final

Friday mornings in Los Angeles are everything Seulgi loves to hate. The sun scintillating in the sky, the incessant blaring of horns on a packed freeway, the angry curses filling the air because it’s Friday, people want to get home, but the predictably unpredictable traffic is holding up the entire city. The only thing left would be for people to break out of their cars and start dancing on their roofs, as per that Damien Chazelle film that Seulgi should but cannot remember.

The sunlight beats down and filters through the windows, mixing orange with blue on her screen. Seulgi groans. It’s difficult enough to move boxes around a Powerpoint slide on a moving car, but the weather is not making things any better. She takes out a pen thinking that she would write down some of her notes, but upon pressing it on her notepad, she realizes it’s out of ink. And it’s been out of ink for a while now. Seulgi groans again.

There is also something dented in her pocket that presses uncomfortably against her back every time she shifts in her seat. She pilfers out a velvet box, heaves a low sigh, and shoves it into her leather briefcase.

The car crawls forward maybe an inch. Seulgi shrugs up her sleeve, checking her watch. 8.04am. She has been there for about two hours, despite conscientious planning. She has a deadline at seven-thirty and a flight at eight, both of which are starting to seem unlikely.

Her Uber driver suddenly slams on his brakes and honks. A blue Honda Civic unceremoniously cuts into their lane, driving forward like he owned the whole damn highway. Her driver is livid.

“God, can’t these people drive?”

Seulgi glances furtively to her right. The boy sitting at the driver’s seat is unnaturally tall, slumped over the wheel so his head doesn’t hit the roof. He slams on his steering wheel, muttering a slew of English cuss words under his breath, some of which Seulgi has never heard before.

He turns to Seulgi. “Sorry.”

Seulgi looks at him. He's probably diagnosed her with a case of culture shock. “No, it’s okay.”

She doesn’t know him. She offhandedly told Irene that she needed a lift to the airport, not expecting Irene to actually listen and send her fling-of-the-month. “At the party last night, he told me he’d be free,” Irene had offered.

By method of elimination, it means that he’s a frat boy from one of the houses across the street, because those are the only parties Irene ever goes for. It explains his ripped sleeves, his socks in boat shoes, his studded piercing in just one ear, his hair slicked back with so much gel it looks like he used the whole bottle, and the cheeky look in his eyes whenever the car stops and he has a chance to glimpse at her. It’s like knowing how to flirt is a fraternity prerequisite.

She clears and fidgets in her seat. “Thanks, by the way,” she says quietly, “for giving me a ride to the airport.”

“You’re welcome.” His eyes glitter. “Anything for a pretty girl.”

Seulgi tries not to roll her eyes. Proves her point about the flirting. “Are you hitting on me?” she asks wryly.

“What do you think?” he chuckles, unfazed.

She shrugs. “I dunno, but aren’t you together with my roommate?”

“Well, having one prospect doesn’t mean I can’t have another.” He rolls down the window, his head to the side, and catches the wind in his hair. “Free world.”

Her previous efforts don’t work – she rolls her eyes anyway. He chuckles, his laughter soft and mellow, like bells tinkling in the breeze. There’s something about the way he smiles and the way it reaches his eyes – like he doesn’t have a care in the world and that’s okay.

“Irene said your name was Seulgi?”

“Yeah,” she nods, “Kang Seulgi.”

The traffic grinds to a halt. He stretches out his free hand. “I’m Suh Youngho.”

She shakes his hand and arches her brow. “You’re Korean?”

“I don’t look Korean?” he laughs. “That’s kind of rude, isn’t it, missy?”

Seulgi just shrugs again. It’s her natural reflex when things get kind of awkward and she doesn’t really have anything better to say. She still doesn’t know him, but she also doesn’t want to be rude to someone driving her across town for free.

He smiles. “I mostly go by Johnny.”

“Johnny?”

