LOST, UNTIL YOU ┃ lee heeseung
solace /ˈsɒlɪs/ — something warm enough to make surviving feel possible again.
You, a city girl, are sent to live with your aunt after the sudden loss of your parents. You tell yourself it’s temporary, that this town’ll do nothing for you. But Fairview Fall has a way of softening people. Through Birdie’s bookstore, football games, unexceptional friendships and LEE HEESEUNG — warm-hearted, music-loving, impossible-to-ignore Heeseung — you slowly finds yourself pulled back into life again. Because sometimes healing isn’t dramatic. Sometimes it’s slow, quiet. And sometimes it looks exactly like falling in love before you realise that’s what’s happening.
word count. . . 34k
themes. . . grief, healing, found family, coming-of-age, fear of change, rediscovering self, sense of purpose, first love, quiet romance, learning to love again, love after loss, small town americana, period piece
content warnings. . . grief, parental death, car accident referenced, angst, mourning, emotional distress, crying, loneliness, anxiety, slow burn, fluff, kissing, pet names, public affection, explicit content, skinship, smut, praise, first time adjacent, fingering, penetrative sex, cum, marking lmk if I forgot anything!
now playing. . . Here Comes The Sun - The Beatles // Can't Help Falling in Love - Elvis Presley // Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison // Can’t Take My Eyes Off You - Frankie Valli // Build Me Up Buttercup - The Foundations
laceys note // this has been in my drafts for AGES and I’m clearing it out rn bc I can’t write bc of exam season anywayyy I hope it’s not too long for you to actually continue reading and please do bc what awaits it full of love and grief and self-finding, Heeseung is such a sweetie THANK YOU FOR READING ILY ALL MY SHAYLAS
The bus station in Fairview Fall is not really a bus station. It is a parking lot beside the post office with a painted sign on a wooden post that reads Fairview Fall — Pop. 2,847 and a single bench that has seen better decades. You step off the bus into heat so thick it feels like walking into something solid, and the first thing you think is that your mother would have had something to say about this. Something funny. She always had something funny. You are still working on finding it funny.
Your bag is on your shoulder and your mother’s cardigan is tied around your waist because you could not bring yourself to pack it and you could not wear it either, not in this heat, but you needed it close. The driver hands down your suitcase from the hold and then the box — your father’s records, wrapped in an old bedsheet and taped within an inch of their lives — and you take it with both hands like it is something that could break, because it is. “Y/N.” You turn around.
Birdie is standing at the edge of the parking lot in a yellow sundress with her dark hair pinned up and her hands clasped in front of her like she is trying to hold herself together by sheer force of will. She is younger than you keep expecting — younger than your mother was, softer somehow, with the same eyes. That is the thing you were not prepared for. The eyes. She opens her arms and you walk into them and she holds on tight and doesn’t say anything for a long moment and that is exactly right, that is the only right thing, and you press your face into her shoulder and breathe. “Okay,” she says finally, quietly, into your hair. “Okay. Let’s get you home.” She takes the suitcase without asking. You keep the records.
Her truck is an old Ford the colour of rust and good intentions. It smells like vanilla and, underneath that, the faint ghost of something that went wrong in a kitchen recently. Birdie swings out of the parking lot with the ease of someone who has been driving these roads for years and cracks both windows so the hot air moves, and for a minute neither of you says anything.
The town scrolls past — the diner, the hardware store, the church, a barbershop with a striped pole still spinning — and you watch it go by with your elbow on the window ledge and the sun on your arm. “It’s smaller than I thought,” you say. “It’s small,” Birdie agrees easily. “You get used to it. Then you start to like it. Then one day you realise you can’t imagine being anywhere else and that’s just that.” She glances over at you. “Happened to me and I came here for a man, which tells you something about how good the town is.” “What happened to the man?”
“He left.” She says it without any weight on it, like a fact about the weather. “Best thing he ever did for me, honestly. I got to keep the town.” You look back out the window. There is a bookshop on the corner of main street with a display in the window — paperbacks arranged around a small ceramic rooster — and a hand-painted sign above the door that reads Read a Cookie in cheerful red letters. “Is that—” “That’s mine,” Birdie says, and the pride in her voice is warm and uncomplicated. “Named it myself. People told me it didn’t make any sense. I told them that was the point.” Something loosens very slightly in your chest. “My mom would have loved that name.” Birdie’s hands shift on the steering wheel. “Yeah,” she says softly. “She would have.”
The town gives way to a residential street, quieter, lined with oak trees that are losing the fight against the August heat. Birdie pulls up outside a small white house with a porch and a hanging basket and a cat sitting in the front window staring out at the street with the energy of someone who has appointed himself neighbourhood watch. “That’s Gerald,” Birdie says. “He doesn’t warm up to people easily.” She pauses. “He’ll be on your lap by Thursday.”
The house is warm and slightly chaotic in the way that feels lived-in rather than messy — books on every surface, a quilt over the sofa, a kitchen that smells like sugar and ambition. Your room has a window overlooking the street and a quilt that matches the one downstairs and a small vase of wildflowers on the dresser that Birdie must have put there this morning, and you have to look at the ceiling for a moment before you can say anything. “It’s lovely,” you manage. “Thank you, Birdie.”
“Don’t,” she says simply. “You’re family. This is just where family goes.” She leaves you to settle in. You sit on the edge of the bed for a while before you do anything else. Then you open the box of records carefully, take each one out, and line them up against the wall until you can find something to put them on properly. You run your thumb along the spines of them — your father’s handwriting on some of the paper sleeves, little notes he’d written to himself, great for Sunday mornings and Y/N will like this one when she’s older — and you breathe through it, in and out, until you can. You take out the journal Birdie sent you in the weeks after. Brown leather, your name on the inside cover in her loopy handwriting. You open to the first page. We’re here, Dad, you write. It seems like a good place.
August bleeds away slowly, the way time does when you are somewhere new and the shape of your days has not yet formed. Birdie puts you to work in the bookshop most mornings — not because she needs the help, though she doesn’t turn it down, but because she is perceptive enough to know that you need somewhere to be. You shelve books and make change and learn the names of regulars who come in and stay too long, browsing without buying, talking to Birdie about their lives while she leans on the counter and listens like she has nowhere else to be.
They look at you with open curiosity every single one of them. Not unkind. Just unsubtle. “This your niece, Birdie?” “That’s her. In from New York.” “Well, welcome to Fairview Fall, honey. You settling in alright?” “Yes, thank you,” you say, every time, and mean it, and still go home some evenings feeling so full of warmth from strangers that you don’t know what to do with it. You write about it.
You write about your mother and how she would have made friends with every single one of them inside of five minutes, your mother who could talk to anyone, who remembered every name, who made a room feel like a party just by walking into it. You write about your father and the record shop you found on main street, the one he would have disappeared into on day one and emerged from an hour later sheepish and happy with something tucked under his arm. You write in present tense. It is the only way you know how to keep them with you.
The grief comes without warning and without schedule. A song on the radio in the bookshop one afternoon that your mother used to hum in the kitchen and you have to go into the back and sit down until it passes. A customer who wears the same cologne your father wore and you spend the rest of the morning slightly underwater. Birdie always knows. She brings you things — a cookie, a glass of water, a hand on your shoulder — and she does not ask you to explain and she does not try to fix it and that, more than anything, is why you are starting to love her. She is an awful cook. She is a spectacular baker. These are two entirely different skills that exist peacefully in the same person and Fairview Fall has long since made its peace with this fact. The dinners are ambitious and variable. The baked goods are extraordinary, and she knows it, and she is not modest about it.
September comes and brings with it the particular dread of a first day at a new school. The night before, you cannot sleep. You lie in the dark and listen to Fairview Fall settle into quiet around you and you think about your old school, your old locker, your old seat by the window in English class, your old life. You think about how none of it exists anymore in the same way. You think about walking into a building where everyone already knows everyone and you are the city girl, the new girl, the one staying with Miss Birdie, and how that will precede you through every door.
In the morning Birdie is up before you. You come downstairs in your mother’s cardigan and your jeans and your stomach in knots and she turns from the kitchen and says “sit down, baby” and puts a plate of blueberry muffins in front of you that are so good it is almost offensive. She sits across from you with her coffee and she talks — about the town, about the teachers, about nothing important — and she lets you eat and lets the morning be ordinary, and by the time you have to leave your stomach has unknotted itself by about half.
She drops you at the school gates in the truck and squeezes your hand before you get out. “You’re going to be just fine,” she says. “I know,” you say, which is not the same as believing it.
Fairview Fall High School is a low brick building with a football field that is clearly the town’s real pride and joy — the grass better maintained than anything else on the property, a hand-painted banner above the gymnasium doors reading GO HAWKS in red and gold so fresh it must be new this week. The gate is open and everyone is moving through it with the ease of people who have done this a hundred times, which they have. They know where they are going. They know who they are going with. They move in clusters that have been the same clusters since middle school and they talk and laugh and do not notice you standing just outside the gate with your bag on your shoulder and your mother’s cardigan tied around your waist trying to figure out if you could leave without anyone noticing.
You are still trying to figure it out when a car pulls up to the kerb beside you — a blue thing, old and a little battered but clearly loved, clearly tended to — and the door opens and someone gets out, and he is tall, dark-haired, broad across the shoulders in the way of someone who has been physical his whole life without thinking about it, wearing a Fairview Fall Hawks t-shirt with the sleeves cut and an easy, unhurried look on his face that you will come to understand is just him, that is just what he looks like, like the world is something he finds genuinely good.
He leans against the side of his car and looks at you. Not in a way that makes you feel looked at. Just in a way that sees you. “You look like you’re trying to figure out if you can leave without anyone noticing,” he says. “That obvious?” “Little bit.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “You’re staying with Miss Birdie, right?” Of course he knows. Of course. “That’s me.” He nods, easy, like this confirms something he already suspected, and then he just pushes off the car and extends his hand like it is the most natural thing in the world. “Lee Heeseung,” he says. “Come on, I’ll walk you in.” You look at his hand. You look at the gate. You look back at him. “Okay,” you say, and shake it.
He walks with the kind of ease that parts a crowd without trying. People call his name and he calls theirs back — first names, last names, nicknames, little details lobbed like catching up even though school has not started yet, how’s your daddy’s back, tell your sister congratulations on the baby — and he does it all without breaking stride, without making you feel like an afterthought beside him. He introduces you to people in the hallway with a hand half-raised in your direction, this is Y/N, she’s staying with Miss Birdie, and they say hi Y/N and welcome to Fairview Fall and love your cardigan and you say thank you, thank you, thank you. He takes you to the principal’s office himself. Sits in the chair beside you like he belongs there, which apparently he does because the secretary says “morning, Heeseung” without looking up, and the principal shakes his hand before he shakes yours. You come out with a timetable and a map of the building and Heeseung looks at both and says “okay, your first class is this way” and just starts walking.
At the door of your first class he leans in the doorframe — just leans there like he was born to lean, like all doorframes exist in anticipation of him — and looks at you with that easy grin. “I’ll find you before lunch,” he says. “You can sit with me and my friends.”
“You don’t have to do that,” you say. “I know I don’t.” He says it simply, without any performance behind it. “I’ll find you before lunch.” You look at him for a moment. “Okay.” “Okay.” He pushes off the doorframe. Starts to go. Then he glances back over his shoulder at you, grin already in place. “See you later, city girl.” The door closes behind him. You turn around and find a seat and spend the first ten minutes of class thinking about absolutely nothing related to the lesson.
He finds you before lunch. He materialises at your locker with the punctuality of someone who means what he says and says what he means, and he falls into step beside you down the hallway and pushes open the cafeteria door and steers you toward a corner table where two people are already sitting. The boy is leaning back in his chair with his arms folded and the look of someone who has a lot of feelings about Wednesdays and none of them are positive. He is handsome in a sharp, clean way, dark-haired, and he looks up at you and nods once like you have passed some preliminary inspection.
The girl beside him is already looking at you like she has made a decision. She is in a bright green dress with her hair down and she has the kind of face that is interesting before it is pretty, quick and watchful and warm all at once, and she says “oh good, another girl” before you have even sat down. “I have been the only one for six years and I want you to know it has been a lot.” “Hi,” you say. “Hi,” she says, and scoots over to make room. “I’m Immy. That’s Hoon, he’s not as unfriendly as he looks.” “I’m plenty friendly,” Sunghoon says, and steals something off her tray without looking at it. “Hoon.” Her voice goes flat. “Sweetheart.” His doesn’t change at all. “I told you not to call me that.” He looks at her then, and there is something in his face that is so straightforward and so completely unbothered that you almost laugh. “I know you did,” he says pleasantly. Immy stares at him. She is fighting a smile and losing. She turns back to you like none of that happened. “So. New York City.” She says it like she is tasting it. “What’s it like?”
“Loud,” you say. “A lot of people. Everything’s very fast.” “Do you miss it?” It is a direct question. You appreciate that she asks it like she actually wants to know rather than like she is being polite. You think about it honestly. “I miss the familiarity of it,” you say. “I miss knowing where I am.” Immy nods. “You’ll know where you are here pretty quick,” she says. “It’s not a big place to learn.” She slides a chocolate milkshake across the table to you. “You look like you need this.” You did not order it. You do not know when she did. “Thank you.” “Don’t mention it, honey.”
Across the table Heeseung is watching you with that quiet, attentive look he has — the one that notices things, that collects details and keeps them somewhere. He catches you looking and grins, easy, and goes back to his food. Sunghoon steals from Immy’s tray again. She elbows him without looking up from asking you about the bookshop. He absorbs the elbow with equanimity. He does not stop eating her fries. You think: Mom, you would love these people. Present tense. Always.
The school day ends and you come out through the front doors into the late afternoon gold of a September in Texas and you are thinking about the walk home — Birdie drew you a map this morning on a paper bag, fifteen minutes, turn left at the church — when a car horn sounds once, short and friendly, and you look over and there is the blue car at the kerb and Heeseung leaning out the window. “Get in,” he says. “I’ll give you a lift.” “I was going to walk.” “It’s a hundred degrees.” It is not quite a hundred degrees. It is close enough that you do not argue. You go around and get in the passenger side and the inside of the car smells like worn leather and something warm, like a radio that’s been on all day, and there is a small St. Christopher medal hanging from the mirror that swings when you close the door. He pulls out into the street unhurried, one hand on the wheel, and you tell him the address and he nods like he already knew. “How was the rest of it?” he asks. “Okay,” you say. “Miss Beaumont gave me a book.”
“She does that.” He says it warmly. “She gave me East of Eden sophomore year and told me to come back when I’d read it. I came back two weeks later and we talked about it for an hour after school. She’s good people.” You look at him sideways. He is watching the road. “You don’t seem like someone who stays after school to talk about books,” you say. He glances over, amused. “What do I seem like?” You think about the football banner. The teammates who called his name in the hallway. The easy authority of someone the whole building seems to orbit without him asking for it. “I don’t know yet,” you say honestly.
He nods like that is a fair answer. “Good,” he says. “Keep looking.” He pulls up outside Birdie’s house before you have figured out what to say to that. You are still working on it when the front door opens and Birdie comes out onto the porch, dish towel over her shoulder, and her face does something warm and immediate at the sight of the car. “Heeseung Lee,” she calls. He cuts the engine and gets out — of course he gets out, of course he does not just wave from the window — and he pulls himself up to his full height and says “afternoon, ma’am” with such genuine politeness that you watch it happen like it is something to study. Birdie gives him a look. “Ma’am,” she repeats. “Yes, ma’am.” “Heeseung.” She puts a hand on her hip. “I have known you since you were a tot. Small enough to fit in that window box.” She points at it. “Now you call me Birdie.”
He has the grace to look slightly abashed, which on him is mostly just the grin getting a little sheepish. “Yes, ma— yes. Sorry. Birdie.” “Better.” She looks between the two of you with an expression that is doing several things at once and landing primarily on satisfied. “You staying for supper?” “No thank you, I’ve got to get home. But I appreciate it.” “Another time then.” She says it like it is already decided. “You drive safe.” “Always do.” He looks at you. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow,” you say. He gets back in the car. You stand on the kerb and watch him pull away — the blue car disappearing around the corner at the end of the street, the St. Christopher swinging — and then Birdie is beside you with the dish towel still over her shoulder and a look on her face that is entirely too knowing for this time of day.
“Come inside,” she says. “I’ll put the kettle on.” You follow her up the porch steps. Gerald is in the window, watching. Inside the house it smells like vanilla and a baking experiment and something that might be dinner taking a turn for the ambitious, and Birdie fills the kettle and sets it on the stove and leans against the counter with her arms crossed and that look still on her face. “So,” she says. “You met Heeseung.” “He found me outside the gates,” you say, dropping your bag on a chair. “He showed me around.” “Mmhm.” She says it in a way that contains a lot. “He’s nice.” “He is.” She nods slowly. “He’s a good boy, Heeseung. His family have been here as long as mine have. His daddy taught him to fix that car himself, the blue one — he was about fourteen when they started on it, worked on it for two years. His mama makes the best peach preserves in the county and she will give you a jar if you so much as look at them.” She pauses. “He’s going to be offered a football scholarship.” You look up. “Yeah?” “Yeah. He doesn’t want it.” She says it simply, without editorialising, like it is just a thing she knows. “He wants to stay here and study music. Plays guitar, did he tell you that?” “No.”
“He wouldn’t, first day.” She unfolds herself from the counter as the kettle starts to murmur. “He doesn’t show that to many people.” She glances back at you with those familiar eyes, your mother’s eyes, and something in her expression is soft and deliberate. “You had a good day.”
It is not a question exactly. You think about Immy’s arm through yours in the hallway. You think about Sunghoon’s complete indifference to being elbowed and Immy’s losing battle with her own smile. You think about Heeseung in the doorframe, easy as breathing, see you later, city girl. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I did.” Birdie smiles and pours the tea and doesn’t say I told you so, which is generous of her, and the evening settles around you soft and warm and ordinary in a way that feels, for the first time, like something you might be able to live inside. Gerald comes down from his windowsill and sits on your feet. “Thursday,” Birdie says, without looking. “I told you.”
