounds blur too: her coach pacing; her junior crying softly into the collar of her uniform; the squeaks, beeps, whines, and drones of the hospital itself. The pulling, stretching, needling pain builds and builds and builds. Then, with one final push, her shoulder pops back into its socket. Relief floods her body.

“Whew,” she says to the nurse. “Thank you.”

Her junior warbles out another apology.

“Sorry for what? It was a great throw!” Hara aims a big, bright, comforting smile in her direction.

She bursts into tears again.

There comes a knock at the door. “That’ll be the doctor,” her coach sighs, slapping his thighs. He leans over to pat Hara’s teammate on the back, at once a gesture of consolation and dismissal. As she bows one more time and lets herself out, the doctor slips in. Young guy. Big dark tablet in his hands. Hara turns the same smile on him. It takes him a moment to return it.

Here it is then, she thinks. The beginning of the end.

Afterwards, her coach drives her home. Her teammates spring out of the waiting room, all talking at once, and insist on piling in the car too. They tell her that it’s nothing. They tell her that she’ll shrug it off, that she’ll be right back at it before she knows it. They tell her that she’s the greatest of all time.

Now, she’s sitting in her empty living room, arm in a splint, icepack dripping down her back, thinking, Well, fuck. What now?

Her phone buzzes.

Park Juwan: Where are you?? Everyone’s here

Park Juwan: Miss Famous???

Park Juwan: Bail this time and I swear ill block you

Park Juwan: Did u see the menu? I circled stuff that you can eat <3

Park Juwan: Hold on. That looks weird to read. I just gave myself the shivers…

She calls him. She explains. It’s good that he’s with everyone—she can hear them laughing, talking over each other, can hear Eunyung’s voice, low, almost sleepy, saying, “Calm down, seriously, you people are insane,”—otherwise she doesn’t know that she could keep her voice from shaking.

“Dislocated?” Juwan yells into the phone. She hears the table around him go quiet. “Your shoulder? Dislocated? And ‘torn’? What’s been torn? Your shoulder?”

“Yeah, man,” says Hara, laughing. A ghostly prickle of pain bleeds through the numbed muscle. She stills, then carefully exhales. “You guys have a nice time. Give everyone my apologies. Next time will be my treat, OK?”

“Did you go to the hospital? You must have. Does your coach know? He must know. Wait, Hara, what are you going to do?”

Good question.

“I mean, right now? Go to sleep.”

“Hara!”

“Love you, man. Don’t forget to block me.”

She ends the call. She shuts her phone off. Then she turns her head to stare out her windows at the huge expanse of night sky, soft velvet black and spangled all over with city lights. In the distance, the ribbon of the Han River threads its silky, sparkling way from end to end. It’s a beautiful view. The whole rest of the room is really only there to frame it, to be big enough and airy enough and empty enough to let its majesty breathe.

OK, she’ll admit it: the place is an extravagance. It’s the apartment of someone who thought she would be at the top of her game for a very long time. It’s the apartment of someone with something to prove.

Her lights are on timers. One by one, they blink off, leaving her alone with her gorgeous, glittering, expensive view. It’s time for her to heat up some food. Past time. It’s time for her to wash up, take her last painkiller for the night, and go to sleep.

The buzzer goes off. BZZT. BZZT.

“Oh Hara! Noona! Let us in!”

Her friends take over the apartment in no time flat. “Hi,” she says, a little shell-shocked, as they smile, yell out their greetings, and trample on in. All the lights go back on at once. Eunyung barely glances at her before setting up shop in her kitchen; Haejoon follows close behind with a massive stack of styrofoam to-go containers. Juwan stands in the kitchen, ordering groceries from the list that Eunyung rattles off as he roots through the fridge, the cupboards, the pantry. Minju puts music on. Marie bounces from place to place, yelling about this and that, keeping spirits high. The air swells with talk, laughter, and old-school K-pop. People step around each other, duck out of the way, stand shoulder-to-shoulder dicing onions, mincing pork, tearing apart fresh mushrooms in their hands.

