Jin did know where my locker was. When the last bell rang, he was waiting for me. He looked nervous, opening and closing his right hand as if his fingers had fallen asleep. I was nervous too. I kept passing the numbers on my combination lock.

"I -" I started.

He interrupted, "I know."

"You know what?"

"I know you have debate in half an hour." I did. "I just want to take you somewhere before that."

"Close by?"

"It's in the gym." He smiled a cocky, I'm-a-dancer smile. "You can't say no to the gym, can you?"

He was wrong, though. I could say no. Only I didn't. I didn't even think about it as I headed out of the main school building and toward the gym.

We entered the gym through the trophy room as usual, but instead of continuing to the locker rooms and the basketball court, Jin pointed to a door marked EXIT: ALARM WILL SOUND. I opened the door (no alarm sounded) to find a set of stairs. As we started to climb in the semidarkness, Jin took my hand. I felt a charge pass into my palm. I didn't know if I I liked the feeling of his hand holding mine or if it terrified me. Maybe both. I was aware of Jin's clean, soapy smell and something else too, something musky underneath that.

The stairs terminated at another mysterious door, which opened onto . . .

The roof!

Pebble-topped and wide as a beach. So much sky.

"I can't believe this," I said, meaning I couldn't believe that the doors weren't locked, the alarms weren't ringing, no one had stopped us. And also? The whole open-space concept was making me feel the urge to do chartwheels.

"I know," Jin said, his plump lips spreading into a smile. He knew what? About the cartwheels? And how I was feeling just then? How could he?

He scratched a cheek absentmindedly, and I caught myself thinking that his cheekbone was really lovely, the way it jutted out the right way. Had I ever thought Jin was good-looking before, or was it just coming to me?

I moved away from him, walking to the edge of the roof, which is surrounded by a wall about three feet high. Jin pulled my hand, and I knelt in case someone happened to look up. It just just after dismissal. There were buses lined up at the main building, and kids were streaming into them. Other kids and the few teachers who weren't staying after were pulling their cars out of the lot. The kids with sports commitments were meandering toward the gym. "There's Shinhye," I said.

Even seen from two stories above, Shinhye was Shinhye. Her stride long and assured, she was checking her nails, and it suddenly occurred to me that if Shinhye had been taken up to the roof by a guy she barely knew, she would find out why. She would ask a direct question.

"So," I said. "What are we doing up here?"

Jin's smile widened, as if he'd expected me to ask. As if the question were part of a game. "You don't remember?" he said.

"No?" I said. "Am I supposed to?"

"You don't remember being up here with me before?"

"No." I didn't like the question. "Why, should I?"

He didn't say anything, just continued to smile at me, like he was waiting for my brain to work its way around to a different answer. "I just hoped you would," he said at last. "That's all."

I was completely at a loss. "Do you remember?"

"Yeah," he said. He took a step toward me. "I do, and it's not a memory I'm likely to soon forget."

I was aware of everything I was starting to like about him. The outline of his shoulders beneath his shirt. The look in his eyes that told me he cared about what I thought.

But I didn't like that step he'd just taken toward me. It made me think about how I was alone up here with him. How no one knew where we were. How no one could see us.

"Jin," I said. "You're starting to freak me out."

I'd hoped that admitting it out loud would dispel the feeling. It didn't. I shivered. A wave of fear rolled over me, the kind that makes you run up the stairs at a sprint when you're home alone in case a strange man is out on your lawn. Knowing the fear is irrational does nothing to diminish its intensity.

"You don't remember," Jin said, confirming now, giving me one more chance to change my mind. Was this a game? Was this some kind of a joke at my expense?

He took another step in my direction.

"I have to go," I said. I did this weird thing where I raised my hands to my sides, as if I couldn't decide between goodbye and assuming a defensive position. I think I ended up looking like a flightless bird, flapping ineffectual wings.

I started walking to the door. Fast. Jin caught up to me in time to open the door. We went down the stairs together, through the trophy room, back outside without speaking. He didn't take my hand, and I didn't want him to. But as we moved back into the stream of kids, there was something about the way he lifted his chin that made me wonder if he was sad. Had I done something to hurt him?

He reached out a hand then and patted me on the shoulder. I couldn't tell if it was condescending or an effort to comfort me. "I got to go," I said, but it was Jin who turned away first.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

That night, eomma set out the special dishes we used for take-out sushi - ceramic painted to look like bamboo. On sushi nights, we always got the same things - the maki platter, tuna sashimi, and a seaweed salad. We shared all three and split a spicy ginger ale, which we watered down with seltzer.

Sometime recently I'd started to worry that eomma and I were too compatible. I worried I was going to end up living at home forever, watching movies and playing cards with her and her best friend, Viviane. Whenever I told Shinhye this, she gave me a look like I was an idiot and said, "You don't do either of those things now."

