The sign on the door of said Shoes and Shirt Required. I glanced down at myself – at heels with straps that wrapped around my ankles with glittering snakes and a frilly dress that was fluffed up and stiff enough to dance on its own.

The gown was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen and my hair!!! I wondered why I was wearing it and what I was doing at the mall. Then I saw the sale signs. Buy One, Get One Free!

Pushing through the mall’s electric door, I snatched up a cart, wondering they even had it, and stared down the first aisle. The shelves were lined with guys. So were the shelves down aisle, two, aisle three, aisle four – they were displayed like cereal boxes, all sizes and varieties of guys, blonde and brunette, brawny and slim, gorgeous guys in suits, guys standing as straight as Ken dolls and grinning at me.

What the hell, I thought.

“Thanks for asking me along,” said my best friend Jessica Jung.

I glanced over my shoulder. She was wearing a very short, very y formal dress and pushing a huge cart as well.

“Any time,” I told her, then reached and picked a cute guy off the shelf, dropping him in my cart. Quick as a flash, Jessica pulled the guy from my basket and put him in hers.

I reached up for another. Jessica grabbed him out of cart again. I reached again. So did Jessica. I took off, racing down the aisles, plucking guys from the shelves. Jessica kept pace. Soon I was moving so fast I couldn’t see their faces. I was still wearing the ugly dress, but now I was rolling along on my in-line skates, reaching and dropping, reaching and dropping guy after guy in my cart. Always it came up empty. Jessica’s was getting very full. Enraged, I skated faster, wielding an old stick, clearing the shelves of guys. Jessica was right behind.

I screamed.

“I can’t stand it anymore!” I suddenly shouted. “Take them. Take all of them. They’re all yours, Jessica!”

I pushed my cart away and threw the stick at a gum machine, which was full of little guys as well, and raced for the door. Jessica was still right behind me, maybe hoping for a sidewalk sale. She didn’t pay. Jessica never worried about the cost of things. A store alarm went off. It was shrieking at me, blasting like it was inches from my ear.

It was. Without opening my eyes, I lifted my head, hit the snooze button on my alarm clock, then dropped it over the side of the bed. My entire body was limp. What a horrible nightmare!

Immediately I felt a twinge of guilt. Nightmare? Jessica was my best friend. What was I thinking?

“How many times are you going to let that thing go off?” my sister Bom whined.

I opened one eye and stared across the canyon between our beds. Bom’s head was a few inches off the pillow, her soft hair sticking out all over. She looked very young – too young to be pregnant, to be exact. But that’s what good old Bom was, home from her last year in college and pregnant. I’m a year younger, but have more sense now than my “big” sister will have when she’s probably forty-seven.

“How many times?” Bom whined again.

“How many times has it already gone off?” I asked.

“Four.”

“Four!”

That made It at least almost 8 am. And my meeting was at eight-thirty. I leaped out of the bed, stepping straight down on the clock’s metal edge, and went yelping and hopping over to a chair where a pile of clean clothes had been dumped. I burrowed through them in search of the right combination for today. This was not how I wanted to start my summer job at the camp.

“Don’t forget to zip,” Bom called when I rushed out of the bedroom still pulling up my jeans.

I spent just enough time in the bathroom to see that my eyes, which were brown, looked like two scum ponds, and hair was wild with humidity. At the bottom of the steps I picked up my bag, which I had packed the night before, and pulled my bike helmet out of the closet. Twisting my hair up on my head, I wondered if I could get away wearing the helmet during the whole meeting.

I know every turn of the back route to YGU, the site of the camp and the place where my mother has taught since I was four. I pedaled three miles of alleys and yards like I was in the Tour de France, just missing a dog, a car, and a jogger, which, the way I figured it, was only one near accident per mile. It was the 2nd week of June and hot. Sweat ran off me. I didn’t mind at all when a man his sprinkler full blast as I was riding across his house toward the hole in the fence – my private entrance to YGU.

But as fast as I pedaled, I couldn’t get away from the nightmare. Scenes form it, as well as memorable moments from last night’s double date and the dance – all of which I’d like to forget – flashed before my eyes like the splashes of sun between trees. Last night it had been Jiyong and Jessica, and at the dance, Youngbae and Jessica, and at the party of one of our friends, Yunho and Jessica, and at the basketball tournament…well, it was always the same story, just a different guy. Fill in the blank: Whomever I dated soon dated Jessica.

And how could I blame them? Jessica is beautiful. She has a silvery laugh and the long legs, and beautiful neck of a dancer. Somehow my chirpy, shy, little-grade school friend had become a college swan. And I, well, I’ve always been more like a friendly woodpecker – a pileated – the kind with a very small boyish body.

I was thinking about this, the unfairness of being a petite woodpecker, while rumbling down the long steps that led to YGU student center. I hadn’t ridden a bike down those steps since I was a kid and had forgotten how your speed builds up and gets you at the quick turn at the bottom. Suddenly I was swooping down on a girl and a guy with a guitar case. Both faces turned toward me, then the girl flattened herself against a wall and the guy jumped into the bushes clutching his guitar like a baby.

I shot between them, screeching on my brakes, then wheeled