Chapter Text
It's a new school year, and they're juniors now. Juniors. Megan still can't quite wrap her head around it.
She walks through the front doors full of dreams and hopes—the dumb, shiny kind that only the first day of school can feed. This year is going to be different. She can feel it in her bones.
She'd spent the entire summer practically constructing a whole new personality from scratch. Tried to hit the gym more often (turns out treadmills personally hate her). Got semi-serious about her skincare routine—toner, serum, the works; she's basically a walking Sephora ad at this point. Dropped way too much money on a new wardrobe with Lara and Manon dragged along as her unwilling consultants.
Unwilling because they'd spent ninety percent of the time roasting her.
"Megan, oh my god, not that one—"
"Babe, no, the vibes are off—"
"Are you trying to dress like my aunt? Be honest."
Still, she'd milked their actual fashion sense for everything it was worth, and the results? Chef's kiss. She looks good. She knows she looks good.
Megan adjusts the strap of her backpack and lets out a slow breath as the hallway fills with the familiar chaos—lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking against tile, somebody already screaming somebody else's name across the corridor. She's ready. This is the year. The year she stops being background noise and finally starts being the main character of her own story.
And—if God is real and loves her even a little—the year she finally, finally asks out Emily.
Emily. The prettiest girl in school. The girl with the half-smile that makes Megan forget her own last name. The girl Megan somehow, miraculously, started getting along with at the tail end of sophomore year, when their history teacher paired them up for a project neither of them wanted to do.
That project had ended up being the best six weeks of Megan's life. They'd traded playlists in the margins of their notes. Stayed late in the library, sharing earbuds while squinting at primary sources. Emily had laughed at Megan's stupid jokes—actually laughed, head thrown back, the whole nine yards—and Megan had walked home every single night convinced she was floating two inches off the sidewalk.
She doesn't really know what they are now. Friends, probably. Maybe more, if she plays her cards right.
Megan glances down the hallway, chin up, lip gloss freshly applied.
New year. New Megan. New everything.
Yeah. She's got this.
Her locker is exactly where she left it in June—third row from the end, second from the top, dent on the lower left corner from that one time Manon kicked it during a particularly heated argument about whose turn it was to pick the movie. Megan spins the dial, muscle memory taking over, and the lock clicks open on the first try.
A good sign. She's choosing to believe it's a good sign.
She's just hooked her backpack onto the inside hook, just started rehearsing in her head how she's going to casually—and she means casually—stroll up to Emily and say something effortlessly charming, when—
"Skiendiel."
Megan's spine locks up like somebody just dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt.
No.
No, no, no, not on day one—
She closes her eyes. Counts to three. Plasters on the kind of smile reserved for dentists and grandparents and turns around.
"Jeung."
Yoonchae is leaning against the locker next to hers like she owns the building. Arms crossed. One eyebrow up. Her hair is shorter than it was in May, just brushing her shoulders now, and she's wearing a black tee tucked into baggy jeans, a single silver hoop in each ear, and the most insufferable smirk Megan has ever had the displeasure of witnessing.
"Cute outfit," Yoonchae says. Her voice is flat. Unreadable. The kind of compliment that could double as an insult depending on how you angled the light.
Megan grips the edge of her locker door. "Thanks. I'd say the same but I try not to lie before nine A.M."
"Brutal." Yoonchae doesn't even flinch. If anything, her smirk deepens. "New personality already? What'd you do, watch a TED Talk over the summer?"
God. This girl.
This girl with her stupid silver earrings and her stupid bored expression and her stupid ability to clock Megan from across a parking lot. Three months. Megan had three whole months of peace. Three months of not being looked at like she was a particularly underwhelming science experiment.
And here Yoonchae is. Day one. Locker 47. Ruining everything.
"Why are you even talking to me?" Megan finally manages, slamming her locker shut a little harder than necessary. "Don't you have anyone else to torment? A small woodland animal, maybe."
"Tragically, no." Yoonchae pushes off the locker, slow and unbothered. "Homeroom assignments came out. We're in the same one."
Megan's stomach drops directly into her shoes.
"You're lying."
"I really wish I were."
"For how long—"
"All year." Yoonchae tilts her head, studying Megan with that infuriating little half-smile. "I checked twice. Hoped it was a clerical error. No such luck."
All year.
Megan stares at her. Yoonchae stares back. Somewhere down the hall somebody screams about a calculator, and Megan considers, briefly but genuinely, sprinting through the nearest fire exit.
And then—
And then she sees her.
Across the hall, past the river of backpacks and shoulders and laughter, in a yellow sweater that has no business being that yellow on a person—
Emily.
