Jin's headaches continued to get worse, and apparently the only thing that helped besides double-dosing himself with ibuprofen was drinking.

So my memory of that winter consists of a string of parties. We went wherever the dance team was getting together, because the dance team was Jin's ticket to alcohol. The dance team did tequila shots ing strange kitchens. The dance team drank out of a funnel. They shook up beer cans to the point of explosion, punctured them with ballpoint pens, popped open the tops, and nearly drowned themselves with the spray. I watched the dance team throw up in bushes. I watched them pick fights with each other. I saw N snap a pool cue in half and use the sharp ends to slit the upholstery on a chair.

I don't know if I could have survived if Jaehwan and Shinhye weren't always there. They helped me drag Jin away.

One time, Jin, Shinhye, and I were sitting on landscaping boulders outside a house where a party was raging. Jaehwan was batting a tennis ball against the garage doors. he was showing off for Shinhye, who studiously ignored him. She was draped across the boulder next to the one Jin and I shared, wrapped in a puffy jacket, her legs stiff in jeans and boots, as if they belonged to a mannequin. She looked into the distance, seemingly focused on the low clouds in the sky.

"Why don't you give the guy a break," Jin said to Shinhye, slurring his words. "Look how hard he's working to impress you? Why not shpread a little love?"

Shinhye gave Jin a look that he was too drunk to understand. Gesturing toward him with her thumb, she said to me, "You're not letting Prince Charming here drive you home, are you?"

Jaehwan stepped away from his handball game to back Shinhye up. "Yeah," he said, standing just behind her. "Back off, Kim." And then, as if the idea just occurred to him, he wound up and threw the tennis ball straight at Jin, hitting him in the shoulder.

"Oh, you did not," said Jin, and he fished the ball out from under a bush and chased Jaehwan off the driveway into the woods behind the house and then back onto the driveway. Without moving from her rock, Shinhye put a leg out for Jaehwan to trip over as he passed. Sure enough, Jaehwan stumbled, then took a few boxer's steps in Shinhye's direction.

"You want a piece of me too, do you?" he said, shaking his hair out of his eyes, leaning over her like he wanted her to stand up and fight.

"Don't be ridiculous," Shinhye said. "I want to play handball. You up for a game?"

And he was. Like one of Shinhye's mom's dogs, he sat up and barked when she called his name.

Jin was not so easily trained. Winded from his sprint, he went to sit down next to me but missed, landing in the bushes instead.

"I feel like someone cracked my skull open with a rock," he said from the ground. "I don't think I can move." And he couldn't. In his helpless, drunken flailing, his jacket sleeve had caught on a branch. I would have laughed except I could see that he was scared.

I unhooked his jacket and got him to his feet. "It's okay," I said, bringing him to me. He was trembling. He held on to me like he wasn't able to stand on his own. "You're safe here," I said. "You're safe with me."

He took my hand and squeezed so hard that I had to pull it away. I rested it on his cheek. I forced him to look at me. "Where are you?" I said. "Come back here. Come back to me."

His eyes refocused, his breathing slowed. He shuddered. "You feel in the bushes next to Taeyong Pham's garage," I went on. "You're drunk but you're okay. It's high school. You know that, right? You're still eighteen."

He nodded and staggered back to the rock. We sat down.

"Is it - is it the dream?" I asked. He'd told me he'd sometimes get stuck inside images from the dream even when he was awake.

He nodded again, and I held him there, kissing his cheeks, holding his face in my hands. Even drunk and frightened, he was beautiful. I loved feeling the shape of his bones beneath his skin.

"What makes it so terrifying?" I ventured. "That it seems so real?"

Jin shook his head. He rubbed my thigh with his palm, as if I were the one who needed steadying. "It's not knowing who or what we were looking for," he said, whispering. "Why we were there. No one explained it to us. We were just bodies." He laughed, and I watched him without understanding the joke. "Our job - a soldier's job - is to take up space and not die. But even so, that building - I remember wondering how they could send us in there. It was a death trap. I could guarantee you that everyone who lived on that alley was hiding inside, some armed with IEDs they'd made in their kitchens out of tea tins and roofing nails." he pushed his ahnd through his hair. He was shaking again.

"Jin," I said. "I'm looking at you. It's 1999. You're eighteen. Don't you see? You don't need to be scared right now."

But it was like he couldn't hear me. "There were stairs, Su." He nearly choked on the words. I saw sweat along the line of his forehead, even though it was winter and we were sitting outside. "Switchbacks. Endless switchbacks."

I pictured the fire stairs at my dentist's office complex. Every time I took them, I felt like I was in a chase scene from a movie, my footfalls echoing on the concrete steps, my fingers scraping on the iron railing where rust had eaten through the paint.

"Do you know what it's like to lead a squad up eight flights of stairs?" Jin went on. "You're looking at sixteen opportunities for someone to jump you. Sixteen chances not to get a straight shot. We were rats in a maze. Blindfolded rats. Rats waiting to die."

I held his hand. I his face. "You're here now," I said.

"You believe me, right?" he asked.

"I do," I told him. And I wasn't just saying that. I believed that what he was telling me was real.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

Over and over, I reminded Jin that his vision didn't have to be his future. Sometimes he found this comforting. Sometimes he would let me talk him down from the nightmare. Other times he took it as a sign that I didn't believe what he was saying.

