“I’m sure.”
“Do you want anything else to drink?”
“No.”
“To eat?”
“No.”
“Is dating Kim Jihoon your infiltration mission?”
I dropped my pencil, blinking up at Yejun. My face suddenly burned. “Did you think bombarding me with questions would trick me into answering that?” I managed.
“Are you trying the same tactic now?” he said, smirking.
I snatched my pencil off the floor. “No more questions. Only calculus.”
“It’s just that you pay a lot of attention to him, but you seem different when you do,” Yejun said. “Sort of like you’re lying.”
I clenched my teeth, embarrassed that he’d figured it out so easily. But I didn’t think of it as lying—Jihoon was sweet, and talking to him made me forget the catastrophes in every other area of my life. It wasn’t like I pretended to enjoy his company. “You don’t know me,” I said. “How would you know how I act?”
“I think I’m getting to know you,” Yejun said, shrugging and slurping boba up his straw. “We already have a secret together. Strangers don’t share secrets. I bet you don’t have any secrets with Jihoon.”
“And where did you get that idea?” I said. “On another napkin in a shoe rack?” He was right, but he didn’t need to know that.
Yejun grimaced. “That’s a very reliable form of communication,” he said, crossing his arms.
“Anyone can stuff some garbage in a shoe rack,” I said. “It’s hardly proof of anything.”
Instead of answering, Yejun set down his drink and stared at it as if deeply contemplating the boba. My gaze fell to the tattoo on his arm, and I realized too late that he was probably thinking about his mother and her note. I hadn’t been talking about her, but he probably thought I had been.
“Yejun—”
“It’s not just a napkin,” he said at last. “I have a shoe.”
I blinked. “A shoe?”
He nodded earnestly. “A green velvet shoe with a short heel and a bow on the front,” he said. “I found it in my dad’s closet. And before you ask—it’s not his size.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that,” I said.
“The shoe tells me a lot,” Yejun said, looking out at the view of Seoul from the cafeteria—it wasn’t quite as impressive as from the top level, but from here it looked like we were floating in a gray cloud.“Someone with a shoe that color was probably artsy. Maybe she painted in her spare time. She also must have walked around a lot, since the heel is so small. Either that or she was close to my father’s height and didn’t want to look too tall. I looked up the brand, and it’s not very expensive, so she was probably practical and liked to save money for things that really mattered. I bet she was the kind of person who liked to mend clothes and re-sole shoes and make old things bright and pretty again.”
He smiled softly to himself, then shook his head and turned back to me with a sigh. “Anyway,” he said. “That’s what I like to think. When you don’t have all the facts, sometimes you just have to make your own story, since it’s all you’re ever going to get.”
I looked down at my worksheet, wishing we could talk about calculus again. If Yejun’s mother had really been erased like he thought, then she must have betrayed the descendants and tried to warn Yejun with the napkin. She’d found a fate worse than death because she believed in the truth.
My parents would never do something like that. If their boss told them to roll over and die, they would do it without question.
“I should go home soon,” I said.
Yejun frowned. “But you haven’t finished your cheesecake.”
I sighed and shoveled the last few bites into my mouth, then bundled up the trash. Yejun wisely stayed quiet as we packed our bags and headed outside to catch the shuttle bus. I’d learnedsomecalculus today, at least. Probably not enough to make me a straight-A student, but I just needed to pass, not perform a miracle.
We’d hardly taken three steps out the door when I saw him.
“Oh no,” I said, drawing to a stop.
