At Jimin's Sandwich, we ordered grilled cheese sandwiches, french fries, and sundaes, but sitting in a booth with Jin across from me, his forearms resting on the table as if he didn't want to miss a single thing I thought or said, I lost the ability to eat. Instead, I laughed.

I laughed when the waitress came over and Jin confessed breathlessly that he was hoping she'd let him order off the kid's menu because he wanted the toy and - blushing - she said okay.

I laughed when he told me a story about how last year the chemistry teacher left the room and this dancer named RM had started mixing chemicals until something exploded.

We talked about dramas. W-Two Worlds. What's wrong with Secretary Kim. Dream High. We talked about kids we knew at school. About Shinhye. He shook his head. "She scares me."

I laughed. Outraged, but enjoying it.

"No offense," Jin said.

"No offense?" We were both laughing now. "She's my best friend!"

"I'm sure she's a good person." He could barely get the words out, he was laughing so hard.

After eating his grilled cheese and both our fries, Jin polished off his sundae, then mine, then pulled a handful of grubby wrinkled cash from his pocket to pay the check. I pulled out my wallet too, but he said, "No way are you paying. I ate all the food."

"You didn't eat my grilled cheese." We looked at the desultory sandwich with one bite taken out, congealed and lonely on the tan plastic plate, its only friend a single crinkle-cut bread-and-butter pickle. And we laughed some more, as if we both understood at the same exact minute how pathetic it would be to fight over paying for something so forlorn and nasty.

Then Jin stopped laughing. "Suzy," he said, his voice suddenly husky, crackling on the second syllable of my name in a way that worried me. I smoothed a lock of hair down across my forehead and pulled my wallet back toward me. I knew what he wanted to talk about.

"I don't understand the things you've been saying," I said, hoping to be preemptive.

Jin looked straight into my eyes and sighed in a comforting, aw-shucks kind of way. "I don't get them either," he started to explain. "But here's the thing. I guess -" He stopped, thought, started again. "I remember -" Another stop. He laid his hands down on the tabletop as if to signal he meant business, but he continued to say nothing at all.

"You . . . remember?" I prompted. He smiled. I couldn't help but smile back. He turned his hands over, cupped, as if waiting for them to fill with rain.

"That first day in physics, when you walked into the room and caught me looking at you?" I nodded. "The moment I saw you, I remembered. I'd seen you before." He took a deep breath. "And I probably shouldn't even be telling you about it, but part of what I remembered makes me think I can trust you." He was looking straight at me still, those big brown eyes. If I were our waitress, I would have let him order off the kids' menu too.

"You can trust me," I said.

"Well, seeing you, I just knew I'd seen you in that exact spot, in that exact room. I knew you were going to sit at that desk. I knew you would turn around to see who else was in that room. I knew you were going to end up looking at me."

I swallowed. I felt like I was standing on a dark stage and suddenly someone had a spotlight. "You remembered this?"

"I thought it might be just deja vu. But it wasn't. Deja vu fades. An hour later, the memory is gone. But this one stayed strong."

I laughed, as if laughing might turn this whole idea into a joke. He laughed a little too, but it was a awkward kind of laugh. 

I looked down at the white tabletop. I didn't know if I thought he was crazy or if I felt flattered that he trusted me. What Jin was saying didn't feel real. But Jin did.

"I remembered being with you on the roof," he went on. "I remembered it so clearly I thought bringing you there, maybe, I don't know - I thought you you'd remember it too. But you didn't, right?"

I shook my head.

"And now I'm freaking you out?" he said.

I wanted to let him know it was all right, that I was okay, but I couldn't. I was embarrassed, as if I were the one who had said something crazy. The lights in the restaurant felt brighter. The sounds of plates landing on tables and cutlery being shuffled in bins and soda fizzing when it hit a cup of crushed ice - I couldn't think amid all this noise.

"I need to get out of here," I said. I was already standing when Jin tilted the grilled cheese plate in my direction.

"You're sure?" He was trying to go back to the part of the dinner when we'd been joking.

I half laughed, half choked.

