Indulgence

For as long as you’ve known, you’ve been allergic to chocolate.

You’ve had to just trust me through the majority of your childhood, eyebrows knit and eyes misty as other kids tore through gold and silver foil, biting the inside of your mouth bloody instead of hard-earned Halloween candy.

But you’d be lying if you said you’d never indulged.

Under blankets, cloaked in moonlight, secrecy, and sin, you delighted in what you could sneak to bed in your grubby hands.

And for such an innocent sweet, you pieced together that it was as close to tangible a paradox could get. You reveled in how unwrapped, it was equal parts fully solid and simultaneously already melting into your fingerprints; how in taste, it was equal parts acutely bitter and simultaneously sickly sweet; how to your allergies, it was equal parts undoubtedly delectable and simultaneously why you were sweating in the cold, breaking out into bright pink patches across your neck. The symptoms were nothing close to fatal, of course, just enough of an eyesore that the wiser part of you wouldn’t eat it outside.

So: you could have chocolate, just not the optics.

You’ve pieced together enough that the same antithetical pull is what draws you to Kang Hyewon.

-

See, when you take the newly vacant student counselor position by next-in-line default, you just trust me’d that it’d be an easy job. You were a newly minted senior with college lined up in the fall, and wanted to take your rite of passage freedom to slack off for the rest of the school year. Now, in lieu of that, you had to man a class outfitted to become a makeshift war room for your juniors as they summarized, re-summarized, and then re–re-summarized full life stories into 650-word–bite sizes.

And the college essay was not an easy opponent.

Nothing was sacred enough to not be sharpened into a sob story: tightly-wrapped childhood traumas unpacked for college admissions readers to casually pick away at if it meant more of a chance than the next applicant. The whole experience took a pressure cooker to any crumb of anxiety, and it was now your job to help navigate this.

Hyewon was a junior assigned to your group who you got to know in excruciating detail for two reasons. One, she was a slow writer.

The college application was arguably a solved concept. At best, it was a game of madlibs with a very tough audience. Fill in prompts about your childhood, upbringing, and aspirations to an interesting enough degree, fudging details here and there where you can to pull at heartstrings or fluff up the footsteps you want to follow in — score enough points, tick enough boxes, and you’d have a good shot.

But every time without fail, you got to lean back in your chair as Hyewon approached every new question like it was her first. You got to study her tells: how she tucked her lips into a pout, dimpling her chin; wrestled a hair tie out of where it nestled in her wrist; and gathered everything but two obedient strands of hair out of her face into a loose ponytail, only to slowly inch her gaze towards you a little bit later to ask how everyone else answered the question.

Two: you were absolutely head over heels.

It’s a losing game, really. Every time you’ve tried to pinpoint exactly what it is about Hyewon that makes your stomach queasy, you end up finding more things that do.

One of your first leads came from how she seemingly made striking so soft. When she’d catch you in her gaze, Hyewon had a way of zeroing anything else out; like the implication was that the both of you were sharing a single breath, and any more that you took would take away from hers. No dice.

Another answer came from how from the almond curvature in her eyes, the porcelain ridge on her nose, the satisfied crease that nestled between her lips, down to the curve on her chin, it was like Hyewon physically wasn’t made up of any hard angles; like before God put her on Earth to remind everyone what was holy still existed, an angel double-checked his work. No luck there either.

It only took a couple rounds of this for you to make peace with the ambiguity; that some things were best left unanswered.

The tension that stood in stark contrast to all of this was that you, of course, were her goddamn counselor.

There isn’t a lot of graceful space between being forward and manipulative, and it wouldn’t take too disingenuous of a read for someone to question what was behind your relationship. Something about reciprocation becoming dishonest when your job was literally getting to the core of Hyewon’s deepest motivations and anxieties — it didn’t take a lot of logic to see how much the guise of writing her essays made things oh so convenient.

The entire situation was delicate at best, and at worst, spelled hauntingly awkward hometown visits during spring break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

So you couldn’t have Kang Hyewon, the optics wouldn’t let you.

