SEESAW

Bang Chan

by kerminghaos
On the slippery stretch of the ice, with the cold nipping at your nose and your skates leaving patterns in their
wake, with the air crisp and clean, that’s where you feel most at home.

“Back straight!” your coach calls from the ranks. The command comes from far away, a different world. Out
on the ice, you’re always alone, caught up in the movement and the slide, the undeniable freedom of sailing
across the rink that almost makes it feel like you’re flying. Everything else becomes tiny, insignificant. Shrinks
further into the background until it’s barely a smudge on the windshield of your perception.

You react on instinct. Straighten out your back, stiffen up the muscles, imagine each vertebra clicking into
place. Years of practice have made you malleable, a soft piece of clay in the hands of former world champions,
former Olympian victors, men and women that used to mean something and are now reduced into shadows
of their former selves. You adhere to their comments on muscle memory, the reflex integrated into the
deepest parts of you.

Sometimes you think that if someone cut you open, cracked apart your bones, they’d find tiny code scribbled
into the marrow. Commanding you to move the way the people around you tell you to.

The music swells to a bursting point and you spin across the ice like a spin top, faster and faster and faster.
Colors blur like flashes of lightning, there one moment, gone the next, ripping apart the blanket of the night
sky, cracks running through the glass of the atmosphere. You spin and spin and see them just as you prepare
for the last leap, an overarching, daring, double toe loop.

They’re points of blue and yellow against the white of the seats, boisterous and loud. Their voices burst into
your world without any grace, busting the bubble of protection you pull around yourself, a gossamer
membrane, whenever you step on the ice.

On the landing, your blades hit at a wrong angle and your leg slips away beneath you. You go sprawling
across the rink, skidding at least five feet forward on the ice. It leaves a burning pain along the exposed skin
of your arms and you hiss, eyes closing.

It’s hard to tell what stings more, the fall or the shame of it all.

“Again?”

You look up from your crestfallen position, the pain of the impact reverberating all the way up into your neck
muscles. Your coach, Oh Jungho, used to be big. He won the world championships once or twice, made it all
the way up the winner’s podium at the 1978 Winter Olympics in some city – Tokyo maybe, or somewhere
else, you can never remember even though you know you should. He used to be big, but he isn’t anymore.
Your coach went the way all brilliant things go – down.

Now he’s just a prematurely balding man with a belly protruding over the edge of his pants, cheeks always
red with Soju. He likes yelling at you, dissecting all your mistakes with a sick, sadistic glee.

“Concentrate,” he says, his voice so loud you’re surprised the ice beneath you doesn’t vibrate with it. “You’re
a mess these days. You’ll never make it.”

Briefly, you imagine what you could say. You’re fat and old and ugly, and you don’t know anything. You’re a
narcissistic asshole who enjoys torturing people. Fuck you.

Instead you say, “I’m sorry.”

Jungho turns his back on you, grumbling profusely. When he’s angry like that, he rubs his hands together,
and you can hear the dry, chafing sound of skin on skin ringing through the air like gunshots.

For a moment you stay on the ice, knees pressing into the cold. You imagine cracking the surface open with
the sharp point of your bones, crawling into the ground, down, down, until no one can see you.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Bang Chan is smiling, but that isn’t surprising. He’s usually smiling, in a non-threatening, sincere way.
Dimples, white teeth, scrunched-up nose. Some part of you realizes that he’s kind, approachable, sweet.
Some other part of you hates him.

Bang Chan, to you, is a mix of strange memories. Sandcastles and vodka shots and a kangaroo plush. You’ve
known him all your life, but you still can’t say whether you love or despise him.

“Yes,” you grit out, pointedly avoiding the hand he offers you. Instead you painstakingly pull yourself off the
ground with a hand on the railing that runs along the inside of the rink. “I’m fine.”

Chan is already in his gear, the blue and yellow jersey, the helmet clamped beneath his arm. A hockey stick
is leaned against a seat. The laces of his skates are still undone.

“That looked like a nasty fall,” he converses, easily, watching as you pull yourself off the ice and stagger onto
the concrete of the stands.

“I can handle it.” The first time you broke a bone, you were five years old. You slid across the ice, crashed
into a wall and snapped your clavicle clean in two. If there’s anything that taught you, it’s that pain is
temporary, that it passes. Bruises fade. Bones grow back together.

The ice has been the best teacher you’ve ever had.

Chan looks like he wants to say something else, but somebody calls his name and both of you look across
the rink. His team is assembling in a circle, hockey sticks knocking together, the boisterous laughter of too
many boys crowding into too little space echoing through the room. You spot Minho near the back, watching
Chan and you with a frown. When he catches your gaze, he beams. You look away.

“I’m leaving,” you tell him, already turning away, and don’t wait for an answer.

You waddle from the hall, skates still on your feet, and wonder why you feel like crying.

“Jungho called today,” your mother tells you. Her manicured fingernails are tapping against the wood of the
tabletop. Long ago, it seems your mother has established some kind of rhythm to live her life to, steady and
constant. Tap, tap, tap. Inhale, exhale, repeat.

You hum, stare down at your plate as you drag your potatoes through the gravy, watch as they turn dark and
soggy. You don’t want to be here.

“Sit straight,” your mother tells you, and you assume it’s just a replacement for the words she really wants
to say. Stop being ungrateful. Stop being a nuisance. Your mother feels about you the same way you feel
about your coach. You don’t want to, but your body reacts to her command before you can even make the
conscious decision. “He said you were distracted, that you lack form and dedication.”

You keep staring at your chicken and vegetables like they might come alive on your plate at any minute. The
dining room is filled with warm light and cold air. Your father’s absence seems to swell, the empty chair
growing and growing until the whole room is occupied only by the acute awareness that he isn’t here.

“Look at me.” Your mother’s hand creeps into your field of vision as she lets it sail down to the tabletop,
without enough force for it to be anything but half-hearted. Her fingernails are painted a cheerful, plastic
pink. “You have a true talent, ____. You can make it big, everybody’s been saying that for years. Don’t you
want this anymore?”

You used to want it. Back when you were younger, and all your friends went to parties and got their first
kisses and their first drunken adventures, all you ever dreamed about was the ice and golden medals and
perfect scores. You used to know exactly who you were going to be and all the things you’d have to do to
get there.
Now you can’t even remember what it feels like to be sure of something.

When you look at your mother, there’s something infinitely sad on her face. She looks older than she is, you
realize. The hair at her temples graying, the skin around her eyes furrowed with deep lines.

“Of course, I do, Mom,” you say quietly. “I’ll do better.”

Later, you scrape the rest of the chicken and vegetables into the trash, do all the dishes while your mother
lays down. Your hands go wrinkly with the hot water, smell like citrus and detergent.

Your father is still all over the house, in the old mugs you used to paint for his birthdays, in the unnecessary
talking microwave he bought once, insisting it was the future. There’s a picture of you and him pinned to
the refrigerator, you, three-years old and red-cheeked, grinning into the camera as your father leads you on
your unsteady feet across the ice. He bought you your first pair of skates.

You climb up the stairs, sit on your bed in the dark for a long time. Across the narrow distance between
Minho’s house and your own, the lights are on in his room, the window open to let in the last drafts of mild
September air. You don’t want to look at him.

From downstairs, you can still hear your mother and her fraying rhythm. Tap, tap, tap.

You live in a house filled with ghosts.

The first time you ever met Bang Chan, he was carrying a stuffed kangaroo in the front pocket of his
dungarees.

He was six then, you were four, and he had the same chubby cheeks all kids have, ears sticking out just a
bit too far. You still remember it vividly, the last rays of a November sun doing nothing to warm your cold
skin, the treetops already devoid of leaves, naked and spindly as they reached across a sky the color of
concrete.

You were sitting in a sandbox, castle smashed to pieces in front of you, and bawling your eyes out. The boys
that had destroyed your artwork already retreated to the see-saw in triumph, laughing.

“Here,” Chan said, smiling from ear to ear and placed the kangaroo carefully in your arms. “You can keep it.”

You didn’t stop crying immediately, but the sobs dwindled down into pathetic sniffling. “Why a kangaroo?”

“I’m from Australia. We have loads of kangaroos there,” Chan told you, pride swelling up his chest. Then he
knelt down in the sand, even if he was probably a bit too old for doing things like that. “Do you want me to
help you build a new one?”

