Jaehee stopped talking to her mother and father the spring she turned twenty. Neither of us had been on good terms with our parents, but that didn’t mean they were especially evil or anything more than typical middle-class conservatives. Like most people’s parents, they constantly nagged their children about propriety and how one should behave, but in their own private lives joyfully indulged in affairs, excess religion, the stock market, or pyramid schemes. I had a real parasitic streak in that as much as I hated my parents, I felt completely entitled to every coin they gave me (was that why my demeanor grew mischievous?) when I was receiving hundreds of thousands of won in monthly allowance. Jaehee, however, cut off contact with her parents after their blowout and refused any form of financial support thereafter. She really did have the heart of a lioness.

She got her first-ever job working at a café called Destiné. She picked it not because it had a large sign with a French name but because it was one of the few places in her neighborhood where smoking was allowed. The sight of her puffing away as she handled the espresso machines was a vision of oblivious nineteen-year-old cuteness. Whenever I had some man in my life, I’d bring him to Destiné for Jaehee to give him the once-over, and every time, she would tell me that the men I liked were always horny with classic asshole personalities. Thinking back, she was right.

By day, Jaehee worked as a barista, while by night she was a private tutor, and then after that she drank until dawn like it was a third job. But she never missed a class, and her grades were OK, and while she did better than average at anything she put her mind to, this talent didn’t extend to her ability to choose men who weren’t a total mess, or to dump said men when the time was right. Which was why I often ended up getting rid of her men via text messages. I, on the other hand, was very practiced in that skill—at least vicariously—because of all the lines I’d heard from men who refused to see me again, easy enough to regurgitate at a moment’s notice. I used to think of myself as the doormat of a naengmyeon restaurant: all you had to do was wipe your feet on it and be on your way (“objective self-judgment”!).