Emily, who is laughing at something somebody said. Emily, whose hair is in two braids today, like she's wandered out of a movie about a girl who definitely deserves better. Emily, who looks up. Right at Megan. And waves.
Megan's brain short-circuits.
Every line she'd practiced. Every casual one-liner. Every effortlessly charming opener. Gone. Vaporized. RIP.
"Oh," Yoonchae says, very quietly, beside her. "Oh. That's what's happening."
"Shut up," Megan hisses, without looking at her.
"You're into Chamberlin?"
"I said shut up—"
"Wow." Yoonchae's voice has gone strange. Not cruel, exactly. Just... quieter. Flatter. Like somebody has unplugged something inside her. "Okay. Cool. Good luck with that, Skiendiel."
She pushes off Megan's locker and walks away before Megan can come up with a single comeback, leaving behind only the faint smell of citrus and the deeply unsettling sense that something just happened that Megan didn't fully understand.
Emily is closer now. Five lockers away. Three.
Get it together, Skiendiel.
Megan smiles. Lifts a hand. Tries to remember what words are.
And in the very back of her mind, in a place she absolutely refuses to examine right now, she is still thinking about the look on Yoonchae's face when she walked away.
Lunch hits like a mercy.
Megan drops her tray onto their usual table—back corner, by the window, far enough from the vending machines that you can actually hear yourself think—and collapses into her seat with the dramatic exhaustion of a woman who has survived a war.
"Rough morning?" Lara asks, not looking up from her phone.
"You have no idea."
"Let me guess." Manon is already unwrapping a granola bar, eyes glittering with the specific kind of glee she reserves for other people's suffering. "Jeung?"
Megan freezes with her fork halfway to her mouth.
"How do you—"
"Babe." Lara finally looks up, deadpan. "We have eyes."
"And ears," Manon adds.
"And we passed your locker this morning."
"And saw the entire exchange."
"And honestly?" Manon takes a bite of her granola bar and chews thoughtfully. "It was so embarrassing I had to keep walking. For my own dignity."
"Your dignity?" Megan stabs at her salad. "I'm the victim here."
Lara snorts. "Oh, you're the victim."
"You. The victim."
"Of Jeung Yoonchae."
"The girl who, may I remind you—"
"Lara, don't—"
"—couldn't even say hello properly when she got here."
"LARA."
Manon nearly chokes on her granola bar laughing. Lara is grinning now, full teeth, the kind of grin that means she is about to be absolutely insufferable for at least the next fifteen minutes.
"Sophomore year," Lara says, like she's narrating a documentary. "September. The new girl from Korea. Quiet. Polite. Knew maybe ten words of English, all of them very carefully memorized. And our girl Megan—"
"I will pay you to stop."
"—our girl Megan decides, on day three, that this poor jet-lagged child is her nemesis."
"She bumped into me—"
"She said sorry, Megan." Manon is wheezing. "She said sorry like fifteen times. With the little bow and everything."
"It was the way she said it—"
"It was the only way she COULD say it!"
"She didn't speak English!" Lara is doubled over now, slapping the table. "You picked a fight with a girl who literally could not fight back!"
"I wasn't picking a fight, I was—"
"You called her rude." Manon wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. "To her face. In front of the entire chemistry class. And she just stood there, blinking at you, like—" Manon mimes a soft, polite, deeply confused expression. "—because she did not understand a single word coming out of your mouth."
"Oh my god," Megan mutters, sinking lower in her seat. "Oh my god."
"And then—" Lara is gasping for air now. "And THEN, the best part, the absolute best part—"
"Lara, I swear to—"
"—she went home, presumably to her dictionary, and came back THE NEXT WEEK—"
"Please—"
"—and absolutely destroyed you. In English. In front of everyone."
"It wasn't—"
"She called you predictable." Manon is glowing. "In her second language. Megan. Her second language."
"She'd been practicing!"
"Yeah," Lara says, suddenly soft, suddenly looking at Megan with something that is almost—but not quite—pity. "She had."
Megan stops stabbing her salad.
She doesn't know why that sentence sits weird in her chest. Doesn't know why her brain immediately produces, unprompted, the memory of Yoonchae's face that first month—the careful, watchful quiet of someone listening so hard it hurt. Doesn't know why she's suddenly remembering that Yoonchae had carried around a little notebook for the first semester. The kind with the spiral on top. She'd write things down in it sometimes, in the middle of class, biting the cap of her pen.
Megan had assumed, at the time, that she was taking notes.
