Someday, in a warmer place, Ash will reminisce and laugh. I was so young and dumb back then, she will say to herself, knowing she has evolved into someone who forgives, who finds no guilt in pleasure, who is cut free from the tether of prickly, endless yearning for things she cannot have or become.

But not now. Now, she takes the bus to Yongsan Garrison.

The perimeter of the army base is fuzzed with yards of barbed wire. There is a sparse tree line barricaded by white bricks on the hilly ascent, crew-cut grasses, spotless sidewalks. Outside a fanged white gate, an idle Jeep is searched and then waved through.

A single soldier guards the pedestrian entrance, a long, narrow gap in the fence that spits into a musty lobby. Dressed in gray-green fatigues and a severely tilted beret, he cradles a rifle in his grip. He seems young, even younger than her. He could never walk out of an American liquor store uncarded, she thinks, bowing her head in acknowledgment. The thought of him burying a bullet in her back is bright, quick, gone.

Inside, more rude awakenings. Five soldiers huddled behind a desk politely redirect Ash, palm down, toward an assembly line of visitation forms full of words she can pronounce but cannot translate.

A sticky crown of paranoia clings to her. The soldiers are looking at her, probably, realizing that she has been humbled by a piece of paper. She pulls out her phone.

“여보세요?” A cheery voice. Not the one she needs.

“아, 안녕하세요—uh, sorry—조준서 바꿔주세요?” On the other end, the usual shuffle.

“Hi.”

“Hey. Sorry. There’s this form? I got some of it, but the rest––”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Just read it to me.”

Ten minutes later, Bobby appears. He is the same: a tower among pillars, all leg, long-lashed, gorgeous, even in harsh camouflage. Turns out that Ash is not too embarrassed to be horny. He touches her shoulder and her clit jumps.

Quickly, they duck out into the day. They see the expressions of the other soldiers they pass. Both of them pretend they are not the thing that is funny.

There are three options for visitation hours: a tiny upstairs cafeteria, the War Memorial of Korea, or a nearby café where soldiers can smoke inside and everyone knows his name. Joonseo, not Bobby, he clarifies. No one here calls him Bobby.

They lap the memorial, a gigantic square plaza. At the north end, there is a museum hall like a palace. At the south, a huge, bullet-like sculpture several stories tall, its belly split open. The two halves are meant to represent the brotherhood between the United States and South Korea, or so says a little plaque on the ground. Ash should feel pensive, she knows, but mostly she thinks about how phallic it is.

Together they meander through a series of open-air, columned hallways. She is relieved to microdose the sight of Bobby’s face after a year apart, to watch sunlight pour through the arc of flags above and paint him in primary colors.

In the cafeteria, she pushes sauce-soaked tteokbokki around a soggy paper plate. They are the only two people in the booth section sitting across from one another.

“Don’t look,” she says through a piece of fish cake, “but the guy behind you looks like he wants to eat his girl alive.”

Bobby looks anyway and snorts. “That’s my sunbae.” The man hardly seems like a superior; he tangles eyelashes with a pouting girl and speaks in a babyish murmur. They are gunning for the title of Most Intensely Unsexy Staring Contest, and winning, Ash thinks.

“Cute,” she says instead. “Girlfriend?”

“Doubt it. Officers go out a lot on the weekends. He picks up new girls just so they’ll visit and get him out of chores.”

“Isn’t that what I’m doing?” The joke is too easy and, by the looks of it, too sharp. Ash feigns a sudden enchantment with the cubed radish between them and the tiny mounted TV playing daytime soaps.

“So. How is the exchange program? Glamorous?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Hasn’t been very long.” Three weeks since her arrival and here she is already, wilting in front of her ex-boyfriend. Four weeks would have been better, or never. But Ash does not have the restraint for never.

“Made any friends?”

“Some. It’s not that easy.”

“The plight of international students everywhere,” he says with a sigh.

“Oh, bite me. You can’t so much as round a corner on campus without somebody throwing rose petals at your feet.”

He laughs, chin dipped but black eyes peering up. He points his cherry-tipped chopsticks at her. “Flattery will get you nowhere.” She’ll remember this smile later, at home, in the dark sliver of her room. It will hurt.

