Once we had our ice cream, we sat together at a picnic table outside a restaurant next to the movie theater. Jennie at her milk flavoured ice cream cone and I tried not to stare as she declared, “You can totally tell a lot about a person by the ice cream they like.” She eyed the milk tea flavoured ice cream in my hand in judgement. “I have this theory that people who like milk tea ice cream are super safe and cautious.”

I had no idea what to say to that. It was just my favourite flavour. At last, I settled on, “Oh. I’m sorry to disappoint you?”

“I forgive you. Would you ever go skydiving?”

“Well yes? That’s one of my to-do-thing on my bucket list before I die...” I answered automatically, but cringe at the thought of my parachute if it ever failed. I’m being pessimistic again. She look at me in shock.

“Why, would you?” I asked.

She nodded. “Of course. In fact, my dad says he’ll take me soon. I’m a total adrenaline junkie. My parents took me bungee-jumping once when I was ten and it was amazing. You should totally come with us!”

“Your parents trusted a springy cord with your life when you were ten?” I asked, appalled.

“I think the professional bungee-jumper that helped us might’ve taken some of the responsibility,” she joked. “But yeah, my parents are pretty awesome. They’re super into, like, the whole living your life to the fullest thing. They watch a lot of ‘inspirational’ documentaries, which is totally cheesy, but I can appreciate the sentiment. We’ve lived in six different states and two different countries since I was born. We’ve gone on vacations to Europe every summer up until this one, and my dad’s got this long bucket list with every roller coaster he wants to ride before he dies and—” She paused, cringing. “God, I sound really obnoxious and pretentious right now, don’t I?”

“I’m just listening,” I told her idly. I already knew they were rich beforehand, who wouldn’t? The way she dressed up. Nobody would dare dress with such luxury… “It sounds interesting, actually. My life’s pretty boring.”

“I don’t believe that. You live here.”

“Seoul’s not that exciting if you don’t let it be,” I told her. “My dad and I have a routine, and we follow it. There’s not that much to share, I guess.”

“What about your mom; where’s she?” she asked me curiously. I stiffened, and, thankfully, she picked up on it. She immediately looked mortified.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Lisa. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay,” I said. There was a long silence as we awkwardly finished our ice cream together. I wanted to move past it, but I didn’t know what else to talk about. So I elaborated instead. “She, um… died in a car crash four years ago.”

Jennie let out a deep sigh and bit her lip. “That’s awful; I’m so sorry. I need to think before I speak a little more often.”

I knew that this particular topic of conversation wasn’t exactly first hangout material, but Jennie was easy to talk to. She talked a lot. She was all energy and earnest pseudo-rambling, at least around me, and for a moment I could only attribute to temporary insanity, I guess I thought it’d be a good idea to open up to someone other than Hoony. Or maybe I just wanted to open up to her.

“We were really close. She went out to have dinner with a friend and just… never came back.” I shook my head, gaining a sudden sense of clarity. This was way too much too soon. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about it.”

“I wanted to be your friend,” Jennie insisted. “You can talk about anything you want. Especially someone you love.”

I offered her a weak smile, and then bent down to feed the remnants of my cone to Kuma.

“Thanks. It’s okay, though. What’s your favorite movie?”

She studied me carefully, and I kept my expression neutral. “You sure?” she asked.

“C’mon.” I reached out to nudge her hand with mine, and her eyes jumped to the contact. I felt embarrassed that I’d opened up to her about my mom. Sure, Jennie was nice, but that didn’t exactly make it natural to start discussing my deceased mother the first time we hung out together. Especially given that hanging out with her was almost certainly an awful idea in the first place.

I could tell she was still stuck on the subject, so I reached out with my index finger and ran it along her pinky before withdrawing my hand. Her eyes flew to mine and, almost meticulously, her eyebrow rose in a silent question. I cleared my throat anxiously, already regretting touching her at all, and then repeated, “Favourite movie?”

She blinked twice, and then, to her credit, recovered quickly. “Charlie’s Angels.”

I laughed despite myself, caught off-guard. “No it’s not!”

“Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz whipping up bad guys? What more could I want?”

“Fair enough. Okay. Your turn.”

“My turn to what exactly?”

“Ask me something,” I insisted.

“Like what?”

“Like… my favourite food, colour. I don’t know. Anything.”

“Okay. Let me think.” She furrowed her eyebrows, staring hard at me for a moment and then, deadpan, declared, “Your hair’s in like a super messy bun right now, but it looks amazing. How do you do that? Seriously. I look like an ogre if I don’t spend half an hour in front of the mirror.”

Oh yeah. I did tied up my hair ‘cause it’s hot out here and I could barely stand the heat. I giggled at her and turned my nose up. “That secret stays with me.”

“No! Please? I’m jealous.”

I felt a flush creeping up my cheeks and saw her grin. She knew she was making me nervous. That only made me more nervous. “Thanks,” I mumbled.

“No problem, Lisa” she said. That sly, amused look from the day I met her was back. My gut told me the way she was looking at me was a good thing, even if my head disagreed. “Okay.” She cleared and wrapped the remnants of her cone up into a napkin. “A real question: where do you work?”

