SEVEN:
Heart and Soul

The doctor shone a light at Jinyoung’s eyes and instructed him to keep his eye on his finger. 

As Jisoo was climbing down from the door shed, she lost her grip and fell. Jinyoung was fast enough to catch her, but the suddenness of the action had made him lose his balance. He managed to break Jisoo’s fall, but there was nothing but concrete to break his. He hit his head against the ground and passed out.

Jisoo had been frantic. She shook him and held his face and called out his name until he started regaining consciousness. He’d only been out for about thirty seconds, and the sharp pain in the back of his head had started to subside by the time Jisoo led him back to the gym and told Minji what happen.

He told them that he felt fine, but both girls insisted that he see a doctor in case he had a concussion. 

So now he was sitting on the examination table while Dr. Kwon did a few tests. 

“Do you know what day it is today?” the doctor asked. 

“It’s Friday,” Jinyoung answered.

“What year is it?”

“2017,” he looked left as the doctor moved his finger.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Doctor’s office,” Jinyoung said. “Kwon Jung Ho, M.D.”

He turned the flashlight off. Jinyoung blinked, getting his sight accustomed to the white lighting in the doctor’s office once more. Minji was sitting in a chair by the sink, patiently waiting for news about his condition. Jisoo was on leaning on the other end of the examination table, doing the same.

“Well?” Jisoo asked. “Yea or nay on the concussion?”

The doctor discarded his rubber gloves. “I don’t think you have a concussion, Jinyoung,” said the doctor. Jinyoung let out a sigh of relief, as did Jisoo and Minji.

“And you said your head doesn’t hurt too much, right?” asked the doctor. Jinyoung nodded. “That’s a good sign. Again, I don’t think the injury is very serious, and you definitely don’t need to stay overnight. Although…”

The doctor turned to Jisoo. “You should probably wake him up a couple times tonight,” Dr. Kwon said to her. “Every couple of hours. Ask him a few questions, make sure he’s lucid. Just to be safe.”

Jisoo gave the doctor a slightly horrified look. Did the doctor think that she was going to—?

“Oh, no no no,” Jisoo said, waving her hands frantically. “We’re not—I’m not—actually, Minji is his girlfriend.”

She gestured over to Minji, the girl who was actually going to be sleeping with him tonight and, therefore, should probably be in charge of the waking every couple hours, too. The doctor, flustered, looked between the two girls. 

“Oh,” he said, turning to Minji. “My apologies. Well, you heard what I said, didn’t you? Every couple of hours.”

Minji nodded. There was a strained, polite smile on her face. Jinyoung jumped down from the examination table.

“So am I free to go?” he asked. 

After being given the go-ahead to leave, the three of them made their way over to their respective cars. Minji helped Jinyoung into the passenger seat of his Lexus and Jisoo went back to her mother’s sedan. She had offered to see them back safely to the Parks’ house, but Minji and Jinyoung insisted that they’d be fine. So they bid their goodbyes there.

By the time Jisoo made it back to her house, her parents and her grandfather were already abed. She went into her own bedroom, changed into comfortable clothing, and immediately texted Jennie to find out if she was able to recruit someone’s help to dismantle the decorations in the gym. 

The excitement of the evening had wiped out Jisoo’s energy, but she couldn’t bring herself to fall asleep. She lay on her mattress and stared up at the exposed wooden beams of her house’s ceiling, started counting the lines along the wood.

If she’d had two or three shots of espresso, her heart couldn’t pound any harder. 

Her mind took her back a few hours, back to that moment Jinyoung hit his head and lost consciousness. At first, she was going to chew him out for touching her , but then she saw that he was unresponsive, and she couldn’t breathe. The stark terror of that moment could have stopped her heart.

Jisoo sat up in bed. She checked the clock on the floor beside her pillow and saw that it was two in the morning.

She guessed that Jinyoung and Minji must have made it back around eleven and probably went straight to bed. Jisoo wondered what the possibility was that Minji had already woken him up and asked him what the date was. A few hours would have passed by now. 

Jisoo fell back against her pillow. She’s probably already woken him, she thought. He’ll be fine, the doctor said it wasn’t that bad.

With that thought, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. Not two minutes later, she jumped back out of bed, grabbed her phone from its charging station, and then left her bedroom. Jisoo tiptoed down the hall and slid open the door leading to the backyard. 

