Joohyun doesn’t do a good job of answering her phone.
Unnie, her sister will groan in a voicemail, you forgot again. I’ll be at Sooyoung’s, but really, you should pay attention. You study too much.
It’s not that she doesn’t get sucked into her work sometimes. Yerim isn’t wrong, but she’s also just not attached to her phone 24/7 like some of her classmates, using textbooks as props to text behind in the middle of lecture.
Joohyun is a constant figure in the center of those classes, not too close to the front but not all the way toward the back, either. The middle, one face no different than the rest.
She does her best. For the past few years, it’s all she could do. There’s no self-help or study guides on how to make it out okay, how to stitch their lives back together since. Joohyun looks at Yerim and she does her best, she thinks.
She rubs her eyes and marks the page she’s on before turning out her desk light. Joohyun texts Yerim goodnight and promises to leave the key under the mat tomorrow morning.
Next time, she reasons, she’ll keep her phone on ring.
---
It’s a week later when her phone lights up and begins to play one of Yerim’s favorite girl groups. The girl changes her ringtone at least once a week, and Joohyun had scoffed at first, but Yerim is usually the only one who calls anyway, so she lets her do what she wants.
She glances at the clock on her desk. It’s early. Yerim said she wouldn’t be needing a ride back from the movies until later. She caps her highlighter and reaches for her phone without looking closely, tapping the green answer icon and holding it to her ear.
“Y -- ”
“I’m sorry.”
Joohyun blinks. The voice on the other end isn’t her sister’s. It sounds -- not just different, but a little lower. Stuffy, too. There’s a choked sound and a raw gasp that sounds like tears burning at the back of a throat. Joohyun’s spent too many of her nights before with the taste of salt and overwhelming sadness threatening to crawl up her throat to not recognize it.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s late there.”
She has to check the time again just to make sure. It’s only a little past nine. It’s a few seconds until the voice speaks again, quieter now. “I just needed to call you.” She -- he? they? Joohyun wonders, but she thinks the caller is definitely female -- sniffles. “It’s so hard here. I don’t think I’m good enough. What if I made a huge mistake?”
She’s asked herself the same question before, is the thing. When their parents died. When everyone wondered if the ordinary girl -- barely an adult -- could take care of her sister. You could go to the countryside, the ajumma who lived a floor above them suggested, you have family there, don’t you?
But Joohyun had just accepted her university in the city. Yerim had friends. Leaving felt like running, but years later she’s unsure, one foot stuck in the past for a decision she wasn’t ready to make, and the other stubbornly stepping forward because what else was there to do?
“You’re trying,” Joohyun breathes finally into the receiver, thinking of what she always wanted someone to tell her, anyone. “You must be tired, right? But you’re trying and it’ll pay off. You have to believe that.”
There’s a quick inhale of breath and Joohyun almost wants to smile, but the corners of her mouth won’t lift, her lips pursed pink in understanding too well.
“You’re not…”
“I’m not,” she clarifies, then adds softly, “Hey, better me than accidentally calling your boss?”
The stranger hiccups. “Maybe,” she murmurs, a shade lighter than before but still weak, like she’s left a part of herself on display for everyone to see. Joohyun doesn’t know how to tell her there’s this caged thing inside of her that has the same thoughts, beats a similar ache. “You’re a good listener.”
Joohyun thinks of her relationship with Yerim, how they get along most days but there are others where storms battle behind the girl’s eyes and I’m doing the best I can feels like an excuse more than anything. Yerim needs parents, but she gets Joohyun instead, with honest intentions but clumsy results.
“I’m trying to be a better one,” admits Joohyun, “I’d call myself a work in progress before anything.”
The girl half-sighs, half-laughs, a faint whisper of something more. “I’d recommend you.”
Joohyun tugs at her hair absently. “Yeah?” she asks, then, “What name do I put on my resume?”
