Jin called the next morning and came over at noon. We walked into town for sundaes. "You know, Suzy, whatever weirdness -" he said, and then he stopped, like even bringing up the topic was getting too close to talking about it. "Are you mad?"

I put my lips together into a smile that was mostly a grimace. Me, mad? I wanted to say. Wasn't he the one who should be mad at me for forcing a theory on him when I obviously don't understand?

But if I said that, we'd be talking about it again, and I didn't want to go there. So I just shook my head. No, I wasn't mad. We looked down into our ice creams until the moment passed.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

From that day on, my memories get choppy, like I'm fishing snapshots out of a box where they were stored in no particular order.

Parent-teacher conference day: no school. Was it October? November? I remember picking apples with Jin. I remember the leaves had started to turn orange for real. We went to Jin's house afterward.

I'd been there before. Jin had the kind of mom who insisted that I come over for dinner, and she'd given me green peppers to chop two seconds after we'd been introduced. "Finally," she'd said when Jin brought me into the kitchen, "Jin's girlfriend." Like she hadn't thought he had it in him.

And Jin had the kind of dad who, when dinner was called, walked in from the garage with grease on his hands and shoveled his food into his mouth like he was being paid to eat and took no pleasure in it. Jin said his parents fought, but they didn't in front of me, expect once, sort of, when Jin's mom was asking about my college plans and she turned to Jin and said, "See? At least someone your age isn't going off to get themselves killed in the marines."

Jin's dad waved a hand in the air dismissively. "Don't waste your breath," he said, addressing Jin as if Mrs. Kim weren't even in the room. "Your mother isn't the type to understand."

After apple picking, with no one home, I learned more about his family. Jin took me out to the tree fort he and his dad built for his little brothers. He pointed out the trail in the woods that his dad had blazed, leading to the pond where Jin had learned to skate. "My dad wasn't around a lot when he was still in the service, but the times he was here, he was here. Now he's around all the time, but it's like he's a ghost. He's nobody."

Jin showed me his BB gun range, which raised my debate-rhetoric hackles. "Do you know how dangerous it is to have guns and young boys together under one roof?" I said. "Did you know that most gun deaths of children are accidental and happen even in households where the guns are locked away? Boys, especially, will find them." I'd debated a gun control resolution six times my freshman year.

Jin stopped me by placing his hands on my shoulders. He looked like was trying not to laugh. "BB guns, Suzy," he said. "We may be gun people, but we're not stupid."

I felt myself calming down. Jin had that affect on me. Taking my hand in the hallway at school, he'd made me feel like I had traveled somewhere - to a place I wanted to be.

"Besides," he went on, smirking. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." I in a huge breath, all ready to tear apart that backward charge so many people accepted as gospel.

Then I realized Jin was kidding.

He put a hand at the back of my waist, pulled me to him. 

Inside, the empty house was filled with dust motes, and it smelled like old breakfast. Before, with Seok and Jinnie to distract me, running around in nothing but Jin's T-shirts and their tighty-whities, I hadn't noticed that the tile on the kitchen floor was yellowed and the couch in the living room sagged. But now, in the quiet, the house felt tired, like it had seen too much history.

Jin made us peanut butter sandwiches and then found me in the den, where I'd gone to look at the pictures on the wall, the way you do only when no one's home.

Most were studio portraits. Some where black-and-white, some were in colors, but all of them were of young Kim men - marines - scrubbed, shaven, shorn, squeezed into dressed blue. All had Jin's even forehead and his broad shoulders. There was more too: group photos, plaques, glass-framed boxes displaying ribbons and medals, a line of family photo albums on the shelves, and a framed poster of the marines.

"That's my halabeoji," Jin said, pointing to one of the black-and-white pictures. A man in glasses and a dimple in his chin. "And that's appa." He looked like Jin with a scar on his left cheek. A handsome young man. "That's Samchon Joon. Samchon Hope. These guys over here were appa's cousins. This guy - Samchon Jimin - he's the one who died in Vietnam, and this guy, Cousin Yoon, he kind of went crazy after this POW thing. For a while, he became a Mormon, and then he went totally AWOL, abandoning his Mormon family and joining this group that was - well, halmeoni always tried to make it sound like he was in a club, but basically I think he was robbing alcohol stores. I only met him once, when he came back east and halmeoni had a BBQ party. Totally crazy."

"For real?"

Jin nodded slowly, so I was expecting bad news. Convulsive ticcing? Ragged clothing? An unmistakable smell of old pee?

With his fingers, Jin traced two lines across his upper lip, pinching air in the neighborhood of his jawline. "Huge mustache." It took me a minute to get what he was even talking about. "I've seen a squirrel tail bushy than what this guy was growing on his lip."

"Wow," I laughed.

"Appa would have put all this stuff in the living room if eomma had let him."

"Wow," I laughed again, though differently this time.

"So you can see . . ."

And I could. I got it now, why Jin wasn't going to college. Why, when we went to the mall, he always stopped by the Military Entrance Processing Station - where recruiters knew him by name and made sure he never left without one of the granola bars they gave out for free, a newspaper article about a former marine who started a small business with a loan, a video called A vision for the Future, or a copy of "The Few, the Proud" brochure. In this family, if you weren't a marine, your picture would show up on this wall. It would be as if, in the context of your family tree, your branch didn't exist.

We moved upstairs. Jin's room had been off-limits when his mother was around. But now I could take it all in: a brown dresser, old-fashion window shades with fringe trim, trophies, beige wall color. And a marines poster, a black-and-white image of a man's face, broken out in sweat and straining in agony. One of the man's hand was visible, grasping a rope he was presumably climbing, while police-tape-yellow type boasted:

WE'D PROMISED YOU SLEEP DEPRIVATION, MENTAL TORMENT, AND MUSCLES SO SORE YOU'LL PUKE. BUT WE DON'T LIKE TO SUGARCOAT THINGS. MARINES: THE FEW. THE PROUD.

