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Jeongyeon does not wake up in the hospital.
She wakes up in her own bed, rolling toward a warm, clear sunbeam, her body still calm and deeply satiated. It takes her a moment to notice she’s back home, sleepy mind still working too slowly for any of it to hit like a startle.
It isn’t until her sister comes in, anxious scowl only burrowing deeper when she finds Jeongyeon awake, that she has to get in the back seat of her father’s car like a child so her parents can take her to meet the team of doctors and company representatives waiting at the hospital.
Jihyo is here, sitting rigidly upright in her t-shirt between a couple of older men in suits. And Nayeon, even though she isn’t in charge of anything and only showed up to be annoying and bossy and give Jeongyeon an annoying, bossy hug that Jeongyeon clings to like a barnacle before she has to let go.
JYP PD-nim is here, even though he’s supposed to have stepped away from this kind of authority. It must have been a big enough deal to haul the old cannons out of the back of the closet.
There are another dozen people Jeongyeon doesn’t recognize, sortable by the signifiers of lab coats and stethoscopes or suit jackets and cell phones.
And already here before Jeongyeon, sitting very still in one corner with her arms crossed in front of her stomach, is Mina. She looks awful, pale and frowning, and she still looks beautiful.
But not as beautiful as she has looked for the past three days, which Jeongyeon and Mina spent alone together in a place called Austin, Texas, that glimmered like the handmade glass shard wind chimes that hung in their kitchen window.
Of course everybody has heard of alternate universe slippage, but few people have ever experienced it, or even known firsthand someone who has. It happens way more often in dramas and music videos than real life. Still, everyone has to learn the signs in school, just in case—someone goes to sleep, usually for two to five days. They don’t show signs of coma or catatonia or dehydration, only deep, peaceful rest. And when they wake up, they have a story of another place.
So when Jeongyeon woke up in a strange bed and turned to see Mina’s beautiful sleeping face, she understood what must have happened. She felt a squirmy sense of guilt, and a vague, heavy dread of what would happen when she woke up back in her own life, but not real fear. And maybe she was too curious about the universe she’d found herself in to worry properly at all. Maybe she ought to have worried a little more.
Mina hadn’t seemed worried. Mina hadn’t seemed to know anything strange was happening. That first morning, she woke up with a yawn and rolled closer, tossing an arm across Jeongyeon’s waist like the fit was familiar. “I want a biscuit,” she announced, and somehow Jeongyeon knew exactly what she had in mind.
Jeongyeon found clothes in a dresser, Mina pulled a sweatshirt over her pajama shorts, and they wheeled bikes out of the front hall of their little house and rode through bright white sunshine to a park. They waited in line at a truck for an unreasonably long time, Mina pretending to wilt against Jeongyeon’s side and declaring she really was going to die this time. People around the park kept doing double-takes at how beautiful she was, cranky in her pajamas, but she didn’t seem to notice, lacking an idol’s anxious hyperawareness of her surroundings.
After they ordered, Mina lay in the grass to wait, and Jeongyeon quickly pulled out her phone to look up alternate universes. The first links were all to Spider-Man movies. Digging deeper, all she could find was fiction—not like the romantic dramas she was used to, but pure sci-fi.
They finally got two egg sandwiches so complicated and enormous it seemed absurd to call them simply biscuits. Mina perked up with the food. Sitting cross-legged in the grass, she smiled and kissed Jeongyeon with salt and sweet jam on her lips, and Jeongyeon lost the sense to feel afraid.
“I thought Mina didn’t know,” Jeongyeon says now, to a room full of doctors and managers. “I thought she was, you know. The other Mina.”
Mina drags her gaze up from the table, big eyes dark and frightened. “I had both sets of memories. It was confusing.”
One of the doctors nods briskly. “Disorientation is to be expected in these situations.”
So they both knew what was happening. They could have talked about it, except Jeongyeon had slipped too easily into playing a fun game of pretend with another Jeongyeon’s life while Mina was, apparently, too disoriented to understand where she was.
Jeongyeon swallows hard.
“Does either of you have any idea what might have triggered this event?” another doctor asks.
Not everyone in the room, but everyone who knows them both—everyone who matters—turns to Jeongyeon. Even Mina. Jeongyeon can feel her gaze, even though she stops herself from catching it.