Nobody mentions the injury. They bob and weave around it as deftly as they bob and weave around one another. But, when the magnificent spread is all laid out on Hara’s best china—all her favorite foods, she recognizes, with an uncomfortable twinge in her chest—she opens her mouth and then closes it again. She can eat anything she wants. There is no longer any reason for her to be on her competition meal plan. Then, before she can think about it too hard, screams ring out from the kitchen; Marie stands at the sink, tap on, detergent in hand, mouth stuffed with piping-hot fried tofu. She tilts her head up and snaps at it, crunching and steaming, like a raptor.

“Good?” asks Minju, leaning on the counter by her side, chopsticks still poised in her hand.

“It’s so motherfucking good,” she puffs. “Ow!”

Minju coos. In a flash, Eunyung sweeps by and picks up the hot plate of tofu for the table, so quick and so soft-footed that her chopsticks dip back in for another piece before she realizes it’s gone. “Phooey,” she says.

“There’s no more?” Marie gargles out.

That’s when Juwan comes up to her left side, loops an arm around, and carefully places his chin on her good shoulder. “Ready to eat?” he asks.

“Yeah, OK,” she says, “I’m ready.”

Afterwards, they all wash up together too. Haejoon does dishes; Eunyung, as head chef, stands parked against the wall supervising; Juwan dries and puts away; Marie wraps up leftovers; Minju is nowhere to be found. Probably off somewhere poking through Hara’s things.

“Last one,” says Haejoon, putting a hot, sparkling glass into Juwan’s waiting hands.

Hara watches Juwan beam at him, methodically wipe the glass dry, and then place it in the cupboard, exactly where it belongs. The reality of the day—both the dinner and the hospital, the hospital and the dinner—crashes down over her all at once. Tears well up in her eyes.

“Thank you guys,” she says, quietly, “seriously. You really didn’t have to.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Juwan replies at once. “We wanted to!”

“Thank you,” she says again. “To be honest, I was putting on a brave face. I actually have no idea what I would have done today without you.”

They trade dopey grins. Haejoon nods along. Even Eunyung gives her a small, brief shadow of a smile before ducking his head and turning away. For a moment, they all stand together in the kitchen, letting the frenetic happy energy of the night slowly fizzle out.

Marie breaks the silence. Her head is still buried in Hara’s fridge. “What about tomorrow?” she asks.

“Pardon?”

“For food, I mean,” she mutters, “and, um, getting to and from appointments and making sure that you have… what you need… around the…” Her voice curls up and dies. “Forget I said anything,” she says abruptly, pulling her head out and then slamming the fridge shut so hard that it rattles faintly after her.

Marie is so sweet. “Don’t worry about all that!” Hara says, laying a hand on the cool, trembling metal, stilling it. “My doctors and coaches will take good care of me. Too good, honestly. I’m going to be fussed over until I feel like puking. And anyway, can you even call this an injury? I’ll probably be better by morning.”

There’s a knit in Marie’s brow. Her gaze bounces around the floor, jumping from tile to tile. Dimly, Hara registers that everyone else has slipped off into the living room. She can hear the low susurrus of their voices, the shuffle of their feet against the wood floors. Then, just as she opens her mouth to reassure her further, make everything OK, Marie looks up.

“Do you want to hang out tomorrow?”

Hara blinks. Why does that question land so oddly with her?

Oh, she realizes, with an icy prickle of guilt, because she has not once asked me to spend time with her, not one-on-one, since the time she interviewed me for her club back in high school.

“I’d love to!” she replies, hoping her surprise doesn’t show. “I can’t say that I can do much for the next few days, but I will be very free.”

“Perfect,” says Marie, voice strangled, face beet-red. “Let’s eat together again, then. Dinner. I can make it.” Then, apparently unable to say more, she marches around the island and out of the kitchen.

After a beat, Hara follows. “Hold on, Marie, you really don’t have to—” she begins, but Marie has already slipped away into the hall closet for her coat and shoes. OK! She lets her go for the time being; it would be a bit much to follow her in.

She looks around to see the room bathed all over in golden light, drowning out the otherworldly glow of the city view. Over by the entryway, the guys are leaning up against the wall, heads bowed together, talking in low tones. Wait. Where in the world is Minju?

Oh. Everyone is whispering and no one is sitting because Minju is curled up on the couch, fast asleep, Eunyung’s designer jacket draped over her shoulders. Her heart squeezes. Her friends are good people.

