Chapter Text
Jiyeon’s presentation starts in an hour, and the sliver of time she has to treat herself is a narrow one. She tests the breeze outside her window—cool, damp, but not too much—then balls up her blazer and lands the shot onto her unmade bed.
It feels good, stepping outside, letting the chill of the sky lick electricity from her skin. Four years deep, Jiyeon understands that pre-performance jitters are just part of the game.
Conferences, talkbacks, dance evaluations—all the same. What matters is, in only a few hours of hassle, it’ll be over and done with. Her resume will win another shiny gold star. She and Yubin can go crazy with the air fryer and rewatch Yellowjackets for the second time this month.
So Jiyeon breathes in and out, letting terms like cyclic bismuth and green chemistry spiral through her mind until even she doesn’t know what they mean anymore.
Usually, she can count on Yubin to drive her for a snack run. Today’s the exception. The poor girl is climbing up and down the walls in her own right, and her timeslot to present Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in Queer-Contemporary Society waits for no woman.
Jiyeon rounds the corner just as the bus is lurching to a stop. She swipes her ID. The driver barely looks at her.
Before she’s made it to a seat, the driver puts their foot back on the gas and sends her fumbling. Jiyeon grips the bar and shimmies into a row opposite the only other person on the bus. Community matters, and all that. The remains of a gummed-up, gray-and-white sticker tell her so from the ceiling.
But sitting opposite her stranger, Jiyeon feels antsy in a way she can’t explain. She’s rarely ever taken the bus alone. Not since Yubin’s parents got her a car a few years back. And in that first, glowing, freshman year, Jiyeon never had to do anything alone. Anytime she took the bus, it was always with—
The stranger in the opposite row shifts and glances away. All the blood in Jiyeon’s body roars to life.
Because—no, there really is no way.
Her “stranger” takes a facemask from her hoodie pocket and tries, inconspicuously, to hide.
But Jiyeon saw what she saw. Anger nearly rips her in half from the inside-out.
Nearly, because, when her name slides from Jiyeon’s mouth—the double-flick of tongue against her hard palate familiar to her still, now tinged by disbelief—Jiyeon chokes on a sudden rush of loneliness that sends the ocean between her ears.
“Kotone?” she scrapes out.
Hooded, masked, in a ball cap, all—she stiffens when addressed. Like there was any chance Jiyeon wouldn’t catch her red-handed.
She tries again, and desperately, “Kotone.”
Waiting, and waiting, the pain in Jiyeon’s chest is vicious and tart.
Until Kotone finally detangles her hands from her Aldi bags. She raises them, palms facing out, with nothing but the distance of three years and the aisle between them.
“Yeah,” Kotone admits. “It’s me.”
She doesn’t have to imagine the thin smile under her mask. She remembers it. The cringing embarrassment of being born into the world at eighteen and made to find their way from there.
Because it’s Kotone, even if not in any way Jiyeon has ever known her. This girl on the bus, in her raggedy hoodie and thick, padded scent of too much Old Spice. Her hair is short and limp. There’s a cane resting between her knees, and—is that a hand tattoo?
Kotone’s Adam’s apple moves as though she swallowed a marble. Jiyeon watches it in her peripheral vision, the whole way up and down.
“Jiyeon,” is all Kotone says, at first.
Then with a sudden, scrambling tug of wire, Kotone is out of her seat to signal the driver to stop. “I’ve got somewhere to be, so just—”
Funny. That was supposed to be Jiyeon’s line. Screw the presentation, she would still risk it all for Kotone.
Put a hand on her arm, Jiyeon begs herself. Stay right here, and ride the bus as far as the line can take them. Carve out a life where they’ll never have to be separated ever again.
Kotone’s body sways with her groceries while the bus screeches to a stop. She’s white-knuckling the handles, and the tremble in her body is unmistakable.
Because, supposedly, Kotone moved away. She knows, because Jiyeon’s the only one who Kotone allowed to help.
Jiyeon stood there waving, throbbing with grief that was soon to completely cave her in. That day, she watched her best friend roll out of the student parking lot. She collapsed into her bed, and she sobbed in wait for the text that she had made it across state lines.
Today, the bus doors fold open. A flare of sunlight surrounds Kotone like a ward against evil. It pierces Jiyeon’s vision, and it makes her stagger.
