Isabella peels off her shoes and flexes her toes. She groans softly, and the noise makes the back of my neck twitch.
I lean my chair back and let it recline to its fullest. I savor the legroom and luxury of the ordeal. The few times I have flown before were spent in economy class, being breathed on by strangers and the heavy scent of recycled air.
When I look at Isabella, her eyes are shaded by sunglasses, a sheet mask stuck to her like a second skin, earbuds in. She looks like a very pretty mummy, or a wax encasing of a person. She hasn’t touched her ice cream. The little white mound has started to pool around itself in the tiny glass saucer. There are grains of vanilla bean embedded in it that hint someone has spent time scraping its stalks rather than pouring extract into a vat. A spoon stands upright in the dish, delicate and engraved and silver.
I take one last look at her, then at the dessert, before scarfing it down. When I’m done, I suck the spoon clean and tuck it away in my bag.
When we land, I’m queasy from the turbulence. My eyes are thick-lidded and heavy. I see my face in the bathroom mirror, and it feels too attached to my face. I tug my cap down over my forehead.
Isabella tells me the car is waiting out front. She has shed her sheet mask to reveal plump, glazed skin beneath. I’m surprised to learn that she means the family car and not a taxi. The driver is an older man, sun-worn, stoic, gloved. He opens the door for us, and Isabella doesn’t thank him. I don’t either, though I’m immediately guilty about it.
I did not pack my motion sickness medicine. When my chest then throat seize, I try to will it down. I fight through twenty minutes of congested traffic, picturing dim and quiet, soothing tea and stillness. In the end, I lose, rolling the window down and emptying my stomach onto the moving pavement. Even as I retch, I think of the cost of a car wash, and I aim my face away from the side door.
Once I’ve finished, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand and uttering a small, embarrassed apology to Isabella, I observe out the window. Seoul is so different from our grassy, sleepy, New England college town. The buildings stretch upwards in rectangular masses, a strange combination of sleek metal and glass against grimy storefronts with colorful block lettering. It seems it’s in a painful transition, the old swallowed by the new, their awkward clash. The city itches with life in a way I’m unfamiliar with. I can’t imagine either of my parents living here at my age, with their small-town restaurant and wordlessness, vocabulary compressed in a language they never grew familiar with.
I look back at Isabella, her gaze angled to her lap, where she scrolls through text messages without stopping to answer any. I wonder how many times she’s been here, and if it feels more familiar to her in a way our town never can. I don’t ask these questions, only wait for her to offer up information. In the rare moments she does, I cling to it, holding it close to my chest like a secret.
The city thins out below us as we drive up a hill, cross through a barrier gate, and pass sprawling apartment complexes. We stop at the tallest one, shaped like a crescent, the center thrust furthest out and overlooking the city. I don’t understand much about Seoul, but I know that it must cost a fortune to possess this much space in a city almost too crammed to breathe.
Back home, I could pretend we lived similar lives, sharing a school-sanctioned room, watching her wipe off the day’s makeup in the bathroom mirror, or sharing microwaved popcorn from a plastic bowl. It feels strange to see her wealth so definitively quantified, to be living in the center of it.
Everything inside the building is pristine and grand but never excessive. The elevator lets out an electric, modern hum, and it deposits us onto the eighteenth floor. Her home feels like a study in sparsity, with high ceilings and hardly any decor besides a few intentional pieces of modern art.
The family portrait hangs above the mantle. Isabella doesn’t look like the Isabella I know, with a close-lipped smile that makes her seem as if she’s been pinned down and preserved between panels of glass. Isabella’s mother resembles her, but it’s as if every feature of Isabella’s has been amplified, to the degree of painfulness. I imagine it would be blinding to hold her gaze. Her father stands behind his wife and daughter, not large in frame but looming nonetheless, obviously so wealthy that he doesn’t need to care that he is old and almost painful to the eyes.
Isabella leads me to the glass side of the penthouse, floor-to-ceiling panes that look out onto the expanse of the city. I notice that there are no handles on the panels, nothing to open these doors and step outside. It’s the grand view from above and nothing else.
Isabella’s room is unlike her, with only the bare bones of a bed, vanity, dresser, and mirror. Our dorm is littered with her things, clothes draped over every surface, more heaped on the floor. She keeps a stack of books that grow taller without ever being read and a smattering of items from the hobbies she picks up and discards. There’s an electric guitar, several balls of yarn, various crystals. Her interests were enough for the both of us, myself content in watching her things slowly coat our room, until I became enclosed in it. But here, it is as if I would need to restart the process of knowing her, to bridge whatever silent gap is growing between us.
“You can share the bed with me,” she says.
I learn that Isabella intends to stay in. When we hardly moved from her bed on the first day, I reason she was exhausted from the fifteen-hour flight. But after three days pass by in a drowsy, stagnant haze, I realize that she has no plan to leave her home.