Now that you think of it, you probably still have that kangaroo, somewhere.

Chan’s ears seem to have grown closer to his head as the years passed, but his smile is still the same. It has
quite the effect even across the expanse of a MacDonald’s, and you think that’s saying something.

When you walked in, you did your best not to be seen, your heart pounding with anxiety, palms sweaty. But
Chan spots you as you queue up to get your milkshake and burger, waving wildly. “Over here!” he calls, and
half his table turns towards you.

You blush, grit your teeth, but walk over anyway. Half the restaurant is staring at you, but it feels bigger
somehow, more. As if all the world is watching.

“Hi,” you say, quietly, and stand behind an empty chair with your take-out bag cradled in your arms. You
don’t know if you’re supposed to sit down. You don’t know if that’s allowed.
There’s a chorus of greetings, and then a wave of smiles, half-pity, half-concern. You think back to your
house, overflowing with flowers and meaningless letters of sympathy, cards with pictures of silhouettes
disappearing into foggy landscapes printed on the front. The way everybody looks at you like that now. How
all the mouths say I’m sorry for your loss but really mean your father’s dead and I don’t know what to say.

You never quite figured out how to tell them that sometimes saying nothing is better.

“Sit down,” Chan urges, pulling out the rickety chair for you. His smile, you notice, is entirely cheerful. You
don’t know how to feel about it, but you sit down anyway, keep your paper bag in your lap.

You feel at once transported back to your high-school days. The same array of faces used to grin at you from
across cafeteria tables. There’s Minho and Changbin and Hyunjin, as well as some other boys you’ve not met
before. At first you feel the heavy weight of their gazes on you, but after a while the excitement wears off
and they go back to their conversations, laughing and joking, telling stories about people whose names
you’ve never heard before.

Being with them after so long is a little like turning on the TV to watch your favorite show, just to find out
that you’ve missed out on two seasons and can’t seem to understand the story anymore.

Your skin itches.

“Hey,” Minho scoots his chair closer to you. The legs make a screeching sound as they slide across the tiled
floors. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

“Oh.” You glance down at your take-out bag. The original plan was to eat in your car, alone in an empty
parking lot so your mother wouldn’t know. Like you’re doing something forbidden. “Sure.”

You unwrap your Cheeseburger, mostly just so you don’t have to look at Minho. You’ve been doing that a
lot these days, you realize. Not looking at him.

“How is it, being back home? Is it really horrible?”

Minho is beautiful. He’s always been beautiful, that’s precisely the problem, but these days it seems almost
ethereal. Looking at him hurts. It’s been hurting for years.

“It’s okay,” you lie. Because you don’t know how to say my mother’s wasting away and I don’t want to be
here to watch her do it. Because you don’t know how to say every time I look out my window I see you and I
remember how in love with you I am and I’m so tired of it. Because you don’t know how to say my dad died
a month ago and I haven’t cried once.

You’ve been in love with Lee Minho for as long as he’s been living in the house next to yours. Which is to
say: you’ve been in love with Lee Minho for as long as you can remember.

“Do you miss the training?” Minho asks. He’s nice. He’s always been nice. He used to braid your hair when
you were younger, used to give you piggy-back rides home from school. You keep on thinking about his face
when he saw you standing on your lawn at two a.m., bare feet, pajamas. So much pity in his eyes. “Must be
rough going back to the common people.”

You know Minho means well. He’s trying to distract you, probably. Make you feel welcome.

Instead you feel cheap.

“It’s okay,” you say. Shrug. Pick listlessly at your fries, then drown them in ketchup. You don’t even like
ketchup, you realize a little too late. “I’m still training, anyway. Just doing it here now.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Changbin pipes up. He’s got his arms folded across his chest and is frowning at you from
across the table. It’s not an angry frown. It’s just a frown. Just muscles reacting, skin creasing. Changbin has
always been a frowner. “If I made it as far as you… I couldn’t just go back here, ever. Small towns suck.”
That’s because your father wasn’t dying. The words are on your tongue, ready to be released, but you let
them dissolve there, look away. You wish Minho would say something. He’s good at saving situations that
are heading towards crashing and burning at a rapid pace. At least he used to be good at it, back when you
still knew him. An out-of-pocket comment, a weird story about his cats, just something to take the edge off.

It’s Chan who speaks instead, “It isn’t so bad here.” He’s still smiling, if a bit strained now. “I like it. Here,
have some chicken nuggets.”

He pushes the box in your direction. You’re too stunned to speak but pick one up anyway, put it in your
mouth and feel like you’re chewing cardboard. Your fingers come away sticky.

Minho is still looking at you. “I’m sorry about your father,” he says, quietly, so only you can hear.

You stare at your greasy hands, at the fries swimming in ketchup. You nod and look away.

Sometimes saying nothing is better.

You’re eighteen when you pull out of the Olympics to watch your father die.

It takes almost a year, even when the doctors gave him three months at best. Somehow, the additional time
seems more like a curse than a blessing.

Your dad keeps telling you to go back to the training camp and you keep telling him that you can’t, that
you’ve pulled out, that you won’t be competing. Maybe next time, you say, holding a hand that’s gone paper-
light.

Maybe I’ll see you win in four years then, your father says, and you laugh and nod and say maybe.

He’s dead two weeks later.

The next time you see Chan, you’re waiting for your mother to pick you up from the rink.

You’re standing in front of the training hall, arms wrapped around your torso to ward off the cold. Your
hoodie and tights don’t really do anything to warm you.

Chan climbs out of his car, a horribly beat-up red thing that’s rusting at all edges, and waves at you. “Hey!”
he calls, pulling out a bag from the backseat and slinging it across his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

You shrug and kick at a pebble on the ground. “I’m waiting for my mother.”

Chan nods, then says, “Don’t you want to wait inside? It’s really cold.”

You don’t know how to tell him that you don’t want to wait inside because being inside means being in close
proximity to Lee Minho. And every time that happens your heart does a weird, painful thing.

“No, it’s fine,” you mumble and keep staring at the fraying fabric of your sneakers. “I like the cold.”

“Yeah, you would, I guess,” Chan laughs. He has a nice laugh, all loud and heartfelt and real. “You like the
ice a lot, after all.”

You glance at his hockey stick. “You do, too,” you say, and then immediately shut up when it comes out
sounding like an accusation.

Chan just grins. “Sure, but not like you. I don’t like it even close to enough to go professional.”
“I’m not professional anymore,” you say without looking at him. This is the part where everybody pauses.
This is the part where everybody asks. But you’re going to be again, right? You’re gonna try?

Chan doesn’t, and for that alone you like him a bit better than you ever thought you could.

Instead he adjusts the strap of his bag and grabs his stick a little tighter. “I always thought it was really brave
what you did. Coming back.”

You have no answer for that. I’m not brave, you think. I’m small and weak and I let everyone down.

Your gaze falls to his hand, still holding his car keys, and suddenly a smile twitches about your mouth. Just
a moment. Then it dies. “You still like kangaroos,” you say, point at the fluffy keychain.

Chan glances down, then grins and lifts his hand. The keys jingle together, the bear smiles at you with kind,
unmoving eyes. “Yeah.” He lowers the key again, squints at you. “And you still like Minho.”

That’s a bit like a bucket of ice water to your face.

“I…” You blink. “What?”

Chan smiles. “It’s pretty obvious, I think. Once you’ve been in love yourself, it’s easy to know what the thing
looks like on other people.”

It’s strange. A heart-to-heart in the freezing cold, in front of an ice rink with all the people that used to be
your friends inside. Then again, Chan and you have always been a little strange. Sandcastles and vodka shots
and a kangaroo plush.

“He doesn’t love me back,” you say. Minho has never loved you back. You suspect he never will either, but
this is the great flaw and the great skill of the human species: that we can never resist hoping. That we can
always believe in the maybes.

Chan buries his hands in his pockets. He levels you with a gaze so intense you feel the need to wriggle. This
is what a frog must feel like as he gets pinned to a board.

You never get an answer. Your mother pulls up and honks once.

“Bye, Chan,” you say, gathering your backpack off the ground. Then you’re running.

In the car, you turn the heating all the way up, hold your hands in front of the stream of warm air until you
feel the stiffness melt out of them.