Jeongyeon swallows again, fighting back a lump in her throat, before she starts. The dread from the first morning is back, heavy knots twisting tighter and weighing her down. “I’ve said things like that before. You know, we’re idols, so we play these games, like, if you had to marry one member, or live in another life….” Jeongyeon can hear herself. I’d want to be Mina’s husband. I’d want to wake up to that beautiful face. “But I can’t think of anything in particular that happened last week.”
Mina shakes her head, too, in the corner of Jeongyeon’s eye. A lot of other reactions scatter around the room, huffs and sighs and hmms, but it’s another long moment before anyone speaks. It’s the doctor at the head of the table, the one PD-nim is sitting right next to. The one in charge. “Of course we’ll need to start with routine physical exams for both of you,” he says, nodding to Mina and then Jeongyeon, and pausing to hold Jeongyeon’s gaze. “And then, I think, we’ll have a few more questions for you.”
Jeongyeon recognized the other universe’s Mina and didn’t, too. She was so relaxed, silly and affectionate. She was late night, indulgent snack, slightly tipsy Mina all the time.
She spent a lot of time playing video games, cross-legged on a sagging sofa, but whether that was her employment or unemployment, Jeongyeon didn’t bother trying to find out.
She looked more carefully for information about what was happening and what to expect, but no matter where or how she looked, she couldn’t find any serious, scientific discussion of alternate universe slippage. Slipped to a universe where they didn’t know about slipping? It seemed paradoxical in a way that was oddly fitting.
And Mina didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong, so Jeongyeon didn’t bring it up. Maybe this Mina had never heard of slippage—maybe it would just freak her out. Compared to the Mina back home, this one seemed so easily swayed by her impulses and whims. She pouted for what she wanted and was entirely unsurprised when Jeongyeon gave it to her. Maybe she was a little spoiled, because maybe this universe’s Jeongyeon liked to spoil her.
Jeongyeon felt protective and she felt fascinated and she did not feel even a little bit like wasting her time in this strange, enchanted place talking about scientific theory.
In the waiting room of another doctor’s office—she had one real night’s sleep and then came straight here in the back of a company car—Jeongyeon looks up restaurants in Austin, Texas, on her phone.
In this universe, the biscuit truck closed in 2021. Maybe Mina’s dedicated patronage made just that little bit of difference.
The door to the back offices opens, and the doctor makes eye contact with Jeongyeon without calling her name. This place is elite and discreet.
“How was traffic, not too difficult?” the doctor asks pleasantly. She has a practical, subtly warm manner, really not bad at all for a doctor.
“No, everything was fine,” Jeongyeon says. They enter an office, not an exam room, another relief. Jeongyeon takes her seat in front of the doctor’s desk.
“Have you had any headaches since you woke up yesterday?” the doctor asks, taking her own seat and lifting a pen as her attention goes to the papers on her desk.
“No,” Jeongyeon says.
The doctor hums affirmatively and checks something off her paper. “And do you identify as in love with Myoui Mina?”
Jeongyeon’s heart stops. And starts again, faster and harder. “That’s kind of a complicated question.”
The doctor makes a face like she’s trying not to make a face. “Really? For a lot of people who experience slippage, it isn’t.”
There’s no question there, but it ends with a heavy quiet that is definitely waiting for Jeongyeon’s answer.
“Being an idol makes everything complicated,” Jeongyeon says. “It’s hard to explain. We’re coworkers, obviously, but there aren’t very many groups who keep it in that box. But it’s not just like being friends, or even sisters, because there is so much work, and we have to make so many choices about what to do and how to do it. Some of the guys talk about bonding like soldiers in battle, but that’s horrible, right? And even when it’s really hard, I don’t want to talk about it like it’s just horrible.”
She pauses, because somehow she needs to catch her breath. The doctor waits, pen still.
“It really is like a marriage, I think,” Jeongyeon says. “I mean, the fans like that metaphor because they like to project romantic things between us or imagine themselves with us. But it’s not just that. It really is the best way to try to make sense of it.”
She thinks of herself, laughing on camera as she talks about how she’d like a life married to Mina. Her thoughts skid, first to that glimpse of a life where she was married to Mina, and then completely away. There must be another way to explain.