Jin pointed to the windows, through which I could see the woods behind the house, the surface of the pond glinting through the trees. "See over there? I almost died there once."

"For real?"

Jin breathed out. "I'd gotten this pair of skates for Christmas. They were used, but they were real hockey skates. My first. I had been warm for a few days ad Eomma told me no skating, but I didn't listen to her. No one was going to keep me off the ice."

Which cracked, he went on to explain, and as he described falling in, I felt the heavy cold that must've penetrated, feeling impatient. It didn't matter that I could see him standing before me, obvious proof that he had lived to tell the tale. I was still scared. I wanted him to get the end of the story quickly.

"I broke my way out."

"You what?"

Jin reset his jaw in the manner of someone who was trying to appear not to care. "Ever seen those icebreaker ships in places where the ocean freezes, like Alaska? They have these huge wheels at the bow that basically eat through the ice, clearing a path for the boat. I turned myself into one of them. I don't know how I'd managed to hold on to the edge of the ice, but I had, and I used it to make my way up."

"But you were really young." When I was that age, I was still afraid of the monkey bars.

"I was as old as Seokie."

I tried to imagine a little-boy version of Jin. In my mind, I saw a crew cut sticking out of the freezing water; he was alone, fighting for his life by beating at the edge of the ice until it cracked in submission. "Did your mother freak out?"

"I never told her. As soon as I got on solid ground, I ripped off my new skates and just left them there. I ran to the house, went in the back door, and threw everything I was wearing into the washing machine. I somehow managed to turn it on, and then I climbed into my bed in my underwear. My teeth were chattering really hard. I drew blood when I bit my lip by accident. I was scared. But I knew if eomma found out, she wouldn't let me skate anymore."

"You were nine?"

Jin shrugged off the question. "Appa got home - it was the day after Christmas. Eomma was working, probably. And I guess he found the laundry. He must have seen the muddy trail from the back door into the laundry room too. He washed everything. Found my skates. Came and put them on the floor by my bed. DIdn't say anything. but he didn't need to. He knew how much I'd wanted them, and how much skating met to me."

Tears were forming in my eyes. Maybe because my own dad had never done anything like that for me. But thinking of Jin as a little boy, and shivering in bed, I had to ask, "Shouldn't your dad have been more worried?"

"Eomma worries enough for our whole family. That's really what her problem is with the whole marines business." Jin grabbed my hand, smiling again, and lowered his head to look into my eyes. "Don't feel sorry for me." He laughed. "I only told you that story to impress you."

He pulled me onto the bottom bunk. I felt a deep ache forming inside of me, a fluttering. That was what it was like to be with Jin. That was how I felt whenever he touched me.

He pulled a mini album from a shelf above the bed. "Want to see pictures of my little brothers back when they were still cute?"

I wanted to do anything Jin suggested. And Seokie and Jinnie were really cute. They were riding bikes in a campground, then eating cereal in matching PJs at a picnic table, a pop-up RV behind them. His mom making pancakes, wearing a Santa hat - she had Jin's eyes. A photo of his dad in his marines uniform, squinting at the little-boy version of Jin holding his hand.

"Your dad -" I didn't know what to say. He looked happy. Hard to tell just from a picture, but there was something there. Pride?

"He should have stayed in the service," Jin said. "But eomma couldn't take it."

"Was he deployed a lot?"

"yeah, and she stopped going with him after a bit. She hated base life. Which I don't get. I mean, I was born in Gwcheon - paradise, right? And all my mom remembers is that her sisters were out getting education while she played solitaire and drank vodka for breakfast."

"Your mom?" I couldn't imagine her drinking.

"At Camp Pam, which I actually remember, there were kids everywhere. You could get any toy at the PX. And candy. But eomma could get away from that whole life fast enough. She moved home and gave appa a choice: re-up as a reservist or live alone. Then, after she went back at school and started working, money wasn't such a factor, and she told him she couldn't stand even the reserves. The minute he was discharged, it was like, boom, he was gone."

"He left you?"

"Not physically. But it's like he can't feel anything. Except anger. I can't remember the last time he laughed. And I get it, he loved being  marine. It's who he was . . ."

Jin's voice trailed off, and as he took the album out of my hand, he laughed bitterly. The he rolled over on top of me, kissed me and tickled me, and we were laughing and kissing at the same time and sort of wrestling too. Then just kissing.

This was the first time we'd ever lain on a bed together. We'd always been in car, or outside, or with my mom, or with Shinhye, or at a party.

Jin pushed the hair off my forehead. He propped himself up on an elbow. He ran a finger under my jaw and down my neck. He said, "I don't want to ever stop remembering the way this feels. Just this shape here." Het his finger rest in the hollow beneath my collarbone. I looked straight up at him.

But I can't write too much more about this. Because sometimes, when I think about holding Jin, or being held by him, when I replay the things he said to me, when I hear his voice inside my head, my hands shake and I can't  think straight to write. I feel . . . I don't know. I feel to much.

Jin and I fell asleep in his bed that afternoon, my head resting on his chest, his arm wrapped around me. We had a blanket pulled up over us, and it was so quiet we could hear the hum of the fridge from downstairs.

What woke me was the sound of Jin crying in his sleep. He wasn't crying out like he was having a nightmare. He was whimpering, and then I saw tears were streaming down his cheeks.

I called his name. He stirred and seemed to swallow the noise he was making, then sniffed and the tears stopped also. He didn't wake up, even when I wiped a tear from his cheek.