Miho,” I said.
“You know each other through Ruby?” he guessed. I nodded.
“Yes, Miho’s a really good friend of ours,” said Hanbin. I may have been imagining it, but his tone sounded like it had a steel edge to it. “She’s one of Ruby’s best friends, actually.”
“Oh wow,” said the boy, looking at me again. “Cool, man.”
Hanbin started talking to me about a Japanese movie we had seen at Ruby’s apartment the previous week. It was odd that he was talking about it—since it hadn’t been particularly interesting and he’d fallen asleep almost halfway through. After a few minutes of being ignored, Jae saw someone else he knew and sauntered off.
“I’m sorry if he was bothering you,” said Hanbin abruptly, swirling his whiskey. “He’s kind of annoying. I think Ruby went to school with him in Korea.”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t bothering me.”
“You know, even before I heard about the orphanage, I knew you were different,” he said, not looking at me. “I didn’t realize that was why, though. It must have been really hard, going through all that. It makes you think. Like, everyone I know is kind of the same—they’ve had the same sort of life growing up,” he said. “It’s different getting to know you, you know what I mean?” He ran his hand through his hair absentmindedly and I thought again how handsome he looked.
“You’re so normal too,” he added.
I frowned uncertainly. “What does that mean?” I asked. He sounded as if he wanted to be congratulated for this observation.
“I don’t know, I feel like I would be all kinds of messed up if I’d had to go through what you went through—no offense,” he said quickly.
I felt a hot embarrassment searing into my stomach and took a quick sip of my drink. But he was talking to me in a more intimate way than he ever had before, and for that I had no choice but to continue in this moment as if it were like any other.
Hanbin looked at me and reached over and touched my shoulder, letting his hand rest for a moment before he gave it a squeeze. I stood there, even after he dropped his arm back to his side.
“What I mean to say is, I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “And not somewhere else.”
* * *
—
THE TRUTH WAS, I did not know if I deserved to be there. The luck of the timing of the chaebol scholarship scandal and my story had opened all my doors. I was unsure about my work.
In the beginning, when I first moved to New York and met Ruby and Hanbin and all of their friends, I had let them see my insecurity, my terror, simply because I had been drowning in a kind of panic in this alien world. They’d never seen anyone so raw before and they must have marveled at me. They cloaked themselves so well with assurance, smug and luminous.
“Thanks, I guess,” I replied to Hanbin, in my most bored voice. “I think Ruby is looking for you.” I could see her in the corner, gesturing toward us. Hanbin looked at me for a second and then turned and went to her, joining the group that had formed around her. It was not that she was talking—she was sipping her drink and appeared not to be listening to the conversation at all, but she was always the center of the universe. She made the party crackle to life just by standing there with her cherry-stained mouth and fur coat, her eyes glinting in mockery.
Taking my own drink, I turned around and looked for the boy who had been talking to me earlier. There was nothing better to do when you had no one to talk to at a party than appear to be looking for someone, that I knew. I walked around the first floor, listening carefully to the slices of conversations that I could overhear, then walked up to the second floor, where the walls were painted shades of magenta to contrast with the ebony light fixtures. I imagined how satisfying it would be to paint a wall this color and wondered