Jinyoung’s window was dark, which didn’t surprise her. It was nearly 3 am after all. Still, she reached over to the light switch, signaled twice, and then waited.

No response. She unlocked her phone and dialed his number.

Jinyoung was pulled out of the deep recesses of slumber when his phone started vibrating. His eyes flung open and he hurried reached for the device, which was charging on his nightstand. Beside him, Minji was still asleep, and he didn’t want to wake her. He was about to ignore the call altogether, but he saw that it was from Jisoo.

He contemplated declining the call for now and calling her back in the morning. But before he could make the more sensible decision, his thumb was already instinctively reaching to answer. He picked up and then swung his legs over the bed to take the call in the corridor outside his room.

“Hello?” he said, his voice groggy.

“Hey,” said Jisoo on the other line. Compared to his, her voice sounded clear. “Are you up?”

Jinyoung closed the door to his room, not wanting to disturb Minji. “Well, I am now.” 

He heard her sigh. With relief?

“I’m sorry,” she said. He could hear crickets in the background of her call. “Minji’s probably woken you up like a dozen times by now, I was just worried.” 

Minji hadn’t woken him yet, actually. He supposed she was going to do it a little later, but Jisoo’s phone call happened to beat her to it.

“Don’t be,” Jinyoung said, closing his eyes and leaning against the wall. “The doctor said it was wasn’t serious.”

“Yeah, I know, but…” she paused for a breath. “You…you really scared me back there. Losing consciousness like that.”

He did remember the look of panic on her face when he finally started waking again up on the roof. He was still a little too hazy back then to give it much thought, but now he supposed that that must have given her quite a fright. He would have been, too, had the roles been reversed.

“I’m… sorry,” he said carefully, then decided to inject a bit of humor, to lighten things up, make her feel more at ease: “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

She gave a weak laugh in response.

“Anyway, I just called because I wanted to—oh, I should ask you questions to make sure you’re lucid. Do you know where you are right now?”

“I’m home,” he looked up and down the hallway again, as if to make sure.

“Okay, good,” Jisoo said. “Yeah, so I just called because—well, you know how I am, I overthink things and I don’t do well when I let bad thoughts sit and fester and I was—”

“Let me guess: festering?”

“Yeah.”

Despite his 3 am grogginess, he felt touched by her concern. 

“I’m fine, Jisoo,” he said confidently, reassuring her. “It’s a minor injury.”

“I know,” Jisoo said. “But it was a hard fall, and I know what a weakling you are.”

He snorted. “Ye of little faith.”

She responded with another weak laugh. “Go back to bed. Sorry I woke you.”

“Goodnight.”

Jinyoung ended the call and then went back into his bedroom. Minji hadn’t stirred through the whole conversation, and he tried his best to get back into bed as quietly as he could. His eyes closed easily and his heart found its steady rhythm once more. Jisoo’s voice was the last thing he heard before falling back asleep, and the sound of it echoed in his dreams.

“Is it too much to ask,” Jisoo’s mother said. “For one decent rehearsal?” She was sitting, defeated, at the piano in the hall, crossing her arms and addressing the third-grade cast of the summer program. 

Opening night was in just a few weeks, but the children weren’t learning their lines and nobody knew their cues. Musical numbers? Forget it.

Jisoo stood by, arms crossed and chewing on her bottom lip. She hadn’t been as active in helping the children (she mostly stayed out of the way while her domineering mother handled things), but she, too, was starting to feel nervous. 

The kids exchanged glances, their blank expressions standing in for conversations they couldn’t have in front of the director.

“Mrs. Kim?” said one little girl. “Can we take a break?”

“No, we can’t,” said Jisoo’s mother. “We’re running out of time and we haven’t gone through the entire thing at least once without problems.”

“Mom,” Jisoo said. “They are just kids, and they’ve been doing this for like an hour now. Maybe a break will do them some good?”

Her mother looked a little horrified at the suggestion, but before she had the chance to argue, her phone started to ring. “Oh goodness, it’s your father,” Mrs. Kim said. She sighed. “Alright, we’ll take a forty-minute break. How’s that? Forty-minute break everyone! Go get some snacks or some water, use the bathroom, we’ll pick up on Act 2 when we get back!”

She stood from the piano as she took the call. “Hello? Honey? No, the TV needs to be on HDMI 3 if you want to watch Hulu.”

As soon as she was out of the hall, the children all let out a collective sigh. They started coming down from the stage, heading out to the patio or stepping out in groups of two or three to go off