"So let me tell you about this dream," Jin said. We were in the deserted stairwell now and could talk in private. He took my hand again, and this time, he held on to it. "You want a ride?"

"Sure," I said. I was thinking about how naturally his fingers wrapped themselves around mine, and how soft his skin felt. I was thinking that I wanted him to kiss me. What if I pulled him into a classroom or behind a door, or pushed him back up against a locker?

"I dreamed I was a soldier in a war," he said.

"A war?"

"I wasn't in combat or anything. But I know there was a war going on."

"Which war?" I don't know why, but I had a sudden flash of the Nazi-tanks-arriving-in-Paris scene from Casablanca, a movie I watched when it comes on TV. "Was it World War II?"

"No, nothing like that. We were in a city," he said. "The Middle East somewhere? Everything was the color of sand. The buildings had flat roofs, where people had hung laundry on lines. That laundry worried me. Somehow I knew there could be a sniper behind every bedsheet."

"it sounds like the Gulf War," I said.

"It wasn't," Jin said. "That was an in-and-out invasion, a war fought door to door. One of the things I knew without really knowing was that this war had been going on a long time. Years."

"So what happened? Was there a sniper?" We were out behind the main school building now, heading for the parking lot, and when I was looking at Jin, I had to squint against the low sun. Jin was squinting too, but he wasn't looking at me. He was staring straight ahead, like he could see something I couldn't.

"I don't know," he said. "That's where the dream ended. Or sort of ended. When I woke up, I didn't feel the way you usually feel after a dream, when you're like, Well, that was weird. And my body -" He looked down as if seeing himself for the first time. "My body feels heavier."

"What do you mean?"

"I felt . . . older. I felt like I knew what it would be like to have a thirty-year-old body. Like, my knees hurt when I had my pack on. And I was taller. Bigger."

"Dreams are weird like that. You can be six years old one minute and eighty the next."

"But you know how you can't feel temperature in your dreams?" he went on. "In this dream, I did. I was hot. It was hot out, much hotter than it ever gets here."

We were walking past the gym now, down the hill toward the mostly empty parking lot. I could see the tree I'd been looking at from Mr. Mang's classroom window, the one that had already turned fall colors.

"Suzy," Jin said when we got to his car. He was unlocking my door. "I'm telling you, it didn't feel like a dream." Holding on to the handle, he raised his eyes to mine like he was asking for help. "It felt real." He stopped, swallowed. I wanted to help him. I could see he was in some kind of pain, admitting this. "I think that dream . . . the way it feels so real . . . I think it might be connected to the things I've been remembering about you."

"Jin," I said firmly. "It's just a dream. it might feel real, but it isn't." I didn't look him in the eye as I spoke. At the time, I told myself it was to save him from being embarrassed. 

Jin stood for a second with the door cracked. Then he closed it and laid his hand on the roof, bracing himself. "I feel like I'm going crazy. I can't believe I'm telling you any of this. I thought it might help. To tell you."

"It's okay," I said lamely.

"Let's just forget it." For the first time he sounded angry. He pulled open my door. "Could you just get in the car?" I did.

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

After dinner, eomma was scrubbing a stain on the counter, her gray hair bobbing, the wristwatch she wears on a loose chain striking the counter with a clicking sound I'd been hearing my whole life.

"Are you going to start on your homework?" she asked. I was leaning against the doorframe, my hands behind my back as if I was hiding something from her.

"I guess," I answered. I certainly had plenty to do. Any second, I'd make my way upstairs, spread my books out around me on the floor, start reviewing subjunctive verbs for English. I had to finish a physics problem set. I had three chapters of Korean Literature for Language, vocabulary to memorize for history, a few more paragraphs of my newspaper article to write, and if I ran through all of that, I could start, as Mr. Mang liked to say, "arming myself with facts" about global warming. But I didn't arm myself with anything.

I just stood there watching eomma clean until the phone rang.

It was Jin. He started speaking without saying hello. "Friday," he said. "How about we go see a movie? I promise:  no more weird memories. No more dreams."

"Cool," I said. I didn't know what to say next. There was a part of me that would have gone with him to the movies or Jimin's Sandwich again or anywhere else, just for the chance to kiss him one more time. And then there was another part that didn't want to go anywhere with him.

In the end, he said, "See you in school," and hung up before there was a chance for more.