It's only now, two years later, in the cafeteria, with a half-eaten salad in front of her, that it occurs to Megan she might have been writing down words.
"Anyway," Manon says brightly, oblivious, "the point is, you started a two-year war with a girl who literally had to learn an entire language to insult you back, and I think that says something deeply unwell about you as a person."
"I love that for us, though," Lara adds. "Keeps things interesting."
"You guys are the worst."
"We're your best friends."
"Those things aren't mutually exclusive."
Megan pushes her salad around. The cafeteria hums around them—trays clattering, somebody laughing too loud near the door, the low background roar of three hundred teenagers all talking at once. Across the room, she can see Emily at a different table, leaning into a story somebody's telling, the yellow sweater bright as a highlighter even from here.
Megan should be looking at her.
Megan is trying to look at her.
But her eyes keep sliding, against her will, toward the far corner of the cafeteria. Where Yoonchae is sitting with Daniela and Sophia, picking at a sandwich, headphones around her neck, saying something that makes Daniela laugh so hard she has to put her drink down.
Yoonchae isn't looking back. Hasn't looked once.
Megan tells herself she's relieved.
She isn't sure she believes it.
"Earth to Skiendiel." Lara waves a hand in front of her face. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The staring-at-Jeung thing."
"I'm not—" Megan whips her head around. "I'm not staring, I was—looking past her. At the vending machine."
"Mhm."
"There's a vending machine right behind her."
"Mhm."
"Manon. Back me up."
Manon, mouth full, points at her own face and shakes her head. Can't talk. Eating.
"I hate it here," Megan announces to the table at large.
"We know, sweetie."
"We know."
And the truly humiliating thing, Megan thinks, as the bell rings and chairs scrape and the cafeteria starts to empty, is that she isn't actually sure anymore what here means.
Unfortunately—tragically, really, in the grand scheme of Megan's carefully laid plans—Emily isn't in her homeroom.
Or any of her classes, as far as Megan can tell from the schedule she's been clutching like a treasure map all morning.
Which means any and all attempts at Operation Sweep Emily Chamberlin Off Her Feet are going to have to happen in the narrow, brutal windows of passing periods, lunch, and—if Megan is feeling particularly bold, which she rarely is—outside of school entirely. A thought that immediately makes her palms sweat.
One crisis at a time.
She slides into a seat near the window, drops her backpack at her feet, and tries to look like someone who has her life together. The classroom is half-full, the AC unit above the whiteboard wheezing valiantly against the late-summer heat, and the teacher is nowhere to be seen.
Megan pulls out her phone, pretends to scroll.
She is, in reality, watching the door.
She tells herself she isn't. She tells herself she's just looking up every time it opens because that's what people do, that's normal classroom behavior, everyone checks the door, it doesn't mean anything—
The door opens.
Yoonchae walks in.
Megan's thumb stops moving on her screen.
Yoonchae pauses just inside the doorway, one hand on the strap of her backpack, and does the thing that Megan has watched her do a hundred times in a hundred classrooms over the last two years: she scans the room. Slow. Deliberate. Like she's mapping something.
And Megan—Megan, who is a fool, Megan, who is apparently incapable of learning—Megan already knows what comes next. She knows it like she knows the dent in her locker, like she knows the lyrics to songs she didn't even mean to memorize. Yoonchae is going to pick a seat near her. Right next to her, or directly behind her, or diagonally across so that every time Megan turns her head she'll catch Yoonchae already looking, that little smirk pre-loaded and ready to fire.
That's the rhythm. That's how it goes. Two years of muscle memory.
Megan even, against her will, shifts her bag a little farther under the desk to make room.
Yoonchae's eyes pass over her.
Don't stop.
Keep moving.
She picks a seat in the front corner. Opposite side of the room. About as far from Megan as the room geometrically allows.
She sits down. Pulls out a notebook. Doesn't look back.
Huh, Megan thinks.
Just—huh.
She stares at the back of Yoonchae's head. At the freshly cut line of her hair against the collar of her black tee. At the way she's already uncapping a pen, already settling in, already acting like Megan Skiendiel is not, and has never been, sitting twenty feet behind her by the window.
Megan blinks.
Looks down at her phone.
Looks back up.
Yoonchae has not turned around.
Yoonchae is not going to turn around. Megan can tell. There's something in the set of her shoulders—something deliberate, something decided—that makes the back of Megan's neck go warm in a way she really does not want to examine.
Okay, she thinks. Okay. Cool. This is good. This is what you wanted, Skiendiel. Peace. Quiet. A whole year of not being insulted before homeroom even starts. Congratulations. Victory.
