Chapter 3

Chaeng had left with assurances that Jennie Kim was flirting with me and that I should make a move on her. I was still skeptical. I moved downstairs to the dining room slash house office with my textbooks in an attempt to get my mind off Jennie. And now my sister—who, it turned out, had stayed after school for one of her clubs—was standing in front of me looking aggravated, which did not seem fair, since she was the one bothering me as I tried to get some homework done.

"There's been talk."

Forgetting about Jennie Kim for the first time in about ten hours, I felt my chest start to hurt as the panic began to roll over me. This was what I had been afraid of when I’d decided to be honest about who I really was. I much preferred anonymity to notoriety.

I swallowed. "What kind of talk?" I managed to push through the closing of my throat as the panic spread.

“That Kim Yerim is going to beat me for student class representative.”

“What?” I responded, confusion quickly replacing the panic. Sorn sighed in frustration. She did that a lot. Her no-nonsense vibe was pretty accurately conveyed through her Jeon Woo haircut and daily sweater vest/skirt ensembles.

“I have a pretty good coalition going, but there are a couple of people who are up for grabs. Kim Yerim mentions her two moms every time we are in biology with those two girls who are always posting petitions about male privilege and gender discrimination in pronoun usage. Do you know how hard it is to bring up my lesbian sister in conversation when you don’t do anything?”

I opened my mouth to respond, even though I didn’t really know how to answer, but she didn’t stop there.

“You had that little bit of personality bump when you came out, but even that was underwhelming. Why couldn’t you have announced you were gay in some big, lasting way that people would still be talking about months later?” The glare she was giving me was so intense, her eyebrows almost met in the middle. But again, no pause for me to answer. “You don’t even post anything on Facebook or Twitter. Are you even a real person?”

After a few seconds of silence, I realized that she was waiting for a response. “Yes, I am a real person,” I began before she cut me off again. “And now no one remembers that you’re a lesbian, and Kim Yerim will be student rep, and my four-year high school plan will be ruined. And that means my four-year college plan needs to be modified, which throws my twenty-year plan off. So basically you’ve destroyed my life.”

I rolled my eyes at her dramatics. My sister was incredibly smart and driven, but she was still a teenage girl. I turned in my chair so that I could look at her face to face. “So to recap: you insult me a couple of different ways, then make it sound like you want to help me, but really you just want something for yourself. Do I have that about right?”

“Yes, exactly!” she yelled, raising her arms in triumph. My attempt at shaming her went right over her head. I wondered if whatever ailment she had was in her psychology book.

Sorn continued. “I tried to be tactful, but obviously it didn’t work. Next time, I’ll just cut all the nice stuff and go straight to what I really mean. You are ruining my life and you have to fix it. Be more of a lesbian.”

My mind went directly to Jennie Kim and her smiles earlier in the day. Me wanting to kiss her would definitely be considered more lesbian, but no way was I telling my sister about any of that. About how I could tell it was Jennie Kim in t