“When Nayeon says I’m her husband, she means she either wants to boss me around or act helpless to get me to do stuff whenever she wants.” Jeongyeon rolls her eyes, but the doctor doesn’t join the joke. Jeongyeon continues, “When Jihyo says we’re wives, she means she trusts me to support her while she leads the group. It’s just a metaphor, right? But it’s a really important metaphor.”
The doctor nods. “And what is the gap between this metaphorical marriage and a literal marriage? Remember, what we need to establish is whether and how your subconscious made that jump. Some romance, perhaps, or some intimacy?”
Jeongyeon nods, but she still feels blank. If she could answer this question, would she even be here? Yesterday, one of the other doctors at the hospital explained it was important they dig into why Jeongyeon’s subconscious mind pulled her and Mina into an alternate universe. It’s important for the scientific record, for her own safety, and for Mina’s. For Mina’s.
So Jeongyeon is here to figure out why. But if the only way to do that is to have a succession of increasingly overqualified doctors ask her why, this is going to take a while.
Jeongyeon has dealt with enough doctors to know how this goes.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” the doctor says. “I assume it was unusual to wake up in bed with your groupmate, of course.”
Jeongyeon blinks. “No. Momo and I shared a bed in the dorms for years.”
That takes the doctor by surprise, too much for her to hide under a professional mask.
“That’s another thing people never understand,” Jeongyeon says. “Of course it didn’t mean what it does to married couples. Some people make that obvious joke, but what they really think is we must have been so exhausted we just crashed every night, and it meant nothing at all. And maybe it didn’t mean what it does to other people. Maybe it meant different things to both of us. But it didn’t mean nothing.”
Jeongyeon’s chest hurts. Maybe it will be worth it, in the end, to unpack all this. Something in her craving, hungry heart is grasping in strange directions, for sure.
“It was romantic to you, and not to her?” the doctor asks gently.
It doesn’t sound right like that, and Jeongyeon considers her answer carefully. “I don’t know. Maybe it was more romantic to her, in a way. Momo always ends up with these boyfriends that—” Jeongyeon cuts herself off, shaking her head. She has a lot of this doctor’s very expensive time reserved, but even that is not enough to break down Momo’s romantic history. This time, her eye roll seems to communicate all it needs to. “Anyway, I think she’d sort of fill in the gaps with me. Between her boyfriends and me she could piece together the intimacy she wanted. And by then I’d already realized I wasn’t going to go the boyfriend route, so I was more ready to accept it for whatever weird thing it was.”
The doctor’s concerned expression settles as she nods quickly and starts writing. Jeongyeon’s heart falls. All those questions, all that talking, and the doctor was really just asking one simple thing. At least Jeongyeon just gave her the answer.
“You’ve talked about several of these women,” the doctor says. “But you haven’t mentioned Mina.”
Jeongyeon sighs. Of course she hasn’t mentioned Mina. She can hardly even think of Mina, so shy and heavy-eyed yesterday morning.
“I had the girl crush concept when we debuted, which means basically I’m supposed to be the boyfriend.” Jeongyeon shrugs. “I wasn’t as good at it as some girls in other groups are, but at least I didn’t have to deal with crop tops and hair extensions as often as the others. I do the same things and it gets called boyfriend behavior or mom behavior depending on what the person talking wants it to be. Whatever.”
The doctor is frowning. With some effort, Jeongyeon gets to the point. “If I was everybody’s boyfriend, Mina is everybody’s girlfriend. There’s something about her you just want to take care of. She never leaves the house unless someone asks her, and I always have something going on, so I try to get her out a lot.”
Jeongyeon thinks of a hundred little dates—going out to get Korean food in the U.S., or Japanese food in Korea, or local food in countries she could never have dreamed of visiting. Riding bicycles to get biscuits in the morning sunshine, a memory just as crisp and true as all the others.
“I love it when she says yes,” Jeongyeon says. “It really feels like I’ve done something special. And… well, it doesn’t feel like I’m her mom, let’s just say that.”
It doesn’t land like the joke, the subtle understatement, that she intends. The doctor is nodding and taking notes so intently that it takes her a while to finish and look up. Jeongyeon’s pulse starts fluttering, odd and high—this is it, the breakthrough, the confession, the moment.
