ghost, with red eyes. Her back arched. Syringes plunging into her face and wrists. Wearing a gisaeng hanbok. I need to do research on gisaeng hanbok. What colors they wore to seduce men centuries ago. A ghost gisaeng series. I stare at her, seeing this and more, and she recoils.
“What?” she says. “Why are you looking at me like that? What is it? Is it really about Hanbin? What did he do?”
I shake my head, to clear it, although my other strong impulse is to start sketching it then and there so that I don’t lose this. But there is a note in her voice that sets me off.
“I really wish you wouldn’t harp on him so much,” I say. “I feel like you think he’s just the worst for dating me because I don’t deserve him or something. It really makes me uncomfortable.”
There, I said it. In reality, her talking about Hanbin does not bother me as much as I just made it sound, but today I am prickly.
“You have it so wrong, it’s incredible,” she says, her voice trembling and ice cold. “Do you know how much of a dilemma I face every day? Whenever I see you, I am trying to ascertain what I think needs more protecting—your future, your idealism, your misplaced faith.”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“I’m talking about Hanbin,” says Kyuri, spitting out every word. “And I was so conflicted about whether to tell you.”
I am wondering if I missed part of the conversation. I tend to do that a lot when I am drawing in my head. “What?”
She glares at me and takes a breath and says “Never mind!” explosively before flouncing to her room. But I am not about to let this go.
“Kyuri. Tell me now. What are you talking about?” I follow her into her room and grab her arm. If this is just mean-spirited hysteria, I do not need it in my life.
She pushes me away from her, and starts changing her clothes without looking at me. In her pajamas, she sits in front of her painted vanity and begins removing her makeup with two pumps of her costly fermented cleansing oil. There is something about this picture—of her in a lace-edged slip, in front of her oval mirror, slowly wiping off the colors of her face in anger—which is riveting. I have a violent urge to run to my room to get my camera, to capture this so I can work with it later.
“Are you sure you want to know?” she asks, turning to me and breaking my trance. Every trace of eyeliner and blush and lipstick has been removed and her skin glistens from the oil.
We look at each other for a long moment.
There is only one thing that this could be, this truth she is dangling in front of me, and in that respect, I already know.
“Just tell me,” I whisper.
She tilts her head from side to side. Then she opens her mouth. “He is sleeping with at least one other girl,” she says. “I’m sorry, I really am.” She cannot meet my gaze. “I mean, isn’t it kind of a relief in a way? This way you do not have to wait until he breaks up with you, and you can just label him a typical asshole bastard and be done with him, instead of harboring any kind of delusion that you are going to marry him, and then it will be years more of your life that you cannot afford just down the drain.”
She stumbles over these words hurriedly, sounding like one of those evangelists talking to someone on the verge of conversion.
“Oh,” I say quietly. It is on the tip of my tongue to say so many things—“How do you know?” “Who is it?” or the futile “That cannot be true.” But it is easy to see from her face that she is telling the truth. I have to hold on to something because I feel as if I am about to keel over. I turn around—and totter back to my room like an old lady. I feel as if I