Yejun shook his head. “You’re trying to make me talk so I can’t eat sushi.”
I rolled my eyes and set my chopsticks on the table, holding my hands up in surrender. Yejun quickly popped a piece of my sushi in his mouth before setting his down too.
He fished out two folded pieces of paper from his pocket and slid them toward me. I raised an eyebrow, but he only gestured for me to take them. I unfolded them both and set them side by side.
Two copies of an article on dung beetles.
“This one is from before we made the change,” Yejun said, tapping the article on the left, “and the one on the right is from this morning.”
I used my dragon eyes to quickly scan for differences. Immediately, one line of text stood out to me. In the first article, it said:
The dung beetle was an insect native to the Korean Peninsula and Jeju Island, presumed extinct after a drop in population in the 1970s.
The article on the right said:
The dung beetle is an insect native to the Korean Peninsula and Jeju Island.
I looked up at Yejun, who grinned expectantly.
“We saved the dung beetles?” I said.
Yejun nodded quickly. “We’re shifting in the right direction.”
I’m getting closer to Hana, I thought. I could almost feel her next to me right now, leaning against my arm, snatching pieces of sushi off my place. I imagined her warmth, the scratchiness of her striped sweater against my arm, the way she might tie her hair back with a black elastic. Soon, she would be real.
I felt tears that I knew I couldn’t stop, so I did the only logical thing: stuffed a bunch of wasabi in my mouth.
“What are you doing?” Yejun said, drawing back.
“I just love wasabi,” I said as my eyes watered. I didn’t have to pretend not to cry now—the wasabi was doing its job.
“I can tell,” Yejun said, pulling out his phone and taking a picture before I could wipe my face.
“Delete that!” I said, grabbing a bunch of napkins and scrubbing my face before he could take any more pictures.
“Never,” he said, clutching his phone protectively to his chest. “This is amazing blackmail material.”
“Do you want to die?” I said, hurling a soiled napkin at his face. He laughed and looked as if he was about to respond, but then his gaze flickered to something behind me. I turned around just as another Yejun in a blue raincoat stormed across the restaurant.
The Yejun in front of me tried to stand up, but the Echo reached him first, snatched his water off the table, and poured it over his head.
“Idiot,” the Echo said, then stormed away, casting the tin cup to the ground.
Yejun tossed his phone to a dry corner of the table, then wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. As his phone spun toward me, I caught a glimpse of his unread texts. My tears dried up as I read the name of the sender:Mom.
“Mom?” I echoed, looking up at Yejun, who had frozen with a handful of napkins. My gaze fell to his tattoo. “Your mom who you told me was erased?”
When Yejun didn’t deny it, dread gnawed through my stomach. Yejun’s phone screen went dark as he set down the napkins and looked away.
I should have been angry, but when the heat under my skin and the gold at the edges of my vision had faded away, I only felt cold.
“You lied to me?” I said. The words didn’t feel real as they left my lips, like this was some strange dream. He was the only person I’d ever told about Hana, but now I wanted so badly to take that moment back. I’d traded my most precious secret for a lie.
I stood up to leave but froze at Yejun’s next words.
“I thought it was true,” he said, staring at the sushi scattered across the table. It was the quietest I’d ever heard him speak. “My dad told me she was erased and gave me a note on a napkin that he said she’d left for me. Last year, I got it tattooed on my arm.”
I sat back down slowly. Not because his story made any sense yet, but because I had never seen him look so dejected, sapped of all his usual light and energy.