Except it isn’t. The rest of the conversation crumbles into confusing, useless circles around what part of last week’s slog of routine dance practices might have triggered a seismic event, and Jeongyeon leaves the office even more frustrated than she entered it.
Seated in the back of the car, she swipes her phone open and finds, still waiting, a bunch of websites for restaurants in Austin. She swallows a yelp and swipes them away quickly, hot and startled like someone might have seen.
The last night in Austin, Mina’s brother showed up unannounced, carrying bags of barbecued meat that filled the small house with a smell so rich it made Jeongyeon feel faintly insane.
It was obviously some kind of routine—Kai pinned Mina to the couch under his significantly larger size and made her recite a questionably sincere list of his virtues before he let her up to eat dinner.
Talking to him in that universe wasn’t so different than talking to him in Jeongyeon’s own, and anyway Jeongyeon can easily banter with anybody’s annoying brother. She thought dinner went fine.
But after Kai left, Mina’s mood turned sour. “Why does he have to just show up?” she whined. “Can’t he text?”
She plunked herself down in front of one of her video games, particularly loud and shooty.
Jeongyeon hadn’t had any way to know it was the last night, then, but she’d understood time had to be running out. She hung around the couch for a while, reluctant to go to bed alone, and tried again to find something useful about alternate universe slippage on her phone.
But there was nothing she could latch onto, not on the phone or in Mina’s mood, so in the end, she gave up and went to bed.
And she was surprised when Mina followed only a few minutes later, hair yanked into a dirty bun but mouth toothpaste-sweet.
It becomes kind of a rhythm. Doctor’s appointments punctuate the pre-tour flow of fittings and filmings and meetings, and then Jeongyeon goes to dance practice and works hard and is completely chill about how intensely Mina avoids all eye contact.
Jeongyeon can ride a rhythm, even a tough one. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t notice how far this one has carried her until she sees the horror on Jihyo’s face.
“Brain surgery?” Jihyo repeats, in a much more furiously squawking tone than the calm one Jeongyeon has been trying to maintain.
“Um, they said it’s like an endoscopic procedure,” Jeongyeon starts. She’s trying not to dwell on it. Getting a tube up her nose is obviously less invasive than having them go in through her skull, but she’d still rather not think about it.
“Have you thought about this at all?” Jihyo demands, squawking only slightly less. “We have a tour! You can’t be recovering from brain surgery!”
She gestures around the practice room, which is full of staff and members, and feels even more full than it is with everyone standing still and watching this conversation.
Privacy is a notion Jeongyeon has long lost any hope for—with two older sisters, she was basically born without it—but there’s a shiver of overexposure here. Anyway, they’re all thinking the next part, so Jeongyeon isn’t really giving anything away by saying it. “We can’t waste days slipping into alternate universes again during a tour, either.”
Obviously, this sucks. Jeongyeon would love to just shrug and give up. But the doctors are too interested, and the company is too invested, and if she doesn’t find an answer eventually, this is going to rattle around in the back of her mind forever.
Jihyo’s mouth twists into a furious pout. “So you’ll let them slice your brain open?”
The aggressive words hit where they’re meant to, and Jeongyeon cringes. “It’s just exploratory,” she says weakly.
Jihyo doesn’t even answer, just makes a frustrated, screamy groan, and there’s a rotation around the room as people start to intervene—Dahyun stepping forward to say something, Nayeon reaching for Jihyo’s elbow, at least three staff members taking out phones and a few more already typing busily—but a voice from the farthest corner cuts across it all. “It was me!”
Silence falls like a stone as everyone turns, all out of sync. Jeongyeon doesn’t have to move—she’s oriented right towards the spot in the corner where Mina is sitting against the wall, knees held to her chest.
Since nobody else is talking, Mina repeats herself weakly. “It was me.” She takes a deep breath. “I went to a temple and I bought a wish and I—I did it. There’s no mystery and it’s not going to happen again.” She pulls in another shuddering breath and says, “No one needs to have surgery.”
She puts her face in her hands.
The whole room starts spinning, a wobbly tilt to it. No—that’s probably just happening to Jeongyeon.
Voice thin the way a razorblade is thin, Jihyo says, “May we have the room, please?”
That seems fine with the staff, inclined to either escape or to get to another room so they can plan more meetings to discuss these ongoing developments.
