—Really? Are you serious? You’re the best. Thank you.

Jaehee changed from the jeans she was wearing to a dress with an elastic waist, and then began to put on makeup. Her lipstick was a color I hadn’t seen before, and when I asked when she’d gotten it, she popped her lips a few times at her reflection and said she’d bought it at a Hyundai department store a few days ago. Before I could stop myself, I cried:

—How could you be putting on Dior lipstick at a time like this?

As if I had the right to scold, like I’d ever done anything for her in my life. She was putting on her sneakers like slippers, not bothering to slip her heels into them. I said to the back of her head:

—You’re the one getting surgery, so why do I feel nervous?

—There’s nothing to it. Think of it as getting a pimple popped.

—Not the same thing.

I said it with a growl but felt a little relieved. All right, if she herself was fine with it, no need for me to get overdramatic. Her impervious (close to insensitive) personality that normally irritated me was a source of huge relief now.

We headed to a nearby gynecologist. She said the doctor there was rude and the place a dump, but she began going there when they offered a 40 percent discount on HPV vaccines. Whether the specialist even did abortions was a separate issue. “Shouldn’t you have researched that on the Internet beforehand,” I asked, but there was no way Jaehee would spend even a microsecond thinking about that kind of thing. She said if they didn’t do abortions, we’d go somewhere else. No one was better than her at bumbling through life’s important decisions.

The clinic truly was a dump. We were the only people there, which got Jaehee a meeting with the doctor as soon as she registered. I sat to wait on a sofa so old that it had permanent butt depressions in its seats. On the walls were posters of all kinds of viruses, the diseases they caused, and the miraculous medicines that cured them, as well as a little blackboard advertising summer deals on laser hair removal, Botox, and fillers. I read all of them while waiting for Jaehee, musing over how much it would cost to make my stupid face more tolerable. It was taking longer than I thought for her to get an appointment. The young nurse sitting at the reception desk yawned. They weren’t going to do the procedure today, were they? What was taking so long . . . ?

Unwrapping a couple of the plum-favored candies on the table and popping them in my mouth, I thought about the urology clinic I’d gone to a few months back. It had a similar vibe.