By the end of the first week you have learned the following things about Fairview Fall High School. The bathroom by the science block floods if someone flushes the third stall, which Immy told you on day one and which you have since witnessed firsthand. The cafeteria does a peach cobbler on Fridays that is apparently worth rearranging your entire lunch schedule around, according to Sunghoon, who said it with a sincerity usually reserved for serious matters. Miss Beaumont assigns reading like she is prescribing medicine — specific and deliberate and not up for debate. The football team practises every day after school on the good grass and half the school finds reasons to walk past the field while it’s happening, which everyone pretends is coincidental and nobody believes.
You have also learned that Heeseung is there every morning. Not waiting for you, exactly. He is never standing at the gate with any kind of obvious intention. He is just — there. Leaning against the blue car with one ankle crossed over the other and his face tipped up to whatever the morning is doing, talking to someone or not talking to anyone, and when you come through the gate he sees you the way he seems to see everything, which is immediately and without making a production of it, and he falls into step beside you like it is the most natural thing in the world, which by Friday it almost is.
“Morning, city girl.” “Morning.” “Sleep alright?” “Better than the night before.” “That’s something.” He holds the door. You go through. “Birdie feed you before you left?” “Lemon muffins today.” “Lord.” He says it with feeling. “Her lemon muffins are something else.” “You’ve had them?” “She used to bring them to my mama when I was small. I’d eat about four before anyone noticed.” He grins at the memory, easy and unguarded, and you look at him sideways and think about what Birdie said — he doesn’t show that to many people — and you file it away without knowing exactly why.
On Friday Immy decides, without consulting anyone, that you are all going to the diner after school. She announces this at lunch with the confidence of someone who has never once proposed something and been told no, which you are beginning to understand is simply accurate. Sunghoon says “I was going to go home” and Immy says “no you weren’t” and he considers this and says “you’re right, I wasn’t” and that is the entire negotiation. Heeseung looks at you across the table. “You in?” “I don’t have anywhere else to be,” you say. “That’s the spirit,” Immy says, pointing a fork at you approvingly.
The diner is called Mae’s, which is also the name of the woman behind the counter who is somewhere between sixty and ageless and who looks at you when you walk in and says “you must be Birdie’s girl” before you have opened your mouth. You say yes ma’am and she nods like you have passed something and brings over four menus that nobody looks at because apparently nobody here needs a menu. “Usual?” she says to Heeseung. “Yes ma’am.” “Immy, you want the grilled cheese or the club today?” “Grilled cheese, Mae, I’m not complicated.” “Hoon.” “Chocolate shake and whatever Immy doesn’t finish,” Sunghoon says. Mae looks at him over the top of her notepad with an expression that has lived in this diner for thirty years. “I’ll put in an order for you like a normal person.” “I appreciate that.” She turns to you last and there is something in her face that is not pity but is in the neighbourhood of kindness, the particular kindness of someone who has watched a lot of life come through a door and knows what it looks like when someone is still finding their feet. “What do you like, sweetheart?”
You look at the menu properly. Everything on it is the kind of food that takes its time — burgers and cobbler and sandwiches that come with a side of something and a pickle that nobody asked for and nobody minds. You order a club sandwich and a chocolate milkshake and Mae writes it down and goes, and you put the menu back behind the napkin holder and look around. The diner is warm and a little worn in the way of places that have been genuinely used — the vinyl on the booths cracked at the edges, the counter stools slightly uneven, the jukebox in the corner playing something slow and country that you do not recognise but that sounds like it belongs here.
There are photographs on the wall near the register, decades of them, Fairview Fall laid out in black and white and faded colour. Football teams and school groups and a ribbon cutting for something and a woman who might be a younger Mae standing in front of the counter with her arms crossed and a look on her face that has not changed. “She’s been here since before I was born,” Heeseung says, following your eye line. He is beside you in the booth, close enough that you are aware of it without it being a thing. “Her husband built the counter. She buried him about ten years ago and kept coming in every day.” “That’s sad,” you say. “She doesn’t seem to think so.” He tilts his head slightly, considering. “She says this place is where she’s most herself. That she can feel him in it.” He pauses. “I think that makes sense.”
You think about your father’s records lined up on the shelf in your room. The way you run your thumb along the spines of them sometimes before bed without taking any out. You think about how some things are sad and a comfort at exactly the same time and how nobody tells you that before you need to know it. “Yeah,” you say. “It does.” Across the table Immy is telling Sunghoon something with her hands, which is how she tells everything — full body, gestures large and certain — and Sunghoon is watching her with his chin in his hand and the expression he gets when he is listening to her properly, which is soft in a way he would probably deny. She is talking about something that happened in her chemistry class, a lab that went sideways, and she is making it very funny, and Sunghoon is not laughing but he is very close to it, the way he always is with her, like she is the only person who can find the seam of him. “How long have they been together?” you ask quietly. Heeseung glances over at them. “They’re not,” he says. You look at him. “Really.”
“Really.” He says it with the patience of someone who has had this conversation before. “They’re just — Immy and Sunghoon. They’ve been Immy and Sunghoon since we were thirteen.” “That sounds like together.” “Don’t tell Sunghoon that, he’ll short-circuit.” He picks up his water glass. “He knows what it is. He’s waiting for her to decide she knows too.” You look back at Sunghoon, who has apparently made a quiet comment because Immy has stopped mid-gesture to stare at him and then shove his shoulder and he has absorbed the shove with complete serenity, the ghost of something pleased at the corner of his mouth. “How long has he been waiting?” you ask. Heeseung thinks about it. “Thirteen,” he says. “So about four years.” You consider this. “That’s very patient.” “That’s Sunghoon.” He says it simply, like it is just a true thing about his friend, like patience is just the shape of him. “He’d wait forever if that’s what it took.”
The food arrives and the conversation opens up and you let yourself be carried by it — Immy asking you about New York with genuine curiosity and not the performative kind, what do people do there, what does it smell like, is it true the pizza is actually better. Sunghoon asks if you’ve ever been to a baseball game and when you say yes, a lot, his whole face does something interested. Heeseung mostly listens, eating his food — a burger, you note, always a burger — and occasionally adding something that reframes the conversation entirely without seeming to try.
You order the peach cobbler because Sunghoon tells you to and because by now you understand that Sunghoon’s food opinions are to be taken seriously. It arrives warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream going slowly soft at the edges and the first bite is the kind of thing that makes you close your eyes for a second. “Told you,” Sunghoon says. “You did,” you admit. He nods once, satisfied. Steals a bite of Immy’s cobbler. She moves it closer to him without comment, which is so unconscious that you are not sure either of them notices they’ve done it. You notice.
Mae brings the check and Heeseung takes it before anyone else can reach it and there is a brief argument about this that he wins through the simple method of already having his wallet out, and you make a note to be faster next time.
Outside the diner the September evening is doing something beautiful — the sky going amber and deep at the edges, the heat off the day softened to something almost gentle, the main street quiet in the way it gets when school is out and supper is being thought about. Immy loops her arm through yours on the sidewalk. This is already just something she does. “Walk me home?” she says, and it is not really a question. “It’s on the way to Birdie’s.” It is not on the way to Birdie’s. You have seen Birdie’s map. You walk with her anyway. She talks the way she does everything — fully, with her whole self in it. She tells you about growing up in Fairview Fall, about the way the town feels small until you know where all the seams are and then it feels like it contains everything. She tells you about the lake, twenty minutes out, where everyone goes on Friday nights in summer. She tells you about the drive-in and how Heeseung once narrated an entire film in the wrong voices because the sound wasn’t working in his car and had half the lot in tears laughing. She tells you about the high roads above the town, the ones that wind up through the hills, and how on a clear night you can see the lights of Fairview Fall spread out below you and it looks like something impossible. “You’ll see it,” she says. “When the time’s right, you’ll see it.”
You walk through a neighbourhood that is going golden in the evening light, porch lights coming on, someone’s radio on somewhere, a dog barking once and stopping. It smells like cut grass and the beginning of autumn and something good cooking in someone’s house. “Can I ask you something?” Immy says. “Sure.” “How are you doing.” She says it without the question mark, which you understand means she wants a real answer and not the performed one. You think about it. The real answer, not the easy one. “Some days are okay,” you say. “Some days it hits me out of nowhere and I don’t know what to do with it. Today was okay.” You pause. “Today was actually good.” Immy nods, arm still in yours. “Good days are allowed,” she says. “You know that, right? You’re allowed to have them.” You do know that, in theory. You are still working on knowing it in practice. “My mom would be furious with me if I wasn’t living,” you say. “She was — she was very much a person who lived. Loudly and fully. She would hate for me to stop because of her.” “She sounds amazing.” “She was.” Present tense is the only way. “She is.”
Immy doesn’t correct you. She just squeezes your arm and keeps walking, and you are grateful for that in a way you couldn’t put into words if you tried.
Her house is a white clapboard on a corner lot with a porch swing and a magnolia tree in the front yard that has shed its flowers all over the path. You stop at the gate. “Same time Monday?” she says. “For what?” “For everything.” She waves a hand. “School. The diner, probably. Heeseung driving you home and pretending it’s just convenient.” She gives you a look that is very Immy, which is to say warm and blunt and absolutely certain of itself. “He drove you home the first day.” “He said it was a hundred degrees.” “It was seventy-eight.” She smiles. “See you Monday, honey.” She goes up the path through the fallen magnolia flowers and up the porch steps and the door opens before she reaches it — Sunghoon, who apparently walked her home by a different route and got here first — and she stops on the top step and looks at him and says “how did you—” and he says “I know a shortcut” and she shakes her head and goes inside and he follows her and the door closes.
You stand at the gate for a moment in the evening quiet. Then you walk home through the golden streets of Fairview Fall with your mother’s cardigan tied around your waist and your hands in your pockets and something in your chest that is not quite happiness but is something adjacent to it, something that has warmth in it, something that you think might be the beginning of okay. Birdie is on the porch when you get back, coffee in hand, Gerald at her feet. “Good?” she says. “Good,” you say. She smiles and opens the door and the house wraps around you, warm and vanilla-scented and familiar already in the way that good places get familiar, like your body knew before your mind caught up, and you go upstairs and take out the journal and sit on the bed and write.
Mom, you write. I think I’m making friends. Real ones. The kind you would approve of. Dad, there’s a record shop on main street. I keep meaning to go in. I think I’m working up to it. I wore your cardigan today. It still smells like you, a little. I’m glad.
Outside your window Fairview Fall is settling into night, the street going quiet, a dog somewhere and a radio somewhere and the distant sound of a screen door. Gerald jumps up onto the bed and turns three times and lies down against your leg with the certainty of an animal who has decided this is now his arrangement. You close the journal. You think about Immy saying good days are allowed, the matter-of-fact kindness of it, the way she said it like it was just true and not something that needed softening. You think about Heeseung in the diner, his voice low, she can feel him in it — I think that makes sense. You reach over and touch the edge of the nearest record sleeve. Your father’s handwriting. Y/N will like this one when she’s older. “I’m getting there, Dad,” you say quietly, to the room, to the record, to wherever he is. “I promise I’m getting there.”
—
Miss Beaumont teaches English the way some people play music — like she means every note of it, like she would be doing it even if nobody was listening. Her classroom is the kind of room that accumulates over years. There are books on every surface that was not strictly designed for books. There are quotes written on strips of paper pinned along the top of the blackboard, running the full length of the room, and on your first day you spent the better part of the lesson trying to read all of them instead of paying attention to what she was actually saying, which she noticed, and which she did not comment on, which told you something about her. There is a rug under her desk that does not match anything else in the room and a lamp in the corner that she switches on instead of the overhead light on grey days, which makes the whole room feel like somewhere you might voluntarily spend time. You like it in there. You did not expect to like anything about a new school this much this quickly and you are choosing not to examine it too closely.
The poem is Whitman. Song of Myself, the sixth section, the one about the grass. Miss Beaumont writes the last few lines on the board in her clean, deliberate hand and then sets down the chalk and turns around and looks at the class the way she always does, like she is genuinely curious what you are all going to do with it. “Well,” she says. “What is he saying?” The class does the thing that classes do, which is to say it does very little. Someone offers something careful and non-committal about nature. Someone else agrees with that person. Miss Beaumont listens with her arms folded and the expression of someone waiting for the room to warm up. Your hand goes up before you have fully decided to raise it. “Yes,” she says, and looks at you with something that sharpens slightly, like a lens adjusting.
“He’s not really talking about grass,” you say. “The child asks what grass is and he says he doesn’t know, but then he spends the whole section telling you exactly what it is. It’s the handkerchief of the Lord. It’s the hair of graves. It’s everyone who ever lived, compressed into something ordinary that we walk on without thinking.” You pause. “He’s saying that everything we’ve lost is still here. Just in a different form. And we keep stepping on it and not noticing.” The room is quiet for a moment. Miss Beaumont looks at you with an expression you cannot fully read. “And what do you make of that?” she says. “The idea that the lost are still here.” You think about your father’s records. Your mother’s cardigan. The way you write in present tense because past tense feels like a door closing. “I think it’s something people need to believe,” you say carefully. “Whether or not it’s true.” Miss Beaumont holds your gaze for a moment longer than feels strictly academic. Then she nods, once, and turns to the rest of the class, and the lesson moves on, and you look back down at the poem in your textbook and read the last line again. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. You underline it. You are not sure if you believe it. You are not sure you need to.
She asks you to stay after. The class files out around you and you gather your things slowly and approach her desk where she is making notes in the margin of something, and she finishes her thought before she looks up, which you appreciate. Teachers who perform attentiveness by stopping what they’re doing the second you arrive have always made you vaguely suspicious. “Sit,” she says, nodding at the chair beside her desk. You sit. The lamp in the corner is on today.
Outside the window the school grounds are going quiet, the afternoon emptying out. “Where are you from originally?” she says, though you suspect she already knows. “New York.” “I thought so.” She sets down her pen. She has the kind of face that has always been interested in things, fine lines at the corners of her eyes from a lifetime of reading in insufficient light. “What did you read there?” “Everything I could find.” You think about your bedroom in the apartment, the shelves your father built along one whole wall, the library card that you used until it was soft at the edges. “My dad used to take me to the Strand on weekends. We’d spend hours.”
“Good man,” she says simply. She opens her desk drawer and takes out a book and sets it on the desk between you. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston. The cover is worn in the way of a book that has been loved by more than one person. “Have you read it?” “No.” “Then read it.” She slides it across. “And come back to me with those wide opinions from the city.” She says it without any edge, but with something pointed in it, something that is less criticism than it is challenge. “You see things. That’s good. I want to know what you see when you’ve read something that will make you work for it.” You look at the book in your hands. “When do you need it back?” “I don’t,” she says. “It’s yours.” You look up. She is already picking up her pen again. “Thank you, Miss Beaumont.” “Come back when you’ve read it,” she says, by way of goodbye.
Heeseung is leaning against the blue car in the parking lot when you come out, turning his keys over in his hand, face tipped up to the sky in that way he has, like he is checking what the weather is planning. He looks over when he hears the door. “Beaumont keep you?” he says. “How did you know?” “She kept me twice in the first month of sophomore year.” He opens the passenger door. “What did she give you?” You hold up the Hurston. He looks at it and nods with the slow approval of someone who has been given books by this woman and understands the system. “Good one,” he says. You get in. He goes around and folds himself into the driver’s side and starts the engine and pulls out of the lot and the afternoon opens up around you — the sky wide and still going gold at the edges, the roads quiet, the radio low. He drives the way he does everything, unhurried, one hand on the wheel, the St. Christopher medal swinging gently. You are almost at Birdie’s when he takes a turn you don’t recognise. “This isn’t—” “I know.” He glances over. “I need to drop something at my daddy’s. Two minutes, I promise.”
He pulls up outside a house that is not unlike Birdie’s — white, porch, well-kept, a truck in the drive — and cuts the engine and reaches into the backseat for a brown paper bag that you didn’t notice before. “Come on,” he says, like it is obvious you would.
You get out. The front yard has a garden along one side of it that is clearly someone’s serious project — beds of herbs and late-summer tomatoes and something flowering that you don’t know the name of, staked and tended, the kind of garden that is visited every day. There is a woman kneeling at the far end of it with her sleeves rolled up and a wide-brimmed hat and garden gloves gone brown at the fingers, and she sits back on her heels when she hears the gate.
“There he is,” she says, and her face does the thing that mothers’ faces do, warm and immediate, like just the sight of him settles something. She pulls off a glove and pushes up the brim of her hat and looks at you with eyes that are Heeseung’s eyes, that same quality of attention, noticing and not making it a thing. “Mama, this is Y/N,” Heeseung says. “She’s staying with Miss Birdie.” “I know who she is.” His mother stands, brushing her knees off, and extends her ungloved hand to you with a smile that is the easiest thing you have ever encountered. “I’ve been meaning to get over to Birdie’s and introduce myself properly. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long.” “It’s lovely to meet you,” you say. “Likewise, sweetheart.” She looks at you for a moment with that honest, unhurried attention. “You settling in alright?” “Better every day,” you say, and mean it.
She nods like this is the right answer, then turns to Heeseung and takes the paper bag he’s holding out. “Your daddy’s in the back.” “I’ll just be a minute.” He goes around the side of the house and you are left in the garden with his mother, who does not seem to find this strange at all. She pulls her glove back on and crouches back down beside the tomatoes. “Do you garden?” she asks, conversationally. “No. We had a balcony in the apartment. My mom grew herbs in pots.” You look at the beds, the order of them, the care. “This is beautiful.”