Couples fill the other booths around them. Most melt over their partner’s shoulders, toeing the boundary of culturally acceptable PDA. Their tables are piled high with containers of white rice ringed in condensation, japchae glossy with sesame oil and julienned peppers, radish kimchi, vacuum-sealed cream buns. Rations of home ensnared in Tupperware.

“And you?” she coughs, as if to clear her nosiness. “Hanging in there?”

His expression shutters. “Conscription is less fun than college, if that’s what you mean.”

She avoids the urge to study his uniform, the black embroidery twisting his name into a welt on his breast pocket. “Everyone misses you, by the way, at school. They say ‘hi.’”

“Like it would kill them to call and tell me themselves.” He gently nudges her foot with his under the table, which is unfair, since the last time that happened they were 7,000 miles away from here, kissing in their dorm lounge.

“It is,” he says, “good to see you.” That new opaque tone he’s been wielding against her.

“Yeah. It’s good to see you, too.”

She dares to offer her hand. He sips from his water glass instead.

To see her friends, Ash must drink. So she drinks.

Tonight they are at Convenience Store Bar, as they call it. Only a third of the group, Ash included, can read and speak Korean. English nicknames for their alcoholic haunts must suffice for the rest. Self-Service Bar and Free Popcorn Bar and Cabin Bar, Red Bar, Happy-Hour-Shots Bar, Bullseye Bar, Arcade Bar.

Convenience Store Bar is in the basement of a 닭갈비 place, so the air is heavy with the peppered caramel of gochujang painted over seared chicken thighs, the syrup-and-yeast funk of frothy beer. Wire racks of chip bags carve a path to the checkout counter where the Europeans buy bottled green soju. Ash doesn’t like to think of her European friends as a monolith—they look nothing alike—but she doesn’t like most of her thoughts. The Europeans tease her, too, jokes about Trump and buttermilk ranch and school shootings. Par for the course.

Everywhere, the bar is lit up like a sitcom set: quirky and grimy, packed with friend groups that are too busy with their own fun to worry about what Ash is doing. Sitting in the huddle, she feels like a child on Thanksgiving surrounded by cousins. Their favorite flavors glint across the low plastic tabletops: pomegranate and green grape and the nebulous “fresh,” which they spear with Melona pops and stir until a lime cream forms. In the bathroom, a very clean bidet.

They drink for two or three hours. No one is counting. She wins a round of hearts and assigns shots as punishments. They are swallowed like gifts.

At the club, she dances with Brooks, also American, who quickly adopted her into friendship during orientation. They dance directly against the glass barricading the DJ from the crowd. The red and purple wash of the club lights tint Brooks’s black skin with a bejeweled glow. When he looks at her dancing—when he looks at her ever—his gaze is warm and absent of judgment. Not even her mother, whom she thinks of as her best friend, looks at Ash that way.

The Europeans alternate smoking outside and twirling Ash on the dance floor, drenching her boots with spilled vodka sodas, gripping her wrist too hard. Her buzz blurs the faces of surrounding strangers, and she is free to imagine how the anonymous might want her.

Brooks throws his ass against her and she catches it, laughing. The crowd splinters and makes room. Some cheer, some cringe. Let them watch, she thinks, and shuts her eyes.

If a sorority girl could shapeshift into a box, that box would be Ash’s dorm. Everything is so skinny and blonde: the mirrored twin beds, the dresser, the floors. Ash wonders if she is allowed to make fun of white girls as a white girl. She is not above friendly fire, she decides.

The only spot of color in the room is the two green suitcases Ash borrowed from her mother to fly across the globe. That and Mackenzie’s collage of Korean boy band posters.

Ash has never met someone so frivolous, but here is Mackenzie with her archive of K-pop paraphernalia, her piggy bank Pell Grants, her squished boxes of McNuggets. At present, she is packing again, her freshly dyed bangs smudging a pink ring on her sweaty, butter-yellow temples. This new life (what is the threshold for a life? one month? two?) is so full of surprises.

“Off to Taipei?” Ash asks, belly-down on her bed, elbows brushing against her millionth flashcard.

“Nope—Shanghai tonight. Then Taipei, then Bangkok. I’ll be back at, like, 3 a.m. on Thursday, so don’t wait up.” She digs through the receipts and wrinkled T-shirts piled between their bunks. Out she pulls a robust plastic stick with a neon green bulb at the end. Not a vibrator, tragically: a concert light stick. She ponders its girth. “Hey, do you think this counts as a weapon? Like, hypothetically, if you were an air marshal, would you arrest me?”