“Wait!” Jiyeon cries. “I’ll text you.”
Kotone sniffs. With her nose to the exit, she murmurs, “You can do that.”
And Kotone steps away from her. She stamps her cane into the packed earth outside.
The doors pull shut, and she’s gone again, right back into the unkempt world that stole them from each other in the first place.
The bus surges bravely onwards. Again, the driver barely looks.
Three years ago, Jiyeon met Kotone on what may as well have been the first night of her life.
If college was supposed to be her salvation, freshman orientation felt like anything but. There were only so many games of “two truths and a lie” that a body marred by her upbringing could handle.
Jiyeon had come to this campus for the trees, not to listen to “second generation alumni” in-the-making brag about all the things they hadn’t accomplished yet. They pushed her around with their pride, the same year Jiyeon was trying to assert that, if she could help it, no one would push her around ever again.
Tomorrow, she would ditch. Tonight, all there was to be done was brush her teeth and go to bed. Her new roommate was staying out. Big plans, she could tell. None of which involved Jiyeon.
She slipped into sandals, and she braved the low-lights of her hall’s communal bathroom. Dread came naturally to her places like these, low and droning as the electric hum of the walls.
Overhead, a swarm of insects in all shapes and sizes pinged their bodies over and over against one flickering bulb. Don’t look up, the RA had stressed to her alongside the other new arrivals. Never look up.
Jiyeon looked up. She curled her lips, unimpressed, and that was the look on her face when a girl came around the corner to wash her hands.
They stared at each other, both skittish and worn out from a day of so much new. Their faces were wan, their smiles instinctually polite, as they each got back to their own business.
She and Jiyeon each claimed a sink, united by one long, toothpaste-spattered mirror. Until Jiyeon scrubbed the back of her tongue too hard. She gagged on her toothbrush so loudly, the girl’s reflection slid to meet her eyes.
She puffed up in awkward laughter, and Jiyeon joined right in. They turned to each other, properly now, face-to-face.
“Today was long, right?” Jiyeon begged her to agree, crossing her fingers behind her thigh, and crossing her legs with a well-trained, defensive grace.
And her stranger blew out with such exhaustion that the force of her breath ruffled her own bangs. This girl met her in the middle. She answered with a roll of her eyes, “Tell me about it.”
Jiyeon-and-Kotone began the way a first day often requires. They were a tentative allyship, two dogs sniffing each other in the park.
But Kotone—in her moth-eaten bathrobe—with dirt beneath her nails, a faint limp Jiyeon didn’t notice before hanging out with her, and all the hair singed from her knuckles, Kotone quickly proved herself as a person Jiyeon could understand. Certainly easier than anyone she had met from her orientation group.
Kotone got her talking about herself. About how (albeit, with appropriate reservedness) Jiyeon had never really had to make a decision of her own volition in all her young life.
College applications happened under the table. She had the grades to get away with it. Her parents—people with too much money and too little time to take an interest in their daughter as an individual—accepted the fact with the same shrugging nonchalance with which they handled most things going on with her.
The troupe told her she should probably think about killing herself. From the ones who made it out, she knew to expect this. It didn’t carve her out any less.
As a dancer, she had identity. In rigid structure and clear expectations, Jiyeon was human. For fifteen years, she accepted this. She slicked down her silhouette. She made herself smaller, properly polished, without complaint.
And then: she came to college as an organic chemistry major, the farthest she could possibly imagine herself from dance. This felt safe. It pleased her ego, and it gave her a reason to keep her soul on the bench for further, later , review.
This, as she learned that night, both was and wasn’t a far cry from Kotone’s own story.
“I kept my nose to the grindstone for years,” she grumbled. “I needed out of my hometown.” It was the middle of nowhere, seriously, Kotone said of the place. “The closest city you’ve ever heard of is fucking Omaha.”
She, like Jiyeon, had clawed her way into the college acceptance that had lifted her out of her circumstances, and for that, she still remembers those earliest moments of meeting Kotone. Jiyeon saw the rough and ragged, sort-of freshly plucked chicken way about her—undecided in her major, and unbothered by the fact, brazenly content in the freedom she worked so hard for.
Then after hours of back-and-forth, punctuated occasionally with talk of how they shouldn’t stay up too late, they had chatted past midnight.