Seulgi squints. A man approaches her in long strides, towering above the crowd like he’s walking on stilts. The ripped tee and boat shoes are replaced by a fitted grey suit and leather loafers. His earring is gone, and his hair falls in a soft comma right above his eye. He still wears a smile, but it no longer reaches his eyes. Even so, Seulgi would recognize him anywhere.  

“Is that really you?” she repeats, mostly because she doesn’t believe her eyes. Of all people she could run into, Johnny Suh?

He chuckles. The familiar sound rings in her ears. “Is it really you?” he jokes, which tells her he’s real. He stops in front of her. “It’s been what – ten years?”

“Has it?” Seulgi raises her brows. She hasn’t been keeping count, and the number shocks her. She eyes him from top to toe. “Did you get taller?”

He leans over her, as though trying to accentuate her point. “Did you get shorter?”

They stare at each other for a moment, and then burst into peals of laughter. It’s anticlimactic but also quite amazing, something like one of those riddles her kid brother loved to tell – two old college buddies run into each other at the airport, what happens?

“I didn’t know you were back in Los Angeles,” Johnny smiles.

Seulgi chortles. “West Coast client,” she replies. Johnny nods. “How about you? Why’re you back? Last I heard, you relocated to Seoul?”

“I did. Just flew in to take care of some business.” They gaze at each other for a while, ready to spring into a series of pleasantries, until the attendant behind Seulgi clears . “Oh, sorry!” Johnny exclaims. “Were you in the middle of something?”

“Oh, right!” Seulgi realizes. She turns back to the counter, where the airline attendant is now trying to stifle her annoyance. “Sorry, what did you say?”

The attendant inhales. “So, as I was informing you earlier, Ma’am,” she says, adjusting to her professional, customer service voice, “the earliest flight to Seoul we can put you on is at nine tomorrow morning. Would that be alright?”

Seulgi’s eyes widen. “Tomorrow?” she gawks in disbelief. She almost asks them why they have such a big airport if there aren’t planes flying out, but she also doesn’t want to be a Karen. She may be in her thirties, but she sure as hell isn’t a Karen.

“Yes, tomorrow,” the attendant replies flatly, with a take-it-or-leave-it tone.

Johnny nudges her. Seulgi jumps. She’s almost forgotten about his presence. “Missed your flight?”

“Yeah,” Seulgi nods, running a hand through her hair and attempting not to seem like she wants to pull it all out.

“Me too. I missed my flight to New York,” he laughs. “Wild, isn’t it?”

Definitely, Seulgi thinks. So wild it could be a plot of a B-grade novel. Seulgi is surprised at how unsurprised she is. At this point, anything could fly.

“Ahem,” the attendant interrupts. Quite unceremoniously, if Seulgi could say so herself. “So, what will it be, Ms. Kang?”

She doesn’t know why, but she turns to Johnny, an old habit resurfacing after years of dormancy. “Well,” Johnny starts. His eyes sparkle, and for a second, Seulgi is brought back to the twenty-one-year-old frat boy she met in the dinky Honda Civic. “My car is parked in P-3.”

Seulgi kicks the door open and clambers out of Johnny’s car. It’s an 01’ blue Honda Civic that looks like it belongs in an antique museum, not the roads of Bel Air. The neighborhood that surrounds their college is all about champagne and limited-edition Lamborghinis, so Seulgi feels grossly out of place lugging fifteen-dollar drugstore vodka out of a creaky old car.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this for you drunkards,” Seulgi grumbles. She likes to think she’s strong, but ten bottles of vodka in a flimsy plastic bag is another monster. “We weren’t even the only twenty-one-year-olds!”

Johnny groans, mostly because his load is double of Seulgi’s. “Quit complaining, squirt. Some of these are for you, too.”

“What the ? I told you, I’m not going with you guys!”

But Johnny has gone selectively deaf, his long legs overtaking her in their hike up to her apartment. Seulgi curses under her breath as she climbs the stairs, wondering why on earth she agreed to move out of campus dormitories to an expensive apartment without an elevator.