“I don’t know. Could you kill someone with it?”

Mackenzie slams the stick onto the crown of her head like a hammer. Ash flinches at how loud the sound is. Mackenzie shrugs, appraising it. “Maybe if I hit someone really hard.”

“Isn’t Bangkok where BamBam is from?” Ash hates that she knows these things now, by proxy.

“Oh my god, yes, and we scored reservations at his mom’s cafe. I’m going to meet the woman my fav came out of.” Ash secretly loves to relish in Mackenzie’s bizarre fanaticism. It soothes her the way reality TV does, the comfort of witnessing someone else be gauche.

“Aren’t they playing in Seoul soon?” Ash asks, poking.

“Duh. In the fucking Sky Dome. I splurged on floor seats and if I don’t feel their sweat on my face, I will literally kill myself.”

“Fingers crossed,” Ash says.

“It’s going to be the best day of my life,” Mackenzie says, more to herself than aloud. She kicks a pile of clothes aside on her way to Ash’s bed. “I gotta go. Can you type the word for airport into KakaoMap again?”

“Gong-hang.” She exaggerates each syllable, displaying the Hangul for them both.

“My hero,” Mackenzie drawls. Ash spots the accompanying eye roll, but ignores it.

The dining hall reminds Ash of a tiny Golden Corral. The display is buffet-style, cheap and hearty fare in silver chafing trays. Mostly Korean dishes she loves. Other stuff not so much. A pile of noodles with tangerine meat—a bastardized spaghetti? A puddle of steaming green leaves. Brooks prods the verdurous mass with serving tongs. “Girl, is this spinach?”

Ash, galvanized, turns to a lunch lady. “잠시만요. 시금치 아니죠?”

The lunch lady tugs her hairnet, pitiful, except all of the pity is for Ash. She whispers as if she’s worried the other students will hear her correction. “아니요. 시금치 아니거든요.” She names the food after, a word Ash can’t quite capture.

She bows to the woman anyway, scoops a pile onto her and Brooks’s trays. It’s all right, she tells herself, people make mistakes and so can she.

She eats the mystery vegetable. She eats every last leaf.

Later that afternoon, in her bed, an email finds Ash with a headache.

She gathers her flashcards and throws them in the air. A blizzard of taunting rectangles.

방법

                (시간이) 지나다

      (으)ㄹ 걸 그랬어요

                            밤새

                    끝내다

       앞으로

                      ~ㄴ/는다니까

              ~더라도

                               반성하다

     혼자

She grabs her dorm-issued pillow, buries her face into the musk of all the others who came before her, smothers her frustrated tears until sleep finds her.

She dreams of a scene on loop: wet, green slop sinking into the trash can with the scrape of her chopsticks, a grave presence behind her. She is too afraid to look, but she can feel the lunch lady seething behind her, watching Ash and her waste, hot angry breath enveloping her like a cocoon.

Lounging in Haneul Gongwon, overlooking the river, Brooks and Ash show the sun their eyelids. A clear, tepid April has come. With it, cherry blossom season. The park hemorrhages with people conducting photo shoots in pale ironed slacks and thin waffle-knit sweaters.

The Europeans roam in search of beer. To pass the time, Brooks and Ash bitch: Seoul is so compact, so busy. Every dog is a sculpted bichon frisé or a sweatered toy poodle—where are the mutts, the yard dogs? Where are the yards? They miss the distinction between salty and sweet. Clothing dryers, full-sized bath towels, brown breads with rustic crusts, when holding doors for people coming or going earned them appreciation instead of enmity. They miss, oddly, the drone of rush hour from behind the wheel. Vast, technicolor grocery stores.

This is what being twenty is all about, Ash thinks: complaining under sunshine.

Returning with bottles of Cass, the Europeans tack on: endless iterations of flavored milk contrasted by the total absence of good cheese, no shoes indoors, no city greenery. Mostly, they hate the constant reminder of their otherness reflected by ogling strangers. The white Europeans hum in agreement. Brooks and the others sip their beers.

“Probably doesn’t help that we only talk to each other. In English,” Hugo, Syrian-French, muses, mesmerized by a nearby group of skaters grinding a rail.

Ash breaks the new tension with a melodramatic reading of her language exchange rejection email. The air sweetens with relief; better not to meddle with the delicate chemistry on which their group dynamic relies.

