The scream came automatically. I felt my hand grasping my throat. I knew I should run for my phone, but instead, since I was still in the entrance hall next to the stairs, I ran halfway up the flight, then crouched down, hiding behind the rails, where I could see through the hall and the arched opening that led into the living room. I was acting on the kind of impulse that causes you to jump onto the counter when there's a rat in the kitchen. It was important, I thought, to get as far away from Taejoon as possible while keeping him in view.

"Where's Shinhye?" Taejoon said, turning toward me, but staying put on the couch. Hearing his voice, I felt my panic intensify. Before he'd spoken, a small part of my brain could cling to the hope that he was just a shadow, a figment of my imagination. But shadows don't talk.

"She's not with me," I said.

"No," he said, his voice trembling. "She is. I called her house. I pretended to be some kid whose name I got out of the yearbook. Her mom told me she was with you, that Shinhye would be sleeping over here."

I couldn't tell what I was supposed to be paying attention to. Through the banisters I saw a copy of the Teen Modele catalog lying on top of our pile of mail. It was there because I needed a new raincoat and eomma had told me to pick one, but I hadn't done it yet. Did that matter? Or was what was really important the fact Shinhye had told her mom she was sleeping here?

A knot formed in my stomach. My breath came fast. Ideas traveled in circles.

I saw some dust on the stairs. Eomma hated that, I knew. I was supposed to have vacuumed before going out to meet my friends, but I hadn't. Shinhye had lied to her mom. I had lied to Taejoon. I had lied to Shinhye. Shinhye was with Woobin. Shinhye was lying to Jaehwan. Jin didn't understand.

Taejoon was here.

Sitting in eomma's spot in the living room.

And I was alone.

"Shinhye changed her mind," I said. "She was going to sleep over but she wasn't feeling well, so she went home." To whose home, I didn't say.

"Don't bother," Taejoon said. "I used to be on the inside of the game, remember? If she's not with you, she's with a guy."

I think I nodded. "Want me to call her?"

I could hear the trembling in my voice, but could he? If I was calm, would I change his mood? "I could call her," I said again. I felt like whimpering, but I made my voice go steady. "It wouldn't take a second."

taejoon didn't answer me. I swallowed hard. My throat was so tight the swallowing hurt. I made a motion as if to stand.

"Sit down," Taejoon growled. I sat.

Taejoon stood. I could see he was holding something that glinted in the streetlamp light coming through the front window. Metal. A knife?

Before I could see for sure, he sat down on the couch again and put whatever he was holding on the coffee table in front of him. In our kitchen, we had one good knife with a wooden handle bolted to a steel blade. It was the knife Jin and I traded back and forth when we helped eomma make dinner, the only knife we owned that didn't get stuck on the skin of a tomato.

"Do you respect me?" Taejoon asked.

"Okay," I said. I'd heard his question, but I was having trouble processing it. I was trying to breathe. I was thinking I might throw up. I was wondering if that would make Taejoon mad or if it might make him feel sorry for me, if he'd let me go into the kitchen to clean up. Or the bathroom. Upstairs. I could sneak into my room on the way, to charge my phone enough to call someone.

"Do you?"

"What?" I said. Then, remembering: "Yes. I respect you. A lot."

Taejoon was quiet again, looking out the window as if Shinhye might come up the front walk any minute.

"She just won't listen."

"Okay," I said.

"But she listens to you. You can explain to her. You can get her back for me."

I didn't point out that he was wrong. That Shinhye didn't listen to anyone. Instead, I said, "Sure." I said, "Just let me call her."

"Stop asking me that!" He was really angry now. "I'm not stupid. I know you're probably thinking of ways to get rid of me, just like Shinhye always was. But I don't want to be gotten rid of. I want to be with someone who can appreciate me. She always said you were smart. She said you thought things through carefully. She said you were a good listener." He was calming himself down. I could hear it. "So maybe you can help me."

"Taejoon -" It should have been easy to explain to him that no one could listen under these circumstances. But then he reached toward the coffee table. And maybe if I'd screamed loud enough a neighbor would have heard. Or maybe, from where I'm sitting, I could have beaten Taejoon in a dead sprint to the front door - it was right there, at the bottom of the steps. I could bust my way through it before he crossed the living room. But I wasn't thinking about those things. I was thinking. Sharp. Danger. Jin had said tat int he marines, all you needed to be good at was not dying. I hadn't understood what that meant until now.

"Shinhye likes you," I said. "Deep down."

"I'm sure of it," Taejoon said. "In Vegas last summer, she was the one who came up to me. I wouldn't have even tried with her, but she called out to me as I dragged my gear up the place. She asked me what kind of car I was driving. She made it sound casual, you know, like she was interested in getting into the attraction."

"But she wasn't?"

"No," Taejoon chuckled, remembering. He was calmer. That had to be good. "She told me later she didn't know anything about cars. We hiked up to a mountain, which is where we got together for the first time. And she told me like she thought it was funny. She was lying to me from the beginning."