“It keeps my hands busy and my head quiet.” She ties a stem to its stake with a small piece of twine, efficient and practiced. “There’s a lot to be said for things that do both at once.” She glances up at you. “Birdie tells me you’re working in the bookshop.” “Most days after school.” “Good.” She says it simply. “Good for you, and good for her. She’s been on her own in that shop a long time.” She pauses. “She loves having you there. She tells it differently but that’s what she means.” You look at the garden so she does not see what your face does with that. Heeseung comes back around the side of the house with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, and his mother stands up again. “Stay for supper,” she says to him. “I was going to take Y/N home.” “Take her home and come back.” He looks at you. You look at him. Something in his face is asking a question without exactly asking it.
“Actually,” you say, before you know you are going to say it. “Birdie would probably— I mean she always makes too much.” You pause. “You could stay. At ours. If you wanted.” He blinks. Just once, just briefly, like you have slightly surprised him, which is not something that seems to happen to him often. Then the grin settles back into place. “Yeah?” “She’ll be pleased,” you say. “She always asks.” His mother is looking between you with an expression she is not bothering to conceal, which is to say fond and unhurried and absolutely certain of something. “Go on then,” she says, and turns back to her garden.
Birdie opens the door before you have reached the porch steps. She looks at Heeseung and then at you and then back at Heeseung and the smile that crosses her face is the most unguarded thing, warm and quick and immediately suppressed into something more dignified. “Staying for supper?” she says. “Yes ma’am,” Heeseung says. She gives him the look. The I have known you since you were a tot look. “Birdie,” he says, correcting himself. “Better.” She steps back to let you both in. “I’m making pot roast. I want no opinions about it until it’s on the table.” “I don’t have opinions about pot roast,” Heeseung says, following her into the hallway. “You haven’t had mine yet.” She disappears into the kitchen. “Y/N, show him where everything is.” You look at Heeseung. He looks at the house around him with the comfortable ease of someone who is good at being in other people’s spaces — not intrusive, just present, taking it in without making it a thing. He looks at the books on every surface, the quilt on the sofa, Gerald on the windowsill who opens one eye and then closes it again. “Nice place,” he says quietly, and means it. “Come on,” you say. “She’ll want someone to set the table.”
You show him where the plates are and he takes them down without being asked twice, and he sets the table with the straightforward helpfulness of someone raised by people who taught him how to be in a house, and Birdie comes in and out of the kitchen with things and talks to him about his parents and about the football season and about a leaking gutter on the bookshop that apparently his daddy offered to look at three weeks ago and has she called him about it, and he says no ma’am — Birdie — and she says she will tomorrow, and it is the most ordinary thing, the three of you moving around each other in the small kitchen and the small dining room, and it does not feel strange. That is the thing you keep noticing about Heeseung. He does not make things feel strange. The pot roast arrives at the table and Birdie sits down and looks at it with the particular expression of someone who is unsure and hoping for the best, and Heeseung looks at it and says “that smells incredible, Birdie” and she looks at him and says “it could go either way” with such naked honesty that you both laugh. It goes fine, actually. More than fine.
You eat and the conversation wanders — Heeseung talking about the football season, the game next Friday, the way he says it with enthusiasm that is genuine without being the only thing about him, just a part of him, one part among many. He asks you about the Hurston and you tell him what Beaumont said, come back to me with those wide opinions from the city, and he laughs and says “she said something almost exactly like that to me once, I don’t remember what about” and Birdie says “she said it to everyone who’s worth saying it to, she said it to me years ago and I’ve never forgotten it either.” You look at Birdie. “You know Miss Beaumont?” “Before she was Miss Beaumont.” Birdie waves a hand. “She’s been here a long time. Came for reasons of her own and stayed.” She says it with a look that suggests the reasons are a whole other story and not for tonight.
The evening goes slow and easy, the way good evenings do. Gerald comes and sits under Heeseung’s chair, which Birdie points out has never happened with a dinner guest in living memory, and Heeseung looks down at him and says “hey there” very quietly and Gerald does not move, which is apparently a significant endorsement. You clear the plates and Birdie produces a peach cake from somewhere that is extraordinary and the three of you eat it at the table while the night comes in through the window screens, and Heeseung talks about music — carefully, like he is not quite used to doing it, like it is something he keeps in a different pocket — and Birdie asks questions that are good questions, not polite ones, and you watch him answer them and think about what his mother said in the garden.
It keeps my hands busy and my head quiet. You think Heeseung understands that too. You think music is that for him. You think the guitar is something he goes to the way you go to the journal, the way you go to the records — because some things need somewhere to go. He leaves at half past eight, because he has school in the morning and because he was raised right and he knows when an evening has found its natural end. He thanks Birdie for supper with a sincerity that is so complete it is almost formal, and she squeezes his arm and says come back anytime and means it, and he says good night to you at the door with that easy grin, the one that is just him, that is just what he looks like. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow.” The door closes. You stand in the hallway for a moment and listen to the blue car start up outside and pull away down the street.
Birdie appears from the kitchen with a dish towel. “Nice boy,” she says, in a tone that contains an entire conversation she has decided not to have yet. “He is,” you say simply. She nods and goes back to the kitchen and you go upstairs and sit on the bed and open the journal and look at the blank page for a while. You don’t write anything tonight. You just sit with the evening, the weight of it, the warmth of it. Gerald jumps up and settles against your leg. Some things don’t need words yet.
The record shop is called Spinning Wheel and it has been on the corner of main street since before Heeseung was born, which he tells you on the walk over on a Thursday afternoon in late September when the heat has finally started to relent into something that feels like the beginning of a season changing. You have walked past it every day since you arrived. You have looked at the window display — a handwritten chalkboard of new arrivals, a turntable set up so you can see it spinning from the street, a cardboard cut-out of Johnny Cash that has been there so long it has faded at the edges — and you have not gone in. You were not ready to go in. The record shop was your father’s thing, his particular joy, the errand that was never really an errand, and you needed to be ready. You did not tell Heeseung any of this. He asked on Wednesday if you had been in yet and you said no and he said “come on then” like it was the simplest thing in the world, which for him it probably was, and that was that.
The bell above the door sounds when you push it open. Inside it smells like dust and something warmer underneath it, like the particular smell of vinyl that you know from your father’s study, from Saturday mornings, from every good memory you have of being small and sitting on the floor beside the record player while he talked you through whatever he was playing. The walls are shelved floor to ceiling. There are crates on the floor sorted by genre in handwriting that has changed systems at least three times.
At the back counter an old man with reading glasses pushed to the end of his nose looks up when you come in and nods at Heeseung with the recognition of a regular. “Lee,” he says. “Mr. Cole,” Heeseung says back. “This is Y/N. She’s staying with Miss Birdie.” Mr. Cole looks at you over his glasses. “You browse,” he says, which you understand to mean take your time and don’t ask me where anything is because it’s organised in a way only I understand. “Yes sir,” you say. He goes back to whatever he is reading. Heeseung moves through the shop the way he moves through everything — easy, familiar, at home. He goes to a crate near the window and starts flicking through without any urgency, pulling things out to look at the sleeve and putting them back, occasionally holding something up in your direction with a questioning look. You move through the other side, slower, running your fingers along the tops of the sleeves.
It hits you about three minutes in. Not hard, not the kind of grief that knocks the wind out of you, but the quiet kind — the kind that just settles behind your sternum and sits there. Your father’s hands doing exactly this. Your father’s voice: you have to feel the edges, you can tell a lot about how it’s been kept. Your father’s face when he found something he had been looking for, the particular happiness of it. You stop at a sleeve and look at it for a moment without seeing it.
“Hey.” Heeseung is beside you, not quite touching. He has learned already, somehow, when to come closer. “You alright?” “Yeah.” You mean it, mostly. “It’s just — my dad loved record shops. This is the first one I’ve been in since.” You pause. “It’s fine. It’s a good thing. I just needed a second.” He nods. He does not say I’m sorry or we can go or any of the things that are well-meaning and wrong. He just waits, turning the record in his hands, giving you the second. Then he holds something out to you. “Look at this one,” he says. You take it. The sleeve is navy blue, simple, the title in clean white lettering. You look at it and something moves in your chest because you know this record. You know this record the way you know your own name — you know the A-side and the B-side and which track your father always skipped back to and the scratch at the beginning of the third song that he said was just part of it now, just part of how it sounded.
“This is—” Your voice does something you do not intend. You clear it. “My dad had this one.” Heeseung looks at the sleeve and then at you. He does not know what he has just handed you. He genuinely does not know, you can see that, he picked it up because he loves it and wanted to show you and that is all, and that somehow makes it more rather than less. “It’s one of my favourites,” he says, carefully, watching your face. “Mine too,” you say. “My dad’s too.” A beat of quiet. Mr. Cole turns a page at the back counter. “You should have it,” Heeseung says. “Heeseung—” “I’ve already got a copy.” He nods at the shelf like this is a minor logistical point and not a kindness. “Take it.”
You look at the sleeve in your hands. Your father’s copy is on the shelf in your room at Birdie’s. This one would be yours. Given to you by someone who loved it without knowing why you needed it. “Thank you,” you say, and your voice is steady, and you are grateful for that. He just nods and goes back to the crate and pulls out something else entirely and holds it up. “What about this one. Your dad ever play you this?” And just like that the shop becomes something you can be in. You spend an hour in there, moving through the crates, playing things on the turntable that Mr. Cole sets up for you without being asked — he is gruff and does not make conversation but he puts a record on when you hold one up with a question in your face and that is its own kind of welcome. Heeseung knows more than you expected and less than your father did and the combination of those two things makes the whole afternoon feel like something that was supposed to happen.
You leave with two records. The navy blue one and a second one Heeseung insisted on, something you had never heard of, trust me, city girl, just trust me. He drops you at Birdie’s in the early evening and cuts the engine but doesn’t get out this time, one arm resting on the wheel, easy.
“There’s a game Friday night,” he says. “Football?” “The very same.” He glances over at you. “You should come. Immy’ll be there — Sunghoon plays, so she’s always there. It’s a whole thing.” “A whole thing meaning what?” “Meaning the whole town comes out. Mae’s does a special. There’s a band that plays in the parking lot after, sometimes.” He says it without selling it too hard, just laying it out, taking or leaving. “It’s a good time.” You think about Friday nights in New York. The specific texture of them — the noise, the speed, the way the city never once lowered its voice. You think about a football field in Fairview Fall with the whole town in the stands and Immy beside you and the evening going cool. “Okay,” you say. He grins. “Okay.” He reaches over and opens your door from the inside, which is a thing the blue car requires because the handle sticks. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow.”
Upstairs your room is the particular gold of a late September evening, the light coming in low through the window and lying in strips across the floor. Gerald is on the bed, which is his default position. You drop your bag and sit beside him and look at the records on the shelf for a moment — your father’s, lined up the way he kept them, spines out, everything in its place. You take the navy blue one out of the paper bag and hold it.
Then you get up and go to the shelf and take out your father’s copy of the same record and sit on the floor with both of them in your lap and that is when it comes, the grief, the real kind, the kind that does not warn you. It comes up from somewhere low and you put your face in your hands and you cry in the way you mostly cry which is quietly and completely, not performing it for anyone, just letting it happen because there is nowhere else for it to go. Dad, you think, not in words exactly but in the way grief communicates which is more like weather than language. Dad, someone gave me your record. Someone who didn’t know it was your record. Someone who just loved it. I think you would like him. You sit on the floor until it passes. It always passes.
You wipe your face with the sleeve of your mother’s cardigan and sit there in the evening quiet with two copies of the same record in your lap and Gerald comes and presses his head against your knee, solemn and warm. “Thanks, Gerald,” you say. He purrs. You put your father’s copy back on the shelf in its place. You put Heeseung’s copy beside it. Then you take out the journal. Dad, you write. Someone gave me your record today. He didn’t know. He just handed it to me because he loved it and wanted to share it with me and I think that’s one of the most him things anyone has ever done without knowing they were doing it. I think you would have liked it here. I think I’m starting to.
Friday night arrives cool and clear, the sky over Fairview Fall the deep blue of early evening with the first stars coming through. Birdie sends you out in your jeans and your mother’s cardigan with a scarf she presses into your hands at the door because it gets cold by the second half, baby, take it. Immy is waiting at the gate to the football field in a red Fairview Fall Hawks scarf and an expression of someone who has been doing this for years and still finds it genuinely exciting, which you are starting to understand is just Immy. She finds things genuinely exciting. She is not performing enthusiasm, she simply has it, in abundance, about most things. “You came,” she says, like she is pleased but not surprised. “I said I would.” “I know.” She loops her arm through yours. “Come on, I’ve got us good seats. Middle of the stands, you can see everything.”
The field is lit up and the stands are already filling — families and couples and groups of kids and older men with their arms folded and the studied expressions of people who take high school football seriously, which in Fairview Fall is everyone. There is a smell of popcorn and cut grass and the first bite of real autumn air, and the band is warming up on the far side and someone is selling something from a cart by the gate and the whole thing has the particular energy of an event that a town has built its Fridays around for generations. You find your seats and the teams come out and the stands go up like a wave. You find Heeseung immediately. You are not looking for him specifically but you find him anyway — tall, easy even in the middle of forty people doing drills, moving with the same unhurried quality he has everywhere, like he has never once been in a hurry in his life. He is laughing at something
Sunghoon has said, head tipped back, and from this distance you can see the shape of him clearly — the way he takes up space without demanding it, the way people orient toward him. “There’s Hoon,” Immy says, pointing, then looks at you. “And there’s Heeseung.” She says it without inflection. “I see them,” you say, equally without inflection. She smiles at the field.
The game is not something you know well but Immy talks you through it in a low running commentary that is partly explanation and partly editorial — that was a bad call, that ref has always had it out for us, oh that’s good, that’s Heeseung, watch — and you watch. Heeseung plays the way he does everything, which is to say with a kind of complete and total presence that makes it look effortless even when it isn’t. He is fast and he thinks ahead and when he does something good the stands go up and you find yourself going up with them without quite deciding to. “You’re cheering,” Immy says, pleased. “I got caught up in it,” you say. “Everyone does.” She is already back to watching. “Hoon!” she shouts, when Sunghoon does something that earns it, and he does not look up at her because he is a professional, but something about the set of his shoulders changes. Fairview Fall wins by two touchdowns. The stands come down in a wave of noise and Immy grabs your arm and squeezes it and you are laughing and you are not entirely sure when you started.
The diner after is Mae’s again, every table full, the jukebox going, the particular noise of a town celebrating something. You are in the big corner booth — you and Immy and Sunghoon, still in his jersey, and Heeseung, hair damp from the locker room, the easy energy of someone who has just played well and knows it and is not making a thing of it. The booth is full and warm and loud and Mae brings milkshakes without being asked because she knows, she always knows, and Sunghoon and Immy are already in a detailed debrief of the game in which Immy is more knowledgeable than you would have expected and Sunghoon is listening to her notes with the expression of someone taking them seriously.
Heeseung nudges the milkshake toward you and you take it and then he takes it back and takes a pull through the straw and pushes it back and neither of you mentions that this has just happened, that you are sharing a milkshake, that this is apparently a thing you do now. “Good game,” you say. “Decent game.” He says it honestly, not falsely modest, not proud. “Second quarter was sloppy.” “Immy said the ref had it out for you.” “Immy says that every game.” He glances over at her, fond. “She’s usually right though.” The booth is loud and easy and you eat and talk and the evening stretches out comfortable around you and Mae brings cobbler that nobody ordered and everybody eats and Sunghoon says something very quiet to Immy and she goes pink in a way you have never seen on her before, pink and pleased, and she shoves him and he grins and steals her spoon. You are watching them when you become aware that Heeseung is watching you watch them. You look over. He does not look away. “What?” you say. “Nothing,” he says. He picks up the milkshake. “You just look like you’re somewhere good.”
You take a second with that. With the diner and the noise and Immy’s laugh and the cobbler and the autumn air coming in under the door. “I think I am,” you say. Outside the temperature has dropped the way Birdie promised it would and you cross your arms against it and Heeseung, without any preamble or ceremony, takes off his letterman jacket and holds it out to you. You look at it. “I’m fine.” “You’re cold.” “I’m from New York.” “New York is cold in winter,” he says patiently. “This is October in Texas. Completely different kind of cold.” He shakes the jacket slightly. “Take it.” You take it. It is warm from him and heavy across your shoulders and smells like the blue car — worn leather and something warm — and you put your arms through the sleeves and the cuffs come past your hands entirely and Immy, walking ahead of you with Sunghoon, looks back and says nothing, which is somehow louder than if she had said something.
Heeseung walks you home. Not formally, not announced, just — falls into step beside you through the streets of Fairview Fall while Immy and Sunghoon peel off at the corner with goodnights, and the town is quiet around you, lit up warm in the dark, and your breath shows faintly in the air. You talk about nothing in particular. The game. A song that was on the jukebox. Whether the peach cobbler is better at Mae’s or Birdie’s, which is a debate that has a clear answer and you both know it but you negotiate it anyway because it is the kind of conversation you have when you are not ready for the walk to be over. Birdie’s porch light is on. You stop at the bottom of the steps. “Thanks for coming tonight,” he says. He is standing close enough that you are aware of it, the way you are always aware of it lately, something you keep not naming. “Thanks for asking,” you say. “I didn’t know I’d like it that much.” “Football?” “Fairview Fall,” you say, and mean something slightly larger than that.
He looks at you for a moment with those attentive eyes, and then he leans in and presses his lips to your cheek, warm and brief, the most natural thing in the world. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says, and takes a step back with that easy grin, hands in his pockets. “Goodnight,” you say. You watch him go back down the street toward where he parked the blue car, unhurried as always. You stand on the bottom porch step in his letterman jacket with the sleeves too long and your cheek warm and you think: that’s just what people do here. That’s a western thing. A friendly thing. That’s just Heeseung being Heeseung. You go inside. You hang his jacket on the hook by the door and go upstairs and sit on the bed and open the journal and look at the blank page for a long time. You write: I think people are just more affectionate here. Then you look at what you have written. Then you close the journal and lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling and listen to the quiet of Fairview Fall and your cheek is still warm and you think, carefully, about nothing at all.