“Was that Bang Chan?” you mother asks. Her nails are cherry red today. They tap against the steering
wheel. Tap, tap, tap.

“Yeah,” you confirm, rest your head against the window and blink into the oncoming twilight. It has no
business getting dark at five pm. You’re already sad enough.

“I didn’t know you two were friends.”

You exhale. “We aren’t.”

You have always had a window into Minho’s life. His room is straight across from your own, your back lawns
between you. You watched as the posters on his walls changed from Disney movies to racing cars to rappers.
You watched as he grew up, separated by a thin stretch of grass that felt like an ocean.
He used to text you sometimes, at two am, wave at you from the square of buttery light and convince you to
go to parties even when you had practice early the next day and your mother would strangle you if she ever
found out.

You remember sitting in Minho’s car, the heater on full blast, his jacket around your shoulders if you got
cold. You remember him telling you jokes, making you laugh, singing along to the radio at the top of your
lungs. You remember streetlights whizzing past the windows as Minho drove a consistent few miles above
the speed limit, his driving erratic at best and reckless at worst.

Sometimes, Minho would stop the car at the edge of the town and you’d watch the sun creep slowly up the
horizon, climbing upwards like it was heaving itself up a ladder. He’d put on quieter music, pull his feet up
on the seat and tell you about his future.

You remember the moonlight caught in his hair like fireflies. The barely visible freckles on the back of his
hands. The smell of new car and too much cologne. The way his eyes sparkled. The gentle smile curving his
lips upwards as he said, “I’ll get there someday.”

Minho, as silly and carefree as he was most days, could paint worlds into thin air when we wanted to. He had
something brilliant about him, and there was so much he wanted to do, so many plans, so many dreams,
and no doubt in him at all that he could achieve it all. With the way he spoke, you didn’t doubt him for a
second. Boys like Minho didn’t fail; they ended up on magazine covers.

You remember wondering what that felt like, to dream the way he did. All you wanted, really, was never-
ending summers with Lee Minho. The things you’d see – beaches and friends and sunrises. The things you’d
do – napping and kissing and laughing. You remember imagining Minho’s bright smile, his body on towels
spread out in the sand, his hand in yours all the way up a hill. Exciting and new and a little stupid.

You never got those summers. Minho got a girlfriend and you got the Olympics and then you got a dead
father. It doesn’t seem fair.

From his room, Minho smiles at you, waves. You smile back and watch as he puts on his leather jacket, closes
the door behind him and doesn’t text you.

It doesn’t seem fair, but you suppose it does make sense.

Chan’s a good kisser.

You know this because when you were sixteen and drunk for the first time in your life, at the first party of
your life, Changbin got out an empty coke bottle and forced all of you down in a circle. You know this because
he kissed you with his hands respectfully kept to his sides and his lips tasting like chewing gum and vodka.
You know this because that night you walked home crying over the fact that your first kiss wasn’t with Lee
Minho.

Your slides hit the ice with enough force to leave dents, but it barely registers. You spin across the ice like a
madwoman, like you’re taking a personal grudge out on the rink. Like every hit of your blades could slice
right through Bang Chan’s gentle smiles.

Jungho tells you you’re too stiff, that you look like you hate half the world and want to punch the other, and
you listen only with one ear, mind already on your bed and your dinner. When he’s finally done yelling at
you, you forgo changing and step outside to wait for your mother instead. You ignore the clamor of the
hockey team, don’t spare them a single look.

It’s raining, heavy ribbons of water that hit the ground in a steady rhythm, tinge the world grey. You huddle
beneath the projecting roof, sit down on the cold ground and pull your knees up to your chest. Then you
wait. And wait. And wait.
It’s an hour and a half later when the door beside you swings open. Half the hockey team spills out, chatting
loudly, their sticks knocking together when they turn to yell something over their shoulder.

You mold yourself into the wall, make yourself as small as possible. Pray they won’t notice you.

It’s Chan who spots you, stops in his tracks. His face softens. “Hey,” he says, carefully. Watches as you pick
yourself off the ground, dust off your legs.

“Hi,” you whisper, nearly drowned out by the conversation.

Chan and you look at each other for a moment, silent. He’s already opening his mouth when Minho steps
closer, eyebrows furrowed, worry crossing over his features. Your heart jumps painfully. “What are you still
doing here?”

“I’m, uh…” You clear your throat. “My mother was supposed to pick me up, but she didn’t show.”

“Did you call her?” Chan asks. He’s frowning, and it doesn’t suit him.

“Yeah,” you lie, shove your hands into the pockets of your hoodie and let your fingers slide across the fraying
threads. “She isn’t answering.”

“I can drive you home,” Minho offers, but you see his eyes sliding towards the boys. They’re talking about
going out for drinks.

“No, it’s… that’s fine. I’ll just wait until it stops raining and then I’ll walk.”

“I can take you,” Chan interjects. He’s not looking at Minho at all, his eyes fixed on you. “I promised I’d go
home to help my mom with her internet connection today anyway. It’s not that far.”

“Are you sure?” Minho checks, but you can hear the relief in his voice.

Your stomach sinks, and you think of that stretch of lawn between his window and your own. A few yards
gaping like a canyon. A window into his life, and no idea what goes on in it.

Chan nods. “Sure thing. Go and have fun.”

You watch as the boys trickle out of the parking lot one by one, piling into cars that seem too small to hold
the sheer onslaught of excitement. “You should come party with us sometime,” Hyunjin tells you in passing,
his smile genuine, “We miss you.”

You don’t know how to answer.

Chan’s shoulder brushes against yours as he takes off his denim jacket and holds it over both your heads.
“Come on,” he says, “we’d better run.”

Water sprays up your legs as you step into puddles on your way across the parking lot. You’re still shivering,
now that October has arrived and is dyeing the leaves in the crisp colors of autumn. The chill seems to settle
everywhere, creeps inside of you until you can’t seem to get rid of it. But Chan is solid and warm beside you,
his jacket shields you from the rain, his elbow is a steady presence where it presses into the skin just above
your shoulder blade.

He unlocks the door and then walks all the way around the car to make sure you don’t get wet on your
journey there, waits until you’ve climbed into your seat. It makes you feel strange, choked-up, uncomfortable.

Chan rounds the car again, gets into his seat, tosses his gear and the wet jacket to the backseat. “The heater’s
broken,” he tells you, already putting the car in reverse and glancing over his shoulder. “I think there’s a
blanket in the back somewhere if you’re cold. Or you can have my hoodie.”

“That’s fine,” you dismiss, even if your toes are numb. “Can we turn on some music?”
“Radio’s broken too,” Chan says, and sounds a little embarrassed. “But here.” He stops the car for a moment,
holds the steering wheel steady with his knees as he pulls out his phone, opens his Spotify and places it on
the dashboard. He’s playing the Beatles, you realize, but the sound is tinny and bad and warped. John Lennon
sounds like somebody doing a bad impression of him.

With the music playing and the light fading faster and faster, in a car with the first boy you’ve ever kissed,
you stop feeling like yourself. It’s alienating. Like looking at your life from the outside, watching, intruding.

It isn’t a bad feeling.

Your phone rings ten minutes into the ride and you almost jump out of your skin. You wrestle it from your
pocket, check the screen, pick up. “Hi, mom,” you say quietly into the receiver. You’re angry.

“Hello.” There’s the rustling of sheets, the white noise of a television, then silence for a moment. “I’m sorry,
I… I’ll get in the car now and…”

You can hear from her voice that she’s been crying, and your anger evaporates. You feel drained then, tired.
A sweater washed too many times, fraying at the edges, colors faded into grey. “It’s fine,” you interrupt, let
your head drop back against the head rest and stare at the unattractive beige of the roof. “I’m with a friend.”

Your mother sniffles, then coughs, like she’s desperately trying to hide her tears. “Which friend?”

“Chan.”

There’s silence, then your mother says, “I thought you weren’t friends?”

Suddenly you’re aware of just how loud the volume on your phone is, and the embarrassment is hot and
tight and heavy in the pit of your stomach. You hope to God that Chan didn’t hear it.

“I… I’m gonna hang up, Mom.” You don’t wait for an answer before following through on your words,
clutching the phone to your chest instead.

