triple dog dare

A year to the day since the last time you saw her face:

You run into Jang Wonyoung in the alley behind a seedy bar.

“Hey,” you say, and stop short. 

“Hey,” Wonyoung says. She’s wearing a black dress, thin straps, hem falling past her knees. She doesn’t even look surprised to see you. Only coughs around the cigarette she’s smoking.

“I was actually just about to call you.” 

“Were you?” Her voice, when unforced, is always different than you expect. Low and rich and full. 

“Yeah,” you say. It’s ludicrous, running into her tonight. Like something more divine than coincidence. “I was. Happy birthday.” 

Wonyoung stares at you.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t say that to me.” 

It doesn’t matter that it’s been a year. Jang Wonyoung is the same as she always is. Ice-cold. No dimples. No smile. All that glossy excessive hair. Those unseeing, unblinking large round doll eyes, reflective sheen like they’re encased in plastic. She looks beautiful. She looks like a ghost. She looks like she hasn’t eaten in weeks, sickly and skeletal in the moonlight. She looks like no one you could ever love.

“Wonyoung,” you say. “Come home with me.”

She takes another drag. You shouldn’t smoke, you think of telling her; come on, you’re killing yourself. But you’d never say that. You’re not in the business of hurting her and you never have been. Plus it’s her twenty-fifth birthday and there’s only so much cruelty a girl can take, even a girl like her. 

It doesn’t matter that it’s been a year. Everything between you two is still as spectacularly fucked up as it’s always been. 

“Fuck you,” Wonyoung says. And then she takes your hand. 

-

You and Wonyoung have no reason to know each other. But:

“This is my table.” 

It’s seven years ago and the first time you meet is in college, when you’re waiting in an on-campus coffee shop and look up from your laptop and there’s this girl standing above you with her arms crossed, looking somewhat mutinous. “I’m sorry?” you say. 

“This is my table.” No pleasantries. Actually tapping her foot at you in her prissy little ballet flat. “I sit here every time I come here.”

“Uh,” you say. 

“So move,” says the girl, flatly. 

“Um-” 

“My God, Wonyoung, are you already torturing him?” 

The switch in mood is immediate, an impossible glimpse of summer sun in mid-winter blizzard. An Yujin walks up with her dimples and tight jeans and dazzling smile and throws an arm around the girl’s stiff, slender shoulders. The effect she has on you just by walking into a room is physical. You relax the second she throws that smile your way. 

“Oh,” says the girl. Looks from Yujin to you. Her expression shifts even colder, as if to compensate. But just like you, her posture relaxes too. “So he’s one of yours?” 

You splutter. “One of-” 

“Shush.” Yujin smacks a kiss to the girl’s cheek. “Ignore her,” she says to you. “This is Wonyoung, my best friend. And - yes, she’s always this much of a sweetheart.” Then she grins, throws a hand out to you in a flourish. “Wonyoung, this is the guy I’m going to marry when I turn thirty.” 

“I’m her boyfriend,” you supply. “Nice to meet you.” 

Wonyoung’s face contorts like she’s just eaten something very sour. She gives you a rather unimpressed once-over, from your hair to your shoes. You’re halfway convinced that she’s about to chew you out like a mean girl from a movie. But all she says is: “Thirty? Like, exactly? You don’t want to get married earlier?”

“I’m not going to get married in my twenties like a fucking child bride,” says Yujin, appalled. “I’m way too pretty to squander my youth like that.” 

Horrifically this makes both you and Wonyoung laugh. You glance her way; she wrinkles her pert, perfect nose, disgruntled to have something in common with you. 

“Thanks for saving me a seat,” Yujin says, cheerfully oblivious or very good at faking it, and plops herself down right next to you.