October arrives and picks up speed. This is the thing about settling somewhere — it happens in the background, without announcement. You do not notice you are settling until you already have, until the shape of your days has formed without you consciously building it, and then one morning you wake up and know where everything is and it does not feel like someone else’s house anymore. Birdie bakes on Saturday mornings. This becomes a fact of your life the way the sun coming through the east window becomes a fact, the way Gerald on your feet becomes a fact — inevitable, warm, something you would notice immediately if it stopped. She does not ask you to help but she does not tell you not to, and somewhere in the second week of October you start appearing in the kitchen on Saturday mornings in your mother’s cardigan with your hair still unbrushed and she hands you something to do without comment and you do it, and that is that.
She is teaching you, without calling it teaching. How to fold butter into pastry. How to know by smell when something is ready. How to clean as you go because a clean kitchen is a kind kitchen, which is a thing her mother told her and which she says with the particular tone of someone passing something down. “My mom couldn’t bake,” you tell her one Saturday, your hands floury, watching her crimp the edge of something with a thumb that has done this a thousand times. “She could cook though. Really well. Everything from scratch.”
“Different skills,” Birdie says, without looking up. “I can’t cook to save my life and I’ve made peace with it.” She pauses. “What did she make? Your mom.” You think about it. The specific things, the ones that come with smell and light attached. “Sunday pasta,” you say. “Always from scratch, never from a box. She’d make it in the morning and leave it to dry on the rack and the whole apartment smelled like it all day.” You pause. “And her chicken soup. When I was sick. It was the kind of thing that actually made you feel better, not just warm.”
Birdie is quiet for a moment, working the pastry. “She learned from your grandmother,” she says eventually. “Their mama. She was an incredible cook.” She glances over at you. “Your mom used to write me letters about it when we were young. She’d describe meals she’d made like they were events.” This is new. You look at her. “You wrote letters?” “We weren’t close in the way that means seeing each other all the time,” Birdie says carefully. “But we were close in the way that means I knew her.” She smooths the pastry down. “She wrote beautifully. You get it from her.”
You look back down at what you are doing. Your hands in the flour. The kitchen warm around you. “I know,” you say quietly. “I get it from both of them actually. Dad too.” “I know you do,” Birdie says. “I’ve read your journal.” You look up sharply. She meets your eyes with an expression that is completely unrepentant. “It was open on the table,” she says. “I read one page. The one about the record shop.” She pauses. “I closed it immediately after. I’m not a monster.” You stare at her. “You write beautifully,” she says again, simply, and goes back to the pastry. You go back to the pastry too. There is nothing to say to that, or there is everything, and either way the kitchen is warm and smells like butter and Saturday morning and for a moment the grief sits quietly, like it is giving you the room.
Shopping with Immy is its own education. She moves through the two clothing shops on main street — there are only two, a fact that she acknowledges and has made her peace with — with the authority of someone who knows exactly what she is looking for and exactly where it is and has strong opinions about everyone else’s choices too. She holds things up to you without asking if you want her opinion and gives it anyway and you have learned that her opinion is usually right, which is annoying and convenient in equal measure. “This,” she says, holding up a blouse in a warm amber colour. “I don’t know.” “I do.” She puts it in your hands. “Your colouring. Trust me.” You try it on. She is right. You buy it without further discussion. In return you talk her out of something she has convinced herself she needs on the grounds that she doesn’t need it, she wants it, which is fine, but the cut is wrong and Immy is a woman who should only wear things that are right on her and she knows that, and she knows that you are right, and she puts it back with the reluctant dignity of someone conceding a fair point.
“How do you know about cuts?” she says, on the sidewalk after, linking her arm through yours. “My mom,” you say. “She was very particular about clothes. She said wearing something that doesn’t fit right is like telling a lie with your body.” Immy considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “I’m going to think about that for a long time,” she says. “She was good at saying things like that.” “She sounds incredible.” “She was.” Present tense is the only way. “She is.” Immy squeezes your arm and keeps walking and you walk with her through the golden October streets and the trees are starting to turn and Fairview Fall in autumn is something you were not prepared for, the particular beauty of it, the way the light goes amber and the air goes clean and everything smells like something ending and beginning at the same time.
Their Eyes Were Watching God takes you a few days, which is fast for a book that requires that much of you. You read it in the evenings after the bookshop and in the mornings before school and once for two hours on a Sunday afternoon while Birdie baked downstairs and Gerald slept on your legs and the wind moved in the oak tree outside your window. You go back to Miss Beaumont on a Tuesday after school with the book under your arm and she looks up from her desk and says “sit” before you have opened your mouth and you sit. The conversation lasts forty minutes. She asks you questions that are not really questions — what did you make of Janie’s horizon, what does the pear tree mean to her, where do you think she ends up when it’s all over — and you answer them and she listens and pushes back and you push back at her pushing back and at some point you realise you are arguing, genuinely arguing, about a novel, and it is the most alive you have felt in a classroom in longer than you want to think about.
When you finally stop she looks at you over the top of her glasses with an expression that takes you a moment to read. It is not quite pride — it is something more precise than that, something more like recognition, like she is seeing something she suspected and has now confirmed. “You argued three of those points better than my graduate students did,” she says. “And I was one of them.” “I disagreed with part of your reading,” you say. “About the ending.” “I know you did.” She takes the book back and holds it for a moment. “I think you’re right.” She says it plainly, without qualifying it, and then puts the book on the shelf behind her. “What do you want to do with this? With reading and writing and thinking. After school.”
You have not been asked this since before the crash. You have not asked it of yourself. “English literature,” you say, slowly, like you are finding it as you say it. “I want to study it properly. I want to learn how to talk about books the way you just did.” Miss Beaumont looks at you for a moment. “Good,” she says. “Don’t let anyone talk you out of it.” She opens her desk drawer. “Take this.” Another book. To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf. “Come back when you’ve read it,” she says. “Same deal.” You look at the book and then at her and you think about your father, who would have loved her, who would have argued with her for hours and walked out glowing. “Thank you, Miss Beaumont,” you say. “Go home,” she says. “It’s getting dark.”
The cardigan tears on a Wednesday. You catch it on the corner of a shelf in the bookshop — the left cuff, your mother’s favourite, the one she always pushed up to her elbow when she was doing something with her hands — and it snags and you hear it before you feel it, a small clean sound, and you look down and there is a pull in the wool, a run, and then a tear, and you stand very still in the aisle of the bookshop with your hand over it like you can hold it closed. Birdie finds you like that. She comes around the end of the shelf with a stack of returns and sees your face before she sees the cardigan and puts the books down. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, what happened?” You show her. You cannot speak around it, which is ridiculous because it is a cardigan, it is a thing, it is wool and buttons and it can be fixed, but it is also your mother’s and it smells like her and you have worn it every single day since the crash and you cannot speak around it. Birdie takes your hand away from the tear very gently and looks at it. Then she looks at you. “Come on,” she says. “We’re closing early.”
She sits you on the sofa and takes the cardigan and her sewing kit and she fixes it while you watch, her hands sure and small and practiced, and you do not cry while she is doing it because you are past the acute part by then, past the part that takes your breath, and you sit with Gerald in your lap and watch her work and the lamp is on and the house is warm and quiet. “She bought it in a shop on fifth avenue,” you say eventually. “I remember going with her. I was maybe nine. She tried on about six things and came back to this one and said this one is me and bought it.” You look at your hands. “She wore it all the time. It was her comfort thing.” “And now it’s yours,” Birdie says, without looking up from the needle. “And now it’s mine.” Birdie ties off the thread and smooths the cuff and holds the cardigan up to the light and inspects it and then holds it out to you. The repair is invisible. You cannot see where it tore. “Birdie,” you say. “Don’t,” she says, which is what she always says when you thank her, which is her way of saying of course, you don’t have to say it. You put the cardigan back on. She refolds her sewing kit. Outside the window Fairview Fall is going dark and gold and the first proper cold of October is in the air. “Mom loved you,” you tell Birdie. “She thought you were the funniest person..”
Birdie laughs, short and bright and a little wet at the edges. “She was funnier than me,” she says. “She always was.” She closes the sewing kit. “We should have been closer. I should have — I kept meaning to, and then there wasn’t — “ She stops. Clears her throat. “Anyway.” “I know,” you say. “I know you know.” She stands up and smooths her skirt. “I’m making pasta tonight. I’ve been practising.” She pauses. “It will not be as good as your mother’s.” “It won’t,” you agree. “But I’ll eat it.” She laughs again, more solidly this time, and goes to the kitchen, and you sit on the sofa with Gerald and your mended cardigan and the quiet of the house around you, and it is not fine, exactly, but it is something that can be lived in. In the morning you come downstairs and there is a note on the kitchen table. Birdie’s handwriting, on a piece of paper torn from the back of a receipt. For my girl — who is braver than she knows and more her mother’s daughter than she realises. Keep wearing it. She’d want you to. You fold it up and put it in the journal.
The Lees have you and Birdie over for dinner on a Friday in late October. Heeseung’s mother has made enough food for twice as many people, which Heeseung says is just how she cooks, she cannot make a small amount of anything, it is a documented fact. His daddy is a broad quiet man with Heeseung’s eyes and a handshake that is very firm and a way of listening that makes you feel like whatever you are saying is worth hearing. He asks about New York and you tell him and he asks follow-up questions and you tell him more and by the time you are at the table you have told him things about the city you have not thought about in months — the specific smell of the subway in summer, the way the light hits the buildings at six in the evening, the sound of it, the particular sound that is not one thing but all things at once. “You miss it,” he says. Not accusing. Just observing. “I miss parts of it,” you say. “It’s complicated.” He nods like he understands complicated. “Most real things are,” he says, and passes you the bread.
The dinner is loud and warm and good, Birdie and Heeseung’s mother finding each other across the table with the ease of two women who should have been friends years ago and are making up for lost time, and Heeseung’s daddy and Birdie talking about the bookshop gutter which he has apparently actually been meaning to fix, he is sorry about that, he’ll come by Tuesday. At some point the adults move to the sitting room with wine and you and Heeseung look at each other across the cleared table and he tilts his head toward the back door.
The garden is dark and cool, lit by the light from the kitchen window and a three-quarter moon that is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is an oak tree at the back of the yard and from one of its lower branches hangs a wooden swing — old, clearly original to the house, the rope thick and worn. Heeseung sits on it and you sit beside him on the grass, your back against the trunk, and for a while neither of you says anything in particular. “Mocks next week,” you say eventually. “I know.” He pushes the swing back and forth with one foot. “You worried?” “A little.” You pull your knees up. “I didn’t miss much school after — after the crash. My teachers were good about it. But I still feel like I’m playing catch-up.” “In what?” “Everything except English.” “English you could teach,” he says, easily, matter-of-fact. “I’m not sure about that.” “I am.” He says it simply, like it is a thing he has assessed and concluded. “I’ve seen you in Beaumont’s class. You think differently to everyone else in there.” He pauses. “That’s not a criticism of everyone else. It’s just — you see the seams of things.” You look at the moon through the oak branches. “My dad used to say that,” you say. “He said I could find the argument in anything.” “Smart man.” “The smartest.” You pause. “He would have talked to your daddy for six hours straight tonight. They have the same way of listening.”
Heeseung is quiet for a moment. “I’ll take that,” he says. “That’s a real compliment.” You sit in the cool dark and talk about the mocks — his, yours, Immy’s periodic panic and Sunghoon’s inexplicable calm — and about what comes after, the haziest outline of it, what it might look like. Heeseung says community college like he always does, easy and certain, and you think about Miss Beaumont saying don’t let anyone talk you out of it and think that maybe you are starting to know what you want too, the shape of it at least, English literature and something that uses the part of your brain that found the argument in Whitman and the horizon in Hurston.
“You’ll pass everything,” Heeseung says, when you circle back to the mocks. “I know you will.” “You don’t know that.” “I know you,” he says. “Same thing.” You look at him on the swing in the dark. The kitchen light on one side of his face. The moon on the other. “Heeseung,” you say. “City girl,” he says back. You look away. “Goodnight.”
The mocks come and go in a blur of early mornings and index cards and Birdie’s good baking and Immy’s voice notes that are mostly panic and occasionally useful. You sit in the exam hall with your pen and your mother’s cardigan and you write and write and write, and when it is over you go to the bookshop and shelve things in alphabetical order because it is the most calming thing you know how to do.
The results come on a Thursday morning. You open the envelope at the kitchen table with Gerald watching from his windowsill and Birdie pretending not to hover by the kettle. You passed everything. English, highest mark in the year. Miss Beaumont’s handwriting in the margin of the practice essay: This is what I meant. Well done. You sit with it for a moment. Then you pick up the journal. Mom, you write. I passed. All of it. English highest in the year. I wish you could see it. I wish I could call you. I wish I could hear you say you knew I would. I know you knew I would. Dad, Miss Beaumont says I think differently. You always said that too. I’m starting to think it might actually be true. I’m going to study English literature. I think I’ve known for a while. I’m writing it down now so it’s real.
You close the journal. Birdie puts a cup of tea in front of you and squeezes your shoulder and doesn’t say anything and that is exactly right. You run into Heeseung outside the school gates at lunch, which is where he always is when the weather holds, leaning against the blue car with his face in the sun. He looks over when he hears the gate and reads your face before you have said a word.
“Well?” he says. “Passed everything,” you say. “English highest in the year.” What happens next is that he crosses the space between you in two steps and picks you up, both arms around you, lifting you clear off the ground and turning once, and you make a sound that is mostly surprise and partly laughter and you grab his shoulders and hold on, and he is warm and solid and he smells like the blue car, like worn leather and something warm, and he is laughing too, low and real, right beside your ear. He sets you down. His hands stay on your waist for a moment, just a moment, before they don’t. “Told you,” he says. His voice is the same. His face is the same. Everything is the same except that your heart is doing something you do not have a word for yet. “You told me,” you agree. He grins. “Highest in the year.” “Don’t make it a thing.” “City girl.” He steps back, easy, hands in his pockets. “It’s already a thing.”
That evening Sunghoon finds Heeseung in the parking lot after practice, when everyone else has gone, and leans against the blue car with his arms folded. Heeseung is loading his bag into the back. He glances over. “What.” Sunghoon does not say anything for a moment. He has the expression he gets when he has thought about something thoroughly and arrived at a conclusion and is choosing his moment. “You picked her up,” he says. Heeseung straightens. “I was happy for her.” “I know you were.” “She passed everything. Highest in English.” “I know.”
Sunghoon looks at him. “Heeseung.” “What.” “You know what.” Heeseung is quiet. He shuts the car door. He looks at the middle distance with the expression of someone who has been told a thing he already knew and was hoping not to have confirmed out loud yet. “It’s not—” he starts. “It is,” Sunghoon says. Not unkind. Just clear, the way Sunghoon is always clear, the way he cuts through the middle of things without making a mess of them. Heeseung puts his hands in his pockets. He looks at the school building, the last of the afternoon light on the brick. “She’s still finding her feet,” he says, finally. “I know,” Sunghoon says. “I don’t want to—” “I know.” He pushes off the car. “I’m not telling you to do anything.” He picks up his bag. “I’m just telling you what I see.” He pauses. “You’ve known since the gate on the first day. You should probably get used to the idea.” He walks off across the parking lot.
Heeseung watches him go. The school is empty and the afternoon is going gold and the blue car is warm from sitting in the sun all day, and Heeseung stands beside it for a long time after Sunghoon has gone, looking at nothing, thinking about a girl who talks about her parents in present tense and picks arguments with Whitman and holds his record like it is something precious without knowing why. He gets in the car. He sits for a moment with his hands on the wheel. “Yeah,” he says to no one. “Okay.” He starts the engine and pulls out of the lot and drives home through the golden streets of Fairview Fall with the radio low and the St. Christopher swinging and something settled in him now, something named, sitting quiet and certain in his chest like it has been there a long time. Because it has.
November comes in quietly, the way months do when you have finally stopped counting them. You notice it first in the light — the way it changes angle, goes thinner and more golden, lying longer across the floors in the mornings and disappearing earlier in the evenings until the town is dark by five and the porch lights are all on by the time you walk home from the bookshop. The oak trees on Birdie’s street have gone fully now, the last of them letting go, and the sidewalks are deep in leaves that nobody seems in any hurry to clear because they are beautiful and this is Fairview Fall and there is time.
You have been here four months. You know this the way you know the layout of Birdie’s kitchen, the way you know which stair creaks and which drawer sticks and the precise angle Gerald prefers to be scratched behind the ear. You know the regulars at the bookshop by name and by reading habit. You know Mae’s by booth and by order. You know the way Immy talks with her hands and the way Sunghoon goes quiet when he is actually paying the most attention and the way Heeseung’s voice drops slightly when he is saying something he means, which is most of the time, because Heeseung does not say things he doesn’t mean. Four months. You turn it over in your hands like a stone, testing its weight.
It is heavier than it sounds. It is lighter than you expected.
November does what November does, which is arrive and then be over before you have properly registered it. There are things inside it — Immy’s birthday, which is celebrated with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has been looking forward to it since October, a dinner at Mae’s that goes on until closing and ends with Sunghoon presenting her with a gift that makes her go very still and then throw her arms around his neck while he stands there absorbing it with his hands in his jacket pockets and a look on his face that is the most unguarded thing you have seen on him yet. You do not ask what the gift was. Some things are not yours to know.
There is a Sunday afternoon at the bookshop with Miss Beaumont, who comes in on her day off and spends an hour in the poetry section and buys three things and talks to you about To the Lighthouse across the counter in a conversation that keeps getting interrupted by customers and keeps resuming the moment they leave. She says before she goes, pulling on her coat, “you should think about what you want to write, not just what you want to read” and then she leaves before you can ask her what she means, which you are beginning to understand is her preferred method.
