The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  Instead, she jumped back as if even the suggestion of his fingertips burned. “God, Conner, you’re such a boor!”

  Boor was a word they’d all put into rotation care of Lainey, who also called people dullards and cream-faced loons, and other Shakespearean insults that broadcast her plans to be a drama major, and that they all loved since none of what they’d memorized in school could be used outside of standardized tests in this way. They’d all adopted Lainey’s taxonomy of Conner’s contemporaries—three-inch fools, incharitable dogs, base football players—but Margaret, who acted oftentimes as Lainey’s student, had done so most heartily.

  “Don’t touch me!” Margaret brushed the grass from the skirt of her sundress and wobbled a bit. “Shit! Fuck!”

  “All right, Jesus, calm yourself, woman.” Conner smiled at the two others in their group.

  Margaret grabbed at her ankle and flopped back into a seated position, pulled her foot into her lap. Ji Sun saw the blood bright on Margaret’s white dress before she could tell where it came from.

  “Oh no, Margaret, what happened?” Ji Sun rushed to her side.

  “I must have cut myself on something,” she said, tears bright on her cheeks before Ji Sun had seen her eyes fill. “Be careful, Ji Sun, I don’t know where it is.”

  Ji Sun pulled loose the scarf she’d tied to her satchel. It was vintage Hermès, an old one Ji Sun had decided she liked after her mother deemed it garish, the goddess Ceres with blue-stone skin, wings, and a tree-trunk body below her abdomen. She wrapped it around Margaret’s foot, made the tightest knot she knew.

  “We’ve got to get you to the infirmary,” Ji Sun said.

  “Fuck is an infirmary,” Conner said. “I’m gonna carry you to the student health center. If you’ll allow it.” He stood before Margaret, bowed.

  “It’s not far,” Margaret said, her hand on Ji Sun’s shoulder.

  “But you can’t walk,” he said, this time appealing to Ji Sun, who looked at the blood-soaked birds on her scarf and agreed.

  So boorish Conner got to be a knight after all, lifting Margaret in his arms and carrying her, as though over a threshold, all the way to the student health center. Ji Sun, running to keep up with Conner’s huge gait, trailed close behind until Margaret called her name, reached out and grabbed her hand, and then for the rest of the way Conner had to carry Margaret with Ji Sun attached at the limb, their link forcing what he must have imagined as a heroic dash into something more cumbersome, and, to onlookers, more confusing.

  “Stay with me, please, Sunny,” Margaret said, and Ji Sun got her absurd nickname then, given to her by the girl who’d go on to get eleven stitches as an indirect result of her defense of Ji Sun’s right to have a non-Anglo name, whom it was impossible to deny, Ji Sun knew already, heart racing as she held Margaret’s hand across Conner’s broad chest, all their sweat intermingling, breadcrumb trail of blood dotting their path—anyone would let Margaret call them anything she liked.

  Chapter 4

  By the start of fall reading period, Conner had become Margaret’s boyfriend. Their courtship flourished over the objections of her roommates and the unsung but palpable dissent of others whose hearts were broken by the news that Margaret was in love, and with someone, as Lainey put it, so disappointingly predictable.

  “He’s rich, he’s tall, he’s handsome.” Lainey stuck out her tongue to indicate that this was not her preferred flavor of handsome. “He has hair like a Ken-doll wig. He’s wears rugbies. With, like, boat shoes.”

  “What’s wrong with boat shoes?” Margaret asked, and traced her finger along her bare foot, forcing Lainey to consider its shape, land only on elegant. A foot! She’d learned new things about beauty from Margaret, that it wasn’t just about a symmetrical face, good hair, and a nice body. There was a harder-to-quantify quality, a porelessness and impermeability, something to account for how Margaret never seemed to have bruises or scratches on her legs and her feet were always clean, heels uncracked, toes hairless and unbarnacled. Lainey had seen Margaret apply body lotion in a haphazard way, smear tinted Clean & Clear moisturizer on her face in the morning without even looking in the mirror. It frustrated Lainey that Margaret’s beauty didn’t seem to require a scrupulous upkeep commensurate with such results, but it taught her that Margaret was formed differently, cast from different materials.