Somehow you all end up sharing the table for the next two hours. Obviously Wonyoung doesn’t say another word to you that isn’t snide and you roll your eyes every time she tosses that long glossy curtain of hair. But you keep having these moments where you glance up and your gazes connect, where you catch each other with mirroring grins, where she goes to kick Yujin under the table at the same time you reach for her hand. It’s uncanny and horrible. She looks at Yujin the exact same way you do; quickly it becomes clear that this is kind of the root of the problem. But it’s just kid stuff, this instant rivalry. It’s college and you’re a stupid teenager and she’s a heinous bitch. You don’t look at Jang Wonyoung and think: We’re going to know each other forever. 

But that’s exactly what you do. 

-

About how you met An Yujin: 

You were taking the same two PM lecture. You both sat in the back of the class. You turned to the side on the very first day and saw bangs and bright eyes and dimples and a low-cut top and a thousand-watt smile. Hi, the girl said. Her hair was up. You couldn’t stop staring at the column of her throat. Hi, you said, dumbly. The smile got wider. Then she said: You’re really cute. Why don’t I know you? Ten minutes later you were skipping class to make out in the bathroom. A week later you were dating. I don’t believe in taking things slow, Yujin said that Saturday, following you into your shitty dorm room wearing shorts so tiny it should qualify as public indecency. She’d made you laugh and then sucked your soul out through your dick and then made you laugh again. Naturally you have come to the conclusion that you have miraculously stumbled across the love of your life. But she holds your hand and kisses your mouth and steals all your clothes and fucks you half to death and tells everyone who’ll listen that she’s marrying you so at least you’re pretty sure it’s mutual. 

“Oh, wow,” says Wonyoung, when she hears you tell this story. “Been there.” 

You gape at her for a second. Then say: “Which part?” 

“Definitely the part where she fell in love with me after I gave her the best head of her life,” says Yujin. 

“No,” says Wonyoung, frostily, color rising in her cheeks. “Shut up. Obviously not that. We’ve never - whatever. I meant the…” Here she mimics you: “Why don’t I know you?” 

“Right.” You say. You shoot a sidelong glance at Yujin, who looks very pleased with herself. Flash of both dimples and most of her teeth. “That how she got you, too?” 

“Pretty much,” agrees Wonyoung. “Seventh grade. She sat right next to me in class and said: You’re too pretty for me to not know you.” Wonyoung makes her voice nasal and smarmy with the impression, gives an exasperated little eye-roll after. But there’s a tilt to her mouth that makes you think that line worked exactly the way it was supposed to. “Best friends ever since.”

“Is this what you do?” you say to Yujin, whose smile has gone so wide her eyes are nearly shut. “You just walk up to people and decide they belong to you?”

Except these days you’ve learned to know her, so you already know the answer. Oddly enough you’ve sort of learned to know Wonyoung, too. It’s weird but the months pass and the three of you hang out every week, almost every day. You skip more classes than you attend and pretend you’re studying together just to end up talking for hours and go to terrible frat parties and spend your weekends getting high in their dorm room until Yujin’s half in your lap and Wonyoung’s ice-princess face has split open in real unguarded laughter. When she looks at you in those moments it’s almost like you’re friends. But then she sees you looking and her expression goes cold and you’re certain you never will be. 

“Yep,” chirps Yujin, leans in, kisses you. Pulls back with victory in her eyes. “Now you’re mine forever.”

“Alright,” you say, smiling. “I think I can be okay with that.” 

-

She breaks up with you that spring. 

She was really very nice about it in the moment, too. Said all the right things like she was reading from a playbook, held your hand to soften the blow. Her bangs were falling into her eyes and you went to brush them away before you remembered you were no longer allowed to. She sighed and said: It’s not you, it’s me. But coming out of her mouth it sounded like brave and earnest honesty instead of the world’s worst cliché. What happened to being yours forever? you wanted to say, and didn’t. Like she’d heard it anyway, Yujin smiled sadly. So sympathetic and sorry. I’m sorry things have to be like this, she told you. I never meant to break your heart. But you stared at those dimples and you knew better. Does it really matter if I left you? that smile said. You still belong to me.