Brooks props his head on his fist. “We could all probably afford to think bigger.”

“Meaning?” Hugo says, still focused on the skaters.

“We sound like a bunch of Little Orphan Annies. You—” he points at Ash. “You have something people want.”

She is game. “Very good looks.”

“You are a white girl who speaks Korean.” Brooks shakes her shoulders. “You are like a walking, talking wet dream for every guy around. Wake up, my friend!”

“Overgeneralizing much?”

“He has a point,” someone chimes in between bites of battered corn dog.

Brooks wiggles his eyebrows. “You wanna practice real Korean? Get a dating app. Flirt, you freak.” The rest of the group bubbles with snaps and muffled cheers.

Ash knows Brooks manages well enough with Grindr and zero language skills, though he doesn’t divulge and she doesn’t press, especially not in front of the others.

“I don’t know how to flirt in Korean. The skills don’t exactly transfer.” Her protests are good-naturedly booed away.

“And how,” Brooks says, “do you expect to learn?”

Mackenzie returns bearing gifts both kitschy and culturally appropriative. Already the rings she bought are staining her fingers with teal halos, wearing down to their copper cores.

She showcases her haul: an intricate eraser of a panda drinking bubble tea, a paper fan freckled with lily pads, a signed photo of Mackenzie and BamBam’s mom, flanked by a shrine to the aforementioned popstar, whose melanin wails behind a lacquer of pale foundation. The man has been possessed by a sexy, gyrating ghost, Ash thinks.

“And look what I scored on clearance at Ewha station,” she announces to Ash. Ash, who has been more or less nailed to her bed, who has been deleting and redownloading the Tinder app over and over without bothering to open an account.

Mackenzie models a too-small baseball cap. The baby blue fabric dents her greasy bangs. Chunky embroidery shouts from the front: ♡외국인♡

“Holy shit,” Ash says, her nonchalance abandoned. “Do you know what that says?”

“‘Foreigner,’ duh.” Mackenzie pivots into a haphazard vogue.

“And you bought it anyway?”

Mackenzie stops posing. “What do you mean?”

She cannot believe how badly she wants to jump and snatch the hat from Mackenzie’s head, to burn it like conservatives burn books. “Isn’t the point to, like, assimilate? Disappear into the culture?”

Mackenzie’s laugh is hollow. “You can’t be serious.”

“Would it kill you to blend in? I just don’t get why you insist on being so loud about it.”

Mackenzie approaches the window to take selfies in direct sunlight. She pulls her boobs farther up in her bra. “Get real, Ash. Like we could blend in if we wanted to,” she says between clicks.

Bobby is—grumpy? Upset? She can’t read him anymore, in any language.

They stall beneath the café overhang. Fat raindrops drip over the edge. They have spent the afternoon mutually brooding. Bobby for legitimate army reasons, Ash for the more inane.

The night before, she agonized over the curation of her dating profile. Tinder had asked what she was interested in, as if she knew. After some cursory swipes, she decided girls were too beautiful, toggled back to men, and cemented her status as a bad burgeoning queer. She wasn’t planning to meet anyone, just talk, practice vocabulary. She didn’t want to use people, least of all girls—but still, if something happened? She could never eat pussy with this knot in her gut.

And the bio. How to be cool in a foreign language? This world was opaque to her. She settled for, 한국어/영어 괜찮다. Korean/English is fine. By morning, hundreds of digital, bobble-headed men bombarded her matches. She swiped numbly and efficiently on the bus ride over as if playing Tetris or shooting heroin.

Now her phone won’t stop buzzing. The risk of Bobby noticing the screen paralyzes her from silencing it. Though beneath the paralysis there is a daydream of his reaction, taunting her—where, confronted by the prospect of losing her, really losing her, he declares their mutual heartache to be something ridiculous. Where he acknowledges this pull between them, this relentless gravity that demands orbit, and yields. Where he says, sure, before us is a canyon with no bridge and no bottom, but at least when we jump, we jump together, and on the way down perhaps we’ll discover there is a bottom after all, a secret sparkling river where we might swim for a while.

He will never do this, she knows. He is too risk-averse, too stifled, too whatever. And she, well, she is pathetic. She is a little earthworm struggling to breach the flooded ground.