They emerge through her front door, and the crowd waiting inside let out a collective cheer, because their alcohol delivery has arrived.

“There you guys are!” Irene exclaims, dashing towards them and relieving Seulgi of some of the weight. Seulgi closes her eyes just before Irene kisses Johnny on a cheek, like it’s a reflex.

“Alright, let’s get some shots around!” But Johnny doesn’t need to make an announcement. The college partygoers are already pouring themselves straight shots of whatever poison Seulgi and Johnny managed to procure.

Irene s a plastic shot cup at Seulgi, which Seulgi quickly waves away. “No. I’m not drinking that .”

“Stop being a spoilsport, Seul,” Irene frowns. How someone looks that pretty even when annoyed, Seulgi will never know.

Johnny joins in. “Come on, Seulgi. It’s a pre-game, you’ve gotta take at least one, or else the party will feel dead to you,” he encourages. “It won’t taste like anything, I promise.”

Seulgi’s brows meet in the middle. “Why are you lot so excited about drinking something that doesn’t taste like anything?”

“Because tonight, we don’t want to feel anything,” Johnny smiles wickedly.

Seulgi doesn’t like the sound of it, but she’s really keen to get Irene’s hooligan friends out of her apartment, so she knocks down the shot. A second later, she realizes that Johnny lied. The liquid burns and leaves a bitter aftertaste that lasts until Johnny’s carrying her out of the party and holding her head over her toilet bowl, with Seulgi swearing in between vomits that it’s the last time she’s ever going to touch alcohol.

 “Could I get the ’12 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley?” Seulgi jabs at the menu, staring as the waiter jots down her order with glee. “Also, I’d like a distiller and two glasses, please.”

“One glass,” Johnny corrects. Seulgi turns to him in shock. “I’ll just have a cranberry juice.” The waiter bobs his head and artfully removes their menus, ducking away to the interior of the restaurant. “Wow, Seulgi. I’m so proud of you – you actually drink now!”

She gives him a comical look. “And apparently, you don’t. Never thought I’d see the day Johnny Suh refuses alcohol.”

“I’m driving,” Johnny reminds her, with an aura of responsibility completely uncharacteristic of the Johnny she once knew.

Seulgi nods and chuckles. Take them ten years back, and she would have gotten him a glass anyway. But peer pressure is one of the bad habits that people leave in college. At least, the good half that actually grows up.

 They are at a swanky pasta restaurant on glitzy Rodeo Drive, at the heart of Beverly Hills. She never would've thought the day would come that she would wine and dine there, of all places, and with him, of all people. Their broke college selves would have shrieked at the prices, but Seulgi now owns an apartment in downtown Chicago and Johnny has a diamond-encrusted Patek around his wrist, so she assumes neither of them has a problem with the would-be bill.

Their waiter is back with their choices of red beverages. When he pours their drinks into their glasses, Seulgi thinks they look ironically identical and she hopes that they don’t accidentally switch. Seulgi still can’t drive. She always tells Jaehyun that that’s what he’s for, much to his ire.

Jaehyun, she almost sighs to herself. She still feels the velvet box though it isn’t even in her pocket.

“Cheers,” Johnny says, clinking his glass against hers and taking her from her thoughts. Seulgi quickly reciprocates and puts on a smile. “Is this something you picked up in consulting?” he asks, nodding at her glass.

“Oh, this,” she replies, looking at her wine. “No, I refined it in consulting. This,” she holds up her glass, “was started by you and Irene.”

Johnny throws his head back in laughter. “I remember! You used to be such a lightweight!”

“Compared to you crazy bastards,” Seulgi jokes. “Wasn’t your maximum like twenty shots or something?”

“God, was it?” Johnny laughs and shakes his head. He sips at his cranberry juice. “I can’t do it anymore, though. I’m too old for that now. Give me one cocktail and I’m reeling.”