Juwan’s eyes light up when he spots her. Once again, he comes over to hug her, gingerly and from the side. “We should probably head out,” he murmurs. “Will you be OK?”

“Yes, Juwan. Yes,” she says, leaning into him. “Go home already.”

As Hara’s busy fielding his mother henning, she sees Marie come out of the coat closet, arms stuffed full of jacket, and cross the room in a few neat, catlike steps. She reaches the couch, plucks off Eunyung’s coat, and silently holds it up for him; he appears at her side to take it with a yawn and a “Thanks, sunbae.”

“Wake up,” she says to Minju, who opens her eyes at once. “I’ll take us home.”

“Hm? Oh no, I can drive,” Minju replies, voice slightly dreamy, casting her dark, languorous eyes up and down the apartment as if not quite sure how she ended up here.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” she says, allowing herself to be used as a crutch as Minju pulls herself up and then sways on her feet. “I have something I have to do tonight.”

Hara takes a sleeping pill that night. She knows she’ll need the help. It’s not the pain, though she took her last painkiller late and can feel the dull, raw throb of it returning, hitting her over and over like waves breaking on the shore. The pain is nothing. It’s the weight of the end that hangs over her like a guillotine as she lies there in bed, in the dark, with the sparkle of faraway lights playing over her splinted arm.

It is time to sleep, she thinks. It is time to sleep. You must sleep to heal. Your muscles will knit back together while you sleep. Your body will put itself back together again, good as new. Almost good as new.

Not good. She starts again.

It is time to sleep. You must sleep to heal. It is time to sleep. Your body will heal. It is time to sleep. You must…

When she wakes up, sun just barely peeking its foggy head over the horizon, it is to a barrage of text messages: from her coach, from her teammates, from Juwan, and from Marie.

Kim Marie: Haha sorry I know I said dinner

Kim Marie: But I kinda accidentally got enough for lunch too?

Kim Marie: So

Kim Marie: Whenever you’re ready?

Kim Marie: LOLOLOL~

Does… Does Marie plan to camp out at her house and make food for her all day? What is she supposed to say? Would it be rude to accept? Would it be ruder to refuse? Panicking, she replies:

Kang Hara: Awwwww Marie~ You’re too sweet!

Kang Hara: Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Kang Hara: Please come up! Ready when you are!

Kang Hara: I really, really owe you one.

Then she scrambles to down her medication, to wash up one-handed, to try to use the dressing hook her doctor gave her to change her clothes. She only gets as far as taking off her shirt before the buzzer rings. Already!?

BZZT. “Um, hi?”

There’s nothing for it. She has to let her up.

Marie chokes on nothing when Hara answers the door in her undershirt and boxers. “Hi,” she repeats, in a small, dry, raspy voice.

So cute! “Hey there,” she says, trying to play it off like she always socializes half-naked, and then uses her good arm to take the profusion of shopping bags out from her hands. Her fingers bump against Marie’s fingers—tiny, red, shockingly cold.

“Let me do that!” Marie gasps.

“Too late!” she replies, even as her other shoulder twinges. She forces it to relax. “You carried them all this way.”

They put away the groceries. Marie lied, by the way. She clearly and intentionally shopped for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the very least. Hara’s eyes sting. What should she get her? A new camera? New shorts? What would she even like?

As she stands there, lost in thought, Marie sets up to cook with an adorably ruthless efficiency. A few frosty fish slap down into the sink. A bag of barley drops onto the counter with a thwump. That’s breakfast: multi-grain porridge, steamed egg, pan-fried mackerel, seaweed soup. Hara tries to help, but she’s shooed out of her own kitchen with surprising confidence.

“Go rest,” she orders, flipping a butterflied fish with her chopsticks. A sizzle goes up as the fresh side hits the pan. Then she not-so-subtly winces. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Hara spares her any more embarrassment. She rests. She answers a call from her doctor. She texts everyone back. She—painstakingly—puts on some loose, comfortable clothes, with the help of her hook. By the time she’s completed these embarrassingly basic tasks, breakfast is already done.