Which was true. And neither did eomma. But she might as well have. She and Viviane went to plays and concerts and out to dinner. One weeknights, eomma sat on her couch knitting and watching TV, or drinking a glass of wine and flipping through magazines, while I'm in a room with my homework. We both wore slippers.

But on the roof with Jin, there had been no room for cozy slippers and known routines. He'd scared me. He wanted something from me, and I didn't know what. I didn't know if he knew either.

"What's the most dangerous thing you've ever done?" I asked Eomma.

"Dangerous, my goodness," she said, chuckling as he a grain of rice off the end of her chopstick. Eomma started dyeing her hair at the first sign of gray, and she has gone increasingly lighter - it's now brown. To keep from looking too washed out, she wears a good amount of mascara and eyeliner, and she looks great, especially when she purses her lips and you can see the light of a joke in her eye.

"Seriously," I said. The demand came out too strong. Eomma's tiny, like a bird - I get my height and thick hair from appa - and sometimes I felt like a giant, stomping around in a house built for dolls, demanding she be serious and decide things.

"Okay," she said. "Danger." Then she laughed again. "I'm sorry, Suzy. I hope you won't be disappointed that I haven't led a very dangerous life."

"there must have been something." In my head, I was flashing through images of the way Jin had half smiled at me, the sad slump of his shoulders as we left the roof. "Didn't you ride in a car without a seatbelt at least once?" I pushed. "What about when you were traveling?" Right after college, eomma traveled a lot. She was going to get a PhD in art history, but she met appa and had me, and then they got divorced and he moved to California, so she got a job at a museum doing fund-raising. "There must have been something."

"I was stopped by border patrol going into Pakistan," she said. "If you want to count that."

"border patrol?" I squawked. "Pakistan?" I knew eomma traveled in the Middle East with her college boyfriend after graduation, but I hadn't heard about this part of the trip. "I think that counts."

"It sounds more dangerous than it was, I can tell you. Really, it was a formality."

"Were you driving?"

"No!" she said, shocked, as if she'd only have gone on a tour bus with representatives of the US embassy on board. "Jaehyun was driving."

One of the things that might be unique to having a single mom is knowing the names of all her exes. Even though I don't think she'd had a boyfriend since she and appa split up, her old boyfriends came up with some frequency, just like the dogs she had when she was a kid. (We never had dogs - too messy.) "Were there soldiers?"

"Of course," Eomma said, as if I'd asked if there was going to be seaweed salad in our order. "One of the things you see when you travel anywhere outside of S.K. is guns in the hands of soldiers and guards. Even in Italy, it's kind of shocking how you'll be walking into the Vatican and you'll pass some twenty-year-old in a ridiculous uniform carrying an AK-47."

"And in Pakistan? What happened?"

"Well, Suzy, it's hard to remember all the details."

"Come on!"

"Okay, the soldiers had machine guns, and they probably weren't much older than you."

We both digest that information. I thought about Jin's dog tags.

"They made Jaehyun get out of the car, but I stayed inside. I think they were afraid of me, even though I dressed very modestly. Women in Pakistan at the time were generally not supposed to show any skin."

"And?"

"And nothing. Jaehyun gave them some money. It was my idea, actually. I leaned out of the window and passed him the cash Halmeoni had instructed me to carry in my shoe. The soldiers laughed at Jaehyun - I guess a man who lets a woman bail him out is pretty unusual. But they let us go on our way."

"That was it?"

"That was it."

Eomma always tells stories about her past the same way - as if there were no hard parts, nothing scary, no danger. Your father and I decided to part ways and now he lives in California and you see him only once a year - ta-da! It's been my dream to get a PhD in art history, but because of timing of your birth and the divorce, I raise money so other people can do the work I always wanted to do - yippee! I got held gunpoint at a border crossing in Pakistan, where I could easily have been shot - aw, man!

"But what did it feels like?" I pressed. I was thinking about the moment when Jin said You don't remember being up here with me before? He's asked the question like it was a code, our secret password, like we were spies, and it was my turn to reveal the answer. But I hadn't been to the roof with him before. And why did he look at me all the time like was in on a secret and he hald suspected I was in on it too?

"Was the danger - I don't know . . . kind of bonding?" I asked. "Did you feel closer to Jaehyun after?" Eomma was looking at me quizzically now. "Wasn't it at least a little bit exciting?"

I guess I wanted her to say "Yes, danger is exciting." I wanted her to explain to me why, after nearly running from Jin on the roof, all I could think about now was going back.

Eomma delicately dipped her tuna in soy sauce. "What can I tell you?" she said. "As soon as we had rounded the next bend, Jaehyun got out of the car and threw up on the side of the road. I was okay, but he was really spooked. We cut the trip short."

"He was really that scared?"

"They made him kneel down in the dirt while they went through his papers. He thought he was about to get shot."

"Oh," I said. "Well. That's different."

"Yes," said Eomma, neatly popping the tuna into . "Danger - real danger - isn't all cracked up to be."