  “I like his feet. He never wears socks, have you noticed?” Margaret touched the spot she’d sliced on the underside of her own foot and didn’t wince, instead retreated into some private reverie about Conner’s feet, which Lainey was sure were sweaty and fungal.

  Conner was a basketball star but read more like a football player (base football player!) with his broad barrel of a chest, shoulders that appeared prepadded, and jocular, heartland, head-injured demeanor. He was a junior but his body made the nonathletes in his year look like pollywogs. Like Margaret, he was midwestern, from Minnesota. Lainey loathed him on sight. Alice wasn’t a fan either, failing to find much beyond a familiar, rich-boy school of studied charisma to nudge her past the first impression she’d formed of him when she’d learned how he’d treated Ji Sun in study group.

  When Conner had apologized to Ji Sun for his “boordom,” Ji Sun had only nodded, so slight that it was clear that while she acknowledged what he offered, she made no commitment to accept. He seemed to take this as a challenge, and launched a campaign of interest in both Ji Sun and Korean culture, asked to try the boricha she kept on their little kitchenette counter, and performed his enjoyment as though auditioning for its ad campaign. Her roommates had all tried the tea out of politeness, but only Conner liked it enough to pour himself a tall glass whenever he came over, and she was surprised to find that his enthusiasm for the beverage offset her irritation at how much he consumed. He reacted with genuine shock when she told him she’d never been, and didn’t plan to go, to North Korea.

  “Did you not go to high school?” Ji Sun asked him, taking pleasure again in the surprise on his wide, generic face at being spoken to this way. “Was North Korea not the villain in like a million of your action movies?” She added the “like” consciously, as though without it she might as well speak to him in Korean.

  “Well, yeah, but like, I guess I thought it was different for uh, other Koreans, South Koreans.” The way he said this, so proud to have remembered this basic biographical fact about Ji Sun, again filled her with a kind of pity and contempt that somehow endeared him to her. Like the rest of her roommates, she told Margaret to break up with him. But privately she was beginning to understand his appeal, his dogged, dopey attempts to win her over, his frothy, lopsided grin. Even his ignorance troubled her less than some of his classmates’, paired as it was with real curiosity. He didn’t try to pretend he knew more than he did, and this was refreshing on a campus full of students from the tops of their classes who, in reading seminars, had read every book “at the start of high school,” and, how convenient, had “probably forgotten most of it by now.” Ji Sun didn’t smile at Conner, or offer him any evidence of this begrudging affection, but she did invite him, along with Margaret and the others, to attend a Chuseok event hosted by the Quincy-Hawthorn Korean Cultural Association, made up mostly of Korean Americans, along with nearly every member of the Korean Christian Campus Fellowship, which Ji Sun had joined in part to appease her parents but also, though she’d never admit it, to remind her of them.

  He reacted as though she’d asked him to escort her to the Nobel banquet.

  “Oh, wow, of course.” He put his hand over his heart, his chest, its shape, like a mold for armor, clear under his thin polo shirt. “And I hope, when the season starts, that you’ll come to a basketball game. To learn about my culture.”

  He was such an idiot. He grinned, and Ji Sun pictured herself in the stands, her all-black outfit a buoy in the sea of navy and forest green, school colors she did give Quincy-Hawthorn some credit for choosing, a kind of spor
ts-appropriate arrogance implicit in the monochrome, how you had to work to distinguish their mascot, an ocelot.

  “You have yourself a deal,” she said. She put out her hand, and he shook it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Conner brought her two red pears. She recognized them from the dining hall, but he’d taken the trouble to wrap them in a piece of crinkled gold tissue paper, and when he handed them to her he whispered, “Happy Chuseok, Ji Sun.”

  She smelled booze on his breath and saw the screw top of a flask poking out from the pocket of his cargo shorts. He’d brought along two friends who, while they at least wore full-length cargo pants, were red-eyed and loud. Unlike Conner who’d practiced pronouncing Chuseok and stood up straight in his beach-bum outfit, they skulked around like wolves, shoved food in their pockets even as they said Ew about dishes they didn’t recognize, laughed too loudly, and looked as though they’d been loosed from their enclosure and weren’t sure whether to hunt or mate.