The sun has fully risen now, burning away the dusky periwinkle of dawn to reveal a true, brilliant blue. Marie sits at the dining table, silhouette dark against the bright wide stretch of sky. Her lovely, homey food is all laid out and piping hot on the table, but she’s not eating yet, just gazing out the window. Her feet swing once, like she’s a little kid, before she stills herself.

“Oh,” she squeaks, turning to find Hara standing there in the kitchen, watching her. “Sorry, I didn’t know whether to, um… Food’s ready! Come sit! Eat!”

She looks down at the spread of dishes, at Marie’s hopeful smile, at the hair falling down into her eyes. It is an embarrassing relief to be around someone who can still be impressed by her, even if it’s not for the reasons Hara would choose. “Thank you,” she says again, throat closing up. No gift could ever be enough. How is she ever meant to repay her?

Marie blushes and splutters and makes some noise about the soup not being very good.

She sits. She picks up a bowl and then gulps it down in one go. Then, smiling, she refutes this point emphatically. The soup—how is it so savory? The fish—and she takes a bite for research here—how is it so crispy? And the egg—slurp—how did she time it so perfectly?

Once it seems like she’s on the brink of becoming too flustered to function, Hara backs off, gets to work setting her at ease instead. So, how is work? How’s the article coming along? (Marie works at a slow journalism magazine, sort of anti-breaking news, all retrospectives and deep dives, in an office—to hear her tell of it—exclusively populated with zany, larger-than-life personalities and their vanishingly obscure fixations.) What about the book? Is that still happening? Oh, and how’s that streamer she and Eunyung like? Did he lose a lot of money again? And what has Minju been making her watch? Anything she really hates?

“I mean, how much time do you have?” Marie grouses, plucking a chewy pearl of shrimp out of the pale, silky steamed egg and gnawing on it energetically. She stops, sits back in her chair. A narrow shard of sun slips into her iris, lighting it up like dark honey. “Wait,” she says, hands twisting once over in her lap, “how much time do you have? I mean, how much time are you taking off from training? What about competitions? What’s the… What’s the whole process? I feel like I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

“Marie,” she says gently, “stop. You’ve already helped me more than enough.”

She looks at her then, eyes big, blank, unreadable, the side of her face cupped by the band of thick white light now creeping into the room. Planes drone outside. Sirens whistle and whine through the streets.

“OK,” says Hara. “OK, OK.”

She explains.

It’s a bad dislocation and a torn rotator cuff. She’s not returning to competition for six months. There’s a whole plan. This week is the worst of it. The doctor prescribed her two weeks of full rest to start. No exercise. She and her coach bargained him down to a check-in and a conversation after one. She’ll feel so much better as soon as she can start physical therapy, but she’ll never be cleared for it if she can’t sit on her ass for a week. For at least a week.

Marie takes a breath. “But how is that going to work?” she bursts out. “Who’s going to take care of you so that you can rest?”

“Oh, I can manage that,” she says, with as much charm and confidence as she can possibly muster. “I promise. You and Eunyung alone have made enough food to last me for weeks. I have tons of my own meal prep in the freezer. And hey, if I run out, I can order any food in the world. I can pay people to take me to appointments. I can wash myself, dress myself”—something flickers in Marie’s eyes—“I will be fine.”

To Hara’s complete and utter astonishment, she argues back. “Injured people shouldn’t be alone. No matter how many resources they have, they just shouldn’t. It’s dangerous. Do you know how crazy it is that you’re trying to tough this out by yourself? I mean, most people our age would have—”

She stops dead, plugging her mouth with a spoonful of cooling porridge. The ceramic spoon clicks against her teeth. Hara realizes, with a cold certainty, that she had been about to say, “Most people our age would have called their parents.”

Marie blinks rapidly at the table, littered with their dishes, one side dipped in sunlight. She exhales. Then she makes to start clearing the breakfast things away.

Hara stops her with a hand on her arm. “Is there anything I can do or say,” she says, “to persuade you that I don’t need to be taken care of like this?”

She pauses for a long time. She stares at Hara’s left hand where it wraps, easily, around her forearm. Finally, she looks up into her eyes. “No,” she says. “There’s not a doctor in the world who could convince me, let alone you.”