It’s not clear which we Jihyo means, but Dahyun is herding Chaeyoung and Tzuyu out, too. Mina gives Chaeyoung a pleading look over her fingers, and Chaeyoung smiles back in a bracing way, but she lets Dahyun’s hand on her shoulder lead her to the door. Tzuyu looks like she might be about to laugh, which makes something in Jeongyeon’s heart rush to follow even as the door is closing behind her.
Not all the members have cleared. Sana has a hand on Momo’s arm like she might be trying to guide her out of the room as well, but Momo’s not going anywhere. Nayeon, too, is standing in the middle of the room with her arms crossed and her eyebrows up at her hairline.
Jeongyeon is always aware of them this way, nine girls orbiting one another like celestial bodies. Mina moves through this system like a comet, a pale flash in the far distance of each dynamic except for those moments she comes blazing through the center.
She’s not moving now, hiding in that corner, but all attention is shining toward her anyway.
“I don’t understand,” Jeongyeon says. “You didn’t have any follow-ups or anything.”
“That’s because I lied, obviously.” Mina is almost growling. She’s not crying behind those hands—as she pulls them down, she looks furious. “I said whatever would get those people to leave me alone so we could all move on, just like you should have done!”
Again, Jeongyeon tests the reactions in the unstable room instead of daring to look inward. Momo frowns but Jihyo’s eyebrows pop up like Mina has made a good point.
“You lied,” Nayeon repeats, “because if you told the truth, it would be, ‘I want to be married to our Jeongyeon so bad I ripped a hole in the universe?’ Just to be clear.”
Abruptly, Sana stops tugging on Momo’s arm and leans into the conversation. Momo actually giggles a little. Jihyo and Nayeon are both frowning, but it looks more concerned (Jihyo) and annoyed (Nayeon) than furious.
And Mina slumps even smaller in the corner. “I know I made a mistake,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Now everyone is looking to Jeongyeon for a reaction, which is a problem because she still needs to judge their faces to figure out how to arrange her own. It’s probably up to her to decide how serious this problem has to be.
Okay—so Mina made a mistake. People make mistakes. Jeongyeon has made lots of mistakes. They can be huge crises or they can be silly, and they can be anywhere in between, and they can usually be solved.
Since Mina spoke, Jeongyeon’s heart has been chasing after everyone who laughed a little bit. Her heart has been chasing that way because that’s where she wants to go.
So she laughs a little bit. Mina jumps.
“It’s good you said something now,” Jeongyeon says. “We can figure it out. Nothing’s wrong.”
Mina’s drooping posture snaps up. She finally makes eye contact, and Jeongyeon nods.
Firmly, Jihyo announces, “I’m going to take care of this,” and she marches out of the room.
That’s comforting, in one way, but in another way it means she has left Jeongyeon alone in a room full of monsters.
“Fun!” Sana chirps. “I love weddings.”
Momo wrinkles her nose. “They are actually so boring. I’ll send a nice gift, okay?”
“Even if you get married, Jeongyeon will still be my husband,” Nayeon says cheerfully.
Mina drops her head back against the wall.
Jeongyeon sighs. “Sure. I can’t call you my close unnie, because I already have older sisters.” She lets one beat hang. “And neither of them let dogs pee in their bed, that’s for sure.”
Nayeon’s smile drops into a scowl, and she jumps at Jeongyeon’s body. It’s shaped like an attack, but once she gets there, all she does is squeeze Jeongyeon in her arms.
And when she pulls away to go, finally, Jeongyeon and Mina are alone in the room.
The last time they were alone together was their final night in the strange magic of Austin, Texas in an alternate universe.
Mina doesn’t seem inclined to move from her spot by the wall, so Jeongyeon goes to sit with her.
A frown pulls so hard on Mina’s face that there’s something almost comical about it—it looks plasticky, like a cartoon character or puppet expressing sadness for a child’s understanding. Yes, that’s what she looks like, a pouty little penguin toy you’d find in a convenience store and then again under your bed a few weeks later. She looks so cute and so beautiful and so unhappy.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, softly and more sincerely. “I didn’t know it would pull you, too. I thought it would just be me and I could take it and keep it secret and no one would ever know.”
