My town is not big enough for a real hospital. We have emergency medical care, which is where you go if you have a fever and you doctor's office is closed. For a real hospital, you drive about ten miles to the city.

Eomma and I parked in a pay lot across the street from a neon sign that read EMERGENCY. At the entrance, wide doors opened as ambulances unloaded.

We followed an arrow around a corner. A woman in scrubs and a cardigan sweater checked the computer for Jin's name. "He's here," she said. She gestured to some chairs. "You can wait over there. I can't let you in unless you're family?" The way she said it, as if it were a question, not a statement, encouraged us, I believed, to lie.

But before I could announce that I was Jin's cousin, eomma cut me off at the pass. "We're just friends," she said, and for one split second, I had the thought that she was talking about herself and me, as if my hysterical insistence on driving downtown in the middle of the night had finally proven to her that we could not be related.

The receptionist promised to tell a nurse we were there - she said Jin would get the message. We sat down next to an old man with a walker and his health aide, who was holding a crocheted afghan. A woman brought a baby in whose cough sounded like a barking dog. "Croup," eomma said. "You had that when you were one."

After about twenty minutes, Mrs. Kim came through the double doors, spoke to the woman at the desk, and then walked over to us. She didn't say hello or smile, and I didn't know if that was a sign of how serious the situation was or just the way she was at work. "He'd like to see you if you want to go in," she said to me.

I stood, waiting a second for her to lead the way.

"You go ahead," she said. "I'll wait. There's no space for more than a single visitor."

Eomma gave me a significant look. "Don't stay long," she said.

I tried to walk purposefully toward the double doors Mrs. Kim had come through, but as I approached them, I found myself wondering if eomma hadn't been right after all. Maybe I wasn't old enough to be walking into an emergency room, to be visiting my own boyfriend here, to be connected to anything grown up and real as a serious injury. I'd never even had a broken bone. I hadn't had my tonsils out. I didn't belong here, and neither did Jin. Maybe if I'd stayed home, all this would have gone away.

Then I caught a glimpse of him on the bed. His arm was in a blood-pressure cuff, and a device I knew from appa was called a nasal cannula bought oxygen into his nose. The bed didn't have blankets, just a white sheet pulled tight over the mattress. I found it reassuring that Jin wasn't under the sheets. I also found it reassuring that he was wearing the khaki pants and shirt he'd worn that day at school.

He looked like himself - his dark hair, his sharp round eyes, the red patches in his cheeks. His skin was pale, but he was still Jin. Living, breathing Jin.

Seeing me, he pulled down the cannula, and in that gesture of "Screw this," I saw echoes of Jin pulling off a baseball cap or his shirt when we were playing pickup basketball, or ripping a page off a legal pad when he was trying to write a paper and it wasn't going well.

"Hey," he said, and I felt tears come into my eyes at the sound of his voice because it was so . . . him. So not sick or in danger of his kind.

I sniffed and he gave me a questioning look, then saw that I'd started to cry and said, "Hey, it's okay. I'm going to be fine."

"You don't look fine," I spat out, crying harder now, though what I'd meant to do was stop crying, to get control of my myself somehow. "Sorry," I said, sniffing again. "But when Jaehwan said you'd passed out, I thought . . . I don't know what I thought."

"Did you think I was dead?" Jin said it like a joke. He course-corrected on seeing my reaction.

"Maybe?" I admitted. "With your fall, and then what Manager Sejin said about your head accessory, and your headaches - Jin?" I didn't want to say any more. I tried to pull myself together. "What happened?"

Jin shrugged. "One second I was out on the deck with Manager - he was grilling burgers and meat and stuff outside, and we were helping him carry the platters in. And maybe it was the temperature change - it was freezing outside - but when I came in . . . I guess I don't even really remember coming in."

"Do the doctors have any idea what's going on?"

Jin put a hand up to his temple. "They're going to do a CAT scan."

"You're having a CAT scan?" That sounded serious.

"When doctors don't know what else to do, they order CAT scans," he said in an attempt to comfort me. "Eomma says it happens all the time. And she's a nurse, remember?"

Thinking about his mom, I remembered what mine had said about keeping the visit short.