If Chan did overhear your mother, he doesn’t comment. You just sit in silence for a while, only the music and
the ticking of his blinker whenever he turns a corner. You stare at the raindrops racing each other down the
window panes, the wipers pushing them off. You think of your mother and the open, empty spaces of your
house, your father in every corner.

Chan’s skin is still tan from summer, bronzed and free of freckles. His fingers, curling around the steering
wheel almost carefully, are long and sturdy, safe. For a second you remember what it felt like when he kissed
you, the barely-there pressure of his mouth, the soft trace of his tongue against yours.

Then you think of Minho and front laws at two am.

“Chan,” you say, quietly, your fingers twitching in your lap. “I don’t want to go home.”

Chan just nods. “Okay. Let’s go somewhere else then.”

He ends up buying you ice cream, drives to an empty parking lot. You eat in his car, with the music off and
the windows rolled down even if it’s too cold for that.

The neon lights of the store front reflect off the puddles, turn the world into the bad idea of a gangster
movie. Chan looks strange like this, his face half shadow, half red-blue-yellow. He belongs in the sun, you
think, all soft blues and gentle pinks.

“I haven’t been here in forever,” Chan says. Now that the gentle drumming of the rain against the roof has
slowed down to a drizzle, his voice suddenly sounds too loud.
You pause, blink into the darkness and the pale glow of the streetlights. “I have no idea where we are,” you
admit.

“Really?” Chan seems to consider something for a moment, then he smiles. “Come on.”

He gets out of the car, pulls his hood up over his head. You watch him, his silhouette dark in front of those
neon lights, casting shadows onto the hood of his car. Then you get out too, slowly, your ice cream still
clutched in your hand.

“It’s still raining,” you tell him, and it sounds more like a complaint than you meant for it to.

Chan glances up, as if he hasn’t even noticed before you pointed it out, then nods. He grabs his jacket from
the backseat, drapes it across your shoulders. It’s dried down mostly, but it still feels a little damp, a little
heavy. You twist the fingers of your free hand into the fabric anyway, draw it closer around you. It smells
distinctly like boy, like aftershave and the damp of the rain.

“Let’s go,” Chan says, smiles at you and leads the way.

It’s like stepping foot back into your childhood. You recognize the chipping paint of the slide, the metal of
the jungle gym, rusty and worn. You stop in front of the sand pit, think of Chan and his kangaroo plush.

“Oh,” you whisper. “That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah.” Chan’s voice is closer than you expected. His elbow knocks against yours as he steps up beside you
at the sandbox. Pushes his hands into his pockets. “Feels like forever.”

You think it feels like yesterday. You still remember the rough grains of sand leaving tiny indents in your
palms. You remember Chan’s put-the-sun-to-shame smile and his stick-out ears. You remember the wind on
your face and the sticky sweet taste of the gum your mom gave you.

It’s one of those things about you. You remember things too well, and you feel things too deeply.

Chan and you sit on the swings. The metal of the chains is cold against your skin. The seat is damp. You let
your feet dangle and drag through the gravel, pebbles and mud sticking to your shoes.

“I don’t really wanna be here,” you say after a long moment. You can’t look at Chan, but you know he’s
looking at you. It’s still drizzling, and the rain paints landscapes into the pavement where houses reflect in
puddles. The concrete cracking open, sidewalks turning into canyons. “I wish I was anywhere but here. I wish
my mom didn’t need me. I wish I could just leave.”

Chan doesn’t answer for a long while. Then he says, “That’s okay. It’s okay to feel that way.”

But it doesn’t feel okay at all.

You eat your ice cream in silence, stare at the kingdom of your childhood – sandpit and wooden castle and
a seesaw shaped like two dragons – and listen as the cars pass by.

Felix and Chan share an apartment at the other side of town. It’s three rooms and a bathroom, a kitchen, a
lawn gnome missing a nose in front of their door and furniture they picked off the streets. Old things,
discarded things, things other people used to love. Walking through their apartment is like walking through
a museum. A museum of broken things.

You fit right in here.

It’s rowdy and loud and you’re not sure how you got here, drunk and frantic and kissing Bang Chan.
After the playground, after your teeth started chattering and your lips turned blue with the frost bite nipping
at them, Chan drove you to his place. He got that blanket from the back off the car, draped it across your
knees, kept throwing worried glances at you while the stoplights crossed red and yellow and green across
his face and the Beatles sang about letting things be and the engine howled up a storm.

The apartment is already filled with people by the time you arrive. It’s the whole hockey team, spilling into
hallways and draping across tables, mixing drinks and laughing and trying to catch gummy bears with their
mouths. Chan apologizes, says he didn’t know they’d be here. You don’t really say anything, but you don’t
mind either.

It’s loud and it’s frantic, faces blurring together into a sticky mess, like shoving chewed up gum into a ball.
You don’t care. Anything’s better than more silence, more ghost, more of Chan’s worried quiet. Sometimes
looking at other people makes it easier to imagine that one day you could be like them again. Sometimes, in
the middle of a moving crowd, you close your eyes, tip your head back, and pray some of their oozing,
looming emotions might rub off on you. The emptiness has become such a burden.

He gives you clothes to wear, leaves you alone in his room so you can undress. You slide on the sweatpants,
draw the string tight, slip into the hoodie. The fabric is soft against your cold skin, smells like boy and
laundry detergent and a bit like the ice rink, crisp and clean and overlayered by a taste of honey. Then you
place your own clothes, soaked through, on the radiator. Press your palms beside them and let the warmth
seep into your frozen limbs. Curl your naked toes against the carpet.

When you emerge from his room, Chan has changed too. He looks soft, with his hair untidy and curly from
the towel he ran over it. You remember you used to think there was a sharpness to Chan’s face, something
guarded, something a little closed-off. Under the soft, non-eco-friendly light of his hallway, there’s none of
that left.

He takes you to the bathroom, shows you the blow dryer. “Do you want a drink?”

You nod and watch him go. The dryer is heavy and old, the stream of air coming from it half-hearted at best.
When Minho’s face appears behind you in the mirror, you nearly drop it in surprise.

“Sorry,” he laughs. Alcohol has made his voice a little swaying, so it glides through sentences like a ship over
a restless see, up down, up down. “Didn’t mean to frighten you. Do you need any help?”

You shrug, twist the fingers of your free hand into the fabric of another boy’s clothes. Your heart is pounding.

Minho takes the blow dryer from you and aims it at your head. There’s the feeling of his fingers sliding
through your hair, his nails scraping across your scalp, his breath fanning over the back of your neck. You
shiver, hold onto the strings of the hoodie like you’re holding on for dear life. The cold melts right out of
you.

“What were you and Chan doing?” Minho asks, and the roaring of the blow dryer is so loud, you can’t tell if
it’s real curiosity or jealousy. You close your eyes. Your stupid heart taps out a rhythm against the brittle
bones of your ribcage. Goes, maybe, maybe, maybe.

“Nothing,” you say, “we weren’t doing anything.”

Minho turns off the blow dryer, combs through your hair with his fingers and hums.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, and sounds genuinely happy. That rhythm in your chest swells.

He puts the dryer back in its spot in the top drawer, and when you turn, Chan’s standing in the doorway.
There’s a glass in his hand, one of those Coca Cola ones you sometimes get at MacDonald’s, and an
unreadable expression on his face.

“I got your drink,” he says, hands it to you. The bathroom feels too small all of a sudden.
Minho laughs, almost awkwardly, and excuses himself. You feel the lingering touch of his hand to the knobs
of your spine like somebody taking glowing embers to your skin.

Chan doesn’t say anything, so you don’t either. There’s music coming from outside, but the bathroom seems
to echo with silence. You pretend to busy yourself with adjusting your hair in the mirror, then stare at the
traces of dried toothpaste in the sink.

“Do you want to sit in the living room?” Chan asks finally. It couldn’t possibly have been longer than a minute
of silence, but it feels much longer. Feels like an eternity. Feels like a whole life.

You follow Chan, take the glass from him and down all of it in two long pulls. It’s just thirst in the beginning,
but then you remember what it feels like to be drunk. Wobbly knees. Worlds tilting sideways. Head heavy
and heart light.

You want that. You’ve been remembering for so long. Tonight you’ll let yourself forget.