And while saying goodbye for the night, hugging farewell by the end of that very first encounter, Jiyeon breathed in as much of Kotone as she could, and she understood, very suddenly, why some animals mate for life.
The next morning, Jiyeon welcomed her burgeoning sense of audacity. She followed the line of floral-print doordecks all the way to the end of the hall, and she permitted herself to knock on Kotone’s door.
She answered in slippers and yawned, her face pudgy with fatigue, “What’s up?”
“I’m tagging along today,” Jiyeon insisted, “Duh.”
A moment stretched long between them. Kotone stood very still.
“Let me come with?” Jiyeon tried instead. “Please? You’re fun.”
And Kotone’s smile curled up in mischief. She disappeared, briefly, to grab something from her closet.
“You need a disguise,” Kotone insisted right back, and stood on her toes to plunk a ball cap on Jiyeon’s head.
Twenty minutes later, Kotone’s orientation leader, Jinsol, accepted Jiyeon’s presence quizzically at first, then with a fervent, “Well, welcome aboard!”
So it went. All that first week, they were each other’s first and only friend, busting up in laughter when they shouldn’t, untried at the game of university pomp-and-circumstance, loving it nonetheless for as long as they had each other to share it with.
That first weekend, Jiyeon and Kotone sheared strips of their orientation t-shirts off the other’s bodies (a sleeveless, backless muscle tank for Kotone, a ribbon-y mess of a crop-top for Jiyeon) until they were borderline unwearable. Jinsol shepherded all the takers to the first party of their college experiences.
With every sip of horrible, blue-raspberry scented, kitchen-sink flavored jungle juice, Jiyeon felt that first year flow into her like the breath of life. She and Kotone downed everything Jinsol handed them, then faux-raved with the kids who weren’t too scared to try.
And in those flashing purples and reds, Jiyeon looked to Kotone and saw the answer to the most shameful of all her questions. Her “I don’t know’s,” flipped to a sudden, certain, “Yes.” I could like a girl, if you payed me to, morphed rapidly into, You. It’s you. Dancing with you, I know my own heartbeat, and for once, my own heartbeat knows me, too.
Swaying pelvis-to-pelvis, Kotone’s head in her shoulder, Jiyeon’s hands in her hair, the only force that could break them apart came in the form of another first-year.
Yubin shot them with the flash of her Polaroid camera, then asked shyly, and only after, if it was alright if she took a photo of the two of them.
It was her dream, Yubin told them, and a goal: before the end of the first semester, she wanted to deck out the string of fairy lights above her bed. Jiyeon and Kotone would be the debut entry.
Yes, they agreed, and vividly, That’s so hot.
But whatever happened to that Polaroid photo, it never made it above her bed. It probably fell out of her pocket the same time Yubin’s insulin pump fell out of her arm.
That’s how Jiyeon and Kotone, and now Yubin, too, ended up crawling around shitfaced in a stairwell, searching for the missing pump around the same time that Yubin realized she was so drunk, she could barely walk. That’s what got them picked out by Sohyun, one of the upperclassmen girls at parties who always kept an eye out.
“Are you her friends?” Sohyun asked, the snarl in her voice signalling danger for them if they said yes, and if they were the ones who let Yubin wind up in this state.
Jiyeon answered honestly for the both of them: “We are now.”
That night, Sohyun set the three of them up on two couches, in her and her roommates’ shared suite. Yubin hit the couch snoring, pump recovered, down and out without a peep.
Kotone wriggled free from what felt like the single cubic foot of space they had to share. She opened the nearest window and put her face to the screen, and naturally, Jiyeon followed.
Her head still buzzing from the alcohol, Kotone passed her a tiny, disgusting bottle of peanut butter whiskey she had swiped back at the party.
The breeze through the window soothed her pulse. They sipped, and they passed, their faces twisting up in a rhythm of back-and-forth. That way, the words came rolling out of Jiyeon’s mouth exactly as they occurred to her.
“I used to rock climb,” Jiyeon told her, as though it were any great secret. “But my first ballet teacher—fuck that guy, seriously—made me quit.”
She ran hot-and-cold from anger at the memory. Kotone nodded for her to keep going.
“I was getting too muscle-y, he said,” and while pressing crescents into the insides of her palms, “It wasn’t a good look. Not for the season’s prettiest prima.”