In the quiet, Bobby lights a cigarette. Her brain does backflips. The buzzcut, the combat boots, the hardy belt buckle, now smoking. Who is this person?

“I smoke now, by the way. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“What a quirky new hobby. Congrats.” She kicks a pebble into the street.

“I’ll quit when I’m back in the fall.”

“It’s famously hard to quit, you know.”

He blows a stream away from her. The tendons in his jaw flex.

“This thing you’re doing—” he nods toward their gray surroundings, “—this charade? This is my life, in case you forgot. I don’t get to just wake up and leave.”

On his left cheek, his beauty mark smolders black, like a hole newly dug. Its matching dyad lay on her right cheek. When they kiss—when they used to kiss—their beauty marks touch. Ash previously thought of it as kismet. Now she wants to wipe it from his skin like dirt.

Bobby twists the cigarette to rubble under his boot. He clears his throat but doesn’t look at her. He gestures toward the crushed thing.

“It’s the only excuse they’ll accept if I try to take a break during work,” he says.

She leaves not long after.

Ash breaks her own rules.

His name is Noah. He lived in Australia for the last twelve years, but as a son of Korea—sarcasm dazzlingly thick—he must heed conscription or lose citizenship. He misses Australia and his friends. Americans and Europeans are better than nothing, he writes, punctuated with a winky face. More truth than joke, she suspects. Not that that stops her.

He bartends in Myeongdong and begs her to bring friends. Everyone gets chummy over free drinks. They stay until close and help him re-rack glasses. When it’s just the two of them, she notices him staring at the others, huddled by the door.

“I almost gave up, you know,” he says to her, sounding very far away. She does know, which terrifies her.

She doesn’t intend to sleep with him. When she does, the condom breaks.

Plan B isn’t sold over the counter in Korea. He sobs on the edge of the bed while she watches, dry and unfeeling. This is not my body, she tells herself, this is not my life. But it is.

He tries to hold her hand while translating the lecture from the OBGYN. She is a severe woman who clutches Ash’s prescription between claw-like nails. Ash phases out of the room, switching between seeing the world through her eyes and watching from above, but Noah won’t stop petting her back, anchoring her to this place, this skin.

“She says these are bad for your liver. You should be more careful.” He tears up.

“Trust me. No one wants to be here less than me,” she says, staring at the doctor dead-on, disregarding all manners. Noah improvises politer words and wipes his runny nose with his sleeve.

Never again, Ash tells herself. She tries so hard to mean it.

To convince her university to fully fund a semester abroad, Ash played many tedious rounds of The Why Game. Questions like: Why her? Why Seoul? Why now, in 2017 of all years, with nuclear proliferation in the North plastered all over CNN—she could just as well study in London or Amsterdam or Prague, couldn’t she? Why not learn a more economical language, like Spanish or Chinese? Why South Korea? the committee asked, as if it were a landfill. She spoke the perfunctory buzzwords, felt the gel in her hair harden with passing minutes.

In the acceptance email, they provided ample pre-departure checklists: paperwork for the Embassy, financial aid forms, and a psych evaluation. Protocol, they insisted.

Slumped in the psychiatrist’s lobby, Ash played The Why Game again, now in her head. She churned out pernicious fantasies: on the psychiatrist’s desk, she imagined a heaping questionnaire that spoke life into her nightmares. Featuring questions like: Was this trip really, truly about cultural exchange? Was she really there to learn? Or was it about another thing entirely: her ex-boyfriend, perhaps?

Was she an idiot? Did she really believe Bobby still wanted her in Seoul?

Did she really believe that anyone wanted her anywhere?

What was there to “exchange,” here, after all? What, possibly, could she have on offer?

Or really, honestly, was it even worse? Inside of Ash, was there a bitter and inexplicable fruit waiting to be picked, dangling from the white-barked birch of her ancestors, dripping juice dark enough to be blood? Was this about manifest destiny? Was this about fetishism?

Doesn’t Ash know that at her core she is rotten—how can anyone be so unknown to themselves? She should know better. The world already knew who Ash was; they had known for a long time, so could she stop messing around and get in line already? It was time, finally, to wake up and face her ugly self.

She told the psychiatrist she struggled with anxiety sometimes. He prescribed her a beta blocker, stamped the paper, and sent her on her way.

