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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, uh, do you want to go to Korean barbecue with me sometime?\u201d Lukas had asked.<\/p>\n
He hadn\u2019t made eye contact. Or rather, he hadn\u2019t made eye contact with her.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Lukas wasn\u2019t talking to Jesus. He was thinking about words a straight boy would use to describe Amy\u2019s boobs that he could later use with Mark. Melons? Knockers? A sack and a half of tits?<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, sure,\u201d Amy answered, grinning. She picked up her binder of hymns.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Park, Mark\u2019s mom and the choir director, was having them rehearse \u201cOn Eagle\u2019s Wings.\u201d They were prepping for the funeral of a senior who\u2019d been killed in a car crash driving back from visiting a Bible college. His copilot, who\u2019d climbed out of the burning car with a broken clavicle, was doing the solo.<\/p>\n
The soloist\u2019s 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, \u201cAnd hold you in the palm of His hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While Amy was helping out her mother with Kim Superfoods\u2019 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\u2014dark red, powdery blue, purple-black\u2014Lukas was watching videos of school shootings with Mark.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you imagine the look on Mr. Jones\u2019s face if I walked into pre-algebra with a piece like that?\u201d asked Mark, clicking past another Graphic Content Warning to a video detailing how a high schooler in Houston 3D-printed a gun.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t actually do it though, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy not? I\u2019m not a pussy like you,\u201d said Mark. \u201cIf that fat fuck suspends me again, I\u2019d definitely go shoot up his class.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a pussy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf fucking course you are. You\u2019re probably a fag, too.\u00a0 My mom says you have a voice like a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I was a fag, would I be asking Amy Kim out today?\u201d said Lukas, loudly, over the recorded gunshots.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah? She\u2019s hot. Good luck, fag.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lukas drove Amy to Daebak Korean BBQ in his dad\u2019s 2013 Ford Fiesta after the funeral ended and as the dinner rush was starting.<\/p>\n
Later, he won\u2019t remember the server ushering them to the table or explaining how to cook the red folds of marbled meat.<\/p>\n
He won\u2019t remember walking to the bathroom.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s boobs, and feeling good that he had spent time earlier memorizing their shape because God, was it coming in handy now.<\/p>\n
He will remember sitting down across from the one who looked like she\u2019d stuffed two baby skulls down her front.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you order drinks? I trust you,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe they have those sodas with the marbles in them? My sister collects them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amy didn\u2019t respond.<\/p>\n
Lukas wondered if those sodas were even Korean, or if he\u2019d 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\u2019d never told Lukas about but Lukas had read about when he Googled his dad\u2019s name after he died.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmy?\u201d he said as the girl in front of him took out her phone and started to swipe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWrong table,\u201d said the girl, looking up briefly. \u201cI\u2019m not Amy.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Amy watched Lukas sit down in front of a girl who wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s, where she texted her mom to pick her up and walked through the produce section while she waited.<\/p>\n
She looped through aisles of conventionally-grown late-summer fruit.<\/p>\n
She looked at the peaches and the plums and the nectarines.<\/p>\n
She turned them over gently, rolling them in their plastic beds.<\/p>\n
She looked and she looked, but she couldn\u2019t find two that were exactly the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lukas wasn\u2019t talking to Jesus. He was thinking about words a straight boy would use to describe Amy\u2019s boobs that he could later use with Mark. Melons? Knockers? A sack and a half of tits?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":21350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-katherine-plumhoff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21351,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21312\/revisions\/21351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}