The ID said he was also part of the entering class of ’06.

—If he comes back here, we can pay him a return visit in Gaepo-dong.

I hugged Jaehee tight. My devil, my savior, my Jaehee.

In those days, we learned a little bit about what it was like to live as other people. Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better. And our conversations always ended with the same question:

—Why were we born this way?

—Who knows?

◊

Throughout this drama, a rumor went around our department about how while we were living together, Jaehee had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. All technically true, which made Jaehee and me marvel at the omniscient wonders of collective intelligence. We were all seniors now anyway, too busy looking for a way to make a living, and such rumors hardly affected the author or the subject of the rumor.

Jaehee overcame her characteristic lack of common sense and maintained good grades while reducing the number of times she got drunk in a week from eight to three, and thus returned to the land of the living. I sat in French literature classes nodding off to geriatric professors blabbering on about love, looked every night for someone to have sex with, and if that didn’t work out, sat at home waiting for Jaehee like one of Jeju Island’s petrified-rock fishermen’s wives of myth, pouring myself a bowl of frozen blueberries. If I ate them with my fingers, my fingers turned purple. For some reason, I found this hilarious.

In the first semester of her senior year, Jaehee defied her job-market handicap of being a female humanities major and scored a job at a large electronics company. During the month she left home to spend at the company training center, I was so bored I almost died. Without Jaehee, there was no one to drink with, have stupid conversations with, or just kill time with. The nights became too long, which got me doing what was so unlike me: poring over the list of men I’d dumped. The engineering student had just got a job at an automobile company and had bought a Kia K3 and (this part is important) wanted any excuse whatsoever to take it out for a drive on the weekends, which suited me fine as well. I hadn’t been trying to get back together with him after the whole shouting-from-the-street fiasco, but riding around in that K3 to N Tower and Sanjeong Lake made it seem like we were doing something that resembled coupledom. We’d already had sex enough times for my body to feel like his and his mine, really nothing new there, but we both had low self-esteem, regularly felt suicidal compulsions, were bullied as kids, and pretentiously enjoyed arty films and books while hating basic crap like Haruki Murakami, Hong Sangsoo, French literature, and Audis, all of which made us end up thinking we were something special as a pair.