Seulgi narrows her eyes. She recalls twenty-one-year-old Johnny gulping tequila straight from the bottle and isn’t even remotely convinced. “You’re exaggerating.”

“No, I’m serious!” Johnny insists. “I had two beers a couple nights back, and I could barely get up in the morning. Nobody believes me when I tell them I used to be in a frat.”

Seulgi chortles. “I don’t even know if I believe you,” she jokes.

He smiles and tips the contents of his glass into his mouth. He reclines, eyes drifting over the ritzy storefronts that flank the restaurant. Something tells her he’s taking a moment to register the uncanny change in their surroundings, just as she had minutes before.

Then he sighs. “I can’t believe it’s been ten years since we graduated.”

She nods. “Neither can I.” She follows his gaze and takes in their view. Her eyes glaze over. “Crazy to think that we’ve been working adults for ten years.”

Johnny tears a piece of bread and dips it into the saucer of olive oil. “When you’re young, all you think about is your future, and then when you get older, you wish you played around a little more,” Johnny comments between bites. The way he talks like a prophet seems to be a testament of his age.

Seulgi doesn’t buy it, though. This is the Johnny Suh she’s talking to. The self-proclaimed university Beer Pong champion. The only person to make it out of the Great American Challenge without puking into the gutter. The who nearly broke his arm drunk-skiing down Bear Mountain on one of the Memorial Day weekends.

“But you were always playing around,” Seulgi points out.

He laughs because he can’t deny it. “That’s also true.”

“Oh you’re awake,” Seulgi says, poking her nose out of her textbook.

He stirs weakly, his movements making little creases on the white sheets. He takes a while to blink away the harsh fluorescents and frown at the strong smell of antiseptics. The infusion pump promptly beeps, signalling that he needs a new bag of saline.

Seulgi rises to her feet. “I’ll get it.” She presses the button for the nurse, watching him stare at her in confusion. “How do you feel?”

He glances at his right arm, which is all wrapped up in a cast. He tries to lift it. “Am I dead?”

“No,” she laughs, mostly because he looks like he genuinely thinks he’s woken up in a different realm. “Hairline fracture. Doctor says that you can be discharged tomorrow, but it’ll take six to eight weeks for a complete recovery.”

“ me,” he groans. He stops trying to get up. “I thought I made a good turn.”

Seulgi eyeballs. “That’s what Irene says when I pick her up from one of your frat parties.” She absentmindedly pours water into a paper cup and proffers it to him. He takes it with his left hand. “How many shots did you have before you went up the gondola?”

“I don’t know – five? Six?” Johnny sips at his water. Seulgi rolls her eyes again – her default reaction to any of Johnny’s antics. “Where are the others?”

“They went back to rest at the lodge after we sent you here,” she replies, plopping back on the one-seater couch at the corner of the room.

Johnny arches his brow. “And you? You don’t need to sleep?” She raises her textbook. He looks even more bewildered. “Aren’t midterms over?”

“For your lot. In engineering, we have midterms every two weeks.”

He pulls a face. “.”

Honestly, Seulgi wasn’t even going to go to begin with. Johnny and Irene were the ones who dragged her out, telling her that she needed to catch a break or she would actually turn into a book. Johnny spent the whole drive to Big Bear telling her about his skiing adventures in Aspen, Mammoth, Tahoe and a bunch of other names that admittedly sounded a lot more fun than the different chemical molecules carbon and hydrogen could produce. So she neglected to tell him about her impending midterm, leaning her head against the car window and watching him chatter mirthfully about all the places he’s seen and wants to see.

“You know, you just don’t strike me as a chemical engineer,” Johnny remarks.

She looks at him knowingly. “Let me guess – are you going to tell me that I’m too pretty to be an engineer or something?”

“Damn, you know all my tricks,” he laughs. She does too. He then leans over, his eyes glimmering like gems. “You know, people with engineering backgrounds make great management consultants.”

“I’m not changing my major and career path just because you tell me that whatever you’re pursuing is cool,” Seulgi chortles. She’s heard this song and dance before.

