If you have a choice: don’t break your own heart.

-- SOMEONE, NAME FORGOTTEN

 

 

 

They see each other again only because her grandmother has died.

Death has this weird way of bringing people together, or so Nayoung likes to think as she slips her shoes on to step outside for some air. There's something about a loss so fresh that it carries in the pockets of your clothes, lingers over every friendly encounter at the supermarket with a I'm sorry that this was the only way to bring us back together kind of pressed-together smile, makes you sad by association when your six-year-old nephew who maybe visited once since Nayoung moved back three years ago starts bawling alongside his mother. There's almost a kitschy sense of tragedy surrounding it all – and Nayoung only realizes that she’s forgotten her coat in the hall after she cuts through a pile of snow that soaks through her loafers, the cold biting at her toes – except the mid-January wind turns her nose red and ticklish with the promise of tears. She exhales, watching as the white of her breath reaches towards the sun, dissipates into nothing. No, she thinks. The tragedy’s real.

This is how Seungcheol finds her: leaning against the awning of the parking lot wearing her grandmother's old knit cardigan, looking up at the pale wintry blue sky from under the shade, cut into neat shapes from the overhanging power lines. He just stands there in front of her, hands in his pockets for the longest time, completely silent. And Nayoung, for the longest time, doesn’t look at him either. It’s weird to think that they have nothing to say to each other now.

“Hey,” he tells her eventually. Harmless, inconsequential, monosyllabic. Hey. That’s it. When she searches Seungcheol’s face for a hint of a smile, she comes back with hands outstretched, but empty. It’s almost like he’s been green-screened into this backdrop, this building they used to bike past on their way to school when they were younger. It’s almost like he’s not even here.

Nayoung feels her eyes watering, and her nose running, but, in all truth, she’s not crying. “Hey,” she manages in return, looking at where he’s standing a little ways down the slope of the driveway, where the snow’s been cleared. If this was a war, she’d have the advantage, being on higher ground. That kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore though, she has to remind herself. That kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore.

But distance does that to people. Makes them strangers, even when a familiarity collects at the crow’s feet that appear around his eyes when he pushes his lips into a small smile. “You’ll catch a cold out here like this,” Seungcheol says, like in the absence of everything else, they'll still always know each other. “C’mon,” he turns without checking if she’ll follow, like he’s forgotten everything, like it’s all cool between them now, that what's passed is past, “I’ll walk you back in.” But that’d be a lie, you know?

Some things, truthfully, Nayoung’s forgotten, too. Other things – inside, her socks leave wet imprints on the floorboards after his like footprints against the scalding hot concrete after getting out of the pool in the summer, walking home with their swimsuits soaking through their clothes, the water collecting in their sandals – Nayoung closes her eyes and can’t help but remember.

 

 

 

Summers in Jincheon were always hot but the summer before Kaeun left for university was almost unbearably so.

"You can visit me during your break," she told Nayoung as they scooped up spoonfuls of watermelon in her kitchen, sitting in front of the fan. Kaeun's family used to live in this tall apartment complex with a been-there-since-Nayoung's-been-old-enough-to-remember advertisement pasted on its side that read, in faded fancy lettering, Vivache. According to her grandmother, it was some sort of perfume, but growing up, they'd all learned to refer to the 7-Eleven down the street from it as the Vivache 7. Sometime when Nayoung was in college, they'd changed building management and repainted the entire side a creamy off-white that she still can't get used to. "I'll show you around Seoul," Kaeun continued, smiling around the spoon in . "I'll know where all the good places are by then."

Nayoung swallowed the Sprite she'd waterfalled from the liter bottle Kaeun found in her fridge. "Call," she replied coolly. Kaeun nudged her shoulder with her own at that and laughed.

That was the summer they'd wheedled Jonghyun into playing hooky at his hagwon, the summer Seungcheol helped out at his uncle's swimming pool, cleaning up after kids, and got them in for free three times, the summer they biked to Nayoung's after one of those times, tracking the pool water saturated in their swimsuits all over the floor, and screamed, mopping up their mess in a hurry when they realized her grandmother was coming back from grocery shopping earlier than expected. Jeonghan charmed her pants off helping her shelve things away while the rest of them tried not to betray the trouble they'd caused on their faces, which went well until Seungcheol, unable to hold it all in, laughed until his eyes watered, holding his stomach on the floor. Instead of getting mad after they brokenly explained what happened through peals of laughter, her grandmother just chuckled along with them and started up the washing machine.