Something about the unexpected combination of Kim Marie and that frank, dogged, almost rude delivery startles a smile out of her. Then it falters. “I can’t ask this of you,” she feels the need to say. “It’s too much.”

Marie is quiet.

“It’s not that I… I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. But I need you to understand: I don’t have any way to repay you,” she continues, squeezing her wrist. Then, realizing that they have been touching for an awkwardly long time, she removes her hand.

Still quiet. She runs her tongue along her teeth, tasting the vestiges of fried fish and porridge in her mouth. 

Marie says, slowly, “OK. Can I come over and help with your recovery?”

“Huh?” she says. Then, breaking into a laugh, “No! No! Dude, are you crazy? What did I just say?"

“You don’t have to ask me for anything. Don’t ask. I’m asking you.”

They spend the rest of the day together. Hara fights tooth and nail for the right to dry and put away dishes. After lunch, they take a walk around the neighborhood for fresh air. Marie sets a timer on her phone to make sure they don’t go on for too long. It’s here, under the huge, lucent blue sky, as the ice-cold wind washes over them, that they iron out the terms of the arrangement.

Back at home, they each do their own thing for a bit, as if they live together already. Playing house. Hara sits at the desk in her bedroom, facing the sky as it slowly ripples through with peach, pink, periwinkle, pale butter yellow. She takes meeting after meeting: with her manager, with her head coach, with the medical team. Everyone is working around the clock getting her out of her modeling contracts, getting her withdrawn from tournaments. Committees are coming together right now to choose her replacements. As she listens—there’s not that much for her to say in this situation—she does the hand exercises her doctor showed her, over and over again. In the other room, she hears the sounds of Marie making dinner.

Dinner is delicious, nutritious, comforting, warm. Hara smiles and says thank you and eats as much as she possibly can, which turns out to not be much. Her lack of appetite feels alien to her. She can feel herself splitting away from the person she knows herself to be. Kang Hara, the person she built up from scratch. That person is alone at this table right now, flushed and hungry as hell from training, eating a mountain of unseasoned chicken—and doing it happily, because she’s doing it in pursuit of something more than herself.

There’s a flicker of movement. Hara looks up to see Marie drawing her chopsticks back in a little silver flash. She looks in her bowl. A fresh pile of hot, fragrant, red-stained potatoes and chicken meat sits on top of her rice.

Noticing that she’s noticed, Marie coughs gruffly and tucks her chin against her chest. 

Resisting the urge to ruffle her hair, Hara instead leans over to spoon a big scoop of stew into Marie’s bowl too. Their eyes meet. Marie gives her a mortified smile. Then she jumps as her phone ding-ding-ding-dings with a series of notifications.

“Not again,” she groans.

“Do you have to go?”

Her gaze flickers between Hara’s face and the phone several times. More notifications pop up. “I… Will you be OK?” she says, watching her intently.

“Yes,” Hara says, so many times that her mouth goes dry. Yes. Yes. Yes. Marie, go home! It’s still quite early in the evening when she leaves. From her window, she watches the tiny vivid speck of her, winding through streets thick with homebound workers and then vanishing into a subway station. The lights go on at the local night market. Steam rises from the stands, floating in drifts and puffs over the dark crush of people. Maybe they can go together soon. She'd like to get Marie something delicious.

Part of her is shamefully relieved to have one last night alone, to be able to be sad and angry and fatalistic without putting someone else in the blast radius. Part of her already wants Marie to come back. It’s funny. She stands there at the window for a long time.

When she finally moves, it’s to do one more round of hand exercises. Then, pushing her luck, she does a round of gentle stretches. She showers. It is a slow, arduous, nerve-wracking process, but it feels like the world’s greatest luxury to go to bed clean. She takes her last pill, then waits for it to kick in. The last little dying shine of sunset stains her room a sweet, subdued violet. As soon as the pain subsides enough, she falls into a dead sleep.

Miraculously, Hara manages to sleep through every single one of her alarms. She wakes up to a bright, sun-warmed room, a dull, drumming pain in her back, and the sound of the buzzer going absolutely crazy.

BZZT. BZZT. BZZT. “Hara! Oh Hara! Did you miss me?”

She groans, dry-swallows a pill, and slouches her way to the intercom. “Hi Minju,” she mumbles into the microphone. “What’s up?”