"Jin," I said. He looked at me, his brow furrowed. "I have to ask you something." He nodded. "Your head accessory. When the strap broke. Did you -" This was turning out to be hard for me to say out loud. "Did you cut it?"

"Come here," he said. I took a step closer to him and he took my hand. "I thought . . ."

"I know what you thought," I said. "You thought it would be like your car radio, right?"

He tapped his temple. "Smarty-pants." Then he shook his head. "I was going to tell you - I was waiting to be sure - but yes, I cut the strap."

I gasped. It was one thing to suspect it, another to hear it confirmed.

"Well, not cut, exactly," Jin went on. "I just nicked it. That took the results out of my hands, you know what I mean? I didn't have to jump off a bridge or drive my car into a wall - it was up to fate." He looked down, suddenly sheepish. "Or luck or whatever. You probably think I was stupid. Though it did work."

"Define 'work'," I said. "I assume you're talking about before you ended up in the hospital?"

Jin looked up at me, shrugged, smiled. I could feel his smile tugging at something inside me. And in spite of my fear for him, I was amazed at that tug, the way we were connected. I knelt by the side of the bed, laid my face against his shoulder.

"It did work," he began. "After I cracked my head on the stage, I felt amazing. I had the best two nights of sleep I've had all year. No dreams. And the headaches? Gone."

"The memories?"

"Also gone. Or at least, I wasn't stumbling onto new ones. I thought the whole thing was over."

"And then tonight?" I prompted. I couldn't look at him.

"When I passed out at the dinner, the dream came back. Hard. Like it had stored up energy during the two days I'd managed to dam the flow."

"It was the same dream?"

"Yeah, but there was something new this time. There was a part where I woke up. Or I thought I was waking up. I heard people calling my name, and when I opened my eyes, I saw doctors. I think eomma was there. It was a hospital. But not this one. The doctors were asking me questions. Did I know where I was, the kind of thing. But I couldn't get my mouth to move. I can't even describe it to you. It was like someone had set fire to my skin."

I cringed, as if I could feel the pain too.

"And somehow - I don't know how I did this - I willed myself to go back to sleep, to go back into the dream. The pain slowed and I woke up and I was lying on N's kitchen floor with all these paramedics asking what day it was and the name of my town and could I spell my own name.

I sat up and held his cheeks in my hands. "Don't think about it anymore," I said. "Just remember, you're here. You're with me."

"I'm sorry, Suzy," he said. I took his hand in mine and held it to my face, wetting it with my tears.

"You can fight this," I said. "I know you can."

"I can't fight something I can't see and don't understand."

Jin was right. This thing was like a giant fog, a monster we didn't know if we were trying to grab by the head or by the tail, or if maybe we had the scale all wrong.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

Back in reception, I didn't care if Mrs. Kim and eomma could see that my eyes were red and I was sniffing. Eomma asked me if I was ready to go home, and I nodded.

In the car, she said, "Sooyoung Kim thinks this is serious. She thinks there might be some kind of tumor."

"Like brain cancer?"

"She said it's an outside possibility. But she's worried. Jin told her he's been having headaches for a while. And he's seemed not quite himself. Apparently changes in personality can be an indication of internal bleeding. The symptoms of a brain tumor can be all over the map, depending upon what part of the brain is affected."

"Does she think he's going to be okay?"

Eomma sighed. "He's in the hospital," she said. "He's got great doctors. I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of it in no time." But she was worried. I could tell because for the first time ever, we were talking about Jin without her letting me know with a look or a sigh or a word that she wished he weren't around.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

The next morning, Shinhye picked me up, and instead of turning left, toward school, she turned right and took me to a stop where I could catch the city bus. We waited for it in the car with the heater on.

"Suzy, is there anything, you know, going on with Jin?" Shinhye asked, and I looked at her. My longing to go back to the time when she and I still trusted each other, when things between us had last been okay, was strong.

I wanted to tell her everything. I had always wanted to, if only to put the confusion and responsibility into someone else's hands. But I knew I couldn't. Shinhye wouldn't have believed me. She's too practical, too much like me. Or at least, how I used to be.

I shook my head. An hour later, I was sitting in a chair at the side of Jin's bed. He's been moved into intensive care.