With your hands clasped around the neck of a bottle of peppermint schnapps, you sit down on the cold tiles
of the living room. There’s no carpet, you notice. Hyunjin and Felix play drinking games with you, while Chan
eats his way through a packet of sour gummy worms, until his lips are stained red and purple and he curls
around his aching belly. You laugh a lot. The schnapps is sweet and tangy at the same time, slides down
your throat and coats you from the inside. It’s like swallowing mouth wash, only better.

It’s good for a while, and then it isn’t anymore.

The girl is tiny and delicate and pretty (prettier than you, a tiny voice in your head whispers), laughs softly,
smiles widely, tells funny jokes. She’s whole, in a way you’re beginning to suspect you might never be again.
Minho puts his hands all over her, smiles at her like she put the stars up in the sky. You feel nauseous.

Your hands tighten around the neck of the bottle. The chill creeps back into your limbs, tingles somewhere
in your fingertips. You look away when Minho presses a kiss to her bow-shaped, red mouth, look away when
his hands settle on her hips. Your heart is twisting in your chest. Your lungs hurt.

You keep thinking of nights in his car. Windows down, music on. His hand just inches from yours. His smile,
his voice, his scent.

“I’m going to be sick,” you say. You stagger out of the living room, nearly crash into Changbin who is carrying
stacks of peanut puffs he got on his gas station run in his arms. You try the bathroom door only to find it
locked, stare at the dark wood for a moment, press your palms flat to the surface. There’s a strange moment
where you almost expect to feel a pounding, like a heartbeat pulsing in the wood.

A hand lands heavy on your shoulder. Chan says your name gently, bends down to be heard over the music.
“If you have to throw up, we can go to the kitchen.”

You blink at the door in front of you, slowly, once, twice. Then you turn around to face Chan, put your hands
on his shoulders, lean up and kiss him. He tastes like gummy worms.

Chan kisses back just for a moment. There’s the relaxing of muscles underneath your hands, words he meant
to say trapped between your mouths, choking out of existence. Then he tenses, grasps your wrists gently,
tugs them down and away as he moves back a step.

“What are you doing?” he asks, and there’s a breathless quality to his voice that makes you want to kiss him
again.

Instead you stumble back against the bathroom door, clasp a hand over your mouth. For a moment you think
maybe you’ll cry, but the tears never come. Instead you panic.

“I’m sorry.” Your voice is watery, bubbles out of you in an endless stream. You can’t breathe. “I’m so sorry, I
don’t know why I did that, I’m sorry…”
“Hey, no…” Chan tugs you away from the door and into his arms, folds himself around you. He cards his
fingers through your hair, soothingly. It reminds you of Minho, and you pant, gasp against his neck, whimper.
“It’s fine, it’s okay…”

You’re all shattered inside. You’ve been trying to put yourself back together for so long, but you can’t
remember where any of the pieces go. You’ve outgrown your own frame.

The whole world is spinning.

You press your face into Chan’s shoulder, feel his palm come up to cup the back of your neck, hold you to
him, gingerly, carefully.

“It’s not,” you whisper, your eyes tightly shut, your hands wound into his hoodie, fingers clutching at the
fabric. “It’s not okay. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

Chan sways you from side to side, like he’s comforting a child. His fingertips press chaotic patterns into your
back, gentle. You can feel his lips ghosting across your forehead, the crown of your head.

“I forgive you,” he says, very quietly. “I understand.”

You hold onto him, because you think if you let go you might just fall.

Chan lets you sleep in his bed.

You don’t remember much, but you wake up in sheets that smell like him, with a mouth that feels like you’ve
been chewing mint gum and sand all night. You’re greeted by the steady drumming of rain against a rooftop.
Chan’s fast asleep in a mountain of blankets on the floor. He’s snoring quietly. The curtains are opened a
crack and grey light floods across the floors.

You don’t wait for Chan to wake up. You take your clothes off the radiator, find your shoes in the chaos by
the door. There are boys sleeping everywhere, stacked on top of each other. Slumped in chairs. Sprawled
across carpets.

Only Hyunjin is awake, pattering about in the kitchen. He smiles at you, offers you a cup of coffee.

“No thank you,” you say. Your tongue feels too big for your mouth. The embarrassment makes it hard to
talk. “I’m going to go home.”

Hyunjin nods, then he insists you take his umbrella. You think he’s much nicer to you than you deserve.

You walk all the way home in Bang Chan’s clothes. Your phone is heavy in your pocket, weighed down by all
the missed calls from your mother. You think of canyons opening up in sidewalks and wish they could
swallow you whole. Deliberately step into puddles. Shove the hand not holding the umbrella deep into your
pocket. Inhale. Exhale.

At home, you let your mother yell at you until she gets too tired to go on. Then you go upstairs, close the
blinds, climb into your bed and sleep all the way through training.

Your father used to read you stories every night.

He’d let you sit on his lap in the big leather chair in his study, bounce you on his knees as he told you about
princesses and dragons and the noble knights that saved them.

“Someday,” he’d say, “you’re going to meet somebody like that too. Somebody nice and sweet and funny,
somebody who loves you and who you love too. You’re going to love them so much, honey.”
“But never more than you, Daddy!” you’d say, laughing.

Back then, your world wasn’t more than your mother and your father and your stories and your backyard.
Back then, you couldn’t imagine ever loving someone more than you did your father.

You never really dreamt about princes. You dreamt about Lee Minho and then you dreamt about the ice and
now you don’t really dream at all.

Your father stopped reading you stories a long time ago, but sometimes you still think you might never love
someone more than you loved him.

At first you think about avoiding Chan. It wouldn’t be too hard, you think.

When you got back from the training camp, after you’d dropped out of a competition and disappointed a
nation – or at least the part of it that had any care for figure skating – you’d managed to go a whole year
without catching more than a glimpse of Minho’s elbow in the square of his window. You burrowed yourself
in books and Netflix and you father’s hospital room, ignored your high school friends and their attempts at
comforting you.

But your palms start itching. You tell your mother that you have a migraine, keep the blinds on your window
closed and lay in bed for three days. Don’t go to practice. Pretend you never have to again.

The fourth morning comes with half-hearted sunshine and the sudden urge to do something. The
embarrassment is eating you alive. It’s a thing with rapid, gnashing teeth. Jaws sunk deep into your neck.

You gather the clothes Chan gave you – washed and dried – and borrow your mother’s car to drive to his
apartment. You park next to Chan’s beat up VW, get out into the crisp autumn air. The rain has stopped, but
the chill remains.

You slip into the apartment complex with a UPS delivery guy who doesn’t pay you any mind, take the stairs
up to the second story and knock on the door. The lawn gnome stares at you with empty eyes. You should
have texted first, you realize belatedly.

Felix opens the door. He is wearing a fluffy dressing gown and eating a yoghurt, the spoon stuck in his
mouth. You can smell the artificial strawberries even from where you’re standing. “Oh,” Felix muffles around
the metal. His smile curves up on both sides around the spoon and his accent makes his words smooth
around the edges. “Hey.”

“Hi…” You clear your throat. “I’m here to see Chan?”

“Sure.” Felix takes the spoon from his mouth. “Yo, Chan! Get out here.”

Then he waits until you’ve stepped into the apartment before closing the door, winking at you once and
retreating into the living room.

You’re fiddling with your shoelaces, unsure whether to actually take off your shoes or not, when Chan steps
out of the kitchen. He’s wearing plaid pajamas and his hand, protected by a pink oven mitt, is curled around
a plate of dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. “Do you want coke or sprite? And don’t say you don’t care again
or I will literally stick my foot up your…” When he finally looks up, his eyes widen to the size of tennis balls.
“Sorry,” he splutters and nearly drops his nuggets. “I thought you were Changbin.”

There’s a blush spreading across his cheeks and it almost makes you smile.

“I’m sorry, I should have called first…” You clutch the hem of your jacket a little tighter. “I just wanted to give
back your clothes…”
“Oh! Right!” Chan places the plate on the dresser and takes off his oven mitt. Then he fiddles with it, blinks
at you. “Thanks?”

The words are stuck in your throat, sideways, so they make it hard to breathe. You keep remembering how
you acted the other night. “I’m sorry,” you apologize, quietly, and press the clothes in your arms closer to
your chest. “I didn’t… I was just really drunk and I shouldn’t have…”

Chan shakes his head. His cheeks are still tinged pink. “I told you,” he murmurs. Shrugs. “It’s okay. I
understand.”