Initially, they were friends out of circumstance. Their parents were friends, or had been, at some point in time. It was like this: Nayoung's mom was friends with Seungcheol's mom, and Seungcheol's mom had ended up at the same university as Kaeun's dad, and Kaeun's dad grew up with Jonghyun's dad, and they'd all had children within a year of each other. Kaeun came first, a year before the rest of them, and then Jonghyun, Seungcheol, Jeonghan, and, in the winter, finally Nayoung, and then running into each other while picking up their kids from school became meeting up at the park on weekends and gossiping while trying to teach their kids how to ride their bikes, and helping each other babysit during the week once they found work again, and Seungcheol giving a crying Nayoung her Hello Kitty lunch box back in primary school before getting sent home early for fighting with the kid who stole it in the first place. They ate together in the month after that, Nayoung handing him her banana milks as a tacit I'm sorry and Thank you, and Seungcheol gave her his wide, toothy smile when she put her lunch bag down next to his every time.

It was like this: Kaeun, who was a grade older, had her other friends, and Jonghyun had his baseball team, and Seungcheol and Jeonghan had their own classmates, and Nayoung only really had them. It was like: that same summer before Kaeun moved for university, Nayoung biked home from the library with Jonghyun one day, wiped the sweat from her upper lip when he wasn’t looking, and told him she liked him.

He turned his gaze down to his handlebars instead of to her. That's when Nayoung knew he didn't feel the same.

"You know," he'd told her a couple years later when he visited her in Seoul at her university and she treated him to barbecue. Jonghyun smiled, piling meat onto her plate. "I always thought it'd be you and Seungcheol."

At that point in time, it was. Eighteen months later, it wasn't anymore, and Jeonghan told her over coffee one day that she'd been rejected all those years before because Jonghyun was gay.

But a lot changed over that summer. Nayoung didn't realize it then, but the day they'd sent Kaeun off to the station was the first day of a week of on-and-off summer storms and the first day she stopped going to the library to study with Jonghyun. That night, she and Seungcheol sat in his dim living room, the practice exams they were too distracted to finish taking strewn all over the coffee table, contemplating their futures.

"I think whatever happens," Nayoung remembers him telling her, though she can't remember now how they'd ended up on the subject. "We'll always find our way back to each other."

The rain pounded against the small, loose-tiled balcony outside. Nayoung turned her head from where she was resting it on the couch to look at him, tinged ochre in the muted light. He and Jeonghan always joked that she looked at people a little too seriously sometimes. "Promise?" she remembers asking. Maybe this had been one of them.

He reached for her pinky and folded it with his. "Promise," he grinned. That was the summer, Nayoung knows now, that was the beginning of the end.

 

 

 

"You drive now."

Nayoung turns to look at him, car keys cold in her hand. The sole street lamp illuminating the parking lot colors him in honey, the edges of him blurred into the early dusk of winter. "Yeah," she says to his faint smile. It's funny because by the time they all started primary school, Nayoung had been the one between them to be too scared to ride her bike without training wheels. "Jeonghan taught me."

Jeonghan had also been the one, the February she'd graduated, to pick her up at the train station. He'd pulled up to the curb in his dad's hand-me-down Sonata, rolled down the window and peered over his knock-off brand name sunglasses at her. "Guess it's just you and me," he'd said in place of Hey, haven't seen you in years, how've you been?

Kaeun was somewhere in Japan, and Jonghyun was starting graduate school, and Seungcheol was wherever she'd left him in the snow two months ago, without looking back. Nayoung let pull up at the corners. "Guess so," she'd replied before loading her things into the trunk.

"Oh." Seungcheol's breath creates clouds, even in the darkness. It'd always been so easy to read him that it went all the way around the bend and became hard again. Or maybe over the years, Nayoung's just lost her touc