  Ji Sun steeled herself to run interference, but the Korean Christian Campus Fellowship, or KCCF, was populated by the most aggressively friendly people she had ever met. There were times when the boundlessness of their generosity and apparent joy made Ji Sun wonder if there wasn’t some way she could believe in Jesus, if only for long enough to know whether this goodness was genuine, and what it felt like to feel that way. A few members approached Conner’s friends, and Ji Sun thought the two werewolf pups would probably wind up agreeing to come to church by the end of the party. There were other non-Korean students in attendance, too, brought along by their friends and roommates in a kind of liberal arts tourism, to learn about the world via free food, paper plates, and congealing entrees scooped from aluminum tins. It all added up to a welcome departure from the dining hall, where everything had started to taste vaguely similar, cooked or raw, animal or vegetable.

  Cat, Ji Sun’s closest friend from KCCF, spotted Ji Sun and came over. She hugged Ji Sun and said hello to her roommates. Margaret pulled Cat into an embrace, and, released, Cat laughed and blushed. She looked at the group with what seemed to Ji Sun like an equal measure of longing and befuddlement. Ji Sun had gathered that Cat both wondered if there was space for her in this foursome, and trusted that Ji Sun would eventually abandon its stricture for a closer friendship with her and Ruby, who came over to join them now.

  Ruby wore a pale peach and gold hanbok, but it didn’t soften her. She smiled at Ji Sun and gave her roommates a cool nod.

  “Lots of new people here tonight,” Ruby said, and pointed at Conner’s friends. “Fun.”

  “Ruby, don’t be mean. That’s part of the point of this!” Cat said.

  “The point of Chuseok is to feed sloppy white boys?”

  “Kind of!” Cat laughed. “No, but fellowship,” she said, and nodded at Conner, who approached with his loaded plate.

  “Are we going to talk about our ancestors?” Conner leaned close to Ji Sun.

  “No, ugh.” Ji Sun reacted more to his hot breath than his question, but both felt stifling. “Just eat, listen to music. It’s a party.” She gestured around weakly, as it didn’t look like much of one. The food table was laden, and a good effort had been made to decorate, but the basement room was too large and well lit, the vibe that of a primary school birthday party where the kid’s parents had made him invite the entire class.

  The full moon had been visible all day, gauzy in the afternoon and sharpening as the sun went down in a cloudless sky. Each of the four felt like she could burst out of her skin. They took the full moon as both warning and permission: anything could happen that night. They could crawl out of their bodies. They could metamorphose. No one was wearing the right thing; they should be naked and howling in the woods somewhere, not listening to quiet K-pop and switching on battery-powered tea lights to place on a lectern-cum-altar.

  Ji Sun had brought along a huge tray of songpyeon that her mother had shipped from their favorite bakery in Seoul. It arrived in the mailroom inside a large wooden crate packed with dry ice and a smaller Styrofoam cooler, and a student worker had been dispatched to alert Ji Sun that she should collect the parcel immediately as it was marked PERISHABLE and URGENT and had come “from a different country.” There was no note from her mother, but there had been one from the baker, who had known Ji Sun since she was a child.

  She felt a pang for this baker that surpassed any longing for family, or home. She’d spent a third of her life celebrating holidays away from home, and she was used to gatherings where students would stand to present on their cultural traditions to a group of people focused on their food, impatient for a dessert they’d dismiss as not the right kind of sweet. But she’d never felt so far away, even surrounded as she was now by people speaking Korean. She didn’t wish to share any memories of the baker, or her family, with these people; she barely wanted them to eat the cakes she’d brought, her least favorite flavors. She wanted to leave, with just her roommates, go back to their window seat, swig straight from the jug of Carlo Rossi that Conner had given Margaret, and gorge on the good flavors of cakes that she’d tucked away in their mini fridge.

  “Sunny,” Lainey called her Margaret’s pet name from time to time, in a theatrical way that mimicked Margaret’s accent and sweetness, “no offense, but if I don’t get out of here I think I’m going to explode.” Lainey’s own older sister was adopted from Korea, contributing to the sense Ji Sun had sometimes that Lainey could be her half sister, though Lainey herself was not Korean, and had told them that her birth mother was white, and her birth father was Mexican and Vietnamese.