Months overdue, Ash learns her political professor has a cruel reputation. She catches word upwind—“이 교수님은 너무 갑질을 해서,” complain two friends in a lower aisle—after details for the major group project is announced. The presentations must be conducted in English. The assigned groups are limited to one exchange student each to, allegedly, preclude unfair advantages. Let’s see if you can keep up, the professor says, surveying the rows of Korean students. Ash and the few like her go unaddressed.

At their first meeting, Ash arrives last to a silent study room. Her three group members occupy the cardinal points of a long navy table; she appears to be West. They return her shallow bow. Settled in her seat, everyone stares at their screens rather than one another.

Ash counts the silent minutes: eight.

Etiquette is poison, she thinks, etiquette is the social barbed wire encircling humanity, and she is so tired of being an alien on the other side of the fence.

“So,” she clears her throat, “should we start?” The group sighs as if she had pressed a gun to their temples and only just dropped it.

She asks questions, she answers, she delegates, hating herself but succumbing to the compulsion to control. The two male group members bolt as soon as they finish. The third, a girl in a flowy black dress, lingers.

“Are you from there?” she asks, pointing to a sticker on Ash’s water bottle of the Atlanta skyline. “I lived there a long time ago.”

“Really? Small world.”

“Yeah, but we left when I was in middle school.” The highlight on the girl’s lower lid shimmers as she tilts her head, spellbound by the sticker, like she is between memories.

“I’ve seen you in class,” she continues. “I always thought you were Dutch or something.”

Ash snorts. “Why’s that?”

“You don’t talk much. And I’ve never seen you wear jeans.” This time they both laugh.

They wander from the library into a coffee shop, from the coffee shop to a picnic table. The girl’s English name is Miriam—too biblical, she complains—and confirms many of Ash’s suspicions. Their professor used to teach Korean history at Columbia, the running hypothesis for his bad attitude. The guys in their group are strangers to her, too, a tricky dynamic that foreign students sometimes make more awkward with their tendencies to speak English too fast. They can be unpredictable, bossy, hard to decipher. Better to sit back and monitor their body language for clues, like a bear slumped on a hiking path.

“It’s cool that you came all the way here. Brave,” Miriam says.

“I don’t feel like much of either.”

Miriam swishes her coffee around her mouth and shrugs. “Well. Take it from someone who’s been in your shoes.”

“Would you ever want to go back?”

“To the US? I’ve been trying. Visa stuff. Complicated.”

“Oh, shit. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She smiles and her nose crinkles. “That’s the other thing with foreign students. Easy to envy.”

“Is the US really that much better?” Ash asks, genuinely curious. Pre-conscription, Bobby had been so patriotic. Visit Korea and you’ll see how much better we’ve got it, he had told her, proselytizing and proud. To ask what he thought now would be acid in a wound.

Miriam ponders for a minute. “It’s not that it’s better. It’s just––god, I sound like my parents––maybe it’s as good as it gets?” A ripple passes between them, a spark, one not made of light.

“Let’s hope not,” Ash says. To that Miriam raises her iced Americano, softly taps Ash’s cup in cheers.

Mackenzie wakes Ash in the middle of the night. Her pleas for help are raspy; she doesn’t feel so good.

She peels off her leggings to reveal blotchy, raw flesh, black block letters tattooing GOT7 4EVER down her right thigh. Under Ash’s flashlight beam, the letters are edged with red. A new scab weeps faintly green pus.

The hospital is a white blur. Mackenzie can’t bear to look at the bill, just slaps down her emergency credit card and asks Ash to sign for her. Ash reassures her it’s fine, universal healthcare and all that, but Mackenzie angles stubbornly toward the wall, stewing in her mild fever and shame.

“Happy now?” Her vocal fry is so curdled by exhaustion that Ash nearly mishears.

“Sorry?”

“You’ve been so certain that you’re better than me. Now you’ve proved it.”

“I never told you to go off and get a staph infection. This isn’t about me.”

She peers over her shoulder just enough for Ash to spot her smirk. “Ding, ding, ding.”

Ash, Brooks, and the Europeans arrive in mountainous Gangwon-do after a drowsy four-hour bus ride. By the time they unpack in their hostel, it is dark. A single BBQ place is left open. The owner, an ahjumma in a purple velour set with HOPE! bedazzled across her chest, enthusiastically seats all ten of them. The other patrons, mostly middle-aged men sipping soju, turn away from their meals to watch her group cut and grill meat, pass banchan around.