I forced a laugh. “It’s this fast food place called ‘McDonald’s’. It . We serve clogged arteries on buns, pretty much. I mean, I’m all for high-calorie, tasty food, but the stuff we make is lethal.”

“You hate your job?”

“Loathe it.” I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. “Who likes working in the fast food industry?”

“Why don’t you quit?” She asked the question like she genuinely didn’t know the answer. I thought it was obvious.

“Because I need the money. My dad wants me to start saving up for when I go off after college. I can’t quit.”

“Well, you could get a job you like,” she suggested.

“It’s not that simple.”

“It could be. You won’t know unless you try.”

I laughed and joked, “Can you sew that inspirational quote onto a pillow for me so I can look at it every day before I wake up?”

She pressed her lips together like she was trying not to laugh and then tossed her balled up napkin at me with a pouty, “Don’t make fun of me.”

I grinned a grin I couldn’t make go away, and for another moment, I forgot what I knew about Jennie’s fate. That was something no one had ever managed before. It taken less than a couple of hours, but just like that, I was officially invested.

I should’ve stopped my idiotic non-plan right then and there, gone home, and saved myself the heartache. But something kept my brain from working properly and kept me there with her outside the theatre.

Maybe it was the same omniscient power that had given Jennie her number. Maybe, just like there wasn’t a way to stop the numbers, there also wasn’t a way for me to come to my senses and leave Jennie alone.

At least, if there was… I’d spend months struggling to find it.

* * *

I’d always imagined that my first real crush would be like it was in the old movies my dad and I watched together. Love was Robert Walker as soldier Joe Allen running after Judy Garland’s bus, calling out to her to meet him under a clock tower, or it was Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer swaying together in the moonlight, or Claudette Colbert tearfully telling Clark Gable that she couldn’t live without him. It was foreign: unattainable. I mean, I couldn’t really even let myself get close enough to a girl to start to like her as a person, let alone as a friend or anything more.

Jennie shattered that image with a smile and a laugh, and after just a day together, I was wondering why I’d chosen now to let my guard down. Maybe a part of me really liked the attention: the way she was obvious about wanting and enjoying my company. Probably a part of me really liked her, and liked the way she so clearly liked me back. Liked me first even, because it was fairly obvious after just a few conversations that she hadn’t been so pushy about hanging out with me without a reason. When I watched romances or read stories, I inserted myself into the main character’s dilemma. I was the piner: the one loving someone and waiting for them to love me back.

But this was real life. And in real life, I was the love interest.

* * *

Jennie was interested in trying out laser tag, as it turned out. I took her a week later. And although Hoony came along, I offered to pay for her, since she’d paid for ice cream the week before. She let me.

Even with Hoony there, it still felt like a date from the moment it began. Maybe it still was. We were two girls who liked girls, even if Jennie didn’t know that I was gay, and she certainly didn’t mind not knowing it, because she flirted with me anyway.

The night before we went out, she called me at ten o’clock. I paused the movie that I was watching to answer my phone, surprised to see her name on the screen. We’d exchanged phone numbers after ice cream, but had only texted a few times since then. She always initiated contact, and I couldn’t force myself to ignore her messages.

“Hello?” I wasn’t sure how casual I could be. We weren’t really friends, and she was definitely more comfortable around me than I was around her.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked me. “Busy with your boyfriend?”

“Jennie. This obsession has got to stop,” I joked, taking a cue from her tone. “I can’t tell if you’re teasing me because you think I’m dating Hoony or teasing me because I’m not dating Hoony and therefore am single.”

“Maybe it’s both?”

“The Wizard of Oz.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what I’m watching. The Wizard of Oz.”

“Oh. That witch terrified me as a kid.” I heard a crunch on the line, and furrowed my eyebrows.

“What are you doing?”

“Eating a carrot. Gotta make sure my vision’s at its best for laser tag, obviously.”

“So you like carrots,” I observed. “Mental note taken.”

She laughed. “What, just in case you need ideas for birthday presents?”

“No,” was all I said. I didn’t want to think about when her birthday was. I didn’t want to know at all.

“So what kind of movies do you like? I’ve seen a lot of action flicks, but only because I mostly hung around guys back where I used to live.”

I shifted my phone to my other ear as she bit down on another carrot. Then, before I could stop myself, I declared, “You’re gay.”

The crunching stopped. There was a short pause. And then, “Was that a question?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For… pointing out the obvious?”

“I don’t think it was obvious,” I half-lied.

“Sure it was. I’ve always wanted to live in Seoul, and I wore my friend’s hand-made rainbow bracelet the other day.”

“The true reason you moved here comes out,” I joked, trying to ease some of the tension. She ran with it, mercifully.

“Ah, yes. I definitely got my parents to pack up and relocate just so I could pick up girls more easily. Kuma is also a ploy. It reels them in, you see?”

“Makes sense.” I nodded and smiled, though she couldn’t see it. There was another pause, and then she cleared .