Everything happens as it should. I check out and pay. Get in a cab and go to Incheon. Check in. Wander around the beautiful airport staring mindlessly at gate numbers and duty-free stores and dodging fellow travelers. The day is bright and sunny, and the clear blue sky through the windows makes me feel small and leaden.
In the business-class lounge, the first thing I do is look for Jihoon, because that’s what should happen, right? He comes rushing in to reveal his love and atone for the error of his ways by filling the lounge with surprise flowers and balloons. There might be a band. There should absolutely be one, since he’sin a goddamn bandthat he values over everything. At least an acoustic guitar.
There’s no band. No flowers except for some decorative willow branches in vases. The only people are bored business travelers pecking at devices and adjusting their dark suits. That’s when it hits me that we are done.
I go into the bathroom and cry.
Not for long, though, because I have things to do. Once I take my red and puffy eyes back to the lounge, I delete Jihoon’s information, feeling nothing as my fingers tap him out of my life. I tell Hana I’m good but need some space. Then I run out of steam.
Luckily, the lounge is fancy and filled with distractions like elegant little matcha cakes and mochi and a bar. I very carefully hide my phone in my bag and down three vodka sodas before I board the plane and fall asleep.
Forty-Five
“Hey, Ari.” Alex’s voice comes in a distressingly mild way over my phone as I wait for my luggage in Toronto, headachy, miserable, and with a tongue so dry I can tap Morse code on it. “There’s a bit of an issue.”
“Of course there is. I can get a cab. Is the invitation to the secret condo open?”
“Sorry, that was ambiguous. I’m here. The problem is I’m not alone.”
I get a five-dollar bottle of water from the vending machine and take a sip that gets absorbed into my mouth before I can even swallow. Those vodkas I had in the lounge in Incheon were not the only ones over the course of the flight, and I regret the decisions that brought me to this point because it’s hard to cope when simultaneously drunk and hungover. “Not alone.”
“Looks like someone got your photo at Incheon airport and people here figured out flights. I’m looking at”—I hear some muttered calculations—“yeah, I’d say three camera crews and a good fifty fans.”
“Why?” The luggage conveyor belt starts up, and the first bag drops.
“Do you want me to go into an exposition on the cult of celebrity and parasocial relationships in modern society and how it’sa substitute for the sense of community we lost in the postindustrial era?”
“No. Do they look mad? Like they want to tear me apart?”
He hums. “I’d say curious.”
“Great.”
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You sound bad.”
“Vodka.”
“Shit, Ari.”
“Give me a break, Alex.”
“Did you change, or are you in the black joggers and white shirt you were wearing when you left?”
“How did you know what I was wearing?”
“Social media.”
I don’t even have the energy to be horrified. “Of course I didn’t change.” I sat on my ass ten kilometers up in the sky for a trillion hours being unhappy, watching terrible movies I could barely hear over the thrum of the plane and falling asleep/passing out. Was it a healthy way to cope? Whatever.
“That’s good, I can recognize you. Put your hair in a braid. Have a hat?”
“No.”
“Mask?”
I fish a crumpled one out of my pocket. “Yes, and sunglasses.”
“Good. You’ve seen media footage of what it can be like,” he says. “There will be cameras and noise, people shouting your name. Uh, or other things, so I need you to ignore that and keep walking.”