She sleeps until the late afternoon, waking up only to roll around until our stomachs ache with hunger. Then she calls the housekeeper to make us food. Even as I listen with eager ears, I only comprehend a few words, too fast and unfamiliar. They don’t sound the same as the automated voice on the language learning apps. Isabella slips into the cadence with ease. Her voice sounds different when translated into another language, the parts of her I cannot access showing themselves. I blame my parents for never teaching me, for using their home language like a barrier I could not cross, a way to speak through me when I was in the same room as them.
We lay on the living room floor with a platter of fruit. She pops a fat green grape into her mouth, then a slice of melon, a pear, and the juice trails down her chin. It trickles onto the tile, and I watch it thicken, first a syrup, finally forming a glistening sugary stain. She abandons the platter quickly, and the contents stew in its own condensation.
We drink soon after, trying every wine in her parents’ collection. It’s like a game to us, though Isabella claims that everything has the same taste. She says this but drains several glasses, leaving her lips a vampiric purple-red and her teeth garish. The heady tipsiness muddles my view of her, and her features appear as if there are gaping absences in her face.
She gets drowsy soon after and requests I read to her. On nights when she’s in a good mood, she lays her head in my lap, and I stroke her hair with one hand, a book in the other. I stiffen up in moments like these, as if I’m holding a skittish cat. I wonder if she can feel the hammer of my heart against my ribs. I want to commit the feeling to memory, the fine silk of her hair, the weight of her on my leg, her breath warming my palm. These moments sustain me for several days, where I forget to complain to myself about our seclusion and only dream about reaching this intimacy with her again. I get hungry for it, impatient and writhing inside.
Isabella takes me down to the building’s tennis courts by the end of the week. We play a game, and she swings with such force that contact with the ball makes a sharp pop. I attempt to rally with her, but my balls either fall short or bounce out of bounds. I’m embarrassed and attempting to be good-natured about it, but she cuts my misery short, laying on her back and letting the weak sunlight warm her face. She pats the concrete beside her, and I sit.
I crack a joke that I forget as soon as it leaves my mouth. Only the embarrassment lingers. I sometimes feel as if she secretly enjoys seeing me flounder.
“This is all so boring,” she says to the sky, and I don’t know how to respond. I’m afraid she means that I am boring, and my body goes cold and still at the thought.
The days are never exerting, leaving me restless. Isabella radiates heat next to me in bed, her skin damp with summer humidity. It’s only when she’s unaware that I can study her, in reflections or as she rounds a corner or in sleep like this. Her dress is silk, bunched up to reveal the curve of her leg and the long line of muscle beneath the surface. I can count her moles, one on her cheek, the other on her forearm. The fine fuzz of arm hair. A small, sharp nose. Dense, dark lashes on a pale face. The sweetness in her expression once it settles. I extract myself from the bed in painfully slow degrees, but she doesn’t stir once.
I pad into the living room, the tile floor a shockingly cool relief, and I make it to the window. I press my face to the glass, distorting it with the hot steam of my breath and the oil of my skin.
The city is still alive at this hour. Its expanse makes me a little breathless. I try to place the landmarks I spent late nights reading about, my phone angled away from Isabella’s view. “The Best Things to Do in Seoul” or “5 of Seoul’s Hidden Gems”, with images of overeager tourists and steaming heaps of food at market stalls and temples of stone. I wonder if Isabella finds anything of worth down there, and I’m unable to convince myself that she does.
I imagined I would feel some homecoming here, a familiarity in streets I’ve never walked before, in the faces of passersby. I would be embraced by something greater than myself, not having to ask to be taken in for the first time. But I belong to neither my birth nor my family’s country, not in the vast whiteness of a small town, clinging to academic scholarships and favors from Isabella, nor in the uncaring bustle of people who do not know me and who I have nothing in common with other than a last name. The idea feels childish and distant now, belonging to another person entirely.
I dig my fingernails into my palm and savor the sharp prick that answers. My eyes run over with water.
I spot what I think is the Han River, but I consult the internet just to be sure. It looks bottomless tonight, like it would swallow you and never spit you back up.
Isabella tells me her friend is hosting a party. She feigns nonchalance, but she is restless for the entire day. Every emotion is heightened to her, her giddiness, her impatience. I rarely see her like this, and it sets off a buzzing anxiety in my skin.
Isabella lets me borrow a dress of hers. She picks out something unassuming and unflattering, and I strain to tug the zipper up behind my back without complaint.
The housekeeper knocks on the door with a garment bag for Isabella. It’s the first time I see her face directly; she’s an expert at slipping away. Isabella's lack of acknowledgment towards her feels more insulting than outright belittlement. A runny bile fills my throat.