She tries to feel victorious.
She does not feel victorious.
She feels, instead, oddly weightless. Like someone has cut a string she didn't know she was tied to, and now she's just... drifting. The room feels too big. The window feels too bright. Her phone screen has gone dark and she hasn't noticed.
She should be relieved.
She is trying to be relieved.
Across the room, Yoonchae leans forward to say something to the kid next to her—Megan can't see who, just a shoulder and a sleeve—and laughs at whatever response she gets. A real laugh. Soft, easy, the kind Megan has, in two years, never been on the receiving end of.
Megan looks back down at her phone.
The screen is still dark.
She doesn't turn it on.
The teacher walks in, finally, a coffee mug in one hand and a stack of papers in the other, launching immediately into a speech about expectations and syllabi and how junior year is going to matter, people, college is closer than you think. Megan hears approximately one out of every three words.
The rest of her brain is busy doing math.
Twenty feet. That's the distance. Twenty feet of scuffed linoleum and rows of desks and other people's backpacks, between her seat by the window and Yoonchae's seat in the front corner.
It might as well be a canyon.
Good, Megan tells herself, firmly, for the third or fourth time. This is good.
Yoonchae doesn't turn around once.
Not when the teacher cracks a bad joke. Not when somebody's phone goes off in a backpack and gets confiscated. Not when the kid behind Megan loudly drops a binder and the whole class jumps.
Not once.
And Megan—Megan who came in this morning with a new wardrobe and a new attitude and a five-step plan to win over the prettiest girl in school—spends forty-seven minutes of homeroom staring at the back of Jeung Yoonchae's head, and trying, with increasing desperation, to figure out why she can't look away.
The bell finally—finally—rings.
Megan is on her feet before the sound has even finished, shoving her notebook into her bag with the kind of urgency usually reserved for fire drills. She doesn't look at the front corner of the room. She refuses. Absolutely not. Not happening.
She is out the door before half the class has even stood up.
The hallway air feels like a balm against her face. She lets out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding for the better part of an hour, weaving through the crowd toward the parking lot with her head down and her jaw set.
Why, she thinks, half a question and half an accusation aimed at her own brain. Why is this bothering you so much.
Yoonchae ignored her. So what. That's, like—objectively—a win. That's the dream. That's literally what Megan has been muttering under her breath after every chemistry class for two years. I wish she would just leave me alone. Well. Congratulations, universe. Wish granted. Cash in your prize.
Except now Megan's chest feels weird and her hands feel weird and her whole entire day feels weird, and she doesn't want to spend the rest of the afternoon doing this. Whatever this is. She is not going to think about Jeung Yoonchae for one more second. She is going to find Lara and Manon, she is going to get into Manon's beat-up little Honda, and she is going to drive home with the windows down and the music too loud, and she is going to forget any of this ever happened.
That's the plan. It's a great plan. It's airtight.
She pushes through the side doors into the parking lot.
The afternoon light is doing that thing it does in early September—too gold, too soft, like the universe is trying to convince everyone summer isn't actually over. The asphalt is still radiating heat. Somewhere two rows over, somebody's playing music out of their car speakers, something with a heavy bassline that Megan can feel more than hear.
She finds Manon's Honda exactly where it always is—third row, second spot from the end, the little dent on the passenger door that Manon swears she's going to get fixed and absolutely never will.
No Lara. No Manon.
Of course.
Megan leans back against the warm metal of the car, pulls out her phone, and tries to look like a person who is fine and normal and not at all having a strange emotional afternoon about absolutely nothing.
She scrolls. She doesn't read any of it.
Two minutes pass. Maybe three.
And then she hears it—Lara's laugh first, sharp and unmistakable, cutting across the parking lot like it always does, followed by Manon's lower one a beat behind. Megan looks up, half-smiling already, ready to wave them over—
And freezes.
Lara and Manon are walking toward her, yes. But they're not alone. They're trailing behind them the easy, looping path of a goodbye-in-progress, throwing waves over their shoulders at—
Sophia. And Daniela.
And, half a step behind, hands in the pockets of those stupid baggy jeans, the corner of her mouth lifted in something that on anyone else Megan would have to call a smile—
Yoonchae.
Megan's spine goes very, very straight.
Excuse me, her brain says. Out loud, almost. Excuse. Me.
Lara says something Megan can't hear from this distance and Sophia laughs, and then Daniela says something back and Yoonchae laughs—a quiet one, more like an exhale, but a laugh, an actual laugh, in broad daylight, in the school parking lot, three cars away from Megan Skiendiel—and Megan feels something hot and sharp and unwelcome twist behind her ribs.
