1.

They were making it legal.

Miyeol stole a glance at Himchan. He flipped through the pages of the form lackadaisically, then skipped to the last one. He went to sign the at the bottom and stopped.

“This pen is dead,” he said, and shook it.

Miyeol’s breath caught in . Was he stalling? Was it possible he didn’t want to do this any more than she did? She watched him, waiting for some kind of cue to act. But then the lawyer handed him a new pen, and Himchan scrawled his name across the line and handed the pen back. It was done.

Miyeol exhaled quietly, and bent over her form again. This was the most dejecting thing she’d ever seen.

2.

At night in her bed, Miyeol listened to Himchan shuffle around in his room next door. Some nights, she placed one hand on the wall and the other on her face, imagining his fingers on her skin instead of her own. It was stupid to torture herself like this, but stupider, somehow, to try to avoid it. Miyeol had always been a determined person. A person who faced things head-on. It was her greatest quality—perhaps her only great quality—but it didn’t feel great. It felt like, at some point in the formation of her personality, she’d been robbed of the ability to self-deceive, which was also, fundamentally, the ability to be happy.

She’d felt weird around Himchan for months, ever since he and Mr. Kim (she was supposed to call him dad) had moved in. What was this feeling? It was like everything slowed down when he was in the room. At first she thought it was just the strangeness of having men in the house for the first time. She’d watch Himchan ambling around the kitchen, and everything he did—drinking soda, opening jars of mayonnaise, picking the phone up when it rang—caused her to focus intensely. She’d never been in love before, which was why it took her so long to realise that was what it was. But as soon as she did, she faced it, and committed to it. Committed to the misery of it. She was trapped: She wasn’t truly Himchan’s sister, but she was as invisible to him as a sister. Bonded to him in a way that guaranteed she’d always be near him, but never close to him in the way she wanted to be.

3.

For months it went on like this, with the four of them bumping into each other awkwardly around the house. Miyeol made it her duty to avoid being alone with Himchan at all cost. She didn’t think she could stand the wanting that fuelled her veins.

“Miyeol, did you know that Himchan is taking traditional music this year?”

Every day, her mother offered up these little tidbits about Himchan—the kind of things you say when you introduce two people at a party. “Did you know that Himchan is great at soccer? Did you know that Himchan loves penguins?” Miyeol presumed these informational sessions were meant to help everyone feel familiar—they were family now, after all—but they had the opposite effect. The more Miyeol learned about her new stepbrother, the more she realised he was basically a stranger, and the more the baffling agony of wanting him drained her body and mind.

She was exhausted all the time. At night, she dreamed of him, often jolting awake with the sheets twisted in a hard knot between her legs. She felt hot and temporarily ecstatic, with so much energy she could’ve easily crushed her fist through the wall that divided her bedroom and his…until she remembered the horrible, impregnable boundaries of her life, and felt the energy seep from her and disappear. Then she’d sink heavily back into sleep and dream of him some more.

4.

Miyeol’s avoidant nature got to the point where Himchan must’ve picked up her intentions and started leaving the house for longer hours.

Himchan went out even more on weekends and came home late. Miyeol heard him through the wall, creeping into his room and collapsing in his bed. Sometimes, she imagined what would happen if he came into hers one night instead. He’d flop into her bed, and wrap his arms around her, and they’d both pretend nothing was happening. But they’d both know, and within minutes, they’d be ignoring the facts that Himchan had a girlfriend and Miyeol was a and both their parents—they were step-siblings!—were sleeping downstairs—or, even worse, not sleeping.

Imagining her mother and Mr. Kim’s life made Miyeol shudder. When the Kim men moved in, Miyeol’s mom made her move out of her bedroom downstairs to one upstairs. As grotesque as thinking about what her motivations were, what Miyeol felt most powerfully wasn’t disgust, it was envy. Adults just did whatever they wanted, didn’t they? They got married, they got divorced, they got married again, they shoved their kids together and then abandoned them. They had as much as they wanted, arranging everyone’s rooms so they could do it without waking the children.

The worst part was how close it was to being a ersely ideal scenario. What girl wouldn’t love to be unsupervised with the guy she likes and two bedrooms at their disposal? But it wasn’t like that. They were alone together, but somehow not together. They barely spoke, and Himchan came and went at odd, unpredictable hours. The wall between their rooms adjoined them, but the way it separated them was all Miyeol could think about.

5.

The fog of Miyeol’s desire was too heavy to hope that it would evaporate on its own. She had to get it off her; something had to happen. If she could have this just once, then she would be satisfied for the rest of her life. Of this, she was absolutely certain, though she couldn’t have said exactly why. If she’d examined her thoughts objectively for five seconds, she would have realised that the idea ludicrous—a childish holdover from fairy tales where kisses always break the spell. But Miyeol wasn’t the type to examine or analyse. She formed beliefs quickly, made decisions based on those beliefs, and then followed them to their end.

Miyeol’s first plot failed. The plan was to make out with Himchan by impersonating his girlfriend, Jieun. The two girls didn’t obviously resemble each other but they had very similar bodies—they were the same height, and had the same s size and even the same hairstyle. If it were dark enough, it was possible Himchan could mistake Miyeol for Jieun for long enough to kiss her.

For days, she studied and perfected Jieun’s handwriting, the light touch of her pen, the tight loops of her letters, before writing a letter and slipping it into his locker:

Dear Himchan,
Meet me at 11 tonight behind the dumpster of Sphyg-Momanus. Do not bring a flashlight. I have a surprise for you, but you’re not allowed to see it. It’s the kind of surprise that you feel!

She’d felt idiotic writing it, but that was Jieun’s style. Sphyg-Momanus was Himchan’s favourite place. It was an old, half-empty restaurant where he went to be alone. He would sit by himself ’til four in the morning sometimes, reading and eating sausages. Miyeol sometimes walked past on the street to catch glimpses of him through the window.

Behind the place was a large metal dumpster. The street lamp above it was broken, hissing occasionally but emitting no light. So the dumpster stood safely in shadows, its back abutting a black patch of forest that Miyeol could easily disappear into if anything went awry. She had gone over the plan a hundred times: She was chewing the kind of gum she’d seen Jieun chew, so that would taste familiar to him. She’d bought stockings, the kind Jieun wore, so when Himchan touched her legs, they would feel like Jieun’s. As long as Miyeol didn’t speak or say a word, he wouldn’t know the difference. And even if Jieun found out about the note later, and denied writing it, there was nothing in it that could be traced back to Miyeol.

Even as she reassured herself of all this, Miyeol was aware, in a small but significant way, that the idea was completely unhinged, like something from a wacky sitcom, and that lust was impairing her mind. It was turning her into someone she couldn’t trust.