Maybe it was the fact that he was in the ICU or that he was wearing a hospital gown. Or maybe it was that he hadn't shaved and the stubble on his face made his skin look gray. Or maybe it was that his skin was gray. He looked worse.

Mrs. Kim didn't look too good either. I don't think she'd slept much, or brushed her hair. Mr. Kim had come. He was sitting in the corner, in a chair that was too small for him, red-faced and uncomfortable, his eyes shifting from Jin on the bed to the curtained opening that was the door, as if hoping for an excuse to walk right through it. When Mrs. Kim stepped out for a break, Mr. Kim waited just long enough for her to be gone before he announced, "I guess I'll go too," and disappeared.

Jin took my hand. There was a window near his bed. I could see a parking garage across the street, the back of a brick hotel, the tower of the museum where eomma worked, the low purplish mountains on the other side of the river.

"This doesn't feel real anymore," he said. "You feel real to me, but the rest of it - the hospital, the fact that my dad came home to take care of my brothers, this window -" He must have seen me looking at it, so I turned back to face him. "They feel like a dream. I feel dizzy all the time."

He pinched his skin on the back of his hand, and it held the crease when he took his fingers away. "That's called tenting," he explained. "It's because I'm dehydrated. None of the doctors can figure out why."

I smoothed the tented skin down. My hand looked impossibly pink next to his.

"I had a thought," I said. "If hitting your head on the stage put some kind of cap on the dreams, there might be some other physical intervention that can get at the problem. More subtle than breaking your skull open on the stage. Maybe the doctors can actually help you."

Jin rubbed his temple. "I'm dreaming so much more now," he said. "I think I'm going to get to the end. I -"

"Jin, please!" I didn't want to listen. But I could see that he was in pain. If talking helped, I had to let him. "Okay," I said, to let him know he could go on.

"It was a bomb," he announced. "A homemade bomb. Nothing special. It was in the kitchen. The fourth apartment we checked. Inside a radio." He'd spoken in bursts, and I couldn't tell if he was short of breath because he was weak or because he was afraid of what he was saying. "This kid was holding the radio. He was young. Maybe eleven?" Jin closed his eyes. "I can see him. Fat cheeks. Skinny arms. Blue eyes - weird for Iraq. He peed himself. That was how I knew the radio was a bomb. Suzy, they blow up their kids. Little kids." Jin let out a dry laugh. "The radio was on too. Playing music. I don't know what the song was, but I can hear it." He rubbed his hairline near the bandage he still wore from hurting his head on the stage. "It's the song I hear every time I dream."

"What happened next?" I asked.

"That's it. I see the kid. The radio. I get that it's a bomb. I think, So this is how I'm going to die. And I wake up."

Just then, a nurse in puppy-print scrubs and red clogs wheeled in a pole with a hook on top. Jin nodded a greeting in her direction, and she cheerfully asked him questions as she checked the label on the bag, attached it to a piece to tubing, flicked the tubing with one finger, the hooked its other end to a port that emerged from a bandage taped to his elbow. I couldn't take it in - the cheery nurse, her scrubs and clogs. What Jin had just told me.

"Like my IV?" he said.

I shook my head. I was trying not to cry.

"It's just fluids and antibiotics. It's the same stuff you take if you have a strep throat."

"You have a strep throat?"

"I wish," he said. "I have this fever no one understands because there's no source of infection."

"Oh, don't you worry, honey," said the nurse. "These doctors know what they're doing. No one's that much of a mystery."

Jin smiled, but as soon as the nurse was gone, his smile faded.

"The pain I told you yesterday," Jin said. "The burning. I felt it again. When I was asleep. I'm guessing it's how I'm dying. In the future."

"Jin . . . ," I said. He looked up at me hopefully, like I was going to be able to help him, like I could make the pain go away.

But then Mrs. Kim returned from her walk. "Oh, Suzy," she said, as if she were just seeing me for the first time. "Shouldn't you be in school?"

"Free period," I mumbled. I picked up my backpack from the chair where I'd tossed it down. "But I guess I should get back."