BZZT. A big, crackly kiss noise comes through the speaker. Hara laughs—ow—and hits the button to let her up.

It’s all she can do to shuffle to the bathroom and splash some water on her face, try to wake up a little. Because she can even contemplate getting some clothes on, there’s already a cheerful rat-a-tat-tat at her door.

She opens it.

“Hello!” says Minju, bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, a huge pearly-pink hardshell suitcase in tow.

“Um,” says Hara.

Then Marie comes puffing in behind her with the matching carry-on. “Hi,” she says, glancing once at Hara and then studiously looking anywhere else.

“Oh,” says Hara, “I didn’t expect… You guys didn’t need to do all this. I was going to order some things so that you would be more comfortable here first.”

“Why trouble yourself?” says Minju, rolling her luggage into the room ahead of her and then leaning in to kiss Hara on both cheeks. “You’re hurt. I brought everything she might need.”

True to her word, she tips the suitcase over on its side and unzips it, letting out an endless tumble of vacuum-sealed packs.

Sorry, Marie mouths, as Minju hums to herself and empties the suitcase all over the floor.

Hara smiles and waves her off. You have nothing to be sorry for. Marie suddenly develops an intense interest in the floorboards.

Right. She had better get dressed.

When she returns, it’s to Marie in the kitchen, playing Tetris in Hara’s drawers to make room for all her cooking equipment. Once she’s satisfied, she squats down to her own splayed-open luggage and retrieves an artfully charred wooden box. Then, sighing, she breaks the wax seal and unwinds the brilliant red ribbon holding it shut.

“Wow, brand new!” Hara observes, watching her pull a little family of traditional knives—one chunky, one delicate, one straight and square—out of the box. Light dapples over the hammered steel like fish scales glimmering underwater. “Hold on: brand new? Marie! Why are you buying stuff? You know I’d get you anything you needed, right?”

“These are my favorites,” says Marie, in an oddly glum tone of voice. “I wanted to take my set from home, but she was worried about me losing them here.”

“Huh? It’s not like I’m a stranger. Even if you did leave them, you could have picked them up again next time you came over.”

She shrugs, then sticks the last knife onto the magnetic strip with a soft ding. “Don’t bother trying to figure it out. Growing up with money gave her holes in her brain.”

“That’s harsh,” says, Hara, gathering up all the fancy detritus from the knife set and throwing it away for her. “She’s sentimental!”

“‘Sentimental,’” Marie snorts.

Hara follows her gaze. She’s peering through the gap over the island into the living room, where Minju, surrounded by towers upon towers of folded clothes, is busy making up the futon with soft pink sheets. Her expression is queasy, like that of an ecologist with a deadly bee sting allergy watching a honeybee at work. 

They are so funny and so, so weird. Hara feels herself being bowled over by an inexorable wave of fondness for both of them.

“Minju,” she calls out, “do you want to stay over tonight?”

They get the apartment all fixed up, then Hara takes them out for lunch at a local Thai place. Before they even get the check, Minju’s already scrolling on her navigation app, scoping out places for round two. “Guys, do we want clams? Clams and knife-cut noodles? Here, look at the menu.” Marie glares and elbows her.

“Sure,” says Hara. “Why not?”

Afterwards, people are in and out of the apartment all afternoon. Teammates come by to drop off homemade soup and banchan. Marie, too shy to speak to them directly, handles the labeling, cleaning, and container redistribution. “Thank you,” she says, a little absently, whenever Hara comes in with a new shipment.

“Your friend is so adorable,” more than one person comments, peeking into the kitchen.

“Right?” says Hara. “Right? She has that effect on everyone.”

Everyone is more or less aware of Hara’s sexuality and so, when she goes on to talk up Marie and how selfless and how kind and how wonderful she’s been during her recovery, she sees a knowing sparkle come into their eyes. Oops. Sorry, Marie! Don’t worry! Hara will correct the record before you ever catch wind of this!

“They think you two are lovers,” Minju says, as she comes up behind Marie and folds her up into her arms.

“Who!?”

Minju points at the two of them with her eyes.

“What!?” Marie screams, a flush flaring up at once in her cheeks.