What.
What.
What are her best friends doing fraternizing with the enemy. What is this betrayal. What fresh hell is this first day of junior year cooking up for her.
Sure, fine, fine, Sophia and Daniela have always seemed—objectively, against Megan's will—pretty nice. Sophia was in her English class and once lent Megan a pen when she forgot hers. Daniela is the kind of person who actually says bless you when strangers sneeze. They're, like, alarmingly likable, which Megan has always found deeply suspicious.
But they're Yoonchae's friends.
Which makes them, by the strict and entirely reasonable logic that has governed Megan's social universe for the past two years, allies of the opposition.
Megan doesn't nod at allies of the opposition. Megan doesn't fraternize with allies of the opposition. Megan doesn't allow her best friends, the only two people contractually obligated to be on her side, to stand in the parking lot in the golden September light, laughing, with allies of the opposition.
And she especially doesn't allow them to do so while Yoonchae is right there, half-smiling at something Lara just said, looking—looking—
Don't, Megan tells herself.
Looking—
Skiendiel, don't.
Looking kind of, sort of, against every law of physics and good taste, a little bit—
—pretty.
Megan whips her gaze down so hard she almost gives herself whiplash and stares, furiously, at her phone screen. Which is dark. Which has been dark for an indeterminate amount of time. Which she now turns on with the intensity of a woman trying to convince an audience of one that she has been deeply, importantly busy this entire time.
The footsteps get closer.
"Hey," Lara calls out, breezy, the way she does when she's about to be insufferable. "Earth to Megan."
Megan does not look up. She is very busy. "Hey."
"You good?"
"Mhm."
"You look—"
"I'm fine."
Manon snorts. Megan can hear the eyebrow raise.
A pause. The kind of pause that means her two best friends are looking at each other over the top of her head and silently agreeing to fully roast her in approximately four seconds.
"Sophia and Daniela are nice," Manon says, mild as anything, the way she says things when she is about to start a war.
"Mm."
"We were just saying hi."
"Cool."
"Yoonchae was there too."
Megan's jaw locks. "Cool."
"She said hi to us."
"That's great for her."
"Megan—"
"Are we going home or not?"
There's another beat. Megan can feel both of them looking at her. She can also feel, even though she refuses to confirm it, that across the parking lot somewhere, in the periphery of her aggressively averted vision, Yoonchae is getting into someone's car. Not looking over. Not checking. Just... leaving. Like a person whose afternoon does not, in any way, revolve around Megan Skiendiel.
Manon unlocks the car with a chirp. Lara slides into the passenger seat. Megan yanks open the back door and throws herself in like the car has personally wronged her.
The doors close.
Nobody says anything for about four seconds.
Then Lara, without turning around, in the sweetest voice in her entire arsenal:
"So. You wanna talk about it, or—"
"No."
"Cool, cool." Manon starts the engine. "Just checking."
Megan slumps lower in her seat, crosses her arms, and stares out the window at the slowly emptying parking lot.
The bassline from somebody else's car is still pulsing faintly through the asphalt.
The light is still too gold.
And Megan Skiendiel—who came into this school year with a plan, and a wardrobe, and a five-step program for winning the heart of Emily Chamberlin—cannot, for the life of her, stop thinking about the way Jeung Yoonchae's mouth had curved, just slightly, at something one of her best friends had said.
Manon eases the Honda out of the parking spot.
Lara reaches for the aux cord, finds the song she wants, and—suspiciously—turns the volume down instead of up.
Which is, in Megan's extensive experience, never a good sign. Manon and Lara turn the music down when they're about to ask something serious. Or when they're about to deliver bad news. Or when they're about to begin a slow, methodical interrogation that will end with Megan crying or screaming or both.
The little Honda merges onto the main road.
Megan stares out the window like the strip mall on the right is the most fascinating thing she's ever seen. A Subway. A nail salon. A vape shop with a hand-painted sign.
Riveting. Could not look away.
"So," Lara says, twisting around in the passenger seat with the studied casualness of someone about to start a fire, "Sophia's actually really cool."
"Mm."
"Like, weirdly funny? She does this impression of Mr. Davis that almost killed me—"
"Cool."
"And Daniela has the same calc teacher as me this year. We were gonna study together."
"Cool."
"And Yoonchae—"
"Lara."
"What!" Lara's face is the picture of innocence. "I was just gonna say she has a really nice—"
"I don't care what she has."
"—laugh."
Megan whips her head toward the passenger seat so fast her hair smacks the window. "What."