She heard Kotone swallow, taking the story into herself the way a whale sorts krill from a gulp of seawater.
“Has that ever happened to you?” Jiyeon nudged her with a shoulder. “Ever been torn in half by the two loves of your life?”
Drunker than she can even remember, Jiyeon recalls the Kotone of that night with the stars in her eyes and moonlight contouring her face.
“No way.” Kotone turned to her and beamed, giving Jiyeon’s bicep a complimentary squeeze. “Not like that.”
Jiyeon loved Kotone. This is a simple fact from the very beginning.
She was earnest, Jiyeon could tell, as a person with absolutely nothing to prove. She knew how to wrestle with the unknown—had practice in the art of living in the world exactly as it was.
Heaps more than Jiyeon, anyways. Kotone seemed to have come out of her life stronger. She spoke of college like just another drop in the bucket, and with no trace of arrogance, mentioned the scholarship that saved her like just any other piece of the story.
In short: in the mission of learning how to be a person, Kotone was exactly the person Jiyeon needed to meet.
“You used to dance?” Kotone balked, raw with disbelief to an extent that was, frankly, insulting.
Jiyeon squirmed and sold it short. “Sort of.”
It had been her idea to reserve a dance studio. You know, just to see what the space was about. It was free to students in the evenings, but no one but the dance majors ever used it. It would be a waste, Jiyeon reasoned, to not check it out.
That’s how she ended up in that same, familiar, liminal realm, sandwiched between a wall of mirrors and the lifeless, uniform brick paneling behind them.
The only new thing about this was Kotone. Jiyeon’s calves itched, and badly—memories of old microfractures blazing to life, climbing the tower of her legs like fire ants hard at work.
Heedless to any of this, Kotone bent forwards at the waist and squinted at herself in the mirror.
“Teach me something,” she said as though it were really that simple.
As if. Dance was the pretext that allowed the adults in her life to contort her. Jiyeon’s body was the vessel, a young girl on full display. Ballet had changed her, made her flexible in places that should have always stayed rigid.
Dance, in her mind, got corrupted alongside prayer. Both became something she did when she was told. She wasn’t allowed to enjoy the former without first making space in herself for the latter. Dance was Jiyeon’s lifeblood. Prayer was a fat tick stuck to her back.
And yet, in that weird, teenage way where everything becomes godly if you let it, tearing her ACL is really the thing that saved her. It was the first injury the troupe couldn’t force her to dance through. It severed her, all at once, from the person she might have been.
She doesn’t like to talk about it. More like: it reaches into her soul and dims her when people ask the wrong questions.
“I’m serious,” Kotone begged. “Give me anything—whatever it is, no matter how stupid—I’ll try.”
Just to make it stop, Jiyeon swept her arm behind her head, then dropped one shoulder and flicked out a hand.
In the mirror, Kotone mimicked her. Clumsy, imprecise—but dutiful, and with feeling.
Jiyeon felt the old embers stir. “This is dumb,” she said.
“Okay,” Kotone agreed. “We’re dumb. Now teach me something else.”
An hour later, sweating, spent, and finding their breath on the practice room floor, Kotone flipped over to where Jiyeon could see her. She rolled up her pant leg and showed her a wrinkled, reddened seam in the swell of her calf.
“I did hockey,” Kotone beamed. “I said I was in it for the scholarship, but honestly, I think I just liked to fight.” She patted the scar with authoritative fondness. “A teammate tripped over my calf. Ripped the whole thing open. And somehow, I didn’t really mind.”
Jiyeon, secretly more pleased than she could stand, reached out and ran a hand through her leg hair. “I thought you have to be tall to play hockey.”
“I thought you have to act pretty to be a ballerina,” Kotone snipped right back. Then she pulled her to her feet, and they were at it again.
“Teaching” Kotone had very little to do with it. She moved like she already knew her own strength. She was amateur, sure, muscle group by muscle group. But she knew how to shuffle the weight of her own whirling soul. She channeled it into her arms, and she suspended it in the very tips of her fingers.
Once, she nearly fell. Jiyeon was there to put her hands on her. Kotone leaned against her then, humid from exertion, back muscles tight from course-correcting.