“I’ll clear it up with them,” Hara reassures her.

She puts her head in her hands. “That is so fucking embarrassing.”

“I think it’s sweet,” says Minju, and tucks a lock of wavy hair behind Marie’s ear.

There are only a few more visitors after that. Hara’s coach comes by to check on her: “Let’s not worry too much, eh? At least you already got us our gold.” Juwan drops in with soup from Eunyung: “Whoa! It’s a party in here.” Hara puts an arm around him and tells him to stay for dinner; Minju adds, “And for our girls’ night sleepover?”; Juwan says he would, but he has a date tonight; Marie mimes vomiting.

For dinner, Marie puts Minju on salad duty while she fries up some tempura to balance out all the soup. After, they pile up on the couch to watch a documentary about trainee sommeliers. Minju raids Hara’s bathroom for face masks. Hara, icepack slung over her shoulder, does the hand exercises again and again. The doctor said they would improve circulation to her injured side.

Heal, she thinks, with every push-pull of blood. Heal. Heal.

They wash off the masks and settle in to bed: Marie on her fluffy new futon in the living room, Hara and Minju in Hara’s bed. (Hara offered her bed to the guests more than once; Marie had refused adamantly, Minju less so. “No,” she had said, after a long moment. “You’re injured.”)

Now, Minju is uncharacteristically quiet, sitting on the bed in her big borrowed clothes, brushing out her hair. Hara doesn’t mind. Her presence alone is comforting. It reminds her of living at the dorms at Hansol, of that first little taste of freedom and independence. She closes her eyes and remembers the drone of the fans, the metallic tang of the air conditioning, her flat school-issue mattress. She’s about to fall asleep, lulled by the memory, when Minju speaks up. Cool fingers brush against her elbow in its sling. “How bad is it?”

She smiles to herself. It is just like Minju to wait so long to ask that simple question.

“I mean, I got my gold already, didn’t I?”

“So that’s not really an answer?”

She exhales, trying not to laugh. “Not bad,” she says, truthfully. “Not too bad. The doctor decided I didn’t need surgery. And it’s not like I haven’t gotten hurt before. But it’s… There comes a point in every athlete’s career when an injury isn’t just an injury anymore. And if that’s not now, then it’s the next one. And if it’s not the next one, it’s the one after that. Do you know what I mean?”

Minju hums. They’re both quiet for a while.

Finally, she says, “If you still need help when the month is out, you should just come stay with us instead.”

She does laugh this time. “Where would you even put me?” Marie and Minju’s apartment isn’t cramped, per se, but it’s very full: full of books and clothes and crafting supplies, full of a decade’s worth of passionate, passing fancies.

“I’ll roll you up and stuff you in the breadbox,” Minju says on a yawn. “I’ll chop you into bits and freeze you in our ice trays.” In an rare gesture of dead serious affection, she reaches across Hara’s stomach in the dark, mussing her shirt, to clasp and squeeze her good hand. She squeezes back. Then Minju withdraws, stretches noisily, and buries her face in her pillow without another word. Hara rolls her eyes and falls asleep too.

Mornings after Minju stays over are typically long, elaborate affairs. They start with at least three different places for coffee, breakfast, and breakfast-dessert. Then come the impromptu daisy-chain of activities: rock climbing, candle-making, fortune-telling; a trip to the shoe museum, the used craft store, the sculpture forest, the opera. Work is no object. Minju makes her own hours.

When Hara wakes up, Minju is already gone. She brushes her hand over the worn-soft cotton of the other pillow in faint disbelief. It’s cool to the touch. She gets out of bed and heads to the kitchen for a glass of water. There, she finds Marie, swimming in a baggy, threadbare “Dojo Experience” t-shirt, hair a roughspun halo in the morning light.

She looks up. “Good morning,” she chokes out. In a heartbreakingly self-conscious little movement, she catches the hem of her shirt and rubs it between her fingers.

Hara thinks to wrap her up in a hug. She thinks to say, Aww! Marie! We’re old friends! Pals! What is there to be nervous about?

Three days ago, she would have done just that, said just that. Somehow, it feels inadequate now. It feels almost insulting. Instead, she holds her gaze and says, “Good morning,” and then, maybe a little nervous now too: “Thank you, Marie.”

