As the fall moved forward, all I wanted was to be with Jin. I didn't care when Viviane got tickets to shows. I didn't want to hang out at Shinhye's after school, eating popcorn and drinking the drinks that was supposed to be for guests. I didn't care if Shinhye was watching Doctor Crush. I didn't care what Yoo Shi-jin and Kang Moyeon were up to in Descendants of the Sun. I didn't want to try on dresses I would never wear. I didn't want to spend Saturday morning wandering the museum's galleries while eomma finished up a few projects in her office overlooking the sculpture court.

I made excuses. I'd tell eomma I had homework, then spend the night on the night with Jin, pretending that I'd just called him when eomma entered my room.

I knew eomma was watching me - over the top of her knitting, her glasses pushed down to the bottom of her cute button nose, the questions she wasn't asking swirling in her brain. I could tell what she was thinking. She was thinking that Jin was enough. That he didn't understand the world - her world. That someone not going to college was going to pull me down.

I could have made a case for him. I could have put her mind at ease, telling her about how physics Jin was the one who understood how velocity and momentum affect the universe. About how he beat me in Scrabble.

I could have told eomma how much Jin knew about the marines. How he'd memorized the complex hierarchy of job classification. How, if you wanted to see any action, you'd need to be an "03," and how you needed to time your enlistment with the annual cycle of job assignments to maximize the available choices. He would say things like "Guys make the mistake of thinking only about basic, but you have to plan for four years. You need a good job going in - you don't want to just be a grunt." He talked about how technology was changing the way the military fought. He mentioned Grenada. The Gulf War.

I could have told eomma how protective Jin was of his little brothers, how because of whatever weirdness was going on with his dad, he had been the one who helped out their Little League team the year before. I could have told her how once, when he and I got stuck in a traffic jam Mrs. Kim had warned us about, Jin pushed his hands against the steering wheel, locked his elbows, and said, "You know what I hate about my mom? I hate how she always ends up being right."

I could have told her how generous Jin was. Generous in ways not people notice. Like, he didn't interrupt people. When Shinhye was talking, he turned his full gaze on her and let her say what she needed to say. He did the same to me, and also to eomma, to his friends, to Mr. Han, although no one interrupted Mr. Han - Lord forbid he should get off the subject of his boat and start talking about physics.

But I didn't tell eomma any of this. Maybe because, from the beginning, there were things about Jin that I knew better than to tell anyone. Or maybe it was just because what I really wanted from Jin was Jin. Undiluted, uncopied, unphotograghed, unprocessed Jin. I didn't want to share him. I wanted it to be just him and me. Alone.

One Sunday, Viviane invited Eomma and me over to her famous Gopchang and I said I couldn't go because I already had plans with Shinhye.

Eomma let me know with a withering look that she assumed I was meeting Jin and just not telling her. But she was wrong. I did have plans with Shinhye - sort of. We were going to meet up Jin and his friend Lee Jaehwan in the park near my house.

"You lied to your mom?" Shinhye said as we waited for Jin and Jaehwan to arrive. Shinhye and I were sitting side by side on a bench facing the Han River. "Your mom?"

Uh-oh, I thought. Shinhye loves eomma. She glamorizes her independence. She thinks of her as that counselor you never lie to because she's just that cool.

"You lie to your mother all the time," I said. "It's practically a religion for you."

"But that's my mom. She wants me to lie to her."

I raised an brow at her.

"If I lied to tell eomma the truth, she couldn't take it. It would be like when those opera singer hit that note that makes everyone's wineglasses shatter."

"Your mom's nice."

"Eomma's acts like it's the 1950s. All she did in high school was take flower-arranging classes and ride horses. She was obsessed with horses. Which is how I know she was a , by the way. Horses are proof positive."

