Rosemary ambled up Mount Curve, greedily filling her lungs with the notes of clove, fresh pine and charred marshmallow. The local newscasters expressed incredulity that it’d be 78 degrees on Christmas Day, yet refused to address the issue of global warming. This was why America was fucked. She savored this feeling of fuckedness, already nostalgic. This, she knew, would be her last winter in America.

The hot, dry Santa Ana winds appeared to have blown somebody’s nylon Santa off their roof, leaving him dangling limply from the eaves like a hanged man. Or maybe that was intentional. Oh, how she would miss this messy mixed-messaging of America.

Over There, they’d be living in a grim little apartment in a crowded high-rise, the airless corridor smelling of pickles and shellfish, each entryway cluttered with the sandals of unseen children, each sidewalk stained by the spatter of old suicides. Over There, unable to speak the language, she’d be considered slow and be ridiculed by classmates. There’d be no coolness factor in being American—the youth of Korea had the chauvinism of K-pop and K-everything. She’d fall in with the wrong crowd, green-haired kids striking for their lack of original thinking, and learn from them how to upload camera-phone videos of herself making peace signs and pouty faces. They’d teach her that selling her used underwear in online auctions would bring her easy cash. Eventually, she’d drop out of school and wind up working bad shifts at a neighborhood 7-Eleven, one that did a brisk trade in condoms and cup noodles at 3 a.m. There would be a microwave oven at the back of the store she’d have to wipe out three times a day from pranksters heating up cans of mackerel. There’d be the awkward Friday night when she’d recognize a couple of the troublemakers as members of the green-haired tribe from school. She’d pray they wouldn’t remember her, and they wouldn’t. And that lack of recognition would make her feel even worse. Finally, after three or four years at the 7-Eleven, when she’d gained thirty pounds from depression and jjajang ramen, a man so ordinary-looking as to defy description would walk into the store, pull out a long, serrated knife and plunge it into her heart.

“Pssst!”

Rosemary was jolted from her fantasia.

“Hey, Ghost! Over here.”

She turned. The wind slapped her hair back against her face. The man who’d given her the gold pendant was standing on the sidewalk, outside Mr. Z’s house. He had on a long coat and black leather gloves, the outfit of one who’d traversed the continent and hadn’t expected to encounter warmth.

She looked around. Nobody for miles. There was a theatrical quality about the setting—backstage at midnight, dark, muted, and witness-free.