That day, Marie goes in to work. Hara does hand exercises; fields calls from her doctor, her coach, her manager; listens to audiobooks at the park, watching ducks paddle through the icy water; walks home in long, gentle, gliding strides, trying to make the most of each movement; thinks about picking up flowers for Marie on the way home, doesn’t want to give her a heart attack, opts for a book instead. The pain is mostly gone now. She wishes she could have it back. It made sitting at home doing nothing feel a little less perverse.

In the evening, Marie posts up in the kitchen, heating up Eunyung’s sublime ginseng chicken soup. (“This,” Hara pointed out, “is the perfect example of the sort of thing that I can do for both of us,” but Marie wouldn’t hear of it.) Hara is sitting in the living room watching old Uta Abe matches, having completely exhausted her movement for the day. She can’t believe how quickly they’ve settled into this bizarre, lopsided domesticity. Under better circumstances, it would be nice. Shockingly nice. But then again, under better circumstances, none of this ever would have happened. The unexpected new closeness and warmth between her and Marie comes from Marie’s willingness to push kindness upon her comes from Hara’s own diminished, vulnerable, precarious position.

The sky outside her window blackens; the field of lights glows bigger, brighter, denser. That’s when her mother calls.

She picks up.

“Hi Mom! Yep, just finishing up now… No, today is strength and randori. No, sorry, I can’t right now. We’re all heading out for shabu-shabu. What? Oh, because they’re all outside already! Sorry, I really have to go. They’re waiting for me to—”

She cuts herself off. Marie is there, leaning in the doorway, brow furrowed, a fresh icepack sweating in her hands.

“Hara-sunbae!” she says, in her brightest, chirpiest voice. “Are you coming?”

“Be right there!” she calls out, and then, into the phone, “Bye Mom! Talk soon!”

She smiles up at Marie—a big, bright, comforting smile. Then her nose starts bleeding.

“Shit,” Hara says, scrambling for a tissue.

Marie rushes over. Fingers still chill and wet, she tips Hara’s head down and pinches her nose for her. “Sorry,” she mutters, fumbling around somewhere that she can’t see. She stuffs a tissue between them.

“No, I’m sorry,” she tries to say, but Marie tells her not to talk. She does not talk. She listens to Marie’s quick, uneven breaths, slightly out of sync with her own. She feels the hot, tinny blood welling in the back of her throat.

After what feels like forever, Marie lifts the tissue. She checks her nose. She says, “Do you have any nasal spray?”

Hara takes the bloody tissues out of her hands. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she says.

The spell breaks. Nervous little Marie comes back. Her eyes dart away. “What? What do you mean, haha? Don’t they happen to everyone?”

“I’m sorry that you had to see that side of me,” she clarifies. “With my mom. I’m not proud of it.”

Marie looks at her in silent attention.

“I don’t want to be a bad daughter. I don’t like to be. I just… I feel like I don’t have the strength to deal with my problems and her reactions to my problems, not at the same time. Is that messed up of me?”

She abruptly remembers who she’s talking to. “Sorry,” she says again, quickly, “you don’t want to hear this.”

“I do,” Marie replies. “I do.”

They regard one another. Hara rubs her arm sheepishly. “I don’t like who I become when I’m around her. I turn into someone I can’t be proud of and then I resent that she’s not proud of me. It’s ridiculous. I hate it.”

“How could any mom not be proud of you?” she asks, not in outrage or in anger but in stark, childlike confusion.

It is so kind of her. It makes Hara feel worse.

“Thanks Marie,” she says, flashing her one of those slow, wide smiles that tend to make her go red. “You’re a doll.”

Marie does not go red. Her reflexive answering smile drops from her face. Her gaze, Hara registers, is fixed on her mouth. “You have blood in your teeth,” she says, almost wonderingly, in faint, sweet, sad horror.

Her heart drops. Grabbing for the wad of dirtied tissues, she brings them to her mouth to frantically rub at her gums. She feels, absurdly, so humiliated that she could cry.

Marie puts her hand on Hara’s wrist. “Stop. Stop. You’ll make yourself bleed again.”

After a long pause, she adds, “I heard from my mom too.”