Junior year. Winter term. This was the time for me to be studying as hard as I could. Like Jung Hoseok, I should have been furiously editing my newspaper columns, making copies for college portfolios. I should have been mining the Felix Lee food and clothing drive for personal essay material. I should have been living and breathing debate. Already there had been a tournament at a high school in Busan, and during December I traveled with the team to Seoul, Gwangju, and Daegu.

But none of those things held my attention. What did? Jin. Dance. Boys beating the living crap out of each other in the guise of an organized group. That was all my brain could absorb.

I fell in love with dancer's can't-look away energy. Every performance is like a concert in slow motion. Except it's not in slow motion. It's fast. And it's high energy. Dancers strap into their outfits. They carry an emotion I can't describe. They hit the movements so hard it becomes a bullet - it's a lethal weapon. If not for the guards standing in front of the crowds, someone could end up dead before the end of every performance. Often when there was a break in each performance, I realized I'd been holding my breath.

But when you're on stage, Jin told me, you can't afford to fear fear. Keeping your head in the game means not feeling yourself open to distractions - not needing your teammates to rescue you - though they always will. Team is everything. 

In a performance, you're not looking at only one person, but as a whole. Where the movements tells a story. Each movements symbolizes an emotion. You feeling what the dancers are feeling.

Maybe I saw the performance as that way because I was always watching Jin. He believed in passing, which was unusual for a high schooler. I thought maybe I was the only one who noticed, but then I heard Choreographer Son commenting on it in a huddle, telling the others to look at Jin setting himself up for the pass, "thinking," Coach Son said, "like I tell you, two beats, bam, bam." The coach called Jin's dancing "real mature."

But the way Jin danced was more than mature. It was beautiful. Jin was graceful and sharp; he was fast and he was subtle; he crouched, he swung himself forward, he flew, he stopped on a dime. Just seeing his tattoo number, 17, slipping through his collars - was enough to send shivers down my spine.

Meanwhile, in the month of December, I could have filled a book with the transcripts of conversations I wasn't having. Eomma wasn't bringing up the subject of Jin and I either. Shinhye wasn't mentioning Taejoon and I didn't ask her about Jaehwan. Even when I found them outside the gym doors at the top of the parking lot, their heads bowed over the shared headphones on Jaehwan's phone. I said nothing. Even when Jaehwan got drunk and asked me point-blank if he had a chance with Shinhye, I shrugged and walked away. Jin wasn't talking either. He didn't once mention his memories or his dreams. I think he could tell I wasn't ready.

Here's what we were talking about: Jin spent hours explaining dancing, moves, emotions, traditions. Shinhye's mom adopted yet another dog, and Shinhye started carrying a lint roller everywhere, using it obsessively and pulling off another masking-tape layer when she saw so much as a single hair on her clothes. Jaehwan got accepted early decision to Busan College, and Shinhye forced him to tell her his SAT scores. Banner news: Jaehwan was actually smart. Eomma was put in charge of the annual Christmas tree display at the museum, and I worked the coat check at the opening party. Viviane got buried under a company merger and didn't see her for weeks.

By Christmas, this strange state of talking yet not talking and discussing without asking had started to feel normal. When Shinhye left for America for Christmas break with her family, we said goodbye and exchanged gifts (winter-solstice pedicures, our tradition), pretending the silences weren't becoming bigger than the conversations, that I wasn't itching all the time to ask her how she could so cruel to Jaehwan and she wasn't thinking I had given her over too much of my myself to Jin.

Jaehwan's siblings and their children arrived in town, and Jin and I brought Seokie and Jinnie over to his house to play touch football with Jaehwan's nieces and nephews. (One of the  nephews was the football. Jin held giggling two-year-old up in the air and Jaehwan shouted, "No spiking!")

Then it was the night before I was leaving to go skiing with eomma and Viviane for winter break. Jin's family was t their tree, so I went over to join them. 

"My dad isn't going to be here," Jin said when I got to the door - the side door by this time, since I was no longer a guest.

"Is he working?"

"He moved out." Jin tucked his chin into his chest as he gave his answer. I could see he didn't want to talk about 1) the separation, or 2) the fact that another of his prediction had come true.

"Are you okay?" I tried. He rolled his eyes. He shrugged.

His mom seemed fine, at least. In fact, she was almost giddy. She had her hair up in a bun. She'd brought home sushi. "Isn't this what you eat with your mom?" she asked, and then, not waiting for my answer: "Jin told me." Seokie and Jinnie weren't talking about the separation, but from the way they scowled at their plates and refused to accept Mrs. Kim's assertions that the crab wasn't raw, I could see that they were mad.

Without asking, Jin poured two bowls of Lucky Charms and put them down on the tables for the boys.

"Next time, we'll try tempura," Mrs. Kim murmured, turning up the volume when "White Christmas" came on the radio and pulling out a box of decorations for the tree. I loved seeing their ornaments: pictures of Jin as a little boy, pinecones decorated in glitter, colored glass balls that felt lighter than the ones we used at home.