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

I was headed for the bus stop outside the hospital when I spotted Shinhye's car parked behind the taxi line. She had her left elbow balanced on the car door, her head propped in her hand. She didn't look busy or thoughtful or otherwise occupied with an agenda. She was just . . . there. And even now, when I think of what the word "friend" means, I remember Shinhye waiting for me that day. Her knowing to come, even when I hadn't asked. Even when things between us were strained.

"Aren't you going to in trouble, skipping school?" I asked once I was buckled into the passenger seat.

She smiled ruefully, that I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know smile that makes it possible to like someone as beautiful as she is. "Aren't you?" she said.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

Somehow, I got through the rest of the day. I remember sitting with Shinhye at lunch, my tray filled with food I couldn't imagine eating. I remember standing at my locker, trying to recall which class was next and not being able to.

After school, I went back to the hospital. Jaehwan came too, and we sat side by side at the foot of Jin's bed, watching him sleep. For the most part, he slept peacefully, but once, he started thrashing. I put my hand on his leg and shook him, hoping Mrs. Kim wouldn't see. It was enough of a disturbance that Jin half woke, then resettled.

Mr. Kim brought Seokie and Jinnie to see Jin after school, before taking them to a friend's for the night.

I was pretty sure something had happened between him and Mrs. Kim during the course of the day. I didn't know what it was, but they seemed more relaxed with each other. And as he left, Mr. Kim put a hand on Mrs. Kim's shoulder and said, "Jisoo, try to rest." He looked at Jin long and hard. "I'm coming back," he said. And then, as if afraid that his statement would be taken to mean more than it should: "After I drop the boys."

Once they were gone, Jin's mom fell asleep in a chair, dressed in the same clothes she'd been wearing the night before. Her sweatshirt had a dribble of coffee down the front, but she didn't seem to know.

When the team of doctors came through, Jaehwan blocked them at the curtained doorway. "Give her a minute, please," he said. "She's just waking up."

I was impressed with him. I knew from my experience on rounds with appa that doctors wait for no one, but Jaehwan was so calm and confident he was able to hold them at bay.

In the conference that followed, the doctors wondered out loud why Jin was sleeping so much and instructed the nurses to wake him every twenty minutes. They kept coming back to questions about his fever and why, even with antibiotics, they couldn't lower it to the level they wanted to see.

"He presented with loss of consciousness, post-nonconcussive head injury. So where is this fever coming from? Why is he showing signs of dehydration?"

I saw Mrs. Kim's back straighten at the words "risk of sepsis" and "like activity," but she nodded and asked questions that made it clear she was a nurse as well as a mom.

Next the doctors woke Jin, asking him the year, to spell his name, how many fingers they were holding up. You could tell he had to really think about the answers. But once the doctors were gone, he put out a hand for Jaehwan to high-five.

Jin's mom never left the room again, so I didn't get to talk to Jin alone. Instead, I listened to Jaehwan tell him stupid stuff about what was going on at school. Jaehwan's deliberately casual reporting seemed to calm Jin, so I tried to match his tone. I think I said something like "I'm going to need your advice on what to do when you cut class on the day of a test." Jaehwan told him that the guys on the team were putting together a highlight reel from everyone's parents' performance videos for Jin to watch if he got bored and missed dancing too much.

Jin slurred his words when he said, "That's awesome." Jaehwan looked at me a little puzzled, a little amused, as if we were at a party and someone was drunk.

At dinnertime, Jaehwan offered me a ride home. Saying goodbye to Jin, I held his hand. He said, "Suzy, can you bend down?" I did. He said, "Closer," and I bent down so far my face was inches from his and my hair falling down around us. He turned his head into my hair and he inhaled, like he was smelling flowers. I looked at him as if to say, "Okay, that's weir," but the desperation in his eyes was too serious for me to make any kind of joke.

"That's real, right?" he whispered. "You're still real?' I nodded. Then he said, "This is why I came back. For this. I remember this."

Out in the hallway, with the elevator door open, I stopped. I could not move.

"Suzy?" Jaehwan said. "You coming?"

"No," I said, turning back toward the room. "You go."

I called eomma. I told her I was staying late. Could she pick me up at ten? She didn't like it - I could hear that in her voice - but she agreed.