The woman reminds me of my mother, not quite in the features but in how she carries herself, an older woman with a softness to the curve of her body, a slight hunch, a tight mouth, chapped hands. I want to ask her if she knows my mother, if, in this vast population, they were maybe childhood friends. If they watched girls who had more than them and felt bitter too. If they dreamed of growing up and escaping who they were. I want to ask her, but the words dry in my throat. I wouldn’t be able to tell her with words she would understand.
Isabella wears her hair up, the precise edges of her bone structure emphasized, and takes off her clothes without pretense. I look away, catching glimpses of skin in the periphery of my vision, my face warm.
“Help me with this,” she says, gesturing towards the zipper. I do, making careful work of it, fighting the urge to allow my fingers to linger in the small canyon of her back. If she let me, I would sink to my knees and trace the knots of her spine with my tongue.
The party is located in another penthouse. It juts upwards into a severe, almost painful point.
The elevator opens up onto our floor, and the room is dark and pulsing with music. I discern people by the glean of their clothes or skin catching in the light. Isabella searches the room for someone, and when she finds him, her disposition shifts into something eager, a hunger opening in her that I have never seen before. It sends an angry surge of heat through me.
He’s tall, broad-shouldered, with handsome and unkind features. His smile reaches the corner of his lips but not his eyes. He wears a dress shirt with the first few buttons undone, a thin chain exposed around his neck, silver. He crosses to Isabella, leaning in to speak in her ear.
When they kiss, it’s slow and lazy and so certain that the tips of my limbs lose feeling. I feel like an intruder, but I also want my presence to be felt, as if I’m somehow involved in the exchange. I imagine putting his chain in my mouth, the soft bloody tang. I imagine Isabella pressed against me in the same way she attaches herself to him like a second skin. I want the heat of human contact, to be so close I absorb them, until I cannot discern our bodies from one another.
He pulls away, offering her something in his palm before slipping back into the crowd, and Isabella’s eyes trail after him.
She appears in front of me, and says, “Open your mouth,” I accept whatever she gives me.
“Swallow.” I do. I watch her do the same, the exposed inside of her mouth, white teeth and a shiny pink tongue. Her throat bobs a little.
I am at the bathroom mirror, gazing at myself even as my reflection swims. The glass seems to flow in counter to the music. I reach out towards the surface but graze empty air. I am the prettiest girl at this party, the prettiest girl I have ever laid eyes on. I am probably the prettiest girl anyone has seen. I pull at the young elasticity of my face’s skin, at the clean scent of me, at the perfect craft of my ears. I grin.
I am Isabella, and maybe I am lonely, but it does not matter because I am spilling over with the beautiful kind of loneliness people spend their lives chasing. I am the kind of isolation people make movies about, longingly gazing out windows, drowning in bathtubs wearing ruby pendants, hot tears rolling down a manicured face, disgustingly rich.
But suddenly, I am not myself but the girl I resent. I am disgustingly plain and too sad about it to face myself. I am unsure why I hate this mediocrity so much. Why to me, to anyone, anything other than remarkability produces a terrible aversion. Why I feel so spat out in this dress. I rub at the fabric, pull it from where it cuts off the flow of blood around my chest. It doesn’t give, and I begin to claw. I tear a strip across the center that dangles like a snapped limb. I cry briefly, loud howls into hands crawling with germs.
The room spins around us, time syrupy. Bodies crush against us. The sticky sheen of skin against the tender inside of our shoulders. We can’t feel the features of our face. I blink and find myself on another side of the room.
We blink and we are sat on the elevator floor as it ascends to another level. The chime alerting us of our arrival reverberates through us. We crawl out of the elevator, the floor digging into our knees, heaving with the weight of ourselves. The night is sweltering. We giggle, one sound that is sweet and piercing and bounces off of the insides of our ears.
Isabella pulls herself up with a grunt, races to the ledge and peers over. It’s the first time I’ve seen her look out on her city. Her face is filled with wonder, and she’s smiling fiercely, as if she discovered this land herself. She looks like a child. I’m suddenly so angry I become dizzy with the feeling. I clutch my head, the hot pulse of blood, the point of every tooth in my mouth sharp and starved. I want to sink my nails into her shoulders. I want to shake her with every cruel casualty she’s subjected me to. I think of pushing her, how easily she would tumble, how gracelessly her flip across the railing would be, how she wouldn’t even register it before she plummeted. I picture her sprawl on the pavement, too small of a dot to make out any gore. It would be a balancing of some sort, an act of fate where someone finally gets what they deserve.
My face is soaked with sweat. It drips into my eyes. My body is feverish and twitching. My hands tremble when I raise them.
Isabella doesn’t look back when I leave the way we came.
I take the elevator down. The numbers on the screen reduce in ticks. I am suddenly so weary. I push through the glass doors, step onto the cigarette-butt-studded sidewalk, and sit on the curb.
I stay there for a while, thinking of how to return home.