"She has a really nice laugh." Lara shrugs, still doing the innocent face, somehow with even more innocence than before, which is impressive given that her baseline is already calibrated to maximum chaos. "It's a fact. I'm allowed to observe facts."
"You are not allowed to observe facts about her laugh—"
"It's a free country."
"It is NOT—"
Manon makes a small, suspicious noise from the driver's seat. It might be a cough. It is definitely not a cough.
"Manon."
"I didn't say anything!"
"You laughed."
"I did not."
"You snickered."
"I cleared my throat."
"You absolutely did not clear your throat, that was a snicker, I have known you since the seventh grade, I know what your snicker sounds like—"
"Megan." Manon glances at her in the rearview mirror, eyes way too soft, way too kind, way too I-am-about-to-say-something-that-is-going-to-emotionally-disembowel-you. "Babe."
"Don't babe me."
"Why are you so mad?"
"I'm not mad—"
"You're a little mad."
"I am a normal amount of mad—"
"At what, though?" Lara turns even further around in her seat, hooking an arm over the headrest, regarding Megan with the steady, surgical interest of a woman who has waited two years for this exact moment. "Like. Genuinely. What's the crime here?"
"You were talking to her—"
"We were talking to Sophia and Daniela."
"Yoonchae was there."
"Yeah, because she's friends with them. That's how friendship works. You stand near each other sometimes."
"Don't get cute with me—"
"Megan." Manon again, mirror again, soft again, the worst. "She didn't even talk to us. She was just there. She said hi and stood there. For like four minutes. That was the whole interaction."
"Four minutes is a long time."
"Four minutes is not a long time, what are you—"
"You can do a lot in four minutes—"
"Like what, Megan, what can you do in four minutes that has you this unhinged—"
"I AM NOT UNHINGED."
The car goes quiet.
Lara is staring at her. Manon is staring at her in the mirror. Megan can hear, with horrible clarity, the tiny tinny sound of the song still playing from Manon's speakers, turned all the way down to almost-nothing. Some indie song. A girl singing about a boy. Or a boy singing about a girl. Or neither. Megan doesn't know. Megan's ears are ringing.
She becomes slowly, deeply aware that she has just shouted, in a moving vehicle, about a four-minute interaction in a parking lot that she did not personally witness.
"Oh my god," she says.
"Yeah," Lara says, very gently.
"Oh my god."
"Mhm."
Megan slides down in her seat until her knees hit the back of the passenger headrest. She covers her face with both hands.
"I don't know why I did that."
"It's okay."
"I genuinely do not know why I did that."
"It's okay, babe—"
"What is wrong with me—"
"Nothing's wrong with you." Manon's voice is doing the careful thing. The thing she does when somebody is about to start crying and she wants to be ready. "You had a long day."
"I had a normal day."
"You had a Yoonchae day."
"Don't—don't say her name—"
"Oh my god, you can't even hear her name—"
"LARA—"
"This is so much worse than I thought."
"What's worse than you thought."
A pause. A long pause.
Megan slowly lowers her hands from her face. Both of her best friends are looking at her in that exact, specific way. That way that means they have already had a conversation about this, possibly several conversations, possibly an entire group chat, possibly a spreadsheet, and Megan was the only one not invited.
"What," she says, flatter, "is worse than you thought."
Lara opens her mouth.
Manon shoots her a look in the rearview mirror so fast and so violent that Lara closes it again.
"Nothing," Manon says smoothly. "Nothing's worse than anything. We were just saying. It's a normal first day. Yoonchae did her thing. You did your thing. Everybody did their thing. We're just driving home."
"Manon."
"It's been a long day, Megan."
"Manon, what was Lara about to say."
"Lara doesn't even know what Lara was about to say, do you, Lara—"
"I don't even know what I was about to say," Lara says immediately, eyes wide, the world's worst actress. "I was just—mouth was open. No thoughts."
"You guys are the worst."
"We love you."
"I'm being gaslit in a Honda."
"It's a really cute Honda though."
"Manon. Eyes on the road, but also—Manon. Manon."
"Babe." Manon's voice goes soft again. Different soft, this time. The kind of soft that is not making a joke. "Just—let it sit, okay? Whatever it is. You don't have to figure it out today."
"There's nothing to figure out."
"Okay."
"There isn't."
"Okay."
"I hate her."
"Okay."
"I do."
"Okay, babe."
The car turns onto Megan's street.
