Chapter 1

High school had been four years of being looked at the wrong way.

Soo Yi was androgynous — slight, flat-chested, barely enough curves to argue the point, paired with a face too pretty for the rest of her to make sense to people who needed things to add up simply. She’d worn her hair short since middle school, easier to deal with, nothing more calculated than that, and by freshman year the combination had already started drawing an unwelcome kind of attention: double-takes in the locker room, confused stares that hardened into something meaner once people decided she was choosing to look the way she looked, like it was a costume instead of just her body.

It got worse from there. Sophomore year the comments sharpened into something with teeth. She still remembered the exact afternoon it stopped being background noise — an assembly, the bleachers packed, and a boy two rows down turning around just to ask, loud enough for six rows to hear, whether she’d started shaving yet or if there was nothing there to shave. The laughter had rolled through the bleachers in a wave, and she’d sat through the rest of the assembly with her face burning, not moving, because moving would have meant admitting it landed. After that, the shoulder-checks in hallways stopped being accidents. The girls’ bathroom stopped feeling safe to use alone. Boys took to barking wrong bathroom like they were doing something clever, like she was the one who’d made the mistake instead of them. By senior year she’d mapped the school the way soldiers map terrain — which stairwells to avoid between periods, which teachers’ classrooms she could linger in until the halls cleared, how to eat lunch fast enough to be gone before anyone decided she was worth bothering.

She was Dr. Park’s daughter before she was anything else, and she’d known it since she was old enough to bring home a 94 and watch her mother’s face do the math on the missing six points. Her father spent his days keeping people unconscious and alive in equal measure and came home too tired most nights to be anything but gentle. Her mother ran the house like a second residency program, and had opinions about the androgyny too, delivered the way you’d point out a coat left out in the rain.

“You could have implants,” her mother said once, over dinner, like she was suggesting a haircut instead of surgery. “Or go to Korea. Plenty of good doctors there who’d be glad to marry a smart girl, never mind the rest.”

Joo Mi had learned to answer that suggestion the same way every time — something sharp enough to end the conversation fast, usually involving her mother’s own body, some crooked, unflattering detail delivered with just enough affection buried under the venom that neither of them ever really meant it as a wound. Her mother would huff and change the subject. That was how they loved each other, mostly. Through the wound and past it.

She told herself college would be different. Everyone kept saying it — people grow up, people mind their business, nobody cares what you look like once you’re an adult. She wanted so badly to believe that when she packed for Texas A&M that she almost had. She’d picked the school herself, actually — conservative, serious, a place where she figured people had bigger things on their minds than what a girl looked like or how she was built.

Three weeks in, she knew better. The looks were the same looks. The under-the-breath comments in the dining hall line were the same comments, just delivered by people old enough to know exactly what they were doing. Adult hadn’t changed anything. It had just given everyone better vocabulary for the same cruelty.