Jiyeon didn’t have to set her straight. Kotone kicked out one leg—the one with more history. In a slow, gentle ripple, she coaxed all her bodyweight back upright.
“I love you so much,” Jiyeon told her unprovoked.
It wasn’t a confession. Again, just a simple fact from the very beginning.
But with the words bouncing around so out in the open, Jiyeon realized, very suddenly, that she had everything to fear.
Kotone was her first friend. The trauma of salvation had had its way with her once. Terror, and adoration—both fought for her body in a fast-acting, liquid drip. The alarm bells in her chest told her: she might have this, or she might have to go ahead and die after all.
Kotone barked with laughter. She glanced to the mirrors, then realized Jiyeon wasn’t kidding.
“I—” Kotone began. Then stood on her toes to let Jiyeon test the fit of their mouths.
In Jiyeon’s opinion, she took to love like a resuscitated fowl put back onto water.
From that night onwards, it was long evenings in the common lounge after dinner, always in Yubin’s building, staying up late on the Pride floor. Mayu, the RA, gave better snacks and packed some wicked hangover cures.
When the two of them got bogged down by too much studying, Yubin was the one who reminded them to have fun. A trio at parties, Jiyeon and Kotone had a way of leaving early and ending up at the burrito place downtown, or in some apartment block a mile from campus, or on the tennis courts, throwing a basketball back and forth.
Kotone’s classes were a pain. Namely: a medical ethics course that, most days, had her coming over to be spooned in Jiyeon’s bed. She’d always been smarter than Jiyeon about worldly things. Jiyeon did everything she could to honor that.
One night, after already saying goodbye for the evening, Kotone knocked on her door well after dark. Jiyeon’s roommate was off with her boyfriend like every Thursday. Kotone knew her schedule well enough to know she’d be awake.
Jiyeon opened the door in slippers. Kotone kissed her, and giddily, she took her by the hand.
“Still have that step ladder for your bed?” she asked.
Jiyeon trusted the process. She and Kotone waddled it down three flights of stairs and all the way to the courtyard outside. After a sprinkler system malfunction in one of the other first-year dorms, the university had to trash an entire sectional couch.
Seeing its great, imposing L-shape in the dumpster, Jiyeon felt as though she were staring at the bones of some ancient beast.
“The humanity,” she whistled, shaking her head.
Kotone set the stepladder down beside it, still bouncing on the balls of her feet.
“This is really, really stupid,” she warned her, “but I think you’re going to love it.”
Kotone stood at the very top, and then, digging her fingers into the plush meat of the couch, she shimmied up the incline.
Jiyeon couldn’t believe what she was watching. She swore she felt the creak, seeing Kotone scramble to the edge and trust the old thing with her weight.
But it held. Kotone stretched, and she got her hands on the roof of the building. Jiyeon released the breath she didn’t realize she was holding as Kotone tensed her arms, then hauled herself all the way up.
Stunned, and awed, Jiyeon followed. Climbing the couch was hardly any more difficult than the stepladder. A long lost instinct kicked back in, and it carried her to the top.
Kotone stuck out a hand. Jiyeon took it just to hold it. A breeze, and the dizzying sight of their entire campus greeted her from on top of the world.
“As if you even need the help,” Kotone panted, and may have been right.
To reiterate: the Pride floor wasn’t officially their floor. It just belonged to every one of their best friends. When news spread that they were a couple, the queer upperclassmen on the floor took care to snap the two of them right up.
Of course, there was Mayu, still sweeter than pie, and Yooyeon, her girlfriend. She was a woman of few words, more energy drinks in her system than blood in her veins, but potent with sincerity, and Jiyeon’s favorite of all the chemistry tutors by leaps and bounds.
Ever since that first party, Sohyun had made sure they stay in touch with Xinyu, the Pride organization’s new president, inheritor to the club after student senate cut their funding from measly to half-of-measly. They gave Jiyeon and Kotone a spot at the “big kid” table. They built them space to belong.
And when outsiders brought the fight to the Pride floor, it was only natural, really, that it became their fight, too.
Jiyeon and Kotone learned of a certain boy through Sohyun’s warnings, then through the school’s directory, looking him up after classes. He was a piano performance major. A real child prodigy about it—there was an article and everything. He had a name, technically. But in all their conversations, he was “that asshole,” and that alone.