And as if you needed more of a reason, Hyewon was quirky.

You see, where other burnt out juniors had journaling or, like, gateway drugs, Hyewon had an affirmations folder. Slotted in the corner of her phone, accessible by a one-tap shortcut, was an application that she kept photos and voice notes-

“To remind me I’m doing well,” she asserts in the middle of a particularly long stretch of you poking fun at it. “You sound like you might’ve needed it considering all this projection.”

“Let’s walk back projection some,” you try and parry, palms raised.

“I mean, I’d be jealous too if I realized I did college applications the wrong way,” she adds, singsongy enough to sound sweet, and with enough acid that it lands acrid in between you both. Then: “Why don’t you add to it?”

You pause for a beat, and Hyewon takes the cue, her eyes darting from her laptop keyboard to the look on your face.

“Ew, and not in any of the ways you’re thinking,” she spits. “You know, because you’re helping me secure my future at a great college or whatever. It’ll be sentimental or some shit.”

You try for a response, but the wiser part of you shuts you up. You tap the red button on her screen and leave her something sentimental or some shit.

“You’re doing great, Hyewon.”

-

For better or worse, this was how the two of you operated: permanently playing high school footsies — loaded, foxy, finished with enough deniability that you could chalk it up to hormones or puberty — and between the two of you, Hyewon was much better at the game.

In your defense, though, she didn’t play by the rules. You’d draw a line in the sand-

i just think this is really cliche, your latest Google Docs comment on her personal statement reads. do you not have any other family stories

And she’d dive headfirst over it-

odd way of getting to know me perv, she replies, before: i don’t like it either. i’ll rewrite!

Except you knew you had to continue walking it back.

Call it pretend, call it reputational awareness, call it whatever you want, for one reason or another, you were aware of the very thin line of implication the both of you straddled and were afraid enough to never cross it. Balancing on it, sure, you’d swim behind the buoys all day, but you knew better than to test even just beyond where the waves picked up.

Just as luck would have it, though, it seemed like Hyewon followed a cosmic force your polar opposite. Whether on purpose or blissfully ignorant, it felt like she never looked down at where she was from the line, or even if she knew it existed. Though whether like a siren out at sea testing your limits or reciprocating your feelings because she felt the same way, you’d never know.

-

“I just feel like this entire thing is so dumb,” Hyewon remarks, gesturing with a golden fry that drooped downwards like it was somber about the whole thing, too.

It was finally a Friday, which meant that unlike every other day that week in your marathon of after school essay read-throughs and polishing, you could exhale for a little.

You had just finished a long stretch of final edits for your counseling group and were taking things as slow as possible in hopes of making time move the same. You and Hyewon were parked in your car behind an old church building, under the only lamp that worked. Between the two of you sat an oily paper box on top of your center console, housing a scattering of drive-thru fries and in lieu of ketchup, a single frosty.

“You and everyone in the country, Hyewon,” you smirk, venturing into the box to find the perfect dipping fry.

She returns you an annoyed kiss of her teeth. “Come on. I mean, seriously. For the past couple of months, it’s just been me and how much I can cut up my identity into palatable answers. How much I can think of the future I’ll create. How much I can look backwards and pull out the motivations behind everything I’ve ever done.”

You stop and look over at her. She’s slouched in the passenger seat, supported mostly only by the small of her back, with her feet up on your dashboard and in the Hyewon usual: everything in a loose ponytail besides two obedient strands. She’s slightly turned away from you, looking longingly at part of her reflection in the rear-view mirror like the implication was that behind the glass, the other her was happier.

You couldn’t help but sympathize. You wondered where you were a year ago, in her shoes: in the middle of writing essays and imagining how you were going to brand yourself for college.

“It’s cliche,” she prefaces. “But I feel like all this looking forwards and backwards… I’m not allowed to enjoy today, you know? The clubs, the grades, the people — I don’t know if I’m doing anything for the application or because I want to do it.”