Shinhye is full of theories like this. I put them in the same category with her knowing when celebrities get arrested or divorced and which teachers are having affairs and who is gay. She called it "gaydar," a word I didn't even know existed until she tried to convince me that eomma and Viviane were "obviously" an old married couple who kept their true relationship under wraps for my sake and for the sake of their careers. ("Shut up!" I had said. That was crossing the line."

"But your mom talks to you," Shinhye was saying now. "You scould tell her about stuff. Like guys. Like Jin."

"I don't want to," I confessed. Shinhye shot me a look. Maybe she was connecting what I was saying about eomma to me reluctance to discuss Jin with her too? I wouldn't have been surprised. Every conversation we'd had lately seemed to end with one of us stopping abruptly because to say one sentence more would mean we were in a fight.

Take Jaehwan, Jin's friend who was on his way to meet at that very moment. Shinhye had been torturing him for weeks, and as I'd watched her draw him in, I'd found myself thinking, what is she doing? I mean, the poor guy. He wasn't in Shinhye's league. He never would be.

Jaehwan was . . . well, he was Jaehwan. Jin's best friend. A good kid in general, but no rocket scientist. He had shiny black hair that fell into his eyes, and he wore baggy pants. I'd never heard him speak more than five words in a row. The dance team - playing, lifting weights with the guys, driving around and partying together - seemed to be his life.

And yet here we were, meeting up in the park and then driving over to Jaehwan's house on a Sunday night because Shinhye said she wanted to see where he lived.

Jaehwan's house was the kind half the kids' in our town lived in - a picture window in the living room, a minivan in the driveway, a basketball hoop over the garage, a wreath of dried flowers on the front door, one backyard spilling into the next. I was expecting the inside to be all about family, with a lot of kids, muddy shoes, and sports equipment, a dad cooking pancakes or hot dogs, a mom running school committees.

But when we got inside, the hall was dark. The wallpaper in the half-lit living room was faded. Jaehwan's white-haired mom was sitting the kitchen table alone, under a single light, clipping coupons and drinking a drink, a pale blue cardigan draped over her shoulders like she was afraid of drafts. His dad was watching a tourament in the den, smoking a cigar, which gave the house a rich, foreign smell that reminded me of the incense in Shinhye's church. "Annyeong!" Jaehwan's dad said, but he looked a bit disoriented, like someone just woken from a nap.

"Sorry my parents are so old," Jaehwan said once we were in the basement.

"They're not old," Shinhye slapped Jaewhan gently on the shoulder like he has just said something funny. "They're nice."

"They're old," Jaehwan sighed.

"Your mom gave us snacks." Shinhye held up the package of cookies his mom had foisted on her.

"She gave us grape soda," Jaehwan said, matching her cookies with a plastic liter bottle. "Who drinks that anymore? What are we, kids?"

"I love grape soda," Shinhye countered, but she couldn't keep the laughter out of her voice. She ran a finger through the dust on the bottle's topmost curve and ended up laughing. "I've been craving a nice ancient bottle of flat grape soda for weeks."

Now Jaehwan was laughing too, but a little uncertainly, like he wasn't sure he was in on the joke.

Shinhye extended an open palm. "Cookie me, please," and Jaehwan fumbled bravely with the bag. After he'd finally managed to get the cookie into her hand, Shinhye sat down on the couch next to me, crossed her legs, and smiled like a cat settling into a sunny spot on a windowsill.

He cookie sat untouched on her knee.

Jaehwan walked over to the TV, which was part of his wood-paneled, stereo-television console . He flipped on a show.

"How old are your parents, anyway?" Shinhye asked.

Jaehwan shrugged.

"You don't know?" Shinhye narrowed her eyes, as if she were looking at a rare specimen of tree frog flown in from the rain forest to satisfy our scientific curiosity. "You're kidding, right?"

"My sister, Jamie, is the oldest, and she's thirty-five or something, so mid-fifties? Older?" Jaehwan shrugged again. "I didn't know there was going to be math on the test."

"I'll give you math," Shinhye said. "Your sister's thirty-five - that makes you a love child!"