There is a Tuesday when the grief comes out of nowhere — a smell in the street, someone’s perfume, your mother’s perfume, and you are at the corner of main street and you have to stop walking and stand very still for a moment and breathe through it with your hand against the wall of the hardware store while the town moves around you. It passes. It always passes. You write about it that night — three pages, which is more than you usually write, and when you are done your hand aches and the feeling has somewhere to be that is not inside your chest.
There is a Thursday when Heeseung drives you out past the edge of town for no stated reason and parks on a rise where you can see for miles — the land going flat and wide in every direction, the sky enormous above it, the late November light turning everything amber and still. You sit on the hood of the blue car and don’t say very much and it is one of the better silences of your life, the kind that only happen with people you trust without having decided to. November passes. December arrives and brings with it cold that is serious now, cold that means something, and Birdie puts a second quilt on your bed and buys cinnamon for the baking and the town strings lights along main street that go on at dusk and make the whole place look like something you would make up if you were trying to imagine a Christmas.
The drive-in is showing Christmas movies on a Friday in mid-December. This is announced on a chalkboard outside as Holiday Double Feature and whoever writes the chalkboard has drawn a small lopsided Christmas tree beside it that has clearly been done with great affection and no particular artistic talent, and Immy calls it the most charming thing she has ever seen and takes everyone.
Sunghoon’s truck is better for this than the blue car, which Heeseung acknowledges without any defensiveness because the blue car is many things and a comfortable place to sit in the back of on a cold December night is not one of them. You all pile into the truck bed with blankets from Immy’s house — she brought four, which was the right number — and the speakers rigged up on the dash inside play the drive-in audio through the open rear window, tinny and warm. The first film starts. Something black and white, something with snow and a big house and people in good coats making complicated decisions about love. You are not entirely following it. You are warm enough, tucked under a blanket with your knees drawn up, and the cold air is sharp and clean on your face, and above the screen the actual sky is enormous and dark and full of stars in the way that a sky over a small town in December can be, which is a way that the sky over New York never was.
Immy is against Sunghoon’s side with his arm around her in the way that is just their arrangement now, comfortable as furniture. He says something low to her and she tips her head up to answer him and you look away because some things are private even in a truck bed.
“You cold?” Heeseung is beside you, close in the way the small space of the truck bed makes everyone close, close enough that you are aware of it as something other than proximity. “I’m fine,” you say, which is the answer you give. He looks at you sideways. “I’m a little cold,” you say. He lifts the blanket and pulls it more squarely over both of you and you shift slightly without meaning to so that you are closer, and he stays very still when you do, and then he is just — there, warm along your left side, solid and present, and you look at the screen and do not think about it because you have been not thinking about it for a while now and you are getting quite practiced. You are not getting that practiced.
Immy and Sunghoon disappear at some point in the middle of the first film — popcorn, Immy says, we need more popcorn, and they climb out of the truck with the blanket and do not come back for a while. The drive-in hums around you, other cars and trucks glowing softly in the dark, the screen washing blue and white light across everything. You are watching the film. You are also aware of his hand, which has found your knee through the blanket, just resting there, warm and heavy, the way his hand always rests on things — without urgency, without asking for more than it is. “Do you like it here?” he says.
You turn to look at him. He is already looking at you, and his face in the light from the screen is soft and serious and very close, and his eyes have that quality they always have, that quality of seeing you, and you look at him and something in your chest does something you are not ready to name but can no longer pretend is nothing. “Yeah,” you say. Your voice comes out quieter than you intended. “I really do.”
He looks at you for a moment longer. The film plays on. His thumb moves once against your knee through the blanket, a small thing, barely a thing at all. Then he leans in and presses his lips to your temple. Warm and still. Not the quick friendly press of before — this one stays, just a moment, and his nose is cold against your hair. “Good,” he says quietly, against your hair. You look at the screen. Your heart is doing something complicated. It’s not just friendliness, you think, clearly, for the first time, the thought arriving with the quiet certainty of something you have known for a while and have finally let yourself know. It is not just western friendliness and it is not just him being Heeseung and I have been so careful not to see it and I see it. You do not say this. You look at the screen. His hand stays on your knee. The film goes on.
Immy and Sunghoon come back with popcorn that is too buttery and a shared expression of people who went for popcorn and did something else as well and are not talking about it. Immy drops back into the truck bed and looks at you and then at Heeseung and then at you again and her face does the thing it does when she knows something, which is to do nothing, perfectly, too carefully. You take some popcorn. You watch the rest of the film. On the drive home Immy sits in the front with Sunghoon and you and Heeseung are in the back seat of the truck and his shoulder is against yours and neither of you moves away and the St. Christopher swings on the rear view mirror and the heater makes the windows fog at the edges and outside Fairview Fall goes past, lit up and cold and yours, more and more yours every day.
Christmas is the two of you. You and Birdie in the small warm house with Gerald and the tree she made you help her decorate on the first of December because she does not believe in waiting, and the smell of whatever she has attempted for Christmas dinner which is ambitious this year, genuinely ambitious, and the radio on the kitchen windowsill playing carols that neither of you knows all the words to and both of you sing anyway. It is a good day. It is also the hardest day. You knew it would be. You have been knowing it was coming the way you know weather is coming, something in the air before it arrives. Your parents were people who made Christmas — made it loudly and fully and with too much food and a specific record your father played on Christmas morning while your mother made coffee and you sat on the floor in your pyjamas and the apartment smelled like pine and something good. That record is on your shelf in your room. You did not take it out this morning because you were not ready and you knew you were not ready.
After dinner — which is better than it had any right to be, Birdie has been practising — you sit on the sofa with your tea and Gerald and the tree lights going soft in the corner and Birdie comes in from the kitchen and sits beside you and she has something in her hand.
“I’ve been thinking about when to give you this,” she says, “and I decided Christmas was right because your mother would have given it to you herself someday and I want to be the one to do it in her place.” She opens her hand. Your mother’s wedding ring. You know it immediately. The plain gold band, the small diamond, the slight asymmetry where she knocked it against something years ago and had it repaired and you could always see where if you looked. She wore it every day of her life. You have not seen it since the hospital. You cannot speak for a long moment.
“How—” you start. “It came to me with her things,” Birdie says quietly. “I’ve been keeping it safe.” She takes your hand and presses it into your palm and closes your fingers around it. “It’s yours. It always was going to be yours.” You look at your closed hand. “Birdie,” you say, and your voice does not work properly, and she opens her arms and you go into them the way you did in the bus station parking lot in August, and she holds on and you cry into her shoulder, properly, the way you mostly don’t let yourself in front of people, the way you usually save for your room alone.
You cry for your mother and your father and the Christmas morning with the record and the coffee and the apartment and the life that was yours before it wasn’t, and Birdie holds you through all of it and does not say hush or it’s alright because she is too wise to say either of those things and she just holds on. When you surface she is crying too, quietly, in the way she always cries which is privately even when she is in company. “Sorry,” you say. “Don’t,” she says. Which means of course not, never. You sit together on the sofa with the tree lights and Gerald and your mother’s ring in your hand and the radio still playing something gentle from the kitchen, and it is sad and it is also okay, both things fully true at the same time, and you are learning that this is how it is and how it will be — the grief and the warmth living in the same rooms, not cancelling each other out, just coexisting, because they have to. You put the ring on the chain you wear around your neck, the thin gold one your father gave you for your sixteenth birthday. It rests against your chest. It is warm from your hand. You write about it that night. Mom, you write. Birdie gave me your ring. I’m wearing it. I’ll wear it every day the way you did. I’m okay. I’m more than okay, most days. I miss you both so much it’s like weather — it changes, it comes and goes, and sometimes it’s very bad and sometimes it’s just there in the background, part of everything. I think I’m building something here. I think you’d both be glad. Merry Christmas.
January comes cold and clear and the town shakes itself out of the stillness of the holidays and picks back up, and with it comes the Winter Festival.
You have heard about this since October — Immy mentioned it in passing as something the whole town does, and Birdie mentioned it as something that has been happening since before she arrived, and Mae mentioned it as her second busiest weekend of the year and said it with the satisfaction of someone who likes being busy. It takes over the centre of town for a weekend — stalls and food and a brass band and lights strung between the buildings and a stretch of the main street cleared for dancing on the Saturday night, which is the real reason anyone comes, which nobody admits.
Heeseung picks you up in the blue car on Saturday evening. You are wearing the amber blouse Immy picked out for you in October under your coat, and your mother’s cardigan underneath, and the ring on its chain, and he looks at you when you come down the porch steps with the same expression he gets sometimes, the one that is only there for a second before the grin settles back into place, but you see it now, you have been seeing it, you are done pretending you don’t. “You look nice,” he says, easy. “Thank you,” you say, equally easy, and get in the car.
The festival is everything Immy promised and a few things she forgot to mention, including the fact that the brass band is genuinely excellent and the food stalls go on longer than the main street which means someone has taken over the hardware store car park and nobody seems to mind. You move through it in a loose group — you and Heeseung and Immy and Sunghoon, picking up other people from school and putting them down again, stopping at stalls and eating things that are too good and too hot and burn your fingers in the good way. Immy buys something fried and inexplicable and shares it with you and declares it the best thing she has ever eaten and Sunghoon takes one look at it and says “absolutely not” and eats it anyway when she holds it out to him, and you are laughing, you are genuinely laughing in the cold January air with the lights above you and the brass band somewhere close playing something that gets into your feet.
The dancing starts at eight. The main street clears itself in the way of places where this has happened for generations — people just know, they move back, they make space — and the band shifts into something slower and the first couples move into the middle and then more, and it is warm from all the bodies and lit gold from the strings of lights and it smells like winter and something sweet from the stalls. Heeseung holds out his hand to you. You take it. He dances the way he does everything, which is well and without making a production of it, and you know the steps well enough because Birdie taught you in the kitchen in November on a rainy evening when there was nothing else to do, this is just a two-step, baby, it’s not complicated, and it is not complicated, it is just his hand warm in yours and his other hand at your waist and the two of you moving through the same space in the same direction. You dance for a while.
Around you Immy and Sunghoon are dancing the way they exist, which is easily and entirely, and other couples are moving and the band is warm and the town is all around you, Fairview Fall in January, lit up and cold and full.
The song changes to something slower. Heeseung does not let go. You do not move away. The space between you closes in the natural way of a slower song and you are close enough now that you can feel the warmth coming off him and you look up at him and he is looking at you, and his face is doing the thing it has been doing for a while now, that serious and certain thing, and he opens his mouth. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “Okay,” you say. “I’ve been thinking that—” He stops. Starts again. “The thing is, I—” He exhales. “You know when you know something and you keep not saying it because you don’t want to—” “Heeseung,” you say. “Yeah.” “Kiss me.” He blinks. Just once. And then something in his face settles, completely, like a thing that has been held at tension for a long time and has finally been allowed to let go, and he brings his hand up from your waist to your jaw, careful, and he kisses you.
It is soft and unhurried and entirely certain, the way he is — no performance, no question in it, just him, just this, just the two of you in the middle of the Winter Festival in the middle of Fairview Fall in January with the brass band playing and the lights overhead and the cold air around you and his hand warm on your jaw.
When he pulls back his eyes open slowly and he looks at you and neither of you says anything for a moment. “Hi,” he says finally. “Hi,” you say. He laughs, low and real, and you laugh too, and he presses his forehead to yours and you stand like that in the middle of the street while the town moves around you, and it is so far from where you started — the bus station, the parking lot, the small wooden sign that said Fairview Fall, Pop. 2,847 — and so completely, entirely right. His thumb traces your jaw once, gentle. “Darlin’,” he says softly. “I know,” you say. “I know.”
You walk home from the festival with his hand in yours. This is not discussed. It just happens — the crowd thinning around you, Immy and Sunghoon peeling off at their corner with goodnights that contain entire conversations neither of them says out loud, and then it is just you and Heeseung on the quiet streets of Fairview Fall in January, your breath showing in the cold air, the festival lights fading behind you, and at some point between the main street and Birdie’s road his hand finds yours and holds it and that is that. You walk without talking much. There is not much that needs saying yet. The kiss is still warm in you, sitting somewhere low and certain, and the town is quiet around you and the stars are out and his hand is warm and you think: this is what it feels like when something is right. You have not felt it before, not exactly like this, and you hold it carefully the way you hold things that are new and true and slightly frightening.
At Birdie’s porch he stops at the bottom step and you turn to face him and he is looking at you in the way he has been looking at you for a while now, except that now neither of you has to pretend it isn’t happening. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says.“Goodnight, Heeseung.” He squeezes your hand once before he lets go. You watch him walk back down the street — unhurried, hands in his pockets, the blue car waiting at the kerb — and you stand on the bottom step until he is gone and then you go inside. The house is quiet. The tree lights are still on in the sitting room, Birdie having forgotten or having left them on deliberately, which is entirely possible. You hang up your coat and stand in the hallway for a moment, your hand still warm from his. Gerald appears from the sitting room, looks at you, and turns around and goes back. “I know,” you say, to no one. You go upstairs. You sit on the bed. You pick up the journal and hold it and then put it back down because some things need a night to settle before you put them into words. You lie back and look at the ceiling and you are smiling and you do not try to stop it.
Birdie knows in the morning. You do not tell her. You do not have to tell her. You come downstairs in your mother’s cardigan with the ring warm on its chain and she is at the kitchen table with her coffee and she looks at your face and her whole expression does something slow and warm and satisfied, like a woman who has been patient about something for a long time and has been proven right. “Morning,” you say. “Morning, baby,” she says. “How was the festival?” “Good,” you say. “Mm.” She wraps both hands around her mug. “Just good?” You get yourself a cup and sit down across from her and look at her and she looks back at you with those familiar eyes, your mother’s eyes, and she is fighting a smile with everything she has and losing.
“Birdie,” you say. “I’m not saying anything,” she says. “You’re saying everything.” “I’m drinking my coffee.” She takes a very deliberate sip. “I’m simply a woman drinking coffee who is extremely happy on a Sunday morning for no particular reason.” You look at her. She looks at you. The smile wins, on both sides. “He’s a good boy,” she says, finally, simply. “I know,” you say. “His mama will be insufferable about it.” She says this with the warmth of someone who likes his mama very much. “In the best possible way.” You wrap your hands around your cup and look out the kitchen window at the January garden, frost on the grass, the oak tree bare. Something has settled in you, something that was restless and is not restless anymore, and you sit with it in the warm kitchen while Birdie finishes her coffee and does not make a production of anything, because she never does, because she is exactly who she is. “Thank you,” you say, eventually, not about anything specific. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over yours for a moment. “Don’t,” she says. Which means of course. Always. You don’t have to say it.
Monday morning arrives and you walk through the school gate and Immy is there. She is leaning against the wall beside the gate with her arms folded and an expression that is doing extraordinary things — warm and knowing and delighted and restrained all at once, the expression of someone who has known something for a long time and has finally been vindicated. “Hi,” you say. “Hi honey,” she says. “Good weekend?” “Good weekend.” “Anything interesting happen?” “Immy.” “I’m just asking.”
She falls into step beside you. “I’m asking a perfectly normal question about your weekend. I happened to be at the Winter Festival. I happened to see certain things. I’m not saying anything about those things. I’m just asking about your weekend.” “Immy.” “Yes?” “He kissed me.” She stops walking. You keep walking. She catches up in three steps. “I know he kissed you,” she says, and her voice has gone high and bright around the edges in the way it does when she is genuinely delighted and cannot fully contain it.
“I saw him kiss you. Sunghoon saw him kiss you. Half of Fairview Fall probably saw him kiss you.” “That’s fine,” you say, because it is. She grabs your arm and stops you in the middle of the hallway and looks at your face with her hands on your shoulders and her eyes going soft. “Are you happy?” she says. Just like that, direct and real, the way Immy always asks the things that matter. You think about it. The honest answer, the real one. “Yeah,” you say. “I really am.” She makes a sound that is mostly just joy, pulls you into a hug that is brief and tight and completely certain, and then releases you and straightens and composes herself into someone who is simply walking to class. “Good,” she says briskly. “That’s all I wanted to know. Come on, we’ll be late.”
You walk to class. You are smiling. You cannot stop doing that today. Heeseung finds you before lunch. He always finds you before lunch. This is not new. What is new is that when he falls into step beside you in the hallway he takes your hand, easy as anything, like it is something you have always done, and you look down at your joined hands and then up at him and he looks back at you with that grin that has always been just him, that has always been the most natural thing in the world. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say.
“Is this okay?” He means the hand. “Very okay,” you say. He nods once, satisfied, and walks with you down the hallway through the midday noise of Fairview Fall High School, and the school moves around you the way it always has, except that now you are holding his hand and the whole building seems to know it and most of it seems pleased.
It is in the corridor outside the science block that you see Cassie Howard. She’s been interested in Heesueng since October from what you’ve seen. Always loitering beside his locker and asking him to help her with reading for English. She’s a nice girl. But when these interactions happened you couldn’t help but feel jealous. She is with two girls from her class, laughing at something, her hair in a high ponytail, and she looks up when you pass and her eyes go to your joined hands and then to your face. Something moves through her expression — you see it, brief and honest, the particular look of someone who has let something go and is at peace with having let it go — and then she smiles at you. A real smile. Warm and direct. She lifts a hand. You lift yours back. She turns back to her friends and keeps talking and that is the whole of it, clean and simple and kind, and you look at it as you walk past and feel something in your chest that is gratitude, or respect, or both.
“What was that?” Heeseung asks. “Cassie Howard waved at me.” “Yeah,” he says, easy. “She would.” He glances over at you. “This town doesn’t really have time for conflict.” You look up at him — the grin, the certainty of him, the way he says it like it is just a true thing about the place he loves — and you smile, properly, all the way through it. “I like this town,” you say. “I know you do,” he says. “I’ve known for a while.”
The conversation about what you are happens that afternoon, in the blue car, parked outside Birdie’s with the engine running for the heat and the radio low. It is not a serious conversation. That is the thing you will remember about it — it is not fraught or uncertain or full of the nervous energy of something that could go wrong. It is just the two of you in the warm car in the cold January afternoon, talking about it the way you talk about most things, which is honestly and without making it harder than it is.