Outside the window, the houses get more familiar—Mrs. Henderson's stupid little garden gnomes, the one driveway with the basketball hoop nobody ever uses, the dogwood tree on the corner that's already starting to think about losing leaves. The late afternoon light slants golden across all of it. The same gold from the parking lot. The kind of light that makes you feel like the day is leaving a long shadow behind.
Megan stares at her hands in her lap.
She is thinking, very distantly, about how Yoonchae's mouth had curved at something Lara said. About how it hadn't been the smirk—the real smirk, the loaded one Yoonchae aims at her like a sniper rifle—but something else. Something small. Something Megan has not, in two years, been the cause of.
The Honda pulls up in front of her house.
Manon puts it in park. Neither of them says anything.
Megan doesn't move.
After a long second, she says, very quietly, to her hands:
"...Does she really have a nice laugh?"
Lara doesn't tease. Doesn't make a face. Doesn't crack a single joke.
She just says, in a voice that is suddenly, weirdly, kind:
"Yeah, Meg. She does."
Megan nods once.
Gets out of the car.
Doesn't look back as she walks up the driveway to her front door.
And behind her, in the Honda, neither Lara nor Manon says a word until the front door closes and Megan disappears inside.
The shower is the hottest she can stand it.
She stands under the spray with her forehead pressed against the cool tile for a long, long time, letting the water run pink-hot down her shoulders, letting the steam fog up the glass until she can't see her own reflection anymore. Which is, frankly, a mercy.
She tries to wash off the day.
She scrubs her face with the new cleanser she's been religious about all summer. She scrubs her shoulders, her arms, her hands—as if humiliation is something you can exfoliate. As if shouting I AM NOT UNHINGED in the back of Manon's Honda is the kind of thing you can rinse off with a sufficient quantity of body wash.
It is not. She suspected as much.
By the time she pads downstairs in her oldest, softest hoodie and a pair of pajama shorts, the house is quiet. Mom's still at work. The kitchen smells faintly of the pasta she made last night and forgot to put in the fridge until 11 p.m.
Megan grabs a bowl. Pours cereal. Pours milk. Carries the whole operation back upstairs with the grim focus of a woman about to go to war.
She has a plan.
The plan is Valorant.
The plan is to sit down at her desk, boot up her PC, queue into a comp game, and channel every single bad feeling currently rattling around her chest into the digital execution of strangers on the internet. The plan is to win. Or, failing that, the plan is to lose loudly, in a way that involves yelling at her monitor until her throat hurts and her shoulders drop and she has officially Felt Her Feelings, just—through the medium of a tactical FPS, like a normal, well-adjusted person.
Lara says this isn't actually how feelings work. Lara says playing Valorant when she's already in a bad mood makes her more frustrated, not less, and that Megan only believes the opposite because she has, quote, a pathological need to lie to herself about what makes her feel better.
Megan thinks Lara is being dramatic.
Megan also thinks, occasionally, when she's being honest, that Lara might have a point.
But the Valorant god, when He blesses her, blesses her. There are nights when something in her brain clicks into place and suddenly she is hitting headshots she has no business hitting, clutching rounds she has no business clutching, and the rush of that—of being briefly, accidentally, transcendently good at a thing—is worth six losses in a row.
And the losses, when they come, do, in their own way, feel useful. There is something satisfying about screaming at a teammate who is hard-throwing on Bind. It feels like expelling something. Like sneezing, but for the soul.
Lara, again, says she is lying to herself.
Lara is becoming an annoyingly recurring voice in Megan's head today.
Megan settles in at her desk, takes a defiant bite of cereal, and boots up her PC. Her monitor flickers to life. The familiar Valorant launcher starts loading. She logs in.
And the second she's online, before she's even had time to look at her own stats from her last match, the friend request notification pops in the corner of the screen.
The friend request. Singular. The same one she gets every single time she logs on.
정윤채 invited you to a party.
Megan grins around her spoon.
There it is.
정윤채. Her mystery friend. Her unkillable, perpetually-online ride-or-die. The one person on the internet she actually likes talking to.
She doesn't remember exactly how they got matched up—some random comp game last winter, maybe February. They'd ended up on the same team, carried each other through what should have been a guaranteed loss, added each other in the post-game lobby almost without thinking. Megan had typed gg add in the chat, half a joke. 정윤채 had added her back within thirty seconds.
They've been queuing together ever since.
Almost every night. Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes until two in the morning.
Megan has approximately zero information about her. (Him? Them? Megan still doesn't know.) 정윤채 has never once gotten on the mic. Megan has asked, gently, a few times, and gotten back only a typed sorry, mic's broken, and then later, my english isn't great when I talk, and then later still, just a :) when Megan suggested for the fifth time that they could try voice chat sometime.