Jaehwan blushed. "Oh, come on."

"You mean an accident." Jin was fiddling with the rabbit ears on top of the TV to adjust the reception.

Jaehwan shoved him. A playful shove. They were like this together; all the dancers were. "How old is your mom?" he said.

"You don't want to go there." Jin held up his hands in a gesture of "I surrender."

Shinhye cleared dramatically. "Are you two done?"

Jaehwan snapped to attention, brushing his hair out of his face. Grabbing a Ping-Pong paddle, he said, "We could - you know . . ." The rubber was peeling off the paddle on one side. "No one uses it anymore."

Shinhye popped the cookie in , uncrossed her skinny legs, extracted herself from the sofa, and, holding Jaehwan's wrist to keep the paddle steady, ripped off the rubber like she was removing a band-aid. "Great idea." She turned to me. "You playing?"

"No, she's not," Jin answered for me, grabbing my hand and somehow making it look like I was pulling him violently down onto the sofa, even though he was basically diving on top of me. "We'll watch," he announced.

Shinhye rolled her eyes and then turned her attention to the table, running her hands over the surface to determine where it was warped, laying out the ground rules for the game.

Shinhye is an amazing tennis player, and she's also got a mean Ping-Pong game, but what she was demonstrating that night wasn't her control over the ball. It was her control over Jaehwan. She flipped her hair. She giggled. She bumped his hips with hers. When he aced a serve, she said, "Jaehwan, Jaehwan, Jaehwan, what am I going to do with you?" and actually apologized, somehow forgetting that she'd aced him three times when she had served. She treated him they they were old friends, instead of people who two weeks before would have passed each other in the halls without speaking. Like Jaehwan was someone she thought about. A lot.

But he wasn't. I'd seen her eyerolls when he called her, pumping him for dirt on who liked who in the senior class and which seniors were in a fight while she drew doodles on her math homework.

The only thing that made what she was doing not incredibly cruel - at least, Ping-Pong-wise - was the fact that Jaehwan played with the same kind of aggressive intensity as Shinhye did. In fact, he beat her. Then she beat him. Then they played a game where the points lasted so long Jaehwan's old-man dad poked his head downstairs and informed us that "Mom says it's getting a little late for the guests." It was nine.

"Want to watch Netflix?" Jaehwan said. "To All the Boys I Loved Before just came out."

"Nah." Jin smiled ruefully. "My head is killing me." We all knew why - dance completions had started, and he'd been practicing all afternoon. He stood up from the couch stiffly, offered me a hand. "Want a ride home?"

I looked at Shinhye. SHe put her hands in the front pockets of her jeans, somehow making her legs appear longer than they were. She was looking at me but talking to Jaehwan. "Ever seen any Leonardo Dicaprio movies?

"Who?" Jaehwan said.

"Oh, right," she said. "I guess Suzy and I  are the only  ones watched Titanic, Romeo and Juliet, and The Great Gabsy."

"Come on," I said to her. The only reason Shinhye knew about Leonardo Dicaprio was because of my mom had introduced his movies to both of us.

Shinhye shrugged. She wasn't looking at me anymore. I think she was deciding that I had failed her. I think her treatment of Jaehwan was supposed to demonstrate how not to let a guy into your inner sanctum. Guys are to be played with and teased, not trusted. See? I interpreted her as saying. This is how we we leave them behind.

But I didn't want to follow her instructions. I didn't want to leave Jin behind.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

"Poor Jaehwan!" I said to Jin when we got in his car.

He didn't answer, just reached across me to open the glove compartment, where he kept an economy-sized bottle of ibuprofen. He shook three pills into his hand and swallowed them without water.

"Aren't you only supposed to take two?"

He shrugged. "Three work better." He kissed me. "And honestly," he said, kissing me longer this time and harder, until we both lost interest in the conversation. "Honestly, those two are starting to get on my nerves."