“So,” he says. “So,” you say. He looks at the steering wheel. Then at you. “I’d like it if you were mine,” he says, which is simple and direct and so entirely him that something in you softens completely. “If that’s something you want too.” “It’s something I want,” you say. He nods. The grin. “Okay.” “Okay,” you say. He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear — careful, like he has been wanting to do it for a while and is allowing himself to now — and his fingers brush your jaw and rest there for a moment. “I’ve wanted to do that since October,” he says. “Which part?” “All of it.” He says it plainly. “The hair. The—” He pauses. “All of it.” You look at him in the afternoon light, this boy who found you outside a gate on the first day and showed you around a town that was not your town and drove you home and stayed for dinner and gave you a record he loved without knowing why you needed it, and you think: I was not supposed to stay. I was not supposed to build anything here. I was not supposed to end up in a blue car in January in Fairview Fall, Texas feeling like this. You think: I am so glad I did.
“Heeseung,” you say. “Yeah.” You lean across the console and kiss him, soft and certain, and his hand comes up to your jaw the way it did last night and he kisses you back the same way he does everything, which is completely and without any hurry, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it, and you think that there is something very specific about being kissed by someone who actually means it, who is not performing it, who is just — there, entirely, in the moment with you. When you pull back he is smiling. Not the grin, not the easy public one — something smaller and more private, something that you think might be just yours. “Go inside,” he says. “It’s cold.” “It’s warm in the car.” “Go inside,” he says again, and the smile gets wider. “Birdie’ll be watching from the window.”
You look at the house. The curtain moves. “Oh my God,” you say. He laughs, fully, head tipping back, and you get out of the car before you start laughing too, and you take the porch steps two at a time and the front door opens before you reach it and Birdie is standing there with the most unconvincing innocent expression you have ever seen. “How was school?” she says. “Birdie.” “What? I’m asking about your day.” You push past her into the warm house and she closes the door behind you both and the sound of the blue car pulling away from the kerb is very clear in the quiet and Birdie hums something small and satisfied to herself in the hallway. “Not a word,” you say. “Not a single one,” she agrees, and goes to put the kettle on, and you lean against the wall and press your hand to your mouth and smile into your palm while Gerald winds around your ankles and the house wraps around you, warm and full, yours.
February in Fairview Fall is the quiet month. The festival is over and the holidays are long gone and the town settles into the particular stillness of a place waiting for spring, going about its business without any special occasion to dress itself up for. The cold is still real but it has lost the bite of January — it is a softer cold now, the kind you can walk in without bracing, and on the clearest days there is something in the light that is almost a promise, a brightness at the edges of the afternoon that was not there in December.
You and Heeseung find your rhythm the way rivers find their course — not by deciding, but by going the way that is natural, the way that offers the least resistance. He picks you up in the mornings. He walks you to class. He finds you before lunch without fail. He drives you home in the blue car with the radio low and his hand finding yours across the console somewhere between the school and Birdie’s road, easy and unhurried, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. It is the most obvious thing in the world. You are still slightly amazed that it gets to be. Birdie makes pointed remarks about how often there are two cups on the drying rack now instead of one, which she does with such elaborate innocence that it is impossible to be annoyed by it. His mother sends peach preserves home with him for you — a jar, then another jar, then a third with a small note attached in handwriting that is Heeseung’s handwriting in thirty years that simply says for Y/N, with love — and you put them in Birdie’s kitchen and they make everything taste like summer. Immy has taken to calling you both insufferable with enormous affection. Sunghoon has said nothing, which is the loudest thing Sunghoon can do.
He takes you to the high roads on a clear Saturday in late February when the sky is the particular shade of blue that only happens in winter, deep and cloudless, the kind of sky that goes on forever. You have seen the high roads from below — from the town, looking up, the winding line of them against the hillside — but you have not been up them yet, and when he turns off the main road and the blue car begins to climb you understand immediately why this is somewhere people go.
The town falls away below you slowly, revealing itself in pieces — the water tower, the church steeple, the football field, the grid of streets you know now, that you could walk from memory — and by the time he pulls off onto the flat ridge at the top and cuts the engine you can see all of Fairview Fall spread out beneath you like a map of a life. You get out of the car without speaking. You both do. The wind up here is different — wider, cleaner, coming from somewhere far away — and you stand at the edge of the ridge and look at the town below and the land beyond it going flat and enormous in every direction and the sky above it all doing what the sky does up here, which is everything. “My dad used to take me to the roof of our building in the city,” you say. You do not plan to say it. It comes out the way things come out when you are somewhere that opens you. “Not to see the city — we could see that from our windows. He took me up for the sky. He said the city was too bright to see it properly from the street but if you got high enough above the light you could still find them.” You pause. “The constellations. He knew all of them.”
Heeseung is beside you, not quite touching, listening the way he listens which is with his whole self, not waiting for you to finish so he can speak but actually receiving what you are saying. “He’d stand behind me and point over my shoulder,” you say. “And he’d say there, do you see it? and I’d say yes even when I couldn’t always see it because I loved the way he talked about them. Like they were old friends.” You look at the sky. The February afternoon is going and the first stars are beginning, faint at the edges of the blue. “He said every constellation has a story and every story is about the same things. Love and loss and people trying to find their way home.” The wind moves. “He sounds like someone worth knowing,” Heeseung says, quietly.
“He was the best person I’ve ever known,” you say. “Him and my mom both. They were—” You stop. The grief is here, the real kind, the kind that comes up from the ground. “They were just the best people. And I don’t know how to—” Your voice goes. “I don’t know how to stop feeling like I should call him every time I see something I want to tell him about.” Heeseung puts his arm around you. Not to stop the crying — you are crying now, quietly, the tears going cold on your face in the wind — but just to be there, to be solid, to be the thing you are not falling into even though you are falling. “You don’t have to stop,” he says. “You can want to call him every time.” “It doesn’t go away,” you say. “People say it gets easier but it doesn’t go away.” “No,” he says. “I don’t think it does.” He says it simply, without flinching from it, without trying to fix it into something more comfortable, and you love him for that in a way that you do not yet have a word for — the particular love of someone who tells you the true thing instead of the easy thing.
You cry for a while in the wind on the high roads above Fairview Fall with his arm around you and the town below and the stars coming through above, and he holds you and does not say it’s okay because he is too wise for that, and he does not say hush because that is not something he would ever say to you, and he does not let go.
When you surface he turns to you and lifts his hand and presses his thumb to your cheek, gentle, and catches a tear that has not finished yet, and then he leans in and kisses where it was, soft, his lips cold and warm at the same time, and then the other cheek, and your eyes close. “Hey,” he says softly, against your face. “Hey,” you say back. He pulls you in properly, both arms, and you press your face into his jacket and breathe and he rests his chin on top of your head and you stand like that on the ridge above the town until you are steady again, until the grief has done what it came to do and settled back into the place where it lives, and the stars are properly out now, a handful of them at least, and you pull back and look up.
“There,” you say. You find the one you know most certainly, the one your father always found first. “That one. Orion. My dad said find Orion first and everything else follows.” Heeseung looks where you are pointing. “I see him,” he says. “He’s always there,” you say. “My dad said that. He said some things are always there, you just have to know where to look.” Heeseung looks at the sky for a moment and then looks at you, and his face in the starlight is so careful and so certain and so entirely his. “Smart man,” he says. “The smartest,” you say. He takes your hand and you stand on the ridge and look at the stars until the cold drives you back into the car, and on the drive home the radio plays something soft and country and his hand is warm over yours on the console and Fairview Fall comes up to meet you, lit and small and entirely yours.
Spring arrives in March like it means it. Overnight, or what feels like overnight, the brown gives way to green and the air changes temperature and quality and the town opens up the way it does when winter is done — windows, doors, people on porches, Mae’s putting tables out on the sidewalk for the first time since October. The football field goes bright again. The oak trees on Birdie’s street bud out and within two weeks are full and green and moving in the warm breeze. Immy announces the lake on a Friday in late March the same way she announces everything, which is as a fact that has already been decided. “Saturday,” she says at lunch. “The lake. All four of us. It’s warm enough.” “It’s barely warm enough,” Sunghoon says. “It’s warm enough,” she says again, with finality. It is warm enough. Just. The lake in spring is the colour of something deep and clear and cold, ringed with trees that are only just coming into leaf, the banks soft with new grass. There are other people there — it is a public place, a Friday night place in summer, but on a Saturday morning in late March it is quiet enough that you have the good stretch of bank largely to yourselves.
Immy has brought a blanket and approximately half of her kitchen and she sets up on the bank with the efficiency of someone who has done this many times while Sunghoon wades in without ceremony and makes a sound that suggests Immy was generous in her assessment of the temperature. You are standing at the edge of the water in your swimsuit — the one Immy helped you pick out, the green one, the one she said was exactly right with your colouring — with your toes in the cold and the spring sun warm on your back, looking at the lake and deciding whether you are brave enough.
You become aware that Heeseung has stopped moving beside you. You look over. He is looking at you. Not in a way that is rude or obvious — in a way that is simply honest, a way he does not quite school fast enough, a way that you catch before it becomes the grin. “What?” you say. “Nothing,” he says. The grin arrives. “You just look—” He does not finish the sentence because Sunghoon, from the water, sends a splash that catches him full across the chest, and you take several steps back to avoid the second wave. “Eyes forward,” Sunghoon says, with absolute serenity. “I wasn’t—” Heeseung starts. “In,” Sunghoon says, and splashes him again. Heeseung goes in, retaliating immediately, and you stand on the bank and laugh at both of them until Immy materialises beside you and says “we should go in before they start trying to dunk each other” and takes your hand and you go in together, fast, because fast is the only way, and the cold hits you all at once and you gasp and then you are in it, properly in it, and after thirty seconds it is perfect, the kind of cold that makes you feel entirely alive.
You spend the morning in the water and on the bank and in the water again. Sunghoon and Heeseung have an argument about something that happened in a football game two years ago that neither of them can fully remember and that Immy referees with the authority of someone who was there and remembers everything. You and Immy lie on the blanket in the midday sun while the boys swim further out and she tells you about the summer she was twelve and she and Heeseung and Sunghoon built a raft in Heeseung’s backyard and carried it out here and it sank immediately and Sunghoon said he knew it would and he had told them so and Heeseung said he was the worst and Sunghoon said he knew that too.
“He was right though,” Immy says. “It was terrible construction.” “Did Heeseung admit that?” “Eventually.” She shades her eyes to look at the water. “He always admits it eventually. He just needs a minute.” She pauses. “That’s one of the things about him. He comes around. He always comes around.” You look at the water too, at Heeseung out in the middle of it, dark head, easy stroke. “I know,” you say. She smiles at the sky.
The afternoon goes golden and then the four of you build a fire on the bank in the early evening in the practiced way of people who have done this before — Sunghoon doing most of the actual work while Heeseung hands him things and makes suggestions that Sunghoon ignores — and you sit around it with blankets and the remains of what Immy brought and the lake going dark and still in front of you.
At some point Immy stands up and says she needs to be home for dinner and Sunghoon stands with her immediately, the way he always does, and there is a small exchange of goodnights and the sounds of them packing up, and then their voices going up the bank toward the road, and then quiet. Just you and Heeseung and the fire and the lake. He has been quiet the last hour in a way that is not unhappy, just interior, something running underneath. You sit with it because you know him well enough by now to know when to wait. Gerald is teaching you this too. Everyone in your life is teaching you to wait. He gets up and goes to the car and comes back with his guitar. You look at it. You have never seen him carry it out of the house before — you know it exists, Birdie told you, you have known it was coming in the way you know spring is coming, something in the air before it arrives.
He sits back down beside you and settles it in his lap and does not look at you. “You don’t have to listen,” he says. “I want to,” you say. He nods once. He adjusts the tuning quietly, the small careful sounds of it, and then his hands find the strings and he begins to play.
It is not a song you know. You do not think it is a song anyone knows — it has the quality of something made, something that grew rather than was written, the melody finding itself as it goes. It is quiet and unhurried and the notes go out over the water and the fire pops and the spring air holds it and you sit very still because you do not want to be the thing that breaks it.
He plays for a while. You look at the lake. You look at the fire. You look at him — his hands on the strings, the concentration on his face, the way he is entirely present in the music, the way everything else about him is here but this particular part of him goes somewhere else, somewhere interior, the same place the journal takes you. He lets the last chord go. The quiet comes back. “That was yours,” you say. Not a question. “Yeah.” He sets his hand flat against the strings to still them. “I’ve been working on it for a while.” “Does it have a name?” He looks at you sideways, and something in his expression is careful and open and slightly vulnerable in a way he rarely is in company. “Not yet,” he says. You look at the lake. “It should,” you say. “It’s too good not to have a name.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll figure it out,” and it sounds like he already has, and you do not push it, and the fire burns down and the stars come out and the two of you sit by the lake in the early spring dark and he plays a little more — things you half-know, things that are fully his — and it is one of the best evenings of your life, quiet and full, the kind you will come back to when you need to remember what good feels like.
March becomes April and the bookshop comes into its busiest season — spring cleaning, Birdie says, people remember books exist when the weather turns — and you are in after school most days, shelving and helping and making change and talking to the regulars who have become your regulars too, people who ask after you by name and bring you things from their gardens and tell you things about the town that Birdie has not told you yet.
You are on the ladder reaching for the top shelf on a Thursday afternoon, a stack of returns to be reshelved, when the bell above the door sounds and you do not look down because you are busy and Birdie is at the counter. “She’s in the back,” you hear Birdie say, and then, a beat later: “second aisle.” Footsteps on the wooden floor. You are still reaching for the shelf. “Need a hand?” Heeseung says, below you. “I’ve got it,” you say. You get it. You come down the ladder with the empty stack and he is there at the bottom of it, leaning against the shelves with his jacket on and his hair slightly messed from the wind outside, and he looks at you the way he looks at you now — that private, warm, certain look that is just yours, that you have stopped being surprised by and started simply receiving. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say. “I’m working.” “I know.”
He pushes off the shelf and steps into the aisle and it is narrow enough that he is very close, and he takes the empty stack from your hands and sets it on the floor without breaking eye contact and you look up at him and the afternoon light from the window at the end of the aisle is warm and golden and his hands find your waist. “Heeseung,” you say, with a very specific kind of not-seriousness. “I’ll be quick,” he says, and he is grinning, and then he kisses you back against the shelves, his hands warm on your waist, and you put yours on his chest and the shelves press gently into your back and it is soft and thorough and entirely him and the bookshop smells like paper and vanilla and spring through the open window.
A sound from the direction of the counter. A very deliberate cough. You pull apart. Heeseung drops his forehead to yours and his shoulders shake once, silently. Another cough. Pointed. Patient. With the timing of a woman who has been a bookshop owner for years and has heard everything happen in her aisles and has Opinions. “We should—” you start. “Yeah,” he says. He steps back. He picks up the empty stack from the floor and holds it out to you with the expression of a man attempting innocence. “Reshelving.” “Reshelving,” you agree.
You go back to the front of the shop. Birdie is behind the counter with a customer, her back to you, discussing a book recommendation with complete concentration. She does not look at you. She also does not stop smiling. You catch Heeseung’s eye across the shop. He presses his lips together against the grin. You look at the ceiling. “Really?” Birdie says, to no one, to the air, conversationally, still not looking at you. “We’re working,” you say. “Mm,” she says. “I see that.” The customer looks between all three of you with polite confusion. Birdie recommends them something excellent and sends them on their way and then turns around and looks at you both with the expression of a woman who has said everything she intends to say on the subject without saying a word.
Heeseung clears his throat. “Afternoon, Birdie.” “Heeseung,” she says pleasantly. “You know my stockroom needs reorganising if you’ve got time on your hands.” He reorganises the stockroom. You shelve the returns. Birdie bakes something in the back that smells extraordinary and pretends this is all very normal and you work through the afternoon in the warm, paper-scented air of Read a Cookie while the spring goes on outside the window and Gerald sleeps on the counter and the town moves past the glass. Later, walking home, Heeseung says: “I like your aunt.” “She likes you too,” you say. “That’s what makes it worse.” He laughs, and takes your hand, and you walk home through the April streets of Fairview Fall with the trees fully green and the light going gold and warm and the ring on its chain warm at your chest, and everything is tender and good and slightly too full to hold, the way the best things are.
Birdie goes to visit a friend in Austin on a Friday in April — an old friend, someone from before Fairview Fall, someone she has been meaning to visit for two years and has finally committed to, leaving Thursday evening with a bag and a list of instructions about Gerald that is longer than it needs to be. “He eats at seven,” she says, at the door. “Not six-thirty. Seven. He knows the difference and he will make your life very difficult if you get it wrong.” “I know, Birdie. I live here.” “I’m just saying.” She picks up her bag. “There’s a cobbler in the fridge. Don’t let Heeseung eat all of it.” “I wasn’t planning on—” “I know you weren’t planning on it.” She gives you the look, the fond and entirely unsubtle one. “I’m just saying.” She kisses your cheek. “Be good.” “Always,” you say. She gives you a look that suggests she finds this moderately believable and goes.
The house is very quiet on Friday evening. You feed Gerald at seven — exactly seven, he does know the difference — and you sit on the sofa with your book and the lamp on and the spring evening going dark outside the window, and it is fine, it is completely fine, you have been alone before, and then the phone rings and it is Heeseung. “Hi,” you say. “Hi.” His voice is warm and easy. “How’s the house?” “Quiet.” “Birdie get off alright?” “With a list of Gerald’s dietary requirements and a pointed comment about cobbler.” He laughs. “She left cobbler?” “Don’t.” “I’m just asking.” “Heeseung.” A pause, warm at the edges. “My parents are at my uncle’s tonight,” he says. “I’m at the house alone.” Another pause. “You could come over. If you wanted.” You look at the quiet room. Gerald looks back at you from the armchair with the expression of an animal who has no opinions about your personal life. “Give me twenty minutes,” you say.