“I’m serious!”

“Shut up and go back to sleep.”

“No, really, you study less, earn more, travel the world–“

The nurse peers through the door. Seulgi gives her a nod and gestures for her to come in. She hurries in, greeting Johnny and asking him the usual round of questions – how his arm is feeling, whether he needs strong painkillers, whether he needs to go to the bathroom. Seulgi retreats to her corner and buries her head in her book. She glances at Johnny, who mouths the words “travel the world” at her. She shakes her head, smiles, and sometime while she’s reading a thick chunk on the formation of halogen compounds, she can’t help but think about all the places he’s talked about and that she hasn’t really been anywhere.

Seulgi is the middle child in a prominent academic family. Her parents are tenured Chemistry professors at the Seoul National University and have devoted their entire lives to gaining and imparting knowledge. They believe that everything else is secondary to researching the wonders of the natural world. They have taught their children to believe the same.

Or at least, they’ve tried to.

As the eldest child and the first prototype, Seulgi’s older brother, Taeil, got the front row seat to his parents’ lectures. The docile Taeil easily surpassed their expectations – he topped his school, enrolled into SNU as a Chemistry major, and eventually became one of the youngest adjunct professors in university history. He’s still the child that their parents bring up the most at large family gatherings.

They decided to try something else with Seulgi, because science is all about experiments. They sent her to a college in the States and allowed her to pick from a range of majors that they pre-approved, thinking that she could add a new level of prestige to their repertoire. One kid at the top of South Korea and another at the top of America, the best of both worlds, they probably thought, ala Asian parents.

But their plan backfired when Seulgi unexpectedly switched her major to Business and got a job at a consulting firm. They were horrified. Seulgi had tried to explain to them that it was a cool profession, that she would get to advise some of the biggest firms in the world on major issues, and that she would get to uncover the wonders of the world from a different angle. Obviously, they didn’t buy her argument at all, still stuck to their mentality that large corporates are where knowledge goes to die.

They were close to disowning her, when one day, her younger brother, Mark, knelt before his parents and told them that he wanted to drop out of college to be a professional rapper. They forgot their anger at Seulgi almost immediately.

It is the central reason why Seulgi still sends him allowance, even though he has millions of streams on Spotify and probably makes more than her and Taeil put together.

“I’m amazed you’re still in consulting,” Johnny says, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. “Most people quit after two years of being worked to the bone.”

Seulgi smiles and nods. She has been at her job for ten years. It is supposed to mean that she spends her days from city to city, client to client, and project to project, supposedly delivering “world-class, value-added business strategy to leading organizations”, or at least, that’s the spiel she still gives to her slightly dubious, but now mostly accepting parents. But Seulgi is also the only one left standing from the batch of associates that initially came in with her, so there’s really no sugarcoating the attrition rate of people in her line of work.

Even that morning, she was rushing a deck because her client had unexpectedly decided to call a director’s meeting, only to cancel it when she finished the deck. But she is still at their beck and call, whether it’s three in the afternoon or six in the morning. Being a sleepless, around the clock “yes man” is supposed to feel like second skin. Naturally, most people would grow out of it. Seulgi sometimes asks herself why she hasn’t.

“I got used to it,” she replies, a classic answer she gives when she doesn’t want to pour salt on her own wounds.

Johnny chuckles. “Your whole job is about not getting used to things.”

“True,” she laughs. Of course, Johnny would know. At some point, he had wanted to become a consultant. He’s the one who led her down the rabbit hole. “Well, honestly, it’s the golden handcuffs, isn’t it?” she admits honestly. “You make one promotion, and you think you’re not far from the next, so you try to make that too. You blink, and it’s been ten years.”

Johnny nods. The thin smile on his lips is more polite than genuine. Seulgi understands. She can complain however she wants, but the grass will always look green to someone who’s wanted to be there, but never got the opportunity to.

She settles herself into one of the p