The line is silent for a moment and Joohyun knows she’s overstepped when the stranger says, “I should let you go now.” She thinks she imagines hesitance coloring her voice, shaded in somewhere amongst everything else. “But for what it’s worth, I’m sure you’ve improved.”
“I could be better,” Joohyun finds herself saying, “I just need the practice.”
Is it possible to hear someone smile over the phone, she wonders, even a little bit? Does it sound as soft as she thinks it does when the girl says, “good night?”
What about when she echoes it back?
---
Two weeks pass.
Yerim stares at Joohyun through the open window of the passenger side when she gets picked up on a Thursday.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Yerim furrows her eyebrows and gets into the car, “I just didn’t have to remind you to pick me up all week.”
---
The next time the girl calls (it doesn’t feel right to call her a stranger anymore, even after one accidental phone conversation), it’s early on Sunday morning.
Joohyun’s sleeves are pushed to her elbows as she tucks the phone between her ear and her shoulder, going back to mixing batter.
She hadn’t saved the number -- she doesn’t even have a name to put under her contacts if she was going to, anyway -- but it’s a lie to say she doesn’t recognize it when it had flashed across the screen, going back to her calls list and looking at the set of numbers every so often during the week between studying, classes, and work.
“Bad time?”
Her voice is clearer this time, Joohyun thinks, which makes sense. She’s not crying.
“Not really, if you don’t count my ongoing battle with making pancakes,” answers Joohyun lightly, pleased when she hears a snort on the other end.
“I don’t,” she says, amused. When she speaks again, however, it’s different again; uncertainty softens the edges of her voice, and something else, too. “I called because I realized… I didn’t properly thank you for that night. So… thank you.”
Bashfulness, Joohyun recognizes. She’s shy.
“You called me two weeks after just to tell me thank you?”
There’s a huff on the line, but not a denial, she notices.
“Cold water,” the girl says, “You should whisk in cold water to your pancake mix to prevent lumps.”
Joohyun immediately moves toward the sink to do just that. “Thanks,” she replies, scraping the bottom of the bowl with the whisk. It works, and the batter is soon smooth. “Are you…” She chews her bottom lip. “Are you normally up this early on weekends?” The last time the girl had called her it was early into the night, but she has a feeling she stays up much later.
Does she sleep enough? Joohyun wonders.
“It’s my one day off, actually,” she answers, a slight rustling on the other end, “My internal alarm clock won’t let me sleep in, but I’m sore enough my body won’t let me move out of bed yet, either.”
She cocks an eyebrow, thinking it over. She guesses the girl could be an athlete, maybe.
“I wish my roommate would bring me pancakes,” the girl says wistfully, “but she’d just eat accidentally eat it all, probably.”
Joohyun shrugs, then realizes she can’t see. “If my sister doesn’t wake up soon, it won’t be an accident on my end.”
The laugh she gets is warm and bright -- Joohyun glances out of the kitchen window where the sun’s golden rays touch every corner of the room. It’s similar, listening to her laugh and what it does to her insides.
“I guess you’re the older one, then?”
Joohyun hums in response. “Yeah,” she says, and then a second later: “It’s just me and her.” She doesn’t say anything else, but the shift in the air is noticeable. She says, it’s just me and her, not -- All we have is each other, but I don’t know if that’s enough, if I’m enough, or I was mad at them for leaving us for so long and I still feel guilty about it.
The line goes blank again, interspersed by bits of static, but it’s not uncomfortable. It yields to something else -- something Joohyun doesn’t know what to call but it begins and ends with the girl’s words, so much said with so little.
“You know, I could use listening practice, too,” and, “I bet she’ll like the pancakes.”
---
She’s right.
Yerim nearly eats them out of house and home even when Joohyun had cooked enough for at least four people, and she snaps a photo of the high schooler mid-bite.
She complains until she remembers Joohyun doesn’t have an SNS account to upload it on anyway, but she doesn’t know her older sister sends the picture to someone with a text attached.