The Lee house is lit warm from the inside when you come up the front path, the porch light on, the garden going dark around it. He opens the door before you knock — he must have heard the gate — and he is in a soft shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his feet bare and he looks at you on the doorstep for a moment with that expression, the private one, the one that is just yours. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say, and he steps back to let you in. The house has the particular quiet of a place that is usually full and is not full tonight, and it is warm from the day’s heat still in the walls, and it smells like his mother’s cooking and something underneath that is just the house, just the smell of a place that has been lived in well. He takes your jacket and you follow him to the kitchen where there are two glasses on the counter and something on the stove that he has apparently made, which surprises you. “You cook?” you say. “My mama taught me.” He lifts the lid and checks it. “I’m not as good as she is.” “Nobody is.”
He makes a sound of agreement and you sit at the kitchen counter and watch him finish it and it is domestic in a way that sits warmly in your chest, the ease of it, the two of you in a kitchen with the evening outside and nowhere else to be. He plates it up — something simple, something good — and you eat at the kitchen table and the conversation wanders the way it does when you are somewhere comfortable, from school to music to something Sunghoon said at practice that made the whole team laugh, to the book you are reading, to nothing in particular. “Miss Beaumont asked about you today,” you say. “Yeah?” “She said you were the best argument she ever lost.” He looks pleased. “What were we arguing about?” “She didn’t say. She said you were wrong but you made her think harder about why, and that’s rarer than being right.” He considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “I’ll take that,” he says. “That’s a real compliment.” “I told her that’s what you’d say.”
He smiles at his plate, private and warm, and you look at him across the kitchen table in the lamplight and think about what it is to know someone — to know the way they receive things, the way they hold compliments, the way they go quiet when something matters and loud when something is funny, the way they drive and the way they listen and the way their voice drops when they are saying something true. You have been building this knowledge for eight months without knowing you were building it and now it is just — there, solid, a thing you can lean on.
After dinner he washes up and you dry, the way you have fallen into doing it at Birdie’s, and it is the same quiet domestic ease, his hands in the water and yours with the cloth and the radio low on the windowsill, and at some point he says something that makes you laugh and you lean into his shoulder without thinking about it and he turns his head and presses his lips to your hair and stays there a moment, and then he takes the cloth from your hands and hangs it over the tap and turns to you. “Come on,” he says, quietly.
His room is at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, the oak tree visible through the window in the dark. It is a room that has been lived in for seventeen years — worn at the edges, comfortable, everything in its place but none of it arranged for display. There are records on the shelf, the good kind, stacked carefully. His guitar in the corner on its stand. A photograph on the desk of the three of them — him and Sunghoon and Immy, young, maybe thirteen, standing at what looks like the lake, all of them squinting into the sun and grinning. Books, more than you expected, stacked on the nightstand and on the floor beside the bed. You go to the records first, because you cannot help it, running your finger along the spines the way your father taught you. “You and my dad would have gotten along,” you say. It comes out soft and easy, not weighted, just true. “I know,” he says, from behind you. “You’ve told me enough about him that I feel like I know him a little.”
You turn around. He is close, in the way he is always close now, in the way you have stopped registering as proximity and started registering as just — him, just the space he takes up in your life. “I love you,” you say. You have not said it before. You have known it — you have known it for longer than you have allowed yourself to know it — but you have not said it, and it comes out now in this room with his records and his guitar and the photograph of him at thirteen with his whole life ahead of him, and it comes out the way true things come out when you stop holding them, which is simply and without apology. He looks at you for a moment. Something in his face does what it does when something matters, which is go very still and very certain. “I love you,” he says back. “I’ve loved you since the gate on the first day and I’m done not saying it.”
You look at him. He looks at you. “Since the gate,” you say. “Since the gate,” he confirms. You step into him and he meets you halfway and the kiss is different to the others — not urgency, not the sweet tentativeness of the first one, but something fuller and more certain, something that has all the months in it, all the mornings in the blue car and the evenings at the diner and the high roads and the fire by the lake and the bookshop and the kitchen and all of it, every bit of it, and his hands are in your hair and yours are on his chest and you are both entirely present in it, entirely there. He pulls back just enough to look at you, his forehead against yours, his hands framing your face. “You sure?” he says. Quiet and straight, the way he always is. “I’m sure,” you say. “Are you?” “Since the gate,” he says again, soft, and you laugh against his mouth and he smiles into the kiss. Your hands slide into his hair immediately, pulling him closer, and he exhales sharply, his hand moving from your face to the back of your neck, gripping a little tighter now, holding you in place as the kiss deepens. His mouth moves against yours with more intent, his tongue slower but heavier, like he’s tasting you properly now, like he’s not holding back the fact that he wants this. Wants you.
Your hands move down his back, pressing him closer, feeling the solid warmth of him, and he responds instantly, his body shifting into yours, his thigh pressing between yours without thinking. “Fuck—” he exhales quietly against your mouth. He pulls back just enough to breathe, but his lips don’t leave you — they trail along your jaw instead, down your neck, slower again but heavier, his mouth open against your skin. You feel it everywhere. “Heeseung—” you breathe. He hums softly against your throat, the sound low, vibrating through you, and then his teeth graze your skin — not enough to hurt, just enough to make your breath catch.
“Heeseung—” you breathe. He hums softly against your throat, the sound low, vibrating through you, and then his teeth graze your skin — not enough to hurt, just enough to make your breath catch. “Darlin’…” he says again, against your neck this time, his voice rougher. “You have no idea—” His hands move down from your face, your neck, over your shoulders, your arms, then back in — pulling your shirt up, slower than before but more intentional, like he’s aware of every inch of skin he’s uncovering. You lift your arms for him and he drags the fabric off you, his eyes dropping immediately to your chest.
He exhales. “Jesus—” His hands come up to your tits instantly, full, firm, like he’s been waiting to touch you like this. His thumbs drag over your nipples and you arch into him without thinking. “There,” he murmurs. “Yeah— you feel that?” “Yes—” He presses harder. Rolls your nipple between his fingers. You gasp. “Fuck—” he breathes, almost to himself. “You’re so—” He cuts himself off and leans down, his mouth replacing his hand, taking your nipple into his mouth, his tongue circling slowly before he sucks. Your fingers tighten in his hair. “Heeseung—” He groans softly against your skin, the sound unguarded, and it makes your stomach flip. “Yeah,” he murmurs, pulling back just enough to speak, his breath warm against your chest. “Say it again—” You say his name again, softer this time, and his hands tighten on you, his mouth returning, slower but deeper, like he’s losing track of how careful he was trying to be. His other hand stays on your other breast, squeezing, his thumb dragging over your nipple in time with his mouth, and the combination makes your hips shift under him. He notices immediately. Of course he does. “Sensitive,” he murmurs. “Fuck— I can feel it—”
Your hands move down his chest now, pushing his shirt up, needing to touch him too, needing something solid under your palms. He lets you, lifts his arms so you can pull it off, and the second your hands hit his skin, he exhales. “Yeah,” he says softly. “There—” You run your hands over him, his chest, his stomach, feeling the tension in him, the way his body reacts to your touch just as much as yours reacts to his. “You’re shaking,” he murmurs, kissing along your neck again. “So are you,” you whisper. He lets out a quiet, breathless laugh against your skin. “Yeah,” he admits. “I am.”
His hand slides down your stomach, slow, his fingers tracing the line of your waist, your hips, before settling on your thigh. He presses gently, encouraging you to open for him. You do. His breath catches slightly when he sees you open.. His fingers brush between your thighs, light at first, feeling the warmth, the slickness already there. “Fuck,” he exhales quietly. “You’re already—” He stops himself and looks back at your face. “You okay?” “Yes,” you say, breath uneven. “Yeah?” he asks softly. “Good girl,” he murmurs. His fingers move again. More deliberate now. He runs them through your folds, slow, spreading the wetness, learning you the same way he learned everything else — carefully, completely. When his thumb finds your clit, he presses lightly, testing. You react instantly, hips shifting. He notices. “Right there?” he asks. “Yes—”
He circles it slowly, steady, his other hand still resting on your thigh, holding you open. His touch isn’t rushed, but it’s precise, like he’s mapping exactly what you need. “You’re doing so well,” he murmurs. “So good for me.” His fingers slide down, then back up, then he presses one finger into you. Slow. You gasp. He stills. “Okay?” “Yes,” you breathe. “Don’t stop.” He nods slightly. “Alright. I’ve got you, darlin’.” He moves again, pushing deeper, then adding another finger, curling them slightly inside you, watching your face for every reaction. “That’s it,” he says softly. “Just relax— I’ve got you—” His thumb keeps working your clit, his fingers moving in a steady rhythm, and you feel it building, tightening low in your stomach. “Heeseung—”
“I know,” he murmurs. “I know—” He leans down and kisses you again, softer now, his movements syncing — his fingers, his mouth, everything aligned. When he finally moves over you properly, settling between your thighs, his body warm and solid against yours, the shift is immediate. Closer. Heavier. Real. He lines himself up slowly, his hand coming back to your face again, thumb brushing your cheek. “Look at me,” he says softly and then he pushes into you. You gasp, your body tightening around him instinctively. He stops immediately. Completely still.
“Okay?” he asks. “Yes,” you breathe. “Don’t stop.”He moves again, slower than he wants to, you can feel it — the control, the effort — but underneath it there’s something stronger now, something that wants more. His hips press into yours, deeper each time, his hand sliding to your hip, holding you, grounding you. “Fuck—” he exhales. “You feel—” You say his name and it breaks him. His rhythm deepens, still controlled but heavier now, more intent, his forehead pressing to yours again. “I’ve got you, darlin’,” he says. “You’re alright— I’ve got you—” Your hands move all over him — his back, his shoulders, pulling him closer, and he responds immediately, pressing deeper, his pace shifting just enough to make your breath catch.
“You feel incredible,” he murmurs. “So warm— so tight—” You gasp. Your body tightens. He feels it. “Yeah— I know—” he breathes. “I know—” His mouth finds your neck again, kissing, slower now but deeper, like he can’t stay away from it, like he needs to feel you there while he moves. “Stay with me,” he murmurs. “I am—” “Good girl,” he says softly. “That’s it—” It builds. Steady and inevitable.. Your body tightens, your hands gripping him, your breath breaking, and he stays right there with you, not rushing, not pulling away, just with you.
“Darlin’—” he breathes. “You’re doing so well—” You come.. His whole body reacts, his rhythm stuttering, then deepening as he follows, his voice breaking softly against your neck as he finishes, still pressed close, still holding you. He stays there. Inside you. Breathing hard. His hand comes back to your face again, thumb brushing your cheek, softer now. “You okay?” he murmurs. You nod, smiling faintly. “Yeah.” He exhales. Relieved. And kisses you again, slow and warm, like he’s not done touching you yet. “Stay with me,” he says softly.
Afterward you lie in the warm dark with his arm around you and your head on his chest and his heartbeat under your ear, and neither of you speaks for a long time because there is nothing that needs saying and it is enough to just be here, to just be this. “Hey,” he says eventually, into your hair. “Hey,” you say. He tightens his arm around you once, just once, and then loosens it, and you lie there in the quiet of his room in the house where he grew up and you think: I was not supposed to stay. I was not supposed to build anything here. You think: I am going to stay.
You fall asleep without meaning to and wake to the dark room and Heeseung warm beside you and the clock on his nightstand reading half past ten. You lie still for a moment, listening to the house, the spring night outside, a dog somewhere distant. Heeseung is awake. You can tell by his breathing. “You okay?” you say. “Yeah.” He says it easily, and he means it, but there is something underneath it, something that has been there since dinner, something you noticed and did not push. You wait. He exhales. “There’s something I should have told you,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to and I kept — I don’t know. I kept waiting for the right time and there wasn’t one so I just didn’t.” You lift your head to look at him. In the low light his face is serious. “The scholarship,” he says. You go still. “Coach put my name forward in January,” he says. “To three programmes. I found out in February that one of them wants me. Full ride. Music programme at a school in Nashville.” He pauses. “It’s a good programme. It’s a real one.” The room is quiet.
“You’ve known since February,” you say. “Yeah.” “It’s April, Heeseung.” “I know.” “That’s—” You sit up. The warmth of the last hour is still in you but something else is in you now too, something cold and specific. “That’s two months. You’ve known for two months and you didn’t—” You stop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because I didn’t want it,” he says. He says it simply, like it is an explanation. “I still don’t want it. I want to stay here. I want community college and music and—”
“That’s not the point,” you say. “The point is you didn’t tell me.” You look at him in the dark. “I heard about it, Heeseung. Someone at school — I don’t even remember who — said something about Coach pushing you for a scholarship and I thought they meant the football one, I thought — I had no idea there was a music one, I had no idea it was real and current and something you were sitting on—” You hear yourself and stop. He is looking at you with an expression that is not defensive, which somehow makes it worse.
He looks like someone who knows he is wrong and is not going to pretend otherwise. “You heard about it at school,” he says. “Weeks ago,” you say. “I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know enough to ask.” You get up and find your clothes and he sits up and watches you and does not try to stop you because he understands that this is not something to stop, this is something to let happen. “I’m not angry about the scholarship,” you say, pulling on your cardigan. Your mother’s cardigan, warm and familiar. “I’m angry that you didn’t trust me with it. I’m angry that I heard it from someone else. I’m angry that you let me fall in love with you and didn’t tell me there was a version of the future where you might not be here.” Your voice does not break. You are grateful for that.
“That’s what I’m angry about.” “I know,” he says. “You’re right.” “I know I’m right.” You pick up your jacket. “I’m going to go home.” “Let me drive you.” “I’ll walk.” “It’s dark—” “Heeseung.” You look at him. He looks back, and his face is open and honest and not making excuses, and you love him, you still love him, that has not moved at all, which is its own kind of complicated. “I just need tonight. Okay? I just need tonight.” He nods. “Okay.” You go to the door. You stop. “I’m not going anywhere,” you say, and you mean Fairview Fall, you mean him, you mean all of it. “I just need tonight.” “I know,” he says. “I’ll be here.”
You go home through the spring dark, the streets of Fairview Fall quiet and lit around you, your mother’s cardigan warm on your shoulders and your heart doing several things at once. Gerald is in the window when you come up the path. You go inside and sit on the sofa in the lamplight and pick up the journal. You write for a long time. At the end of it you close the journal and sit in the quiet house and you are still angry and you are still in love and both of those things are fully true and you are learning, slowly, that love is not the absence of anger, it is just what is there when the anger passes. It will pass. He will be there. You know both of these things the way you know Orion — certainly, completely, because someone you loved taught you where to look.
The thing about being angry at someone you love is that it lives in your body. It is not a clean, distant thing. It sits in your chest and your throat and behind your eyes and it makes everything heavier — the morning, the walk to school, the seat at lunch, the backseat of Sunghoon’s truck where the space beside you is wrong now, off-balance, like a room where the furniture has been moved in the night.
You give yourself the weekend. You walk home Friday night and you cry into Gerald and you write in the journal and in the morning you get up and you make tea and you sit with the quiet and you let yourself feel it fully — the anger, and underneath the anger, the fear, and underneath the fear, everything else. You give yourself the weekend because you said you needed tonight and one night was not enough and you are learning to know what you need. Monday comes and you walk through the school gate and he is there, beside the blue car, and you look at him and look away and keep walking, and the air between you is something you have never felt between you before, which is distance.
You do not sit with him at lunch. You sit with Immy, who does not ask questions, who hands you half her sandwich and talks about her chemistry coursework with the focused energy of someone who understands that the best thing she can do right now is be normal, and you love her for it even as you are aware of Heeseung across the cafeteria not looking at you in a way that is very much looking at you. Sunghoon says nothing. He eats. He is a barometer of the situation and he knows it and he stays very still.
Wednesday he comes to the bookshop. You hear the bell above the door and look up from the returns you are sorting and he is there in his jacket with his hands in his pockets and he looks at you with an expression that is not an argument, that is just — him, open and present and a little wrecked around the edges in the way you have not seen him be before.
“Hey,” he says. You look back at the returns. “I’m working.” “I know.” He does not move from the door. “I’m not here to push. I just—” He stops. “I wanted to see you.” “I’m here,” you say, to the books. He stands there for a moment. Then he goes to the shelf nearest the door and starts looking at things, not browsing, just — being in the same room. Giving you something without asking for anything back.
Birdie comes out from the back and sees him and sees your face and does the thing she always does which is to read the room completely and not comment on a single thing she has read. She says “Heeseung, those top shelves need dusting if you’ve got a minute” and he says “yes, Birdie” and she hands him a cloth and he dusts the top shelves and you sort returns and nobody talks and the afternoon goes by and he leaves at closing without saying anything else and the door bell sounds and then the shop is quiet. Birdie puts the closed sign up. She comes to stand beside you at the counter. “You don’t have to tell me,” she says. “But I’m here if you want to.”
You look at the counter. The grain of the wood. The small chip at the corner that has been there since before Birdie bought the shop, that she has never repaired because she says it is part of the history of it. “He kept something from me,” you say. “Something important. For two months.” Birdie is quiet. “A scholarship,” you say. “A real one. Music, in Nashville. He knew in February and he didn’t tell me.” You pause. “I heard it from someone else. I didn’t even understand what I was hearing because I didn’t have enough information.”
“Ah,” Birdie says. “I’m not angry about the scholarship. I know he doesn’t want it. I believe him.” You press your palms flat to the counter. “I’m angry that he didn’t trust me with it. That I had to find out from someone else. That—” Your voice does something unexpected. “That there’s a version of this where he’s not here and he didn’t tell me.” The last part is the real part. You hear it when you say it. Birdie hears it too. She turns to face you fully. “That’s not really about the scholarship,” she says, gently. “No,” you say. “That’s about not knowing,” she says. “About not being told. About something changing without warning.”
