As the elevator doors opened I said, “I really think she’ll be okay.”
In fact, Sin-Jun did not seem particularly okay at all. Leaving the hospital, her father passed her his coat-I hadn’t thought to bring one from her room-and Sin-Jun responded irritably, in Korean (it was the most animated I’d seen her since before she’d taken the aspirin). She wouldn’t put the coat on, or even hold it, so Mr. Kim draped it over her shoulders. He turned to me and said in English, “You will stay here with Sin-Jun while I retrieve car.” After he had walked beyond the porte cochere, Sin-Jun went outside as well. I followed her.
“I think your dad wants us to wait inside.”
She gave me an unfriendly look. “I need air.”
It was hard to know how to treat her. My impulse was to act as if she were physically ill-at some level, it had surprised me to see her dressed and waiting for us by the nurses’ station, and then it had surprised me that she simply stood and walked out rather than being pushed in a wheelchair-yet another part of me saw her as not sick at all; I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to snap out of it. Her lack of affect seemed ridiculous, a parody of a moody teenager. Not, of course, that I would grab her by the shoulders, but the reason I wouldn’t was not so much that it would be inappropriate as that, in her new incarnation, I found Sin-Jun intimidating. I could imagine her having disparaging thoughts about me. She had done something fearless and dramatic, something people at school were talking about. The school psychologist was making her way around to all the dorms, starting with girls’, talking to students at curfew-Sin-Jun had set these meetings in motion, quiet and easygoing Sin-Jun-and other students who were aware that I had once roomed with her had been asking about the details of what had happened. The girls at least feigned concern (Is she okay? Or, How awful!) while the guys’ remarks were more distant: That’s fucked. What’d she do that for? Was she always psycho? But this was the thing: Neither the girls nor the guys seemed entirely unimpressed. The fact that Sin-Jun had taken pills made her interesting. It was becoming-I could feel it happening-a phenomenon, another story. It was no longer an act of desperation, or at least not messy, slobbery desperation. And now that Sin-Jun was, by the larger Ault community, being reconsidered (surely, though she hadn’t yet gotten back to campus, she could sense this reconsideration; surely, when you were cool, you were always at least slightly aware of your own coolness), I feared her; perhaps she found me dorky.
“Do you want to play gin rummy tonight?” I said.
Sin-Jun shook her head.
“Or tomorrow,” I added. (I was dorky-she’d be entirely justified in thinking so.)
She was standing a little in front of me, scanning the parking lot, and I couldn’t read her face.
“Are you glad you’re leaving the hospital?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“You know how you felt bad before? Do you still feel that bad? Or do you feel better?” It was because she was all but ignoring me that I could ask this; I was comfortable in the world with only one person emoting at a time, and if she’d been weeping and confiding, I’d have been distantly attentive, blandly soothing.
“I am fine,” she said.
“There have been times when I’ve felt depressed.”
Sin-Jun looked at me squarely. “You are depressed?”
“Sure,” I said, and it felt like I was lying. My depression, if that’s what it was, was always so ephemeral; it was possible to be distracted from it by hanging out with Martha, or by listening to a chapel talk, or even-this had to mean it wasn’t serious-by watching television. “There are things that get me down,” I said.
“Which are things?”
“Ault is stressful,” I said. “There’s a lot of pressure.” These were the kinds of complaints students made, but they were asinine. Not once in three years had I thought, I’m under a lot of pressure.
“Grades,” Sin-Jun said. “They are why you worry?”
“Not as much as I probably should.”
She looked at me blankly, and I didn’t know if she couldn’t tell I was making a joke or if she just didn’t find the joke funny. Abruptly, I remembered our first week at Ault, living together in Broussard’s. One evening we both had been ready for formal dinner well before we needed to be-when you’re new to a place, there’s always too much time to fill-so we sat on our beds, just waiting. That early on, I was shy even around Sin-Jun; I hadn’t yet determined the hierarchies in a way that classified her as unthreatening.
I’m not sure where Dede was-in the shower maybe-but the room was quiet except for a window fan and the sounds from outside the screens. I didn’t even play my music then, fearful that my taste in tapes might reveal something humiliating. I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It’s like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.
Finally, I said, “Your skirt is pretty. I like the polka dots.”
She smiled, and the blandness of her smile made me almost certain she had no idea what I’d said.
“Do you know what polka dots are?” I asked. “They’re the round spots. Like-well, here.” I got up and pointed at her skirt.
“Ahh,” she said. “Polka dot.”
“I have polka-dotted socks,” I said. I retrieved them from the top drawer of my bureau and held them up. “See?”
“Very exquisite,” she said. “I also like.”
I sat back on my bed, emboldened, and said, “You have nice clothes.” I had noticed, actually, that Sin-Jun had a pair of Levi’s, and I’d speculated about whether she’d owned them in Seoul or bought them in anticipation of enrolling at Ault.
“You can ask me other words if you want to,” I added. And she sometimes did after that-usually words she’d heard but couldn’t figure out how to spell, and therefore how to look up herself in her Korean-English dictionary: centipede, or procrastinate. But more often, I was surprised by what she did know the meaning of: pineapple, sarcasm, honeymoon. I’d wonder, was Ault much harder for Sin-Jun than it was for me because it was literally foreign and not just unfamiliar? Or was it easier because its currencies were not her own? Perhaps that made it possible to view its dramas more distantly, even to disregard them.
Except that, as we stood in the hospital parking lot, it seemed apparent that she took her life at Ault quite seriously, that she viewed it not as her American life or her school life but as her actual life.
“Sin-Jun,” I said.
She turned.
“I’m supposed to tell you something. It’s a message from Clara. She said don’t eat too many peach daiquiris.”
Sin-Jun regarded me shrewdly, searching my face.
“You know what it means, right?” I said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean to be nosy, but what’s going on with you and Clara?”
“Nothing is going on.”
“I’m not saying she’s a bad person,” I said. “Just that I bet she’s kind of hard to live with.”
Sin-Jun reached out and squeezed my hand. Mr. Kim had parked the car in front of us and was climbing from the front seat. “We stop talk about it,” Sin-Jun said.