  “Me too!” Margaret squealed. “I feel so, I don’t know—scratchy.” She did a full body wiggle and Ji Sun saw some students turn to watch.

  “Yeah, it’s the full moon, man,” Alice said, mouth full of food. “It’s no joke.”

  “But we just got here!” Conner said. His cronies had by now been absorbed by the KCCF crew, and they laughed together like old friends, heads tossed back.

  “We should be outside, don’t you think?” Margaret asked, wiping powdered sugar from the corners of her mouth. “This feels like one of those nights full of potential.” Margaret said potential like she was proud to know its meaning, and Lainey and Ji Sun exchanged a glance.

  They had a private ongoing investigation, about which Ji Sun wished she felt more ashamed, into how Margaret had gotten into Quincy-Hawthorn College. Margaret struggled in all of her classes, met with her writing tutor twice a week, and still got Bs—considered Quincy-Hawthorn Ds—on her papers.

  When they’d last whispered about it, Lainey had asked, “Do you think they knew?”

  “Knew what?” Ji Sun asked.

  “That she looks like that!” Lainey couldn’t bring herself to say, that she is so beautiful, was tired of affirming it all the time.

  Ji Sun had said no, but she couldn’t remember whether Quincy-Hawthorn had given the option to attach a small photograph of yourself if desired. Her father had graduated from Q-H, and the family had made donations large enough that Ji Sun knew she could have attached a photograph of Kim Jong-il and still been admitted.

  “Yes, let’s do get out of here,” Ji Sun said now, and took Lainey by the arm. “Conner, you can stay,” she said, and linked her other arm through Margaret’s.

  “Hey, wait up,” Alice said, loading her napkin with cakes. “Am I supposed to stay here and mind these hooligans?” She pointed at Conner’s friends, who’d started a dance party with three giggling freshmen.

  Ji Sun took note of the looks they gave the girls, the way they licked their teeth. Did the boys know the girls’ names? This didn’t matter. Could they tell them apart? This did. But it wasn’t her problem, and she was tired of feeling like Conner’s friends, or Conner, were connected to her, even tenuously. She knew they’d say something stupid and racist, but she didn’t need to stick around to hear what.

  Ca
t was dancing with Ruby and some others, and when she caught Ji Sun leaving, she stopped. Ji Sun waved and mimed that she would call her, left without looking back to see whether Cat was dancing again. She might have invited Cat to come, but felt sure that Cat wouldn’t leave, and more, Ji Sun didn’t want to broker any getting-to-know-you conversations, wanted only to dance wild with her roommates, none of them observed by anyone, all of them free.

  Outside, Margaret waggled the silver flask that she’d snagged from Conner. She held it aloft, a beacon, and they chased her to a quiet corner of the brick fence, the least lit by salt lamps, sunk together into the damp grass.

  Margaret opened the flask and Lainey leaned in, took a sniff, “Ugh, smells like cleaning solution.”

  Margaret held the silver lip to her nose. “Smells like fire. No, like candy!” She took a swig and bowed her head, raised it with a sucked-breath Yow, eyes gleaming. “Black licorice!”

  “Let me try,” Alice said, and took a long gulp. “It’s cinnamon.” She shook her head, took another draw.

  “Whoa, slow down there, cowboy,” Lainey said. “Save some for the rest of us.”

  They passed the flask among them until it was finished, each feeling fire on her tongue, fuzz in her head. They skipped and staggered past empty lecture halls on their way to the arboretum, where they held hands, spun one another round, belted out songs from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

  Quincy-Hawthorn’s campus was ringed by woods, with the arboretum as its crown. It butted up against a state park, on the other side of which was the nearest town. The arb was open to the public, but even the trees seemed to sense the divide, with the arb’s entrance and far perimeter marked by rows of huge sycamore trees, standing sentry, mighty enough that they seemed both to guard against and to be the menace.

  The leaves had just begun to turn, and the buildings on campus were the color of burnished brick in the daytime, reds bright against the manicured green spaces that anchored the grounds: the courtyard and its horseshoe of housing; the library lawn with its willow trees; and the big hill and birch-lined quad below, where most of their classes met. Now, in the moonlight, the leaves looked bruised purple and metallic, as though they might chime if there were any breeze.