“It’s not okay at all,” you say, and it comes out sharper than intended. “I don’t understand why you keep
saying that.”

Chan is caught off guard by your outburst. His eyes open and close slowly for a long moment, like those of
an owl. Then the doorbell rings.

He buzzes whoever it is that’s waiting up. His movements look mechanical, mindless, like he’s lost in
thought. He pulls the door open and a breeze of cold air drifts into the warmth of the apartment, raises the
hairs on your arms.

When Chan looks back at you, you feel naked, bare. Vivisected. If you think about it, Bang Chan has always
made you feel like this. Like he can strip you open, rip apart the thicket of indifference you pull across
yourself, drag you into the light and show you all the ugly parts of you you’d rather keep hidden.

It looks like he wants to say something, but Changbin and Hyunjin push the door the rest of the way open,
come into the apartment with laughter and excited chatter. They both hug you and you remember when you
used to have lunch with them every day, packed into plastic chairs, chatting about your favorite classes and
the fear of impending exams. It feels like a different life. You still have Hyunjin’s umbrella at home.

They take off their shoes, go to join Felix in the living room. Changbin steals a nugget shaped like a T-Rex.

Neither Chan nor you speak. The clock on the wall is ticking incessantly, and you think of your mother. Tick,
tick, tick. Tap, tap, tap.

There’s a tentative meowing and then a slender cat rubs itself against your legs. The silky fur is the color of
vanilla custard, the nose pink and damp and wet when it presses itself against the slither of skin exposed
between your socks and pants.

“Oh,” you mumble, place the clothes on the dresser and then kneel down. Your knees press into the cold
tiles, your fingers twist into the fur. “Is she… yours?”

From the corner of your eye, you can see Chan nod. “Her name’s Maia.”

You pat the cat, watch as it curls closer to you, purring in content. Almost absentmindedly, you say, “Cute.”

Chan sits down next to you on the floor, cross-legged. His knee brushes up against yours.

“I’m more of a dog person, actually,” he tells you. He reaches out and then his hand is sliding through the
soft fur next to yours. You think about how close he is. How you can feel the steady heat radiating off him.

Minho’s a cat person.

“Why have you got her then?”

Chan shrugs, scratches behind Maia’s ears and laughs as she purrs. “Found her in the street,” he says. “She
was starved half to death, I think. And so dirty I really thought her fur was black at first. I couldn’t just leave
her there.”

And that’s the problem with Chan. He’s never found a broken thing he didn’t want to fix.
You don’t say anything. You just sit there, your chin on your knee, your arms wrapped around your shins.
Watching as he pets his cat. Watching as the light crosses over his face, paints him iridescent every time he
looks up.

“When you said…” You have to clear your throat. Your voice is all husky. “You said you thought me coming
back home was brave. What did you mean?”

Chan keeps looking down at Maia. He won’t meet your eyes. “I meant that… everybody kept talking about
you, you know? How proud they were that you made it to the Olympics, how crazy that the little girl they
knew would actually compete. And then when you dropped out… they were all taking about how it’s sad but
understandable. How you wouldn’t be able to concentrate anyway, so you were taking the easier road.” Chan
looks up then, and there’s something in his eyes that, for a moment, has you thinking you might cry. “I don’t
think this was easier at all. Going home to watch your own father die… I think that’s the bravest thing you
could ever do.”

It’s funny, because you didn’t feel brave at all. You felt small and stupid and weak. Like you were letting
down everyone. Like you were giving up. Like you were failing.

People have always expected things of you – to go to the Olympics, to win, to make somebody proud who’s
dead and buried now – and you’ve always come up short. This is the biggest failure of your life, and Chan is
making it sound like you’ve done something wonderful.

You struggle to breathe for a while.

“Do you want to watch the Lion King with us?” Chan asks, finally, softly. “Changbin might have left some of
those nuggets for the rest of us.”

A week ago, you would have said no. But now you think of the way Chan smiles at you sometimes, not like
he pities you. Like he’s proud of you, in some strange, inexplicable way.

I just want to pretend, you tell yourself, just once. I just want to pretend that maybe I could be happy again.

“Okay,” you agree, and take the hand he’s offering you.

You end up on the sofa, sharing a blanket with Chan. Your ankle is hooked across his, your legs and thighs
and hips and arms aligned, melting into each other, soft and pliable. It’s like you feel warm again for the
first time in forever.

When Hyunjin starts screaming along to Hakuna Matata and Felix performs a Fortnite dance to I Just Can’t
Wait to Be King, you laugh until you nearly choke on your popcorn. Things aren’t okay, but for a moment, in
the soft light of Felix and Chan’s living room, with the blinds drawn, a children’s movie playing and the air
smelling like butter, for a moment it feels like they might be again. Someday.

“Isn’t it your birthday soon?” Changbin asks, much later, while you’re putting on your shoes. Chan is leaning
against the wall by the door, his feet still in slippers. He insists on walking you down to your car. “We should
celebrate.”

“Oh…” You pause. “No, that’s fine, really…”

“Come on, it’ll be fun!” Changbin argues, nudging you with his foot. “We can do it here. You can get like…
super drunk.”

You tie your shoelaces and then stare at them for a moment. “I’ll think about it?”

Chan holds your car door open while you buckle yourself up, one arm braced on the roof.

“You should let us throw you a birthday party,” he says quietly, watches as you adjust your rearview mirror.
“I don’t know,” you say. “It’s… I don’t want to make you go through any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. We’re your friends.” He says it with such sincerity that there’s not even the fraction of a
chance for you not to believe him.

“You’re my friends,” you repeat, quietly. “Of course. Okay.”

Chan stays in the driveway until you’ve rounded the corner.

When you come home, your mother’s sitting at the kitchen table. There’s a bottle of wine in front of her,
half-empty, right next to the album full of her wedding pictures.

You put down your keys, kick off your shoes, round the table. “Mom,” you whisper, place a gentle hand on
her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

Your mother looks older than she is, dark circles beneath her eyes, deep lines around her mouth. Her gaze
has gone a little glassy, half-alcohol, half-tears. “I miss him,” she confesses.

It’s strange. Your mother has been trying to be strong for so long. She’s been strong at the funeral, at the
hospital before that. You know she cries, you know she grieves, of course you do. She’s just been so careful
not to do any of these things in front of you.

You wrap your arms around her shoulders. “I know,” you say, quietly, so, so quietly, “I miss him too.”

You sit in your dark dining room long until midnight has passed and let her cry against your shoulder. Your
chest aches like there’s a tiger going wild in it. Nothing’s fair.

You go back to training, end up with blisters on your feet and scrapes on your palms. Your birthday comes
too fast, sneaks up on you suddenly and surprisingly.

Changbin picks you up, drives you to Chan and Felix’s apartment. His car is filled with balloons. Some of
them escape when you open the door, drift into the night sky until the darkness swallows them. You laugh.

There are so many people. All of them congratulate you, laugh, wish you a happy birthday. You don’t know
half of them and you doubt they know you. Probably they’re just here for the free alcohol.

Your heart keeps on doing a strange, jumpy thing. You search through the crowd when Changbin leaves to
get himself a beer, and you can’t tell who it is you’re looking for.

Minho comes first. His hair is dyed a light brown, and his smile is wide. The pretty girl from the last party is
nowhere to be seen.

“Hey,” he yells, to be heard over the music. “Happy birthday!”

Minho hugs you, pulls you tight against his chest, and you close your eyes for a moment. He still smells like
he did when you were fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and helplessly in love with him. It’s unsettling and
comforting in equal parts.

“Are you having a good time?”

“Yeah,” you nod. “It’s great.”

Minho pulls you along for the rest of the party. He keeps your hand in his and everything’s strange.
Unfamiliar. New. Your stomach flips, your palms are damp. But inside, beneath that tiger that won’t stop
tearing you apart, you feel hollow. Carved out. Detached from all this.
It could easily be somebody else’s party you stumble through. Somebody else’s life you’ve been living for
nineteen years. You’ve gone numb months ago, but the pain’s still there, hiding behind corners. Waving at
you from passing cars.

You don’t get drunk this time. You don’t see Chan. You drift behind Minho, listen to his excited chatter.

Maybe you’ve spent so much time in a house filled with ghosts you’ve become one yourself.

