After my defense of her sort of outed me, the two of us developed a relationship that consisted in the first place of talking trash about boys, as neither of us had previously had anyone with whom to share such thoughts, making us both desperate for a sounding board.
Jaehee and I had very little sense of chastity, or none at all, to be honest, and we were apparently known for it in our respective spheres. Jaehee was five foot six and 112 pounds, while I was five ten and 172 pounds, both a bit taller than average but neither particularly attractive nor a complete lost cause, just enough not to embarrass any partner. (Note that when I won a New Writers Award for fiction, the judges’ comments were united in their praise of my “objective self-judgment”). The world was just not ready for the boundless energy of poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds. We met whatever men we wanted without putting much effort into it, drank ourselves torpid, and in the morning met in each other’s rooms to apply cosmetic masks to our swollen faces and exchange tidbits about the men we had been with the night before.
—He works at a company that makes hiking gear. Small dick but good foreplay, I think worth fifty points?
—He says he went to Yonsei University, studying statistics, but I think that’s a lie. His face was a blank space, and I kept wanting to laugh because whenever he said something, it was obvious his head was just as empty.
—He tried to take a video while we were in bed, so I threw his phone across the room. He said he wasn’t going to share it with anyone, like I’d ever believe that bullshit.
And after we made fun of the men from the previous night, our eyes would begin to close and we’d fall asleep side by side, with dried-up masks on our faces. Being an early riser, I would get up first and let Jaehee rest longer, with the quilt pulled all the way up over her head, as I boiled instant pollack stew or ramen, and when it was ready Jaehee would finally get up at the smell and eat the breakfast with sides of soured kimchi and cold rice. At some point, Jaehee’s room had an extra set of my hair wax and a Gillette razor, while my room had a double of Jaehee’s eyebrow pencil and MAC powder compact. Jaehee didn’t know this, but when I was alone, I used her liner to fill in the gaps in my eyebrows and helped myself to her compact to half-heartedly apply a puff or two of concealer on my cheeks and forehead. Which made me wonder if Jaehee used my razor on her legs or armpits without telling me.
Jaehee stopped talking to her mother and father the spring she turned twenty. Neither of us had been on good terms with our parents, but that didn’t mean they were especially evil or anything more than typical middle-class conservatives. Like most people’s parents, they constantly nagged their children about propriety and how one should behave, but in their own private lives joyfully indulged in affairs, excess religion, the stock market, or pyramid schemes. I had a real parasitic streak in that as much as I hated my parents, I felt completely entitled to every coin they gave me (was that why my demeanor grew mischievous?) when I was receiving hundreds of thousands of won in monthly allowance. Jaehee, however, cut off contact with her parents after their blowout and refused any form of financial support thereafter. She really did have the heart of a lioness.
She got her first-ever job working at a café called Destiné. She picked it not because it had a large sign with a French name but because it was one of the few places in her neighborhood where smoking was allowed. The sight of her puffing away as she handled the espresso machines was a vision of oblivious nineteen-year-old cuteness. Whenever I had some man in my life, I’d bring him to Destiné for Jaehee to give him the once-over, and every time, she would tell me that the men I liked were always horny with classic asshole personalities. Thinking back, she was right.
By day, Jaehee worked as a barista, while by night she was a private tutor, and then after that she drank until dawn like it was a third job. But she never missed a class, and her grades were OK, and while she did better than average at anything she put her mind to, this talent didn’t extend to her ability to choose men who weren’t a total mess, or to dump said men when the time was right. Which was why I often ended up getting rid of her men via text messages. I, on the other hand, was very practiced in that skill—at least vicariously—because of all the lines I’d heard from men who refused to see me again, easy enough to regurgitate at a moment’s notice. I used to think of myself as the doormat of a naengmyeon restaurant: all you had to do was wipe your feet on it and be on your way (“objective self-judgment”!).
Around the time the Brown Eyed Girls’ “Abracadabra” had conquered the Korean peninsula, I received a summons for national service. Because I knew of someone who during his service had received a letter from his boyfriend that began with “My loving hyung” and was outed for it, resulting in untold torture throughout his time in the army, I instructed K, the guy I was going out with, to write to me under Jaehee’s name. She was a handy smokescreen in times like this. I asked not only K but the real Jaehee to write me funny crap while I was in there, but knowing how lazy she was about that kind of thing, I didn’t expect much from her.
Yet during the second week of boot camp, when the letters began arriving, I felt my heart rise up to my throat. Unlike K, who had acted like he’d have given me his liver or spleen if I had asked for it but in two weeks had written me only a single letter (and not even a whole page at that), Jaehee had written twelve. At first it was just chitchat about her boring day (“I was drinking at Squid Ocean and accidentally tipped over the table”) or cursing out the people in our department (“that fucking nut Cheolgu asked me to sleep with him when I know for a fact he’s talking shit about me behind my back, he’s as disgusting as his face”), but as the days wore on, she wrote more about the times we had together and how much she missed me. In her latest missive she even said, “There’s something to be said about realizing how precious something is once you’ve lost it. Like with you”—God knows where she got that from—and even though I knew she’d written it drunk, I was almost moved to tears. That made me take up a sheet of military-issue stationery and begin my response to her with “To my dear, ugly Jaehee,” trying hard to keep the letters straight.