Once we were on the sidewalk, we started to walk, but it wasn't the meandering kind of walk you might take after ice cream sundaes. I was walking fast, like I was trying to catch a bus, and Jin was hurrying to keep up. He didn't ask me what was going on. He just followed.

"Suzy?" he ventured after a while. We'd reached a wooded park near my house where people let their dogs chase squirrels. No one was around. "Can we slow down?"

I couldn't. "Have you thought about seeing a doctor?" I asked.

"I don't think it's something a doctor's going to be able to help me with."

"Could you have hit your head, maybe? Hitting into something during dance practice? You're sure you don't have a headache or anything like that?"

He stopped walking, and as if he was getting a headache right then, he pushed his hair off his forehead with his fingertips and held his temples between his palms.

"Does it hurt right now?"

"No," he said. "Yes. A little. Stop." He stopped walking. "Can we please stop walking?"

I noticed it was getting dark when Jin stepped off the sidewalk and headed a dozen yards into the shade of the tree, his eyes fixed on the patchy grass as if he was looking for something he had dropped there. I followed.

"My mom's a nurse," he said, looking up at me when I put a hand on his shoulder. "She happens to work in a neurology ward. I know all about traumatic brain injury, concussions. That's not what this is."

"Are you sure -" I began.

He interrupted me with a groan. "I've done a terrible job of explaining this to you." He walked even deeper into the trees, and I followed. "But then again, how can I explain something I don't even understand you myself?" He took my hand and pulled me behind a tree.  We couldn't see the road now. "Suzy," he said, his voice husky.

He smiled, and I felt myself wanting to smile at him. Stop it, I thought. Be rational. I willed the muscles in my face to play dead. But my mouth was twitching. I knew that.

The moment my smile finally emerged, his exploded. We stood there for I don't know how long, looking into each other's eyes and smiling. All my embarrassment was gone. It was like that time on the front lawn of my house when he'd caught me watching him not being able to mow down that clump of grass near the fence.

He lifted my hand and looked ta it, playing with my fingers.

"In physics, the second I realized I'd been in that room before, watching you come in, having you sitting at your desk and look right at me, I also remembered being on the roof with you. It was like the two memories were attached to each other."

"You really remember being with me on the gym roof?" I said. "You remembered it like it happened?"

Letting go of my hand, he pressed his fingers into his temples. I was thinking, Brain tumor. A little giddy from at that smiling, I thought, It's a shame his whole head is going to swell up, because, well, those cheekbones . . .

He started speaking again, slowly, as if he wanted to give me just the facts without any more interruptions.

"I was kind of hoping that when we went up on the roof, the memory would fade, that once I was up there with you for real, the difference what I was imagining I remembered and what was real would become clear."

"Did it?"

"Not at all, actually," he said, like was just realizing it. "It made me remember more. I remembered that the time before, it was dark out. We were up there at night. And I think you were wearing a dress."

"What kind of dress?"

Jin shrugged. "A dress dress?" He pointed to the space next to his thighs where a dress would hang if he were wearing one. "You looked nice."

"You could have imagined it."

Jin's eyes grew big with frustration. he looked like someone trying to come up with the answer to a math problem they don't have the first idea how to solve.

"On the roof . . ." he said. "Okay, fine, I'll just tell you. What I remembered about being up there was that I was kissing you." He stopped, as if waiting for me to yell at him. When I didn't, he went on. "And I couldn't have made up what it felt like. I couldn't have imagined."

I felt like suddenly all the oxygen had been removed from the atmosphere. I couldn't breathe. I didn't want to.

"Look, Suzy," Jin said. He took my hand and pulled me toward him, wrapping an arm around my back. Despite the craziness of what he was saying, his arm was strong and steady. He was looking at me like he was going to find the answers in my eyes, and I let him look. I looked back. His eyelashes were a dark shade. His skin was smooth.

He kissed me gently, and I felt my hands rising to touch his face. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them again, he was still looking at me the same way, as if he were searching for answers.

"What do you want from me?" I said.

"I don't know. But I want something."