Megan stopped asking after that. It didn't seem important. They had the in-game pings. They had the text chat. 정윤채 typed in clean, careful English, never any typos, never any rushed slang, like every message was being proofread before it got sent. Which, given the my english isn't great thing, made sense.
Megan accepts the party invite.
A little message bubble pops up almost immediately.
정윤채: hi
정윤채: how was the first day
Megan blinks at the screen.
Right. School. Right. 정윤채 knows about school in the vague way you know about a friend's life when all you do together is shoot pixels at other pixels—Megan has, over the months, mentioned that she has school, mentioned that she has friends named Lara and Manon, mentioned (regrettably, drunkenly typed one summer night) that there is a girl named Emily and she is the prettiest girl in the world. 정윤채 had responded only with that's nice and immediately changed the subject to which agent she wanted to play next game.
Megan stretches her fingers, types one-handed while she scoops up another bite of cereal.
megan: it was a NIGHTMARE
megan: like genuinely a 9.5/10 humiliation event
megan: queue with me i need to kill something
There's a beat. Three dots blinking. Then:
정윤채: what happened
Megan starts typing before she thinks.
megan: ok so there's this girl
megan: who has personally been making my life worse for two years
megan: and i finally thought maybe junior year would be different
megan: spoiler: junior year is not different
She hits send before she can rethink it.
The three dots blink. Disappear. Blink again.
정윤채: that sounds rough
정윤채: are you in queue yet
Megan snorts and clicks the button to queue them up.
That's a 정윤채 move, classic. Listen. Acknowledge. Redirect to Valorant. Megan has, over the past nine or ten months, told her mystery friend things she has never said out loud—about her mom working late, about how she's pretty sure her dad isn't going to call this year on her birthday either, about the weird shapeless dread of being seventeen and having no idea what she actually wants to do with her life—and every single time, 정윤채 has done some version of that sounds hard or i'm sorry or just a quiet :(, and then, without fail, has gently turned the conversation back toward the game.
It should feel dismissive. It does not. It feels, instead, weirdly safe. Like talking into a very kind, very attentive void.
Megan likes that about her.
Him.
Them. God.
She finishes her cereal as the queue music kicks in. Her left hand finds the WASD keys out of muscle memory. Her right hand cradles the mouse. She rolls her neck, cracks her knuckles, and tells herself—firmly, for the dozenth time today—that she is going to stop thinking about Jeung Yoonchae.
She is going to play this game.
She is going to do one normal thing.
The match loads in. Megan locks in Jett, because of course she does. 정윤채 locks in Sage, because of course she does—she always plays support, always heals Megan first, always throws her wall up at exactly the right second to save Megan's stupid duelist life. Megan has, more than once, told her she's the only reason Megan hasn't decayed to bronze.
정윤채 had replied, i know.
(Megan had laughed out loud at her desk for like ten full seconds.)
The map loads. Haven. Megan's favorite.
She rolls her shoulders. Cracks her knuckles. Settles in.
In the text chat, a single line pops up before the round starts.
정윤채: hey
정윤채: about the girl
A pause. The three dots.
정윤채: she's not worth your night
Megan stares at the screen.
It's such a normal, throwaway thing for a friend to type. It's such a kind thing to type. It's the kind of thing Lara might say, except Lara would say it meaner.
And yet.
There is something about it—about the careful, considered weight of it, about the little pause before the send, about the fact that 정윤채 typed the girl like she'd remembered every other time Megan had complained about the girl—that makes Megan's chest do something stupid.
She types back, fast, before she can overthink it.
megan: thank you
megan: seriously
megan: you're like
megan: my favorite person on the internet, you know that?
The three dots blink.
Blink.
Stop.
Start.
Stop again.
For a long second, nothing comes through. Megan watches the empty chat box, suddenly self-conscious, suddenly aware that favorite person on the internet might have landed weird, might have come across as more than she meant—
Then, finally:
정윤채: i know
정윤채: buy guns megan we have 20 seconds
Megan laughs out loud at her empty bedroom.
She buys her gun.
The round starts.
And somewhere, on the other side of the country—or the other side of the world, for all Megan knows—Jeung Yoonchae is sitting at her own desk, in her own room, with her own bowl of something getting cold beside her, watching the same round timer tick down. She has not, in the nine months she has been queuing with megan_skndl every night, ever once corrected the assumption that they have never met.
She is not going to start tonight.
She presses buy on her own gun.
Throws her wall up exactly where Megan is going to need it.
And waits.