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Chapter 33
ON THE NIGHT OF THE LAST EPISODE’S PREMIERE,I invite Minjee and Bryan over to my apartment for a viewing party with my parents.
Minjee’s the first to arrive, and when she comes over, Mom gives her a hug and tells her “how much prettier” she’s gotten since she last came over to our place.
Minjee blushes and says, “Thank you.”
We’ve just settled down on the couch when someone knocks on the door. Mom gets up to open it, but before she can even fully open the door, Bryan bursts in with a flourish. And he’s not alone.
“Hello, everyone!” he says, dragging along a frazzled-looking boy with platinum-blond hair and round glasses. “This is Claude. Claude, meet the fam. Well, not my actual fam but you know what I mean.”
Minjee and I exchange confused looks as Claude greets us in English.
“Is he the person you’re dating?” I hiss at Bryan. “Or is he just a friend?”
“Secretlydating,” Bryan says with a smirk. “I met Claude at a fashion show on one of my off days. He lives in France, but he comes with his parents to Seoul often.”
“Of courseyou’d have a mysterious French boyfriend,” Minjee says. “The life of Bryan Yoon is never dull.”
“Shh,” he says. “It’s far too early for labels. After what happened with Hana and me, I’ve learned to take it nice andslow.”
He waggles his eyebrows at me, and I laugh.
“I love this for you,” I say. “Live your best life.”
Our living room is definitely not big enough to comfortably fit six people, but tonight, everyone is in such good spirits that no one seems to mind. My parents sit on the couch while the rest of us settle onto the floor in front of the TV.
Mom hand-rolled kimbap that we can snack on while watching the show, and we’re all munching on those and other Korean snacks from our neighborhood grocery store as we wait for the episode to start.
“Damn, these are some of the best kimbap I’ve ever had! Thank you, Umuni!” Bryan yells, politely addressing my mom by using the Korean word for “mother.”
“You’re welcome!” Mom says. She looks dazed, as if she still can’t believe an internationally famous K-pop star like Bryan is sitting right here in our living room.
Then finally the screen goes black. Dad announces, “It’s starting!”
We all hush. No one says anything throughout the opening credits. I feel a weird, bittersweet sensation when the screen says “Last Episode” after the credits. And then, we all watch as Hyun stands on top of a hill overlooking the Royal Palace.
“Looking sharp!” Minjee says, clapping Bryan on the back. He laughs, but like the rest of us, he keeps his attention glued to the screen.
“So much has changed,” Hyun says in a voiceover. “Finally, there’s peace, but I don’t know if I can go on living like a normal high school student again.”
The show then plays a sequence of flashbacks that recaps what happened throughout the entire series. Back when I was a viewer watching other K-dramas, I used to hate it when shows did this on the last episode—“They’re just using old footage to fill up the air time!” I complained—but now the recap hits me differently since I can see how much I’ve changed throughout the show. And it’s not just me. Bryan, Minjee, and even some of the supporting actors... we all look so much younger in the footage from the first few episodes somehow, even though we started filming this show last fall.
So much has changed....I repeat Hyun’s words in my thoughts. They can definitely apply to my real life, too. I take Minjee’s hand and squeeze it. She squeezes back.
The episode quickly picks up after that, with Hyunwinning against the sorcerer that trapped our characters in their cycle of reincarnation. When Hyun delivers the final blow and walks off into the light, we all burst into applause for Bryan, since that’s his last scene on the show.
“That was a nice finish!” I say.
He smiles like a little kid as we all pat him on the back. Claude gives Bryan a peck on the cheek, which makes me grin.
As a voiceover, Hyun goes on to talk about how he realized that the only way to truly break the cycle is to stop making the same choices he did in his previous lives.
“Sometimes,” he says, “the people we think we’re meant to be with aren’t the ones we actually end up with, and that’s okay.”
The camera fades out to black and fades back in on my face.
As Sora, I look out into the distance, like Bryan was in the beginning of the episode. But instead of looking down at the palace, I’m looking at...