Jin pulled one US Marine Corps ornament after another out of the box and hung them prominently on the tree. "Must you?" Mrs. Kim sighed, but she didn't object any further.

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Before I left, I gave Jin the watch. I didn't say, "You already know what this is." And when he said, "I promise I will wear this all my life," he didn't make it sound like he already knew he would. He broke our code of silence only once, when he buckled the watch to his wrist, held it away to show it off, and said, "It looks so new."

His present to me was a locket with pictures we'd taken at the photobooth at an arcade we went with Jaehwan and Shinhye. In one side, we were sticking our tongues out. In the other side, he was kissing me on the cheek. Engraved on the was ALWAYS: 17.

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Skiing was something that for the most part I did alone, as eomma had never wanted to learn and Viviane, after teaching me, had given it up in favor of shopping and hitting the spa with eomma. So over Christmas break, I spent time alone with my thoughts, missing Jin, wondering if he was all right.

Huddled on the chairlift just after the snowstorm, I wondered if it had snowed back home. I wondered if the landscaper who gave Jin work in the summer had called him to help clear and plow - Jin had said he might. I imagined Jin shoveling, tripping down to a flannel shirts and snow pants, making short work of drifts.

But was Jin also - at some point in the future - leading a squad of marines into a death trap, snipers hiding in doorways or behind the laundry strung up on rooftops?

Breakfast in the lodge: Viviane's dark hair, her framed red glasses catching the light from the fire already roaring, eomma cozy in fur-trimmed boots, her hair blowdried, makeup in place. A toasted bagel with jam. Dark coffee for eomma. Raisin bran for Viviane. Both of them talking crow's feet and belly fat and laughing in a way I remembered from when I was little. All of it should have been comforting, but it wasn't. I felt claustrophobic. I wanted to go home.

Questions about college. There was a choice to be made. There was no wrong answer. Big, small; city, country. Not too close. Not too far. Liberal arts gives you the freedom to make up your mind about a career later. It teaches you to think.

But I didn't want to think. Especially about college. I just wanted to ski. I wanted to escape eomma's and Viviane's prying gazes and penetrating questions. They could see I wasn't the same; they didn't know why, but they knew better than to ask. Even if I'd tried to explain, they wouldn't have understand. They didn't know what I knew. They hadn't heard Jin crying in his sleep. They had safe choices. I was the one out in the cold, seeing the future through Jin's eyes.

On the last afternoon of skiing, I experienced vertigo for the first time in my life. I was standing at the top of the mountain, poised for the final run of the day, and suddenly, all I could think about was falling. In fact, I felt like I was already falling, my insides dropping out as if I were on a roller coaster. I couldn't feel my feet. I couldn't remember how to move my legs. My skis felt about as useful as a pair of cinder blocks. I couldn't look down.

I was not in a good place to stop moving. It was cold, there was a strong wind, and the icy snow was stinging my cheeks. I let it, squinting at the blue in the ice, the shadows stretching over the trail as snow blew across it in sheets. The sun was sinking lower in the sky.

Jin, where are you? I thought. I wanted him with me. He knew what it was like to feel your heart pounding in your chest and not understand why. I understood his dream now in a way I hadn't before. I saw it the way he did, bathed in the cold light of anxiety.

In my fear-addled state, the images from the dream gripped me with a new intensity. It was so visceral  it was as if an older Jin, a terrifyingly real, heavier Jin, had stepped back in time and taken a hold of me. By the throat.

The rooftops, the laundry, knowing about Felix's fire - I understood why it terrified him so much. And I understood that I believed him. The memories were real.

As if I could outrace them, I finally pushed myself forward over the crest of the hill. I skied in way I had never skied before. I skied like I was being chased by demons. I crouched into a tuck, turning my skis as little as possible, leaning as far forward as I dared. My breath came quickly. Blood pounded in my ears. I could hear the edges of my skis scraping against ice. I knew if I didn't slow myself down, I would ski into a tree or lose my balance and fall. But I didn't slow down; I raced faster and faster, clinging to the hope that the kill would end soon.

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That night, I had a hard time getting warm. Even when I was tucked safe in the lodge, drinking cocoa with eomma and Viviane and watching sappy movies on pay-per-view - a last-night-of-the-trip- tradition dating back to when I was nine - my toes were like ice.

"Look at her," Viviane said to eomma when they reached a pause in their conversation and looked over at me. She was half teasing in the way she always did, and I smiled, clenching my jaw to hide my chattering teeth. "She's growing up. She's nearly an adult."

"yes," eomma said, and then she giggled, which is something she does only when Viviane is around. Also, they were drinking champagne. "My baby!" she called out, embarrassing me, clearly enjoying it. I gave her an eye roll she was looking for, but I wasn't really there.

I called Jin later from my room, so I could have some privacy.

"There's something I need to know," I said.

"Okay."

"Your dream," I said, letting it sink in that I was breaking a month of silence on the subject. "Every time you have that dream, you see more. You head hurts more. You remember more. So what's going to happen when you get to the end of the dream? What happens when your remembering is . . . complete?"

Jin said nothing for a minute. "I don't know," he finally admitted. Then he sighed. "But I have an idea."