What mattered is: he was one of two drunk, howling frat boys who started the practice of “treeing” freshmen inside the passcode-protected gender neutral bathrooms. After some undisclosed amount of scolding, he made his return to the Pride floor by pulling flags down from the walls.
Rumor has it, anyways. That’s the language used in the official report.
Yubin, through the open sliver of her door, told it this way: he wrenched with both hands, until either the screws ripped out of the wall or the fabric tore. He balled that first flag up—pink, blue, white—then dunked it into the wet, rank trash of the floor’s shared kitchen.
Jiyeon and Kotone were on their way to the lounge that night. They heard it from outside of the building: the vicious, gorgeous notes of an expert on the piano.
Oppressively loud, he played his statement right out in the open. He was the only one in the lounge—go figure. Mayu was out for the night. The RA upstairs was supposed to be doing her rounds, but every resident knew that getting too high and falling asleep by 10pm was her M.O. on Tuesdays.
“Dude,” Kotone tried. Her hand was over-warm with anger like nothing Jiyeon had ever felt from her before.
It could have ended with one word. Then he played to the end of the bar, and finished with a trill.
“Can’t a guy put his feet up in here?” he sneered. “Or does that cost extra pronouns?”
By Jiyeon’s account, it was a stupid fucking thing to be baited by. But spoken from the mouth of a boy, an artist on the keys, with all his venom couched inside the sheepskin of a joke, Jiyeon respected the moment the air in the room changed for the final.
He started up again. A jaunty tune, this time. “Heart and Soul.” Usually a partner piece. He didn’t get that far.
Jiyeon felt the decision cross through Kotone’s body. The air seemed to ripple then as she supplied herself to her full, slight height.
She set her hands on the piano lid, then dropped her shoulder and slammed it down onto his fingers, so hard and so sure, Jiyeon wasn’t sure if she heard the bang first, or his screaming.
“Sign the petition.”
For those next few days, this was Yubin’s one and only pitch to anyone who would look her in the eye. Idle time never suited her. Even then, waiting on the bench outside during Kotone’s “trial” with the dean, she was adding to the impressive mountain of signatures she had gathered in her favor.
Jiyeon didn’t so much as breathe, not really. Not until Kotone walked the strip of sidewalk out the front of the building and wobbled her way to sit next to her.
“It’s not expulsion,” Kotone said. Then she bubbled up with laughter far too keyed up to be relieved.
Jiyeon hoped against hope. Yubin blinked over her shoulder, both believing while knowing better.
“It’s not expulsion,” Kotone repeated herself, then swallowed so hard, Jiyeon felt she could see the words grinding forwards and back in her throat. “They’re just cutting my scholarship.”
The weeks after Kotone left—who really gives a shit.
Jiyeon sank deeper into her bed than she knew was possible. When she closed her eyes, she felt herself wriggling inside a void far emptier than a body’s meant to come back from.
They didn’t break up—but then again, they’d never put a label on it in the first place. They said they’d keep in touch, but then they didn’t, and that was just it.
She excelled in her classes. Organic chemistry was a breeze compared to first heartbreak.
She saw Kotone everywhere, then nowhere. Jiyeon avoided the memory of her. For nearly the rest of the year, that meant avoiding Yubin and Mayu and Sohyun, too.
And then, at once: she started seeing her again in all her worst dreams, surrounded by eyes in the dark, in separate trees, together yet apart, united inside the scope of the hunter’s gun.
One of those mornings after, she woke up and couldn’t move. Jiyeon stayed down long enough to sleep through all her classes.
In the evening, she walked to the old dance studio by herself after dark. She laid on her stomach without knowing why, restless without a cure, letting the laminate flooring stick and pull against the skin of her arms.
And then, for no reason at all, Jiyeon pressed her palms into the floor, and she started doing push-ups.
The straight line of her body in the mirror pleased her like nothing else could. She braced her muscles, letting herself sink those few inches at a time, settling into the rhythm of pushing herself back up again.
Within the minute, her arms were shaking, and the burn of exertion stole the breath from her lungs. She was so far out of practice. She could very easily believe it.
But with her grades, getting approved was easy paperwork. Nothing would change, not right away. Not until next semester, when Jiyeon’s new double-major allowed her, for the first time in her waking life, to take a dance class and know with all her body that she wanted it.