Good call on the batter trick. She loves them. Thanks.
---
A few days later, Joohyun leaves a class after taking an exam and checks her phone to find a photo of a girl with her arm thrown over her face, sleeping peacefully. Her black and orange dip dyed hair clashes against the couch she’s on and she looks like she’s holding… Pringles cans?
One of those were supposed to be mine ):, the text underneath reads.
---
The first time she calls the girl, not vice versa, is after a fight with Yerim, after she’d slammed the door shut in her room and Joohyun had had to leave the apartment and pace the alley outside just to get air. Her hands are trembling and she’s never smoked a cigarette once, but she wants something, anything to calm the heat in her bones and the bitter taste at the back of her mouth.
“She’s just a kid,” she tries to soothe her, “She didn’t mean it.”
But Joohyun is resentful, angry even to the beautiful voice that she’s learned all the dips and rises in pitch for every shift in mood in the past month. She feels like she’s just run for too long and too hard, the metallic taste of blood persisting in her throat.
“She’s seventeen,” Joohyun lashes out, quiet but deadly, a venom that only gets worse over time. She feels the stinging at the corners of her eyes, too. “And I’m twenty-three. I’m not her mom.”
“Unnie -- ”
“Don’t,” Joohyun chokes, immediately, because that’s the first time she’s heard her say that and she can’t handle hearing it at all, not now, “Don’t call me that.”
The silence stretches too long, and fear begins to spin its web along the cracks of her anger, until she speaks again.
“What do I call you then? What do you want me to call you?”
She closes her eyes and leans back against the brick wall of her apartment.
“Joohyun,” she says at last, “Bae Joohyun. Bae Joohyun, senior at Yonsei. Bae Joohyun, orphan.” Her own voice tapers off. “Bae Joohyun, disappointment.” She kicks at the ground, worn sneakers sending dust flying, and looks toward the sky. The moon is bright.
“You’re the only one who thinks that, you know.” At Joohyun’s responding scoff, she continues. She doesn’t stop.
“Do you think Yerim wouldn’t have asked to move or live with someone else if she thought you were a disappointment, if you hadn’t held the both of you together even when you didn’t know how? Do you think she’d spare your feelings if she hated you a fraction as much as you think she does?” There’s an intake of breath. “She never needed you to be your mom, Joohyun. You’re her sister and that can be everything, too.”
“Do you think Son Seungwan from Toronto, Canada could have gotten through being homesick alone without you? That if she packed up and left Korea today you wouldn’t be one of the first things she’d miss?”
She doesn’t say anything for awhile, but when she does, it’s a name. It’s the name she’s wondered about for a month. “Seungwan,” Joohyun repeats, testing it on her tongue, feeling like she’s called it a thousand times someplace else, some other time.
“I hate that name.” Joohyun can feel her grimace through the line.
“I like it,” she says softly. Without realizing it, the tension has left her shoulders. She rolls them back and looks up toward the apartment building. Yerim’s bedroom light is still on.
“I don’t mind it as much when you say it,” Seungwan confesses carefully, like she’s uncovering something as fragile as a baby bird’s healing wings. There’s a stirring in her Joohyun’s chest, too, that feels like its taking flight.
She swallows. “Thanks for listening,” she breathes, “you’re good at it.”
“Actually, I was talking quite a bit,” answers Seungwan, but there’s that hesitance again lurking underneath her words.
“Will we ever do more than that?” Joohyun wonders out loud, “Talking and listening, I mean.” She tries not to sound nervous, busies herself with taking the stairs instead of the elevator up once she’s back inside. She still needs to talk to Yerim, still needs to look within herself for who she wants to be instead of who she thinks she should be, and she can do that, she thinks. If she lets herself try.
Seungwan hums, and there’s something musical about the lilt of her voice, she realizes. She takes into account all the little details she's let slip and gets it now. The girl, the trainee, the girl on the other end of the line finally asks her:
“How do you feel about going for pancakes?”