"George Bush, okay?" Jin burst out once. We were supposedly doing homework in the breakfast nook in my kitchen, but we'd gotten on the subject of Jin's dream.

"What?"

"He's the next United States president."

"George Bush already was president."

"No, not him. His son. George W. I just remembered. No one will think he has a chance, but then he'll win. Or sort of win. There's this huge freak-out over whether he actually got elected legally, and for a month after the election no one knows if he's president or not."

I stared. I swallowed hard.

"You know that guy tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York last year but everyone was fine?"

I nodded.

"He comes back. Or someone just like him. It's horrible. All these people - office workers, maintenance guys, people who work in the restaurant on the top floor - they all die."

As he let this point sink in, he lifted his arm to scratch the back of his neck, his loose-fitting t-shirt pulling away from his arm. I loved the way his muscle curved in at the elbow, the way his skin was soft and smooth just there. He could someone so beautiful be the source of such terrible news? Couldn't he be wrong? Couldn't that not be true/"

"Jin," I said. "please stop."

He did.

But the dream, the memories, the headaches kept coming. One unusually warm day in February, Jin took me back up to the gym roof and we stood at the parapet again, watching the kids streaming toward the parking lot, the locker rooms, jobs, buses, after-school activities.

The skin on Jin's face was drawn tight over his cheekbones. There were dark circles under his eyes. His mom had noticed his headaches; she'd confided in me that she thought they came from stress - the stress of his approaching enlistment, of his parent's impending divorce. She didn't know about his dreams. She didn't know he was afraid to fall asleep at night, that he was waking up thinking he was in danger and could not forget what he had seen.

"We started to go up the stairs," he told me on the gym roof that day. "Inside the apartment building. I remember a baby crying and a teakettle whistling, but like I said, everyone was hiding, so it looked deserted. When we looking the few doors that were standing open, the apartments appeared to be empty, as if all the people who lived there had cleared out suddenly. but he knew they were still there, that the beds, the curtains, the closets, whatever, were crowded with them. You could smell them."

Jin put his hands on the edge of the parapet and pushed on it, as if he had the power to move concrete. "I think I felt it before I heard it," he said. "The plaster was ripping itself out of the wall next to me."

"Ripping itself?" I could feel his pain, the fear, as if I'd been there beside him.

"That's what I thought, until I realized it was bullets striking just inches above my head. I ducked and they stopped. I don't remember signaling to the guys behind me, but I do remember looking down the stairs and seeing them all crouching. There were windows at the landings, and I'd been right in front of one."

I wanted to cover my ears. I didn't want to hear anymore. But Jin needed to tell me. I could see that. He needed me to leech the pain away. "Did you? Did you get shot?"

"No. I was okay." He put my hand on his heart. "But this thing was going crazy." I could feel his heart beating now, strong.

"What if you didn't join the marines?" I said. "You can get a job that keeps you outdoors. You can become a dance instructor or a wilderness ranger. You can be a farmer."

"My uncle Rin's a farmer," Jin said. He was back to smirking - I was always glad to see any sign that he was his old self, even if that sign was his dismissing my idea. "My dad told me Uncle Rin makes, like, ten thousand dollars a year."

"Why aren't you taking this seriously?" I said, pretending to be annoyed, pushing his shoulder, hoping he'd push back. But also? I was annoyed. Why couldn't he decide not to enlist?

Jin wrapped his arms around me, buried his head in my neck. "I'm not not taking it seriously," he said. "It's just that taking it seriously hurts."

"It hurts?" I said. "I know your head hurts, but you're saying you can feel . . . an idea/"

He broke away, sat down on the pebbly surface of the rooftop. "I don't know how this works, okay? I don't know the rules, if there are any. All I know is it hurts. Thinking about change hurts a lot."

"But you just imagine it," I said. I bent down, forcing him to look me in the eye. "Imagine us married. Imagine - I don't know - kids. A minivan. Whatever."

"I think about it constantly," he said. "All I think about it how much I want to be with you."

"You do?"

"And all I get for my efforts is pain."

"So it really hurts right now?" I said.

"Yeah," Jin said, grimacing as if to show me. "It hurts a ton."

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

At a party, Jin, Shinhye, and I ended up in a hot tub with this senior girl who was drinking vodka out of a Gatorade bottle she'd been carrying around all night. Shinhye gestured to the senior girl in her bathing suit, the Gatorade, N passed out on the patio furniture - it was like we'd stepped onto the set of a TV show. "This," she whispered, "is ridiculous." I agreed, but I liked the ridiculousness. I liked that it was something Shinhye and I could see without spelling it out. I liked that we were laughing together. I liked the feel of Jin's leg next to mine in the warm water, his hand on my knee.

He slung his arm around my shoulders and gave me a sloppy wet kiss. "I want you to know," he announced to Shinhye and to me in the tone of a drunk, "I'm going to fix this. I'm going to make this stop." Shinhye had no idea what he was talking about, of course, but I did, and when Jin and I were in Jaehwan's backseat, headed home, I whispered, "So . . . you're not going to enlist?"

He pulled away. "No," he said. "I have another idea. I can't tell you. I have to work it out more in my head. And I can't promise anything. The whole thing will be a giant experiment."

And I let it go. Later, I wished I'd forced him to tell me more.