He'd started to sound angry again, so I tried to steer him back. "But it was fun, when you were in Vegas?"

"It was amazing," Taejoon said, the bitterness out of his voice. He started to talk about all the things they'd done together. They went to casinos. They did the mountain hike. They lay at the park and looked up at moon. It wasn't until they got back home that things started to go wrong.

I tried really hard to show Taejoon I was listening, "Uh-huh," I said over and over. I wouldn't say I got comfortable, but I did relax enough to notice that my finger nails had been pushing into my palms. I opened my fists, willing my hands to lie flat on the step I was sitting on.

"Shinhye," Taejoon said. "She just makes me feel . . . I can't describe it. But do you know what I mean?"

"Of course," I said.

"You have a boyfriend, right?" Taejoon said. "I've seen you with him."

"Jin," I said. Just saying his name made me both sad and hopeful at the same time. Couldn't he save me? "He's about to enlist in the marines." I don't know why I mentioned that, except that I was grasping at reasons for Taejoon to let me go. Maybe if he thought my marine boyfriend was going to come looking for me . . . Although Jin wasn't a marine yet. And he wasn't looking. He was probably too busy getting a good night's sleep - he was taking this ridiculous military recruitment test called the ASVAB the next morning, which was supposed to determine whether he'd be better at landing helicopters or filling them up with gas between flights.

"I've thought about doing something like that," Taejoon said. "I look at those guys and I envy their sense of purpose. It seems like if you're a marine, you know who you are."

"If you're a marine, you're someone who's going to let the government pay you seventeen thousand dollars a year so you can get yourself killed before you twenty-fifth birthday," I said."

"What about honor and country and all that?"

"That's a line." I could feel my brain switching over into debate mode. "If you look at the Korea foreign policy since the end of the American Cold War, it's all about oil," I said. It felt good to control the information. "Our foreign policy debacle in Nigeria, the whole mess of the Middle East, our refusal to confront China on reports of human rights abuses. That's oil." (tbh, I really don't know what I'm talking about.)

Taejoon raised a hand. "You sound like the kids in my dorm. They're so caught up in their ideas. They never say hi to me. They don't notice anyone but themselves."

And when he said that, I was suddenly, out of nowhere, completely enraged. Maybe it was spillover form thinking about Jin's becoming a marine. Maybe it was the stupidity of Taejoon's comment - I mean, okay, he thought his hallmates were selfish because they were more interested in talking about big ideas than in taking care of Taejoon's fragile ego?

In the lucidity of rage, I decided that the knife was an impulse Taejoon didn't have the guts to follow through on. I also decided that because the knife came from my kitchen, it wouldn't be possible for it to hurt me, as if, instead of a regular kitchen knife, it was an enchanted weapon that could not rise up against its master.

This harebrained logic caused me to do what I did next, which in hindsight I can see was colossally dumb. I said, "You know what, Taejoon? Why don't you and your pea-sized ego get yourselves out of my house."

He stared.

"You know what Shinhye really said about you?" I went on. "She said you were too sad and pathetic to scare her."

Taejoon stood up fast. He groaned, looking at the ceiling as if Shinhye were up there, or as if he was angry at heaven.

The fear I'd managed to push away rushed back.

I ran up the last few steps and turned into the upstairs hall. I went into the first room I got to - eomma's room - grabbed the home phone off her bedside table, and then practically leapt over her bed into her bathroom, pulling the door closed behind me and locking it.

I'd vaguely heard Taejoon calling "Wait!" when I'd started to move. I'd heard his footsteps on the stairs. Seconds after I slid the lock into place, the handle turned. I felt him push against the door.

"Hey," he said. "I thought you understood!"

I didn't answer him. I was holding the phone. I'd already dialed. All I needed to do was wait. All I needed was to get through someone before he had the chance to knock the door down.

I've heard that the differences between a disaster and a near disaster comes down to snap decisions, and the snap decision I'd made just then was a bad one.

You see, I hadn't called 911. I'd called Jin."

All I can say to explain why I made that choice is that when people think they're in danger of dying, they do strange things. I called Jin because I felt really scared and alone and I knew he would understand. As if what I needed was understanding.

My memory of that moment is all shaking fingers and the sound of my own breathing in my ears. Jin's phone rang once, twice. He picked up groggy on ring number three.

And then the line went dead.

"Shinhye said you're smart," Taejoon said from outside the bathroom. "You didn't think I would just unplug it?"

He was pushing the door now, I assumed with his shoulder. I saw the latch moving. The doorframe was splintering.

I thought about the knife.

I thought about the tiny window in the shower wall. It opened onto a sheer drop of twenty feet. Stone patio below.

Then the rattling on the door stopped. And a second later, I heard Taejoon say, "What the -"

There was a whack. An "Oomph." Something hit the wall. The door shook. A muffled "Argh." Another whack. Then a thump on the floor like someone had dropped a heavy book bag, and Shinhye's voice: "Suzy, open up."