I took out our passports and Thai baht from Gyu-ho’s backpack. The passport covers had Pororo characters on them. I sometimes called Gyu-ho Pororo, since his eyes also shrank when he put on his big glasses. Meanwhile, I had a big face and prominent nostrils, which was why my passport cover was of the dinosaur Crong. I put our Pororo and Crong passports and money into the black-cloth-lined security box.

When Gyu-ho and I went to the Jongno district office, he hesitated over deciding how to spell his name in English. I wrote down “Q-ho” for him instead. It made him glad that the spelling was easy to remember. I whispered in his ear:

—It stands for “Queer Homo.”

—Do you want to die?

Gyu-ho was surprisingly bad at English but was great at East Asian languages like Mandarin or Japanese. I was the complete opposite of him and once got the lowest score on a Chinese character test in high school, an exam I had actually put a lot of effort into studying for. The teacher told the whole school about my result, a humiliation I carried with me for a long time. But I’d watched so many episodes of Friends, Will and Grace, and Sex and the City on repeat that my English was all right.

That evening, we spent a ridiculous amount of time choosing outfits for each other. The clothes in our backpacks were mostly shorts that doubled as swim trunks and cheap 6,000-won T-shirts from H&M, and we tried to find the least cheap-looking things we’d brought with us. Collars added a modicum of formality, so we ended up going with matching polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers, as not to show our wriggling toes.

The elevator took us to the thirtieth floor. I practically had to block my nose and pop my ears.

When the elevator doors opened, we were greeted by a party in full swing. Flawlessly pomaded men with pocket squares tucked into the breast pockets of their sharp suits, women with off-the-shoulder gowns and thick makeup . . . A DJ of indeterminate race was playing EDM beats. Cartier bracelets and Patek Philippe watches, Van Cleef & Arpels necklaces and Hermès shoes were drifting past us as we stood there, taking it all in. A hotel worker came up to us and took down our room number, told us it was a standing party, and encouraged us to enjoy ourselves at any spot on the roof. Gyu-ho went up to the DJ booth, which was almost two stories tall, and reverently examined the woofers and amps before I finally managed to drag him to a seat with a view of the city. We sat on a slippery leather sofa, our shoulders touching, and stared out at downtown Bangkok. I picked up a cocktail menu that had no prices listed and ordered a “motorcycle.” It was rimmed with a salty-sweet spice, which I licked off with my tongue, and which helped the alcohol go down easily—this great drink was free? We got a little too excited as we ordered everything on the drink menu, and the whiskey-based cocktails got us drunk fast. One drink tasted like grass, another was sweet, another bitter, another . . . Soon it didn’t matter what we were drinking, we simply looked at each other’s burning-red faces, touched our hot foreheads, licked the spices on the rims of our glasses, and kept drinking. As if we were going back to when we were children with ice cream. The sight of it was so funny, we kept laughing. Everyone else was laughing, too, not just us, and the drunker we got, the better things felt, and we held each other in the balmy night breeze, taking in the blurring Bangkok night lights, happy like we were five-year-olds again.