It wasn't a week later that something happened with Jin's head accessory during a performance. Dancing hard, he faked in anticipation of a routine and collided with a dancer he hadn't seen coming. The force of the impact sent Jin flying across the stage, and as if it had been shot from a cannon, his head seemed to separate from his body and skid across the stage, stopping only when it slammed into the boards.

But no, that hadn't happened, I quickly came to understand. The head accessory had slid. Jin's head was still attached to his shoulders, the side of his face pressed to the floorboard where he'd fallen.

Nevertheless, something was wrong, Jin wasn't moving. And there was blood.

The arena went silent. I could hear nothing but my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. The pool of blood was growing. Then the manager was there. The choreographer too.

When I saw Jin move, I felt an enormous wave of gratitude pass through my body. He wasn't dead.

A beautiful thought.

He wasn't even unconscious. The choreographer was checking him, and he was responding, lifting parts of his body. I saw that he was talking. Then he started to get up. As he walked off the stage with the trainer on one side and Manager Sejin on the other, I pushed my way out of the seats and through the hallway into the backstage.

I found Jin perched on the examination table in the backstage room, still wearing his light gray hoodie, distressed pants and socks, his face stained with blood, his shoulders slumped like he had lost the ability to lift them. "Are you okay?" I asked from the doorway. The manager was holding a piece of gauze to Jin's temple. He pulled it way, and I got a brief glimpse of the gash at his hairline. His face was pale, and his hair was matted to his forehead, which was slick with sweat.

"Jin?" I said. The manager stepped away and I approached the exam table. Jin blinked at me kind of funny, and for a second, everything I'd learned about head injuries the day I ensconced myself in the library came back to me. Were his pupils dilated? Different sizes? Did he know the day of the week? The year?

He sure was blinking a lot.

Then his face opened up into a smile. A Jin smile - the smile of the boy says, "Hell, no" when asked if he's planning to go to college. He beckoned me in.

"Okay, that was terrifying," I said.

The manager was reaching into the supply cabinet, directing Jin to hold the gauze to his head. "That little tumble?" Jin said.

"Do you have a concussion or anything?"

"You with your concussions."

"Quick: what year is it?"

"Um . . . ," Jin said, like he had to think about it, like it was all a joke. "Michael Jackson is still alive . . ."

I looked down at the floor and breathed. Deeper than I'd meant to.

"Are you okay?" Jin asked, lifting my chin. I laughed.

And Jin winked.

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Jin's mom took him to the doctor that night, but he was back in school the next day. He looked different, and it wasn't just the bandage at his hairline where two stitches had gone in. He seemed . . . looser. Happier. He kept laughing for no reason. I turned around in physics to catch him stretching luxuriously, as if he were waking up from a deep sleep, not recovering from a head wound.

HIs good mood lasted into the next few days. I chalked it up to his having survived the fall. To his feeling lucky to be alive. And to all the attention he was getting from his dance friends, who were calling him Head Fake and going out of their way to high-five him in the halls.

Jin did not seem even remotely curious about what had happened to his head accessory, why the strap had broken, how it managed to fly off his head. But Manager Sejin was. He phoned the stylist, and by lunchtime, they'd called back and asked him to send them accessory. Promising to make sure all accessory are safe to perform in, including the whole team.

A few days later, when Jin and I were checking his practice schedule on the bulletin board outside Manager Sejin's office, Manager called Jin into talk about the head accessory some more. I waited, listening to every word through the door, which they had forgotten to close.

Apparently the accessory claimed the strap had been partially damaged before the game began. Maybe Jin hadn't been keeping it clean as he packing everything into the sport bag? Could have been old.

"You've kept it in a secure place, not just shoving everything in?" Manager asked. "You don't need me to tell you that."

Jin mumbled something I didn't catch.

"We can't have accessories flying around," Manager continued. "I need to know whether to go after these guys."

"Yeah," Jin said with a laugh. "That's what my mom's been saying." And by laughing, he got Manager to laugh too.

It wasn't until later that I realized he hadn't answered Manager's question.

