Somewhere Only We Know(24)

“Bless this food and bless you for bringing me here,” she murmured as she wiped daintily at her lips with a tiny, thin paper napkin. Her face was flushed from the warmth of the food, or maybe it was from the pure joy of enjoying a quiet meal, undisturbed. I wondered how far-reaching her celebrity-life limitations were.

“It’s good,” I said between mouthfuls. And it was. Charlie had been trying to get me to wake up early enough for breakfast congee for months, but this was the first time I’d done it. The right motivation was all it took, apparently.

“What do you like about being in choir?” I asked her.

She took another bite before answering me. Her expression was incredibly composed even as she chewed. She was trying to figure out what to say. “It’s … a way to share music with an audience.”

“Is it music you feel passionately about, though?”

I thought the question might make her choke on her food, being as direct as it was. But she only frowned slightly. “You seem to have an opinion about church music.”

If “church music” was subbing for K-pop in this conversation, then yeah, I had an opinion. “It doesn’t seem personal. It’s music that’s … for everyone.”

Her eyes lit up. “Music for everyone. You say that like it’s a bad thing. But I find it to be a very cool thing. People are so divided in the world, you know? It’s a miracle to offer something that so many can all agree to like.”

I blinked. I’d never thought of pop music that way. “That’s … so insightful.”

“Wow, don’t look so surprised,” she said with a snort, back to goofy Lucky again.

When every morsel of congee and egg was devoured, Lucky reclined in her seat and lolled her head back. “That was the best breakfast I’ve had in months.” The strangeness of the words landed with a thud between us. We both seemed to avoid looking at them, neither of us willing to acknowledge the weirdness of their shapes. I politely ate my porridge, taking the occasional sip of tea.

Suddenly she bent forward, sliding her elbows across the table until her cheek rested on her right palm. “So, what’s your story?” she asked.

Her proximity made me choke on my food. Without moving her torso, her left hand snaked over to my cup of tea and pushed it closer to me. I took a big swig of it and it scalded my throat. When I recovered, I placed it down on the table with a gentle rap. “My story?”

“Yeah, how old are you?”

Koreans always got down to business—age first. Where did we stand in the hierarchy of seniors versus juniors? “How old do you think I am?” The teasing words came out of my mouth so swiftly, like some practiced creep.

Lucky was not amused. “Who cares what I think? What’s the truth?”

Hm. She wasn’t one for beating around the bush. “I’m eighteen. I graduated last June.”

There was a flicker of something like jealousy behind her eyes. “High school? Here or in California?”

“Here.”

“Where in Cali are you from, anyway?”

“LA.”

She straightened up. “I knew it. Me too. I’m from LA.”

“For real?”

“Yeah! I grew up there, in Studio City.”

She was a Valley girl.

“Cool, I’m from La Ca?ada.” It was a suburb north of downtown, near the foothills of the Angeles National Forest. A suburb filled with giant trees and kids taking tennis lessons, headed for Ivy Leagues. It was strangely serendipitous, both of us growing up in such placid suburbs, finding ourselves sharing congee seven thousand miles away.

“Wow. What a coincidence, don’t you think?” she asked, her chin slipping back down into her palm, her dark eyes staring up at me.

Everything she did was kind of perfect, and it didn’t seem practiced somehow. But she was a performer. Maybe the beauty of her performance was the belief that what you were seeing was real.

And it was kind of a weird coincidence. One that made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t the one being interviewed here. The less she knew of me, the better. “Where do you live now? Seoul?” I asked, taking a sip of tea, extremely aware of how close her forearms were to my fingers.

Another moment of silence as her mind whirred, strategizing, already thinking five steps ahead and making decisions based on where she wanted to land. “Yes. I moved there a few years ago.”

I nodded. “How old are you, then?” Seventeen. She was seventeen.

“I’m also eighteen.”

My hand stilled over the teacup. Liar. “You are?”

“Yeah. Why, do I look older?” Her tone was teasing now, and I suddenly felt a flash of heat in my cheeks. Why did she get the upper hand so often when I was the one who held all the cards?

Time to flip this. My fingers brushed against her arm, ever so casually, as I moved the teacup a little. “Not old. But you look like you’ve seen some life.” My eyelids were lowered. I felt downright coy.

And there it was. A sharp intake of breath. Vulnerable-celeb-looking-for-someone-to-see-her-loneliness mode initiated. But then I heard a peal of laughter and my eyes flew back up.

Her cap was pushed so far back on her head that I saw all of her smooth forehead, straight eyebrows, and clear brown eyes. “Is this how you get girls?” she asked, tapping my wrist with a long, tapered peach nail. “Because, I get it. Woo, must knock them off their feet.”