with distressed faces, but I don’t care—I hail down a young waiter and make him grill for me while I go find Sujin. In the bathroom, she is prodding her face with a crystal-flecked fingertip in front of the mirror.
“What are you doing?” I snap.
“Oh, sorry, sorry,” she says, flustered. “I had all this food stuck in my mouth and I was scooping it out and then I thought maybe I got some sensation back in the right part of my chin, but I think I was wrong. Coming!”
Back at the table, she retrieves the tongs from the perspiring waiter and starts flipping the pork belly, setting the pieces that are cooked onto my plate. As I watch her pick up the scissors and start cutting her own pieces into tiny slivers, I feel my chest softening. Of course I remember what it’s like—how difficult every meal is—the food getting stuck, the slow chewing, the clicking of the jaw, the numbness and discomfort.
“You get used to it,” I say to her, again. After my own surgeries I had to work hard to stop myself from stretching my neck like a crane and constantly poking my chin because I couldn’t feel it. Sensation never came back, but that’s what hand mirrors and selfie modes were for—to check if food or drink were dribbling down my chin. Wordlessly, I reach into my own bag and hand over my favorite mirror—it is small and round and has a border of lace.
“Oh, it’s okay,” she says, tilting her head and breaking into a smile. With most of her swelling down, beauty has emerged dramatically from her face this past week. I am amazed, as I always am, at how suddenly it blooms when it finally happens.
I can see the men at adjacent tables sneaking looks at her and then at me. She’s taken my advice and sought out my lash place, and they’ve worked decadent magic on her newly symmetrical eyes. Even her nose looks cuter; a common side benefit from jaw surgery. With a smaller face, untouched features like the forehead and nose tend to look prettier in tandem.
I wish Sujin had been this pretty three weeks ago, that night of the Taein incident. Perhaps she’d have gotten hired at Ajax and we’d all be partying together with Crown now, in some secret private room at some blazing new club. Instead she’s working as one of those freelance girls who get carted around in a bus to room salons that are short on girls for the night. And even that was a favor I’d called in to an old friend of mine from my Gangseo days.
* * *
—
“ARE YOU ACTUALLY INSANE?” Madam had said, when I had gone to apologize to her a few days after that disastrous night. It was early afternoon and she was sitting at a table in one of the rooms at the salon, writing numbers into a little black book and using her phone as a calculator.
It was Miho who had been adamant about going to apologize in person no matter what. “Just go. It will do so much, trust me. Older people, that’s all they want—for others to say they are sorry and make a gesture first.” I had been planning to just stay home forever, my debts be damned. “The worst that can happen is that things stay the same,” Miho said. She had stopped moping around over that boyfriend of hers, and her smug air of proactive martyrdom was becoming unbearable. Despite her shrill conviction, I still hadn’t gone in for a few days until the manager oppa had texted me to say that Madam had said nothing when he mentioned my name. If you come in now, it’ll be like nothing happened, he texted.
“I am truly, terribly sorry,” I said over and over, bowing as deeply as my waist would allow. “I have no words.”
Looking back down at her phone, Madam did not acknowledge me. She made me wait there for a good half hour while she balanced her books and made some calls, but I did not move either. I was comfortable prostrate. I pictured her brain whirring inside her large skull as she calculated the optimal way to