After debate practice, I met Jin at his car, where he was listening to music. BTS. I could hear how loud it was even before I opened the door. "Doesn't that hurt?" I shouted, touching my temple because I wasn't sure he could hear me over the EDM. Lately, because of his headaches, he hadn't been listening to music in the car at all.

Jin smiled which earned him free samples at candy counters and ice cream stands. "Not today!" he shouted. He was still smiling when he slammed the car into gear. He drove fast, taking curves at a speed that the week before would have made him wince in pain. Something wasn't right.

I figured out what it wad as Shinhye and I were coming back form our jog the next afternoon and I saw someone slap the side of the soda machine when it wasn't giving back their change. I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Jin cut the straps," I said out loud. "He cut it on purpose."

"What?" said Shinhye. She's pretty hard to surprise, but here she was, staring like I'd just sprouted a second head. "Jin did what?"

"Nothing," I said.

"No," she answered. "It's not nothing. You said Jin cut his head accessory strap."

"I didn't say 'head accessory'."

Shinhye put her hands on her hips. "We both know what you meant."

I wanted to tell her she had no idea, but I just nodded and shrugged like she'd caught me, then pretended to come clean, sticking mostly to parts of the story she already knew. I'd hated lying to Shinhye all year, but right then I was so worried about Jin I didn't care.

I told her I was guessing Jin thought hitting his head hard might make the chronic headaches stop. I didn't tell her where the headaches were coming from, how painful they were, or what was at stake in getting them to go away. "I think he figured it would be like the radio in his car," I explained. "The one you have to hit from time to time to get it to find the station."

"But you think he cut the strap on purpose? You think he wanted to hit his head?"

"It was just a thought," I said. "I'm probably wrong."

"I hope so," she said. "He could have died."

I attempted a reassuring smile, even as a wave of fear washed over me.

Had this been Jin's plan, the one he'd announced to me in the hot tub? Had the plan been to rejigger his brain? Or die trying?

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

After school, Shinhye dropped me at home, where I picked up the phone to call Jin and then hung it up, remembering that there was a dance team dinner that night. I thought I leaving a message, but the questions I wanted to ask him - "Did you intentionally try to get yourself hit in the head?" "Did you realize you could have die?" - weren't message material.

Too= keep from going crazy with worry, I forced myself to study. I memorized five objectives the federal government was trying to achieve during the Reconstruction. I read all the way through the third act of Hamlet. It was then that my phone rang. Jin would be calling, I knew - I had pulled the phone out to find out it wasn't Jin. It was Jaehwan.

"Did anyone tell you yet?" he said. "Jin passed out. He was breathing and everything, bu they couldn't wake him up."

"What?" How can Jaehwan be so wrong? I was thinking. "Jin didn't ever lose consciousness," I insisted. "I saw him just after he fell. He was fine."

"I'm not talking about his fall on stage," Jaehwan explained. "This was at the dinner tonight. Something happened. He just passed out."

I understood the danger Jin was in in the way I can't quite explain. I don't know what I thought it was. I only knew it was bad.

I was on the stairs almost before I finished listening to Jaehwan tell me about the ambulance, about how Jaehwan went with Manager Sejin to the hospital, about Jin's mom's being tracked down the ward where she worked.

"Eomma!" I called, running. But the living room was empty. I raced back up the stairs and found eomma in her room, already in bed, her white ruffled nightgown buttoned up to her chin, a book in her hand, her glasses sliding down her nose. "Jin is in the hospital and you have to drive me down there to see him right away!" I said. I was shouting. I was speaking so fast she had to ask me three times to repeat myself. And then she tried to argue that it wasn't a good idea for me to go down to see him, that this was a time for his family to be alone with him, that she would take me first thing in the morning.

"You're wasting time!" I finally interrupted. I told her that if she didn't take me, I was going to walk. And so she pulled out the black sweatpants that make her ankles look like an old lady's and told me to pack up my history notes, as if I might be able to study, and we got into the car, not even waiting a few minutes with the engine running in the cold before putting it into drive.