First Choice

There is a very specific kind of suffering that no one ever warns you about.

It is not the suffering of heartbreak, or failure, or loss. It is quieter than all of those, and in some ways, far more maddening. It is the suffering of standing in the middle of the school hallway while two of the most inexplicably impossible people you have ever known in your entire life are somewhere in the same building, completely unaware that they have made your life a catastrophe.

You've known them both since you were seven years old. You are intimately familiar with the particular devastation of each of them, which is the problem.

Karina, Yoo Jimin if you want to be formal about it, and she usually does, is the kind of beautiful that makes the hallway rearrange itself around her. Not loud about it. That's the thing people get wrong. She didn't perform it. She was simply, quietly, impossibly herself, and the rest of the world adjusted. She was precise in everything: the way she walked, the way she sat, the way she tilted her chin at exactly the angle that communicated she had already considered your argument and found it wanting. She played five instruments. She held a black belt. She made the school cafeteria feel like somewhere she was doing a favor by being. Half the school was in love with her. The other half was too intimidated to admit it. Both halves were correct. You had watched, over the years, a staggering number of boys work up the nerve to confess to her. The count was somewhere north of thirty. She had declined every single one of them, politely and with the kind of finality that did not invite follow-up questions, and you had never once heard her explain why.

An Yujin was a different kind of impossible. Where Karina was gravity, Yujin was weather; she simply arrived, filled every available space, and made you wonder how any room had functioned before she was in it. She was tall and bright and laughed like she invented the concept, and she had the specific quality of someone who made every person she talked to feel like the only person in the room, which was deeply unfair because she was almost always talking to several people simultaneously. She was the girl every group photo got better because of. The one who knew the DJ at every party and was somehow on a first-name basis with every lunch staff member in the school. She had never once in her life been unsure of where she belonged, because every room she walked into immediately became somewhere she belonged. She had also, by your count, been confessed to somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty times in the last two years alone, and had turned down every single one of them with the same breezy warmth she used for everything else, leaving the confessing party somehow feeling like they'd been done a favor. You had thought about this. Both of them, all these years, every confession declined. You had told yourself it was probably a coincidence. You were starting to suspect it wasn't.

The problem is not that two people asked you to prom. The problem is that you have eyes. Karina is the kind of beautiful that makes you feel like you've been caught doing something you shouldn't, like just looking is already giving something away. Yujin is the kind of beautiful that makes you feel like the room got warmer. Both of these things have been true for a long time. You have been dealing with this for a long time. You are not dealing with it well.

You are, without question, the unluckiest person alive.

It started, as most disasters in your life do, on a Tuesday.

You were at your locker, minding your own business, trying to locate your Chemistry notebook in a bag that seemed to have developed its own ecosystem, when Karina appeared. She didn't walk so much as materialize beside you, the way a comet arrives: all at once, unavoidable, with a faint suggestion that your continued survival is not guaranteed.

She leaned against the locker next to yours, arms folded, chin lifted at that specific angle, the one that meant she'd already decided how this conversation was going to go and had allotted you approximately zero influence over its direction. She was wearing her hair loose today, a dark, sleek curtain that swayed when she moved and that she knew perfectly well looked devastating. Her lips were pressed together. They did that when she was concentrating, or thinking, or bracing for something; a small, private habit that you had cataloged years ago without ever saying so.

"Yah," she said. "We need to talk."

You kept your eyes on the bag. "I'm busy."

"You're losing a battle against your own backpack."

"Critical battle. High stakes."

She made a sound, part scoff, part sigh, the specific blend she deployed when you were being difficult and she hadn't yet decided whether to find it endearing or exhausting. Then she nudged your shoulder with hers. You had known Karina since the second grade, when she'd stolen the last chocolate milk at lunch and then, wracked with what was clearly a crisis of conscience, had silently split it with you exactly in half without ever acknowledging the theft. This one was carrying something it wasn't admitting to.

"Prom is in three weeks," she said.

"Mm."

"You don't have a date."

"Correct."

She was quiet for three seconds. You counted. "I was thinking," she began, in a voice she had clearly practiced, "that it would be, logical, really, for us to just go together. As friends. Low pressure. No drama. Fun." A pause, and then, with immense dignity: "Obviously."

You finally looked at her.

She was examining her nails. Not because her nails needed examining. Because she was not going to look at you right now, and this was the cover story. Her ears, you noticed, had gone the faintest shade of pink.

"Obviously," you echoed.

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making anything."

"You're doing the face."

"What face—"

"The almost-smiling face," she said, with some feeling. "You know exactly which one. It's very annoying. Stop it."

You retrieved your Chemistry notebook from the depths. "I'll think about it."

She looked at you then. A fast, unguarded flash of something real, before she caught it and assembled her expression back into something cooler. A small adjustment. The way you close a door quietly so no one hears the click.

"Fine," she said. "Think about it. But don't take long. I have other options, you know."

"Of course."

"Many options."

"Karina."

"What?"

"I said I'll think about it."

Something in her face eased, just barely, just at the edges. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, which she only ever did when she was flustered and trying not to appear flustered, which meant it communicated the exact opposite of its intended effect. "Good," she said, with great composure. "That's, fine. Good." She turned and walked away down the hall, posture immaculate, each step deliberate.

You watched her go.

You were in serious, serious trouble.

You found Yujin at lunch.

Or rather, Yujin found you, which, to be accurate, is how every interaction with An Yujin has ever begun. She has a gift for it: appearing wherever you least expect her, like she operates on a frequency that bypasses your natural defenses. One moment you were sitting alone at the end of a table, opening a container of rice, and the next moment a lunch bag landed beside you with a decisive thump and Yujin folded herself into the chair with the loose, unthinking ease of someone who has never once in her life been unsure of where she belonged.

"Hello," she announced, unwrapping kimbap with theatrical ceremony, holding a piece up to inspect it in the light like a jeweler evaluating a stone. She was holding the chopsticks with her index finger sticking out at a jaunty angle, a quirk you'd long since stopped trying to correct, partly because she'd explained that it "provided better leverage," which was not a real explanation, and partly because you secretly found it endearing. She set the chopstick down, turned to you with those wide, unguardedly direct eyes, and said, with the cheerful confidence of someone announcing a menu change: "So. Prom."

You put down your spoon. "Yujin."

"Hear me out."

"I haven't said—"

"You were about to make the face."

"I don't have a face—"

"The one you've been making since we were nine when you're about to refuse something before I've even asked for it." She pointed the kimbap piece at you with gentle authority. "Your default setting is no. We've discussed this."

You picked the spoon back up. "What do you want?"

She beamed. It was the beam of someone who had mentally already won and was simply enjoying the procedural stage of the negotiation. "Come to prom with me."