Long after midnight, Minho pulls you down onto a couch next to him. It’s the same one you’ve sat next to
Chan on not too long ago, you realize. You wish you could go back to that golden afternoon and the slow,
honeyed sweetness of it. You don’t know how to feel about that.

“We all missed you a lot, you know?” Minho asks. He’s drunk and he’s tired, but there’s something sharp to
his gaze, something aware.

“I missed you too.”

Minho’s fingers are gentle beneath your chin. He turns you to face him, lets his eyes wander across your
features for a moment. Your breath catches in your throat, your hands ball into fists.

“You’re really pretty. You’ve always been really pretty,” he says, and you can’t tell if it’s a realization or a
compliment.

Then he kisses you.

His lips are a little dry, but his hands are soft. He touches you like you might break apart, all fingertips and
no palms. Searching and careful, so gentle it’s almost ridiculous.

You have imagined this moment a million times, a million nights. Shouting with joy. A world erupting in
fireworks. A heart beating out of your chest. A million stars soaring behind your closed eyelids.

Instead, you feel nothing.

You’re so tired. Your chest aches like somebody dropped a thousand-pound weight on it. The sadness is so
large, you can’t seem to see a beginning or an end to it.

You wonder where Chan is.

Minho pulls back and blinks at you for a moment. “No, right?” he asks then, and there’s no accusation in his
voice. Maybe a little bit of amusement.

“No,” you agree. “I don’t think…”

“Yeah.” He laughs. “Funny. I always thought you were in love with me.”

I am, you want to say, but the words won’t come.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” you tell him instead.

You meet Chan on your way, because the world’s just that kind of place. He’s standing by the doorway to
the living room, one hand in his pocket. His gaze still has that piercing quality, that see-right-through-you
skill, but today you want to run from it, want to hide from it.

It wouldn’t be fair for him to figure out what it is you’re feeling before you’ve figured it out yourself. Not
when you’re not even sure if you want him to know. You’ve lost so much in your life, can’t you at least keep
your heart to yourself?

“I got you a present,” Chan says. You’re not standing far from the spot you were sitting and patting his cat
not too long ago, but everything’s different now. It’s too loud. Too bright. Too many people around you.
You know the moment he speaks to you that he saw you with Minho. A part of you wants to clear things up.
Wants to tell him that it meant nothing, means nothing, but you’re afraid you might be lying.

That was the boy you’ve been in love with all your life, kissing you on your birthday, wanting to kiss you on
your birthday. That means something. That has to mean something, or else you’ve been living a lie for longer
than you care to think about.

“You shouldn’t have.” Your voice barely carries across the distance between you. It feels vast suddenly, years
and oceans and planets crashing between you, pushing and pulling you further and further apart.

Chan doesn’t answer. He thrusts his present forward and into your hand.

It’s a plush kangaroo, about the size of a small toddler. Long limbs and a button nose. Dark eyes. Soft brown
fur that glides like a caress beneath your palms. You forget how to speak.

“It’s a kangaroo,” Chan says, as if you can’t see it.

“I… yes. Thanks,” you say, and he nods, curtly, turns around and leaves. You feel like the worst person in the
world. Shabby. Disgusting. Cruel.

The feeling won’t leave for the rest of the night. You play beer pong, down three shots in a row, let Minho
smile at you from across the room but you still feel shabby. Disgusting. Cruel.

You lock yourself in the bathroom after two a.m. Sit down with your spine pressed against the ridges of the
radiator. Your skin turning cold even through the layers of your clothes.

You miss your father, so suddenly and so intensely that it chokes the air out of your lungs. The tears that
haven’t come for over a month are there then, sliding down your cheeks, salty on your lips.

On your ninth birthday, your father took you to the sea. Later, you’d have a dinner with your mother and
your grandparents, but he took the day off just for you. Drove all the way out to the beach. You’d never seen
the sea before, but you remember the cresting of waves, the wind on your face. Ice cream by the seashore.
Playing badminton with your father in the sand. How he gave you a piggyback to the car because your feet
were aching. Both of you sunburnt and tired and the happiness inside your chests like liquid sunshine.

You sob, clench your fingers into the fabric of your dress. And you cry and cry and cry. It seems like once
you’ve started, you can’t find a proper way to stop.

In a bathroom at two a.m, all the people you used to be crowd around you like ghosts.

You’re four and crying in a sandpit. You’re eleven and win your first competition. You’re fifteen and you’re
in love with Lee Minho. You’re seventeen and you’re in love with Lee Minho. You’re nineteen and sitting on
Bang Chan’s bathroom floor, crying because your father’s dead and you might not even know what love is.

Nothing’s fair.

Changbin drives you home. The balloons in his car look sad now, half-deflated, fewer than they used to be.
You don’t say a word for the whole ride.

It’s only when you get out of the car that you realize you’re still clutching the kangaroo.

When the doctors say there’s nothing they can do for him anymore, you take your father home to die.

You’ll never forget that, the drive home from the hospital. Your parents in the backseat, you driving. Like
your whole childhood turned on its head.
You remember the warm sunshine, the air soft and warm and pressing into your car with all the windows
rolled down. The Frank Sinatra song playing from your radio. Your father laughing, your mother laughing.

You remember missing him so much, then, even as was sitting right behind you. The feeling was square and
large in your throat, made it hard to breathe.

You’ll always think of that, how you already missed him before he was gone.

(You’ll never forget the night you found him dead either. Your mother was sobbing. The ambulance was
already roaring up a storm outside. You remember stepping onto the damp grass on naked feet. Remember
shivering in only your pajamas, the night air cold. Remember the sheet across your father’s face. Remember
looking across your lawn and at Lee Minho, returning home from a party in his leather jacket, staring at you.
You remember thinking how strange it is, that somewhere your High School friends are getting drunk, getting
high, getting fucked, while your father dies alone in his bed, dissected by cancer.

Some part of you is rolled out of the house on that stretcher with your father. Something inside of you breaks
irreversibly. You’ll never be the same again.)

You slide across the ice on your elbows, tights ripping where they drag along the surface. Your impact with
the wall is sudden and painful, rattles at your bones. When your teeth clamp together on instinct, the taste
of blood fills your mouth.

Somewhere above your head, Jungho sighs. As if this is all a horrible nuisance. As if you’re ruining his
morning.

“Hopeless,” he says under his breath, and then he leaves. You hear his steps echoing across the rink,
multiplied a thousand times. Until it sounds like there’s an army marching away from you.

You pull yourself up to your knees, spit out once. The blood is crass against the blueish white of the ice. Like
lava bubbling up from the ground. For a moment you indulge in the idea of this whole place being swallowed.
Burning down.

Somebody says your name.

Minho is standing a few feet away from you, feet safely on concrete instead of ice. He’s smiling, a little sadly,
hands shoved into the pockets of his giant puffer coat. Like that, you think, he looks a bit like a penguin.

“What are you doing here?” you ask, hoisting yourself onto your feet with two hands securely holding onto
the railing. “You don’t have practice today.”

Minho shrugs. “You weren’t answering my texts.”

You weren’t answering anybody’s texts. Your phone is shoved to the bottom of your backpack, buried
underneath a pair of worn socks, but you don’t say that.

He offers you a hand and you take it, let him help you off the ice. You sit down on a plastic bench, bend
down to undo your laces.

“Are you okay?”

You freeze, fingers hooked beneath the leather of your skates. “Why are you asking that?”

“You just came back,” he says, “and then after your birthday you disappeared again. I wasn’t lying when I
said we all missed you.”

There’s a gum stuck to the ground, gone grey with dirt and shoes stepping on it day in and day out. You
stare at that until your vision goes blurry.
“Why are you here, Minho?” Your voice has gone small, tiny, fragile. A child cowering back in the face of
things it does not understand.

“I wanted to apologize.” When you glance up at him, there’s an embarrassed twitching to his mouth that
seems foreign and misplaced on Lee Minho’s face. “For kissing you. I shouldn’t have… done that.”

You think of a similar conversation you had with Chan, roles reversed. Apologizing to him for your own
drunk, stupid actions in his hallway. His pink oven mitt. The dinosaur shaped nuggets.

“Why did you do it?” you ask, mostly because you’ve been wondering for a while.