Jeongyeon makes a noncommittal noise in response, trying to formulate a question in her mind—because Mina is speaking as if Jeongyeon already understands something about the situation that she is not sure she does.
“And I thought it would be more like a dream,” Mina says. “You know, how you barely remember, and it’s all fuzzy?” She holds Jeongyeon’s gaze for one long moment and then turns back to the mirror.
“Right,” Jeongyeon says. It’s not like remembering a dream, it’s like—it is—remembering something that happened. Jeongyeon can fully recall the smell of barbecue and the sparkle of light reflecting off shards of colored glass and the give of Mina’s skin under her fingers.
“I thought I would just—” Mina pushes an angry puff of air through her lips. “Let off a little pressure, you know? And then I would never think about it again. But now it’s all anyone is thinking about.”
“Stop thinking about what, exactly?” Jeongyeon asks, heart big and loud and hungry in her chest.
Mina actually glares at her, sidelong but unmistakable, before her face melts into that miserable penguin shape again. “You know.” She gasps and claps her hands to the sides of her head like she needs to block out a horrible noise. “I totally manipulated you into doing whatever I wanted. I’m some kind of evil monster.”
Jeongyeon is going dizzy again. Whatever I wanted. She sure did, yeah, Jeongyeon thinks. “Yeah,” Jeongyeon says. “Wow.”
Mina makes a pathetic little noise.
“No, I mean—” Jeongyeon shakes the dizzy feeling off and says, “All I do is try to get you to spend time with me. Constantly.”
Mina is still pouting. It’s kind of doing something for Jeongyeon. It’s just so cute, maybe. And it’s intoxicating somehow that Jeongyeon has ended up with all the power in this situation, and that she’s already decided to be generous with it.
“Why aren’t you mad?” Mina asks.
“Do you want me to be mad?” Jeongyeon asks. Maybe she’s a little flattered. Maybe as soon as she finds Tzuyu, she’s going to laugh about this. Maybe she’ll consider her feelings more closely and articulate some clear boundaries she can share with Mina after they both cool off, but like, probably not.
Mina is chewing her lip, looking at the door and seeing past it, to all the people outside who are deciding whether this is going to be a crisis. But that’s Jeongyeon’s decision, and she’s made it.
“I don’t think this is that easy,” Mina says.
“What, are you scared of Jihyo?” Jeongyeon grins.
But Mina stares back at her in pure horror. “Yes.”
“I can handle her.” Jeongyeon waves a hand. “I think… you should be the one to ask first, though. I think that’s only fair.”
Mina’s lower lip puffs gently forward on a small breath, and she settles into a pout. Jeongyeon holds out for about four seconds, and then she asks first.
On the first night in Austin, Jeongyeon crept cautiously back to the bed she’d woken up in so cozy.
And then Mina came running in and jumped on top of her so hard, the mattress bounced. She was laughing in a way that made Jeongyeon start laughing, too, before she even noticed the emotion underneath.
Sexual consent in an alternate universe is a problem of philosophy and law exams, of not a few drama plots and other easy, pop-culture fantasies. In reality, it was too big of a problem to get Jeongyeon’s head around in just a few seconds, especially with Mina all warm and wriggly next to her, and her own body responding easily.
Jeongyeon had enough time to feel a rush of panic, and Mina had enough awareness to notice it. She lifted her head, and if she’d asked a question, Jeongyeon would have had to answer it. Instead, Minashe simply said, “Nothing’s wrong.”
She waited for Jeongyeon to disagree, and Jeongyeon didn’t. She couldn’t. She followed Mina’s rolling momentum until she ended up on top. Nothing was wrong.
Mina’s apartment is so nice. She’s got all that SK-II money and nothing to spend it on except staying home, so it makes sense.
There are no sisters or dogs here to make the morning feel busy. Jeongyeon loves her own place, but she loves this too. When she wakes up, the apartment is comfortably quiet, underlain by the little melodies of the air purifier humming and the coffee machine turning itself on in the kitchen and Mina softly breathing.
As soon as Jeongyeon shifts, though, Mina is rolling into her with wakeful energy, throwing her arm around Jeongyeon’s waist with a familiar fit.
“I want toast,” she says. Jeongyeon knows exactly which shop she means. She turns to press her lips to Mina’s forehead, and then reaches for her phone to start the order.