Lukas will forget the date after he tells the story once, to Mark, whose teasing brought the whole situation together in the same way that wet, warm, upwards-pushing air creates a storm. Amy will remember it every time she eats outside of her house.

“So, uh, do you want to go to Korean barbecue with me sometime?” Lukas had asked.

He hadn’t made eye contact. Or rather, he hadn’t made eye contact with her.

He stared at the crucifix hung on the wall behind the lecterns with his fists tugging down the pockets of his cargo shorts like ballast.

To Amy, it seemed like he was waiting for Jesus, whose head was tilted away from his slender white body, ribs sharp and stigmata dripping, to answer. She imagined they could talk in their heads, Jesus and Lukas, the only two white boys at Korean Presbyterian Church of Metro Detroit, both their faces beautiful.

Lukas wasn’t talking to Jesus. He was thinking about words a straight boy would use to describe Amy’s boobs that he could later use with Mark. Melons? Knockers? A sack and a half of tits?

“Yeah, sure,” Amy answered, grinning. She picked up her binder of hymns.

Mrs. Park, Mark’s mom and the choir director, was having them rehearse “On Eagle’s Wings.” They were prepping for the funeral of a senior who’d been killed in a car crash driving back from visiting a Bible college. His copilot, who’d climbed out of the burning car with a broken clavicle, was doing the solo.

The soloist’s sling kept her in a perpetual hand-on-heart pose that, even to Amy, whose agnosticism was growing in line with her cup size, gave her devotion real depth, especially when she sang, “And hold you in the palm of His hand.”

 

While Amy was helping out her mother with Kim Superfoods’ weekly restock before choir practice, stacking sugar plums on styrofoam trays and shrouding them in plastic wrap, small and firm and $2.49/pound, each a slightly different color—dark red, powdery blue, purple-black—Lukas was watching videos of school shootings with Mark.

“Can you imagine the look on Mr. Jones’s face if I walked into pre-algebra with a piece like that?” asked Mark, clicking past another Graphic Content Warning to a video detailing how a high schooler in Houston 3D-printed a gun.

“You wouldn’t actually do it though, right?”

“Why not? I’m not a pussy like you,” said Mark. “If that fat fuck suspends me again, I’d definitely go shoot up his class.”

“I’m not a pussy.”

“Of fucking course you are. You’re probably a fag, too.  My mom says you have a voice like a girl.”

“If I was a fag, would I be asking Amy Kim out today?” said Lukas, loudly, over the recorded gunshots.

“Yeah? She’s hot. Good luck, fag.”

 

Lukas drove Amy to Daebak Korean BBQ in his dad’s 2013 Ford Fiesta after the funeral ended and as the dinner rush was starting.

Later, he won’t remember the server ushering them to the table or explaining how to cook the red folds of marbled meat.

He won’t remember walking to the bathroom.

He will remember coming out of the bathroom, and seeing four tables that each had a long-haired Asian girl in a crewneck sweater, and scanning their chests to see if he could recognize the outline of Amy’s boobs, and feeling good that he had spent time earlier memorizing their shape because God, was it coming in handy now.

He will remember sitting down across from the one who looked like she’d stuffed two baby skulls down her front.

“Did you order drinks? I trust you,” he said. “Maybe they have those sodas with the marbles in them? My sister collects them.”

Amy didn’t respond.

Lukas wondered if those sodas were even Korean, or if he’d gotten another thing wrong, like when he mispronounced ddakji in front of all the Korean kids playing the game after Sunday school and his dad, back when he was the one who brought Lukas to church, taught him how to say it. His dad had learned it when he was stationed in Camp Humphreys, 60 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, which he’d never told Lukas about but Lukas had read about when he Googled his dad’s name after he died.

“Amy?” he said as the girl in front of him took out her phone and started to swipe.

“Wrong table,” said the girl, looking up briefly. “I’m not Amy.”

 

Amy watched Lukas sit down in front of a girl who wasn’t her. She heard him call the girl her name. She stood up and walked out of the front door of the restaurant and down Telegraph Road into Meijer’s, where she texted her mom to pick her up and walked through the produce section while she waited.

She looped through aisles of conventionally-grown late-summer fruit.

She looked at the peaches and the plums and the nectarines.

She turned them over gently, rolling them in their plastic beds.

She looked and she looked, but she couldn’t find two that were exactly the same.