“You’re my friend,” Minho says, as if that explains everything. “I wanted you to be happy.” He goes quiet for
a moment, looks away from your face to the other end of the rink, where the hockey goals are kept. “You
used to be in love with me, so I thought that could make you happy. I shouldn’t have done it in the first
place, not without meaning it. And then it didn’t make you happy anyway, so it was just dumb.”

You exhale. “Why do you think I’m not in love with you anymore?”

There’s something gentle to Minho’s face. A sad, amused smile around his mouth. An embarrassed flexing
of his fingers.

“I never really understood you, you know?” he says quietly. “Not before your dad died, and sure as hell not
now.”

You look away from him, twist your hands in your lap. “Yeah.” You nod, blink rapidly. “I’ve always been a bit
of a mess.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Minho shakes his head vehemently. “I don’t need to understand you to love you.
You’re my friend. I took you to all those parties because I like you, because I wanted to hang out with you,
because that’s what friends do. I just think… you got caught up in the idea of something. You and I… we
would have never worked out.”

You remember being sixteen and loving Lee Minho so much you thought your chest would burst with it. You
remember feeling like you were made of clouds every time he looked at you. You remember thinking you’d
never love someone like that again.

And now you look at Minho, and all of that is gone.

You still love him, of course. You love his kindness, and his dumb jokes, and his strange, stubborn dedication
to making you happy. You love him because he’s your friend. But you realize – and perhaps a part of you has
known this for a very long time – that you’re no longer in love with him.

Maybe the problem with all of this is that the girl that used to be in love with Minho, sixteen-year-old you,
doesn’t exist anymore. And maybe you just wanted to hold onto her for a bit longer, be sixteen and over the
moon once more. Hope, despite all hope, that maybe someday Minho would feel the same way about you as
you felt about him, even when you knew it would never happen.

Your father’s death was like the departure form everything you’ve ever known. A headfirst dip into the abyss.
And it left you clinging to the scraps of the familiar, the shattered pieces of the girl you used to be.

You have been playing a seesaw game for weeks now. Bobbing up and down, between the person you used
to be and the person you are.

You’ve been holding onto this for so long, you realize, a part of you is scared of letting go. When you live
with a pain long enough, you learn to love it.

It’s the same way with the ice. It’s still your home, but you’ve come to hate it.
But what happens when you let go of it? What happens when you let go of all the things that made you who
you are?

“I think Chan understands you a lot better than I ever did.”

Minho’s words are quiet, barely more than a whisper, but they pierce right through you. Settle in your
stomach. Melt the cold that’s been lodging inside of you for so long.

“Can you…” You shift on the bench, anxious suddenly. The nerves are travelling through your body in
shockwaves. “Will you give me Chan’s number?”

And Minho grins, bright and wide and beautiful. “I already texted it to you.”

Chan picks you up in his beat-up car.

He eyes Minho and you suspiciously from the driver’s seat, white-knuckling the steering wheel. But Minho
just laughs and waves, pats your shoulder.

“Good luck,” he says, winks conspiratorially, and leaves.

You get into the car, your whole body shaking. You’re a leaf in a thunderstorm.

“Where to?” Chan asks, without looking at you.

“I don’t know,” you confess, the seat belt digging into your flesh where you hold on too tightly. “Anywhere.”

Chan drives to the same parking lot you ate your ice cream in. It’s ugly and deserted and alive with those
neon advertisements, blinking in and out of focus, shifting the world into a dream like state.

You get out of the car, sit on the hood of it. Kick at the pebbles at your feet.

“I’m not in love with Minho,” you say, after an eternity. After you’ve finally found the courage to admit it. “I’m
not sure I ever was. I’m not sure I even… I’m not sure I even knew what love was, back then.”

Chan doesn’t answer for a moment. “Why are you telling me that?”

You exhale air in a shuddery stream, tug your sleeves down across your fingers. “I wasn’t fair to you. When
I kissed you, and then when I let Minho kiss me, that wasn’t… that wasn’t okay.” It takes a lot for the next
words to come out. “I’m really scared, Chan.”

You can feel him looking at you. “What are you scared of?”

“Everything.” You laugh, but there’s nothing funny about it. “I’m scared of everything.”

Chan is quiet for a very long time. So long that your skin itches, that your fingers flex, that your heart gives
a strange lurch.

Finally, he says, “It’s okay to stop wanting the things you used to want, you know?”

You blink up at the stars, at the clouds of white puffing from your mouth, and wonder why in the world Bang
Chan understands you better than you understand yourself.

“Is it?” you wonder. “If I don’t love Minho anymore, and if I don’t even want to skate anymore… then who am
I? That’s all my life has been for so long and I… don’t know who I’ll be without it.”

“Maybe there’s more to life than Minho and the ice.” Chan shrugs. “Sometimes we outgrow dreams. That’s…
it’s normal. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
“You have?”

He nods. “I used to want to be an astronaut,” he tells you. “And before that I wanted to be a racecar. Not a
racecar driver, the actual car. And then I thought I wanted to be a teacher and then I wanted to be a
professional hockey player and now I mostly just want to not fail my classes.”

You breathe a laugh, tug at your jeans with trembling fingers. “Isn’t… isn’t that scary? Having no plan?”

“Sure it is. But that’s life. It’s not really real if it isn’t scary.” He pauses. “Besides there… there are some things
that don’t change too. Constants.”

You don’t dare moving an inch. Even breathing seems precarious. “Like… like what?”

Chan’s mouth twists a little. His eyes race from side to side. He makes a little humming noise, looks down
at his worn-out sneakers.

“I’ve been in love with you for a very long time,” he whispers, finally.

You think of Chan at eight, with the kangaroo plush in the front pocket of his dungarees. You think of him
at twelve, the first time you met him at the ice rink and he waved and smiled from across a sea of seats. You
think of him at eighteen, when he held your hair back the first time you threw up at a house party. You think
of him in a badly lit MacDonald’s, a month after your father died, offering you his fries.

You must have been very stupid, you think, not to realize that Bang Chan has been your North Star for as
long as you’ve craned your neck back to look at the night skies.

Tentatively, hesitatingly, you slide your fingers into the spaces between his own. Chan’s reaction is
instantaneous, moving to hold your hand, the pressure of his skin warm and steady against your own.

Your heart leaps into your mouth. You think there are tears in your eyes.

Smiling, you press your face into his shoulder, and close your eyes.

This, you think, is a dream worth dreaming.

The dining room is quiet. Your father’s presence doesn’t seem as stifling anymore.

You used to be scared of these last traces of him leaving, but now you feel almost as though there is
something liberating to it. Everything changes, but not all change has to be bad.

“Mom,” you say, “I don’t want to do figure skating anymore.”

Your mother lowers her fork and looks at you for a long, long moment. You half expect her to yell. You half
expect her to cry.

“I know,” she says finally.

You swallow heavily, anxiety gnawing at you. “I… are you mad at me?”

She doesn’t answer at first, just exhales softly, blinks at the raindrops tapping against the window pane.
Tap, tap, tap. There’s something calming to the rhythm.

“Sweetheart, you know…” She trails off, then smiles. It’s the saddest smile you’ve ever seen. “You deserve to
be happy. Even if he isn’t here to see it.”

You’re shaking. It isn’t enough to hear it from her instead of him, but it’s something.
And if there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that you have to take of happiness what you can get.

Chan’s kisses are always gentle. Soft things, melting things, breathed against your lips.

It’s scary, drifting as you are. You don’t really know what you want from life. You barely know if you want
anything.

But just this – lying on Chan’s bed, his fingers in your hair, his palm on your naked skin where your shirt has
ridden up, his lips lazy and careful on your forehead, your nose, your mouth, his socked feet rubbing against
your own, his heartbeat calm and steady beneath your ear – just this is enough for now.

“I love you,” Chan whispers into the skin below your ear. A secret, something meant just for you.

“I love you,” you echo, tuck your smile beneath his chin. A secret, something meant just for him.

In the quiet of his room, with his arms wrapped tightly around you and his voice low and tender when he
says your name, that’s where you feel most at home.

Perhaps Chan is exactly who your father was talking about all these years ago, when he told you about that
person you’d love so much one day. Before Chan, you didn’t even know you could love like this, so big, so
sure, so lasting.

You think your father would have liked him. You think your father would have liked him a lot.