One man approaches Ash. He picks up a lock of her hair, studies the ginger strand the way a child might a ladybug. He mutters words Ash can’t make out, then pats it back into place. The man reaches for Brooks, about to twist his dreads between thumb and forefinger, but retreats after Brooks bears a disarming grin.

They bumble into Seoraksan National Park early in the morning. At its center, the largest Buddha statue any of them have ever seen. It is at least sixty feet high (sixty-two, Brooks confirms, phone slack in his hand) and represents a wish for Korean reunification, according to another plaque on the ground. Streaks of grey, green, and rust fall across its smooth face and stocky body. At its base, visitors light long pearly candles and place them into glass cabinets.

Ash has never seen the Eiffel Tower or One World Trade Center or Taj Mahal or any architecture in any place that might be deemed “great.” To look at the Buddha is to push a soft cake slice of herself into its mudra palm. To look at the Buddha is to feel herself be tenderly eaten. She blames her tears on the wind.

Age is truly but a number, she learns: the ahjummas and ahjussis kick their asses on the ascent. Their semi-transparent visors cast green arcs over their noses, neon athleisure swishing as they climb. Along with the routine gawking, some of them shout out words of encouragement or slap the Europeans on their backs.

When they finally reach the peak, a line forms in front of them. The elderly all want their picture taken with Ash and her friends as if they are celebrities. One man shakes hands with Brooks and says he has never met a real-life Black person before. At Brooks’s request, Ash translates. He laughs with the man, though Ash senses something else there, ringing at a frequency she can’t hear.

In return for the pictures, the ahjummas and ahjussis offers rolls of kimbap. One woman gives them an entire bottle of makgeolli. It’s tradition to celebrate with shots, she says, so they do. Again, she is reminded of holidays with extended family, pinched cheeks and buttery casseroles.

On the descent, Ash daydreams about the photos with the strangers. She wonders if they will be printed, framed, immortalized on a shelf. If they will serve as props when, grandparent to grandchild, a story is spun.

Bobby is discharged a month before her semester ends. He offers a lukewarm proposal for celebratory pancakes. He claims he wants to see her one more time before they return to Atlanta, to school, to the real world and its consequences.

The breakfast is typical: two people in emotional straitjackets trying to hug.

Over the last dregs of coffee, he hedges an apology: when they last saw each other, earlier the same morning, news broke that one of the newest recruits in the platoon, on break for the first time since basic training, had hung himself. Soldiers were not excused to attend the funeral. Tending to their duties, they were told, was the best way to honor his memory.

Ridiculously, she goes misty, but Bobby doesn’t miss a beat. He grabs her hand to gently push back her cuticles with his thumbnail, a gesture of comfort between them gone so long unrepeated that she is startled by the reminder of its existence. It’s okay, he whispers over their table like a spell. He made it. It’s over. She knows the words aren’t for her, not really.

At checkout, she breezes through the cashier’s questions and pays before he can translate.

“You’ve gotten much better,” he says, walking her to her bus stop.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“So unlike you, not wanting to show off.”

She rolls her eyes. “I have learned some slang, actually.”

“Yeah?”

She thinks for a second. “안물 안궁.” I didn’t ask, so I don’t care—more or less. He lets out the sort of laugh she hasn’t heard in a long time.

“What’s so funny?”

“I never thought I would hear you say something like that. In my language.” She doesn’t tell him who taught her this slang or how she knew them. He doesn’t ask.

At the bus stop, they say goodbye and make vague promises to catch up in the fall. Behind him, the sun fades, a floating ball of light at his shoulder. This is how she imagines their hope: a tangible, sacred, nymphal creature whose allegiance she can never win. For the first time, watching him disappear into the city, she entertains the idea that she doesn’t have to.

The day is unspecial. Its only rare quality being that she spends the time alone, running errands, strolling to the beat in her headphones. When her phone dies on the train, she reads the map comfortably: only four stations until hers.

Crossing the Dangsan bridge, the day has cracked open its yolk yellow sun into the blue bowl of the sky. The skin of the Han River dimples with sunlight.

Ash does not think of Bobby or her friends. She is too busy squinting her eyes, imagining that she can spot the curve of the Earth through the pastel glow, that she can see home hovering on the same line of latitude a hemisphere away.

There it is, she thinks: there is the world. It is wide open. It is glittering.