The grief comes up then, the real kind, the deep kind, the kind that has been sitting underneath the anger all week waiting for you to stop being angry long enough to feel it. Your parents did not call to say they were leaving the work event. They did not say goodbye. One moment they were in the world and the next moment they were not and you had no warning, no preparation, no chance to hold the last conversation more carefully because you did not know it was the last one. You know this is not the same. You know Heeseung withholding a scholarship is not the same as a car crash on a highway. But fear does not do logic. Fear finds the shape of itself wherever it can. You put your face in your hands and you cry, properly, the ugly kind, the kind that has been building for days and longer than days. Birdie puts her arm around you and holds on and lets you. “I know,” she says, softly, into your hair. “I know, baby.”
“I’m so scared of losing someone else,” you say, into your hands. “I know that’s not fair to him. I know it’s not the same. But I’m so scared.” “That’s not unfair,” Birdie says. “That’s just true. You’re allowed to be scared.” “I love him,” you say. “I know you do.” “It makes it scarier.” “That’s how it works,” she says. “That’s just how it works. The loving and the scared are the same size.” She rubs your back. “That doesn’t mean you stop. You just carry both.” You cry until it’s done.
The shop is quiet and dark except for the lamp at the counter and outside the April evening is warm and the town is going about its business and Gerald has appeared from somewhere and is pressing himself against your leg. You wipe your face. You breathe. “I need to talk to him,” you say. “You do,” Birdie agrees. “When you’re ready.” “I’m almost ready,” you say. She squeezes your shoulder. “Almost is enough,” she says. “Come on. I’ll make tea and we can eat cobbler for dinner and not tell anyone.” “Birdie.” “I’m just saying what’s going to happen,” she says, and goes to put the kettle on, and you stand in the quiet bookshop and breathe and look at the chip in the counter and think about history and what you carry and what you build and the difference between the two.
Almost ready turns out to be another week. Finals are close now — three weeks out — and the school has that particular compressed energy of the end of a year approaching, everyone slightly too loud or slightly too quiet depending on their disposition. You study in the evenings at the bookshop after closing, your books spread across the counter, Birdie moving around you with tea and the occasional baked thing. You study well. Miss Beaumont has given you a reading list for the summer that is long enough to be a compliment, and you are working through it alongside the exam texts, because you cannot not. Heeseung studies too. You know this because Immy tells you, casually, the way she drops things casually that are not casual — Heeseung’s doing his English revision at the library after school, he asked me to recommend something Beaumont would like — and you do not comment and she does not push and the information sits with you.
He still drives you to school in the mornings. You did not ask him to keep doing it. He just keeps doing it. You get in the car and you say good morning and he says good morning and the radio is low and the drive is short and it is the saddest version of something that used to be the best part of your day. He offers his hand one afternoon in the backseat of Sunghoon’s truck, the four of you coming back from somewhere, and you look out the window instead, and you feel him pull his hand back, and the silence in the truck is enormous for about ten seconds until Immy says something completely unrelated in a bright voice and Sunghoon responds and the moment passes but it does not pass, not really, it just goes underneath.
Immy appears at your locker on a Tuesday morning two and a half weeks before finals with an expression that is equal parts loving and done. “Come with me,” she says. “I have class.” “You have ten minutes before class.” She closes your locker for you. “Come with me.” You go with her. This is the thing about Immy — you always go with her. She takes you to the science block. The old one, the one that floods, the one nobody uses anymore for anything except storage. She has a key, which you do not ask about. She opens a door at the end of the corridor and you follow her into a room full of old equipment and afternoon light through dusty windows and— Heeseung.
He is standing by the window with his hands in his pockets and when you come through the door he looks at you and then at Immy and she says “you’re welcome” and steps back into the hallway and pulls the door closed and you hear the key turn in the lock. You look at the door. You look at Heeseung. “She planned this,” you say. “Since last week,” he says. “Sunghoon drew a diagram.” “Of course he did.” A pause. The room is dusty and warm and smells like old chemicals and something that has been closed up for a long time. Light comes through the window in long stripes and dust moves in it.
Heeseung looks at you. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to say that first and I need to say it properly.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry you heard it from someone else. I’m sorry I let two months go by and kept it from you.” He pauses. “I thought I was protecting you from something that wasn’t going to be a thing. I thought if I turned it down before you had to know about it then it would just — not exist. Not be something you had to think about.” He exhales. “That was wrong. I treated it like my decision when it was about both of us and I didn’t give you the chance to be part of it.”
You look at him in the dusty light. He looks back. “You scared me,” you say. “Not the scholarship. You. The not telling. It made me feel like—” You stop. Start again. “My parents didn’t tell me they were leaving that night. They didn’t call to say goodnight. It was an ordinary evening and then it wasn’t and I had no — there was no warning, there was no chance to—” Your voice is steady. You are proud of that. “I know it’s not the same. I know that. But fear doesn’t do logic and when I realised you’d been keeping something from me about your future it hit me in the same place.”
He crosses the room. He does not reach for you — he stops just short, close enough, and he looks at your face with that quality he has always had, that complete attention. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “I know.” “The scholarship—” “Tell me,” you say. “Tell me properly. What do you want to do.” He is quiet for a moment. “I want to turn it down,” he says. “I’ve known since February that I want to turn it down. Nashville is — it’s far. It’s not here. It’s not—” He pauses. “Music is mine. It’s the thing that’s actually mine, more than football, more than any of it. And I want to study it the way it deserves. But I want to do it here. Community college. Close to my family. Close to Birdie.” He looks at you. “Close to you.” He says it plainly, without making it a plea, just a fact. “This is my life. You’re in it. That’s not something I’m willing to set aside for a programme in a city that isn’t mine.” You look at him. “It has to be your choice,” you say. “Completely yours. Not because of me.”
“It is completely mine,” he says. “You’re part of my life. Choosing my life isn’t choosing because of you. It’s choosing because this is where I belong.” He pauses. “But I should have told you. I should have trusted you with it. That part I got wrong and I know I got it wrong.” The room is quiet. Dust moves in the light. “I was so angry at you,” you say. “I know.” “I’m still a little angry.” “That’s fair.” “I cried to Birdie about it.” Something moves through his face. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and means it.
You look at him for a long moment. The boy who found you outside a gate. Who drove you home and stayed for dinner and gave you a record and took you to the high roads and held you while you cried and played guitar by the lake and kissed you at the Winter Festival and said since the gate and meant it completely.
You close the space between you and put your arms around him and he wraps his around you immediately, both arms, tight, and you press your face into his shoulder and breathe and he presses his lips to the top of your head and holds on. “I’m not going anywhere either,” you say, into his jacket. His arms tighten once. “I know,” he says. “I love you,” you say. “Even when I’m angry at you.” “I love you,” he says, into your hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to be honest.”
You stand like that in the dusty science lab in the old building that floods, held together by a plan that Immy drew up and Sunghoon diagrammed, and it is not romantic exactly and it is also completely romantic, because this is Fairview Fall and this is them, and you would not have it any other way. From the other side of the door, very faintly, you hear Immy say something to Sunghoon. You hear Sunghoon’s low response. You hear Immy make a sound of satisfaction. Heeseung laughs against your hair. You laugh into his shoulder. He pulls back enough to look at your face and he wipes your cheek with his thumb — you did not know you were crying until he does it — and he kisses you, soft and certain, and you kiss him back the same way. “Are we okay?” he says, against your mouth. “We’re okay,” you say. “Go tell your coach.” “Tomorrow,” he says. “Today,” you say. He looks at you. He nods. “Today,” he says. You step back.
He goes to the door and tries it and it is still locked and he knocks twice and from the other side Immy says “are you done?” and he says “yes” and the key turns and the door opens and Immy is there with Sunghoon behind her, both of them wearing expressions that are so carefully neutral they are the least neutral things you have ever seen. “Good talk?” Immy says. “Good talk,” you say. She looks at your face and his face and her carefully neutral expression gives way completely to something warm and bright and entirely herself. She puts her arm around your shoulders. “Come on,” she says. “We’re going to be late.” You walk to class through the old science corridor — you and Immy ahead, Heeseung and Sunghoon behind — and from behind you you hear Sunghoon say, very quietly, something you cannot make out, and Heeseung says something back, and then there is a sound that is Sunghoon being shoved and not minding. Immy squeezes your shoulders. “Okay?” she says. “Okay,” you say. And mean it, fully, all the way through.
Finals arrive the way the end of things always does — faster than you were ready for and slower than you could stand. The last three weeks of the school year compress into a particular kind of time, dense and pressurised, the days full of index cards and highlighters and the specific exhaustion of a brain that has been asked to hold too much at once. You study at the bookshop counter after closing and at the kitchen table with Birdie’s tea going cold beside you and in the blue car in the school parking lot during free periods, your textbook open on your knees and Heeseung beside you doing the same, the two of you in companionable silence broken occasionally by one of you reading something out loud that the other has to hear.
This is its own kind of intimacy. You did not know that before. You know it now — the particular closeness of working in the same direction, of being tired together, of someone handing you a biscuit at ten o’clock at night because Birdie left a tin and they know you forget to eat when you are deep in something. Immy studies in bursts — intense, focused, slightly panicked, then suddenly fine.
Sunghoon studies the way he does everything, steadily and without visible stress, which Immy finds both reassuring and personally offensive. “How are you not worried?” she says at the diner one evening, revision notes spread across the booth. “I’m worried,” Sunghoon says. “You don’t look worried.” “I know.” He takes a fry from her plate. “It’s a gift.” She stares at him. She steals his milkshake. He lets her. You watch them across the booth and Heeseung’s knee presses against yours under the table and you look over at him and he is already looking at you and the grin is there, warm and private, and you think: I am going to be okay. I have been okay. I am building something here that is mine.
The exams themselves are five days of early mornings and the exam hall and the scratch of pens and the particular silence of a room full of people thinking as hard as they can. You sit in your assigned seat with your mother’s cardigan over your shoulders and the ring warm on its chain and you write. English is last. Three hours in the same hall, the same seat, and Miss Beaumont is one of the invigilators and she does not look at you differently to anyone else in the room — she is professional and precise and entirely fair — but when you hand in your paper at the end and walk past her desk she looks up briefly and gives you one small nod, and that is everything.
You walk out of the exam hall into the May sunshine and Heeseung is there — leaning against the blue car in the car park, face tipped up to the sky, and when he hears the doors he looks over and reads your face before you have reached him. “Well?” he says. “Good,” you say. “Really good.” He opens his arms and you walk into them and he holds you in the school car park in the May afternoon sun and you press your face into his jacket and think: Mom. Dad. I did it. I really did it. “Proudest person in Fairview Fall,” he says, into your hair. “Birdie might have something to say about that.” “Tied,” he says. “Birdie and I are tied.”
The weeks between exams and graduation are the loosest, most golden weeks of the year. There is nothing left to do but wait for results and show up and let the school year finish itself, and so you do — you and Heeseung and Immy and Sunghoon filling the days with the things that have become your things, the diner and the lake and the high roads and the bookshop and long evenings on Birdie’s porch and longer evenings in the blue car parked somewhere with the radio on. The results come on a Thursday morning and they are good — better than good, all of you, and Miss Beaumont leaves a note in your locker that is two lines long and says more than two lines usually can: You were the best argument I ever lost. Go do something with it. You keep it. You put it in the journal.
Heeseung turns down the scholarship the week before graduation. He calls Coach into his office himself — does not wait to be summoned, does not ask anyone to do it for him — and he tells him clearly and without apology that he is grateful and he is declining. He tells you after, in the blue car, with the same simple directness he brings to everything that matters. “How did he take it?” you ask. “He was disappointed,” Heeseung says. “He’ll get over it.” He pauses. “He said I was making a mistake.” “What did you say?” “I said I disagreed.” He looks over at you. “Respectfully.” “Of course.” “I’m always respectful.” “Always,” you agree. He takes your hand across the console.
“Community college music programme starts in September,” he says. “I already registered.” “I registered for English literature last week,” you say. He squeezes your hand. You look out the window at Fairview Fall going past — the main street, the bookshop, the diner, the church, the barbershop, all of it so known to you now, so entirely yours — and you think about September and what it will look like, this town in autumn again, the light going amber, the oak trees turning. You think about being here for it. You think about the shape of a future that is not the one you were supposed to have and is better than you could have built on purpose. “Birdie’s going to cry at graduation,” you say. “My mama’s going to cry at graduation,” he says. “My daddy’s going to pretend he’s not crying and fail.” You are both smiling and the blue car takes you home through the early summer streets of Fairview Fall and the St. Christopher swings and the radio plays and everything is very good.
Graduation is on a Saturday in early June. The ceremony is held on the football field — of course it is, this is Fairview Fall, everything important happens on the football field — with white chairs set out in rows and a small stage at one end with a podium and the faculty in a line behind it and the bleachers full of families who have been looking forward to this for eighteen years. Birdie is in the front row of the family section in a yellow dress — her good one, the one she saves — with her hair pinned up and Gerald’s absence conspicuous because you would not let her bring him, which she argued about and lost.
She is already crying when you find her before the ceremony and she says “I’m not crying” and you say “Birdie” and she says “I’m just very warm, it’s June” and you hug her and she holds on tight. Heeseung’s mother is two seats down with a camera that is serious enough to suggest she means business. His daddy is beside her in a good shirt with the look of a man who has decided to hold it together and is not certain he will manage it. They both pull you into a hug before you go to find your place in the graduating line and his mother holds your face in her hands for a moment and says “we’re so proud of you” and means the we completely. You find your place in the line. Immy is two ahead of you in her gown with her cap at an angle that is very her, and she turns and finds you and grabs your hand and squeezes it hard. “We did it, honey,” she says. “We did it,” you say. Sunghoon is behind Heeseung somewhere in the line and you cannot see him from here but you know he is doing the thing he always does which is standing very still and holding everything together quietly, and Immy knows it too and the knowing is in her face.
Heeseung is ahead of you by several places. He turns before the line starts moving and finds you over the heads of the people between you and he grins — that grin, the one that has always been the most natural thing in the world — and you grin back and then the music starts and the line begins to move.
The ceremony is long in the way that ceremonies are long, which is to say that individual moments of it are everything and the rest of it is just time passing. Names are called and people walk across the stage and the bleachers erupt for each one the way small towns erupt, which is completely and without irony, and Mae is in the stands hollering for every single graduate regardless of whether she knows them, because this is Mae and this is what she does.
When your name is called you walk across the stage and shake the principal’s hand and the bleachers go up and you hear Birdie clearly above everything else, Birdie who is not crying, who is simply very warm, and you think: Mom. Dad. Look. And then the speeches.
The principal speaks first, the usual things, and then she says: “This year’s student address will be given by someone who needs very little introduction in Fairview Fall. Lee Heeseung.” The bleachers respond the way the bleachers always respond to Heeseung, which is warmly and immediately.
He walks to the podium with his hands in his pockets and his cap slightly crooked and he looks out at the crowd with that easy, unhurried quality he has, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it well. He speaks about Fairview Fall the way someone speaks about a place they love without sentimentality — honestly, specifically, with the detail of someone who has paid attention. He talks about what it means to grow up somewhere that knows your name, about the particular gift of a community that shows up, about Mae’s cobbler and the football field grass and the record shop on main street. He makes people laugh twice and mean it both times. And then he pauses.
“This year we welcomed someone new to Fairview Fall,” he says. “Someone who came here when she didn’t choose to, who stood outside these gates on the first day of school not knowing a single person inside them.” He looks out at the crowd and his eyes find you in the graduating class with the ease of someone who always knows where you are.
“She taught this town a few things this year without meaning to. She taught me what it looks like to carry grief and keep living inside it. She taught me that some things are always there if you know where to look.” He pauses. “She came here for someone else’s reasons and she stayed for her own. And I think—” He stops. The grin, private and certain, just for you. “I think that’s the best thing a place can do for a person. Give them reasons that are theirs.”
The bleachers are quiet in the way of people who are feeling something. Then they are not quiet at all. You look at him at the podium and your vision goes slightly and you blink and the ring on its chain is warm against your chest and you think: Mom. Dad. Do you see? You know they see. The caps go up. This is the moment — the principal says I hereby declare you graduates of Fairview Fall High School and the field erupts and every cap in the graduating class goes up into the June sky at once, a cloud of them, black against the blue, and you throw yours and you are laughing and Immy beside you is laughing and Sunghoon beside her is smiling the widest smile you have ever seen on him and the bleachers are a wall of noise.
Heeseung finds you in about four seconds. He crosses the field with purpose and when he reaches you he takes your face in his hands and he kisses you, right there, in the middle of the graduating class of Fairview Fall High School with the caps still coming down around you and the bleachers still going and Birdie in the front row making a sound that is probably not crying because she is simply very warm. He pulls back and looks at you and his eyes are bright. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say. You are still laughing. “That speech.” “Too much?” “Perfect,” you say. “It was perfect.” He keeps his hands on your face for a moment. Around you the field is full — families flooding in from the bleachers, people finding each other, photographs being taken, the particular happy chaos of an ending that is also a beginning.
“Fairview Fall, Texas,” you say. “Population now includes you,” he says. “Permanently.” “Permanently,” you agree. He kisses you again, softer, and then his forehead is against yours and the June sun is warm on both of you and the town is all around you and somewhere behind you Birdie is making her way across the field in her yellow dress with her camera and his mother is right beside her with hers and the two of them are going to take approximately forty photographs of this moment and you are going to let them. “What comes next?” he says, against your forehead.
You think about September and community college and English literature and his music programme and the bookshop and the blue car and the high roads and the record on its shelf and the ring on its chain and Birdie’s baking and Immy’s late night phone calls and Sunghoon’s quiet certainty and Mae’s cobbler on Fridays and the lake in the summer and Fairview Fall in every season, yours in every season, for keeps. “Everything,” you say. He smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Everything.” The caps come down around you like the beginning of something. You catch yours. You stay.
perm tgl: @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa @firstclassjaylee
