A Love More Than Lovely
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Being a couple who shared every class together did something neither of them had fully anticipated: it closed off the geometry the four girls had been relying on. There was no more catching Soo Yi alone between Organic Chem and the parking lot, no more waiting for the ninety-second window when she stepped away from a library table by herself. Brad was always three feet away now, sometimes less, and even when he wasn’t physically present, people had started to notice the two of them as a unit — which meant anyone bothering her risked being seen bothering them.
For almost two weeks, it worked. The comments in the hallway thinned out. The stairwell near the chem building stopped being a place Soo Yi dreaded walking past. She let herself believe, cautiously, that the worst of it might actually be behind her.
She was wrong about the shape it would take next, not the fact that it would come at all.
It was a Tuesday night, ordinary in every way up until it wasn’t. Soo Yi was at her desk finishing a problem set, phone face-down beside her out of habit more than anything, when Priya came through the door without knocking — which she never did — and stood there for a second too long before saying anything.
“You need to sit down,” Priya said.
“I’m already sitting.”
“Then don’t get up.” Priya’s laptop was open, held against her chest like a shield, screen angled away. “Someone sent me a link. I need you to know it exists before you see it somewhere else and I’m not there.”
Soo Yi’s stomach had already started sinking before Priya turned the screen around.
It had been posted to an anonymous account an hour earlier, already reposted into a group chat that half the sophomore class had access to by the time Priya caught it. The image was an AI-generated composite: her face, unmistakably hers, grafted onto a nude male body, genitalia fully rendered. The caption read: “Finally settled the debate — Soo Yi Park has a dick. Wrong bathroom this whole time, ladies.”
Soo Yi didn’t cry. She sat very still instead, staring at a spot on the wall past Priya’s shoulder, some part of her brain doing the same math it had done a hundred times in high school — how bad is this, how many people have seen it, how do I make it stop — except this time the math didn’t resolve into anything survivable. Her hands started shaking before she noticed they’d started.
Priya called Brad without asking. He was at the door in under ten minutes, and when he saw Soo Yi’s face he didn’t reach for his own phone to look at whatever it was — he just crossed the room and got down in front of her chair so they were eye level and asked, quietly, “Are you safe right now? Physically?”
She nodded.
“Okay.” He held her hands until they stopped shaking quite so badly, and only then did he ask Priya to show him.
He looked at it for exactly as long as he needed to understand what it was, jaw tightening, and then he closed the laptop himself. “Don’t touch anything else,” he said. “Don’t delete it, don’t share it, don’t respond to it. I need to call my dad.”
His father, CTO of one of the largest software companies in the state, picked up on the second ring. Brad gave him maybe ninety seconds of explanation before his voice shifted into something Brad had heard only a handful of times — calm, exact, three steps ahead of the conversation already. “Don’t delete anything,” his father said, loud enough that Soo Yi could hear it through the phone. “Don’t confront anyone directly, don’t post anything back. Screenshot the original post, the account, every message in that group chat, with timestamps. Once you’ve got it preserved, you go to the police. Tonight, if you can manage it. Not the school first.”
“Why not the school?” Brad asked.
“Because a university protects its own reputation before it protects a student. Get this in front of law enforcement first, everything documented and time-stamped, so there’s a record that exists outside the school’s control. Then the school can’t manage the story. They just have to respond to what’s already been reported.”
Soo Yi listened to the two of them work through it with a strange, detached clarity, like she was watching the plan get built for someone else’s life. It was Priya who finally got her moving — pulling a hoodie over her head, tucking her laptop and phone into a bag, walking her down to Brad’s car with a hand steady between her shoulder blades the whole way, murmuring nothing in words she could later remember, just a low, constant stream of I’m here, you’re okay, I’m right here that gave Soo Yi something to hold onto besides the panic still climbing her throat.
It was nearly ten by the time they sat in a small, fluorescent-lit room at the campus police substation. The officer taking Soo Yi’s statement was careful and businesslike, no judgment anywhere in his voice — federal law was unambiguous on this, he told her, an image like this, AI-generated or not, of an identifiable person, without consent, was a crime, full stop. She answered his questions in a voice that didn’t sound entirely like her own, Brad’s hand resting against her back the whole time, steady, not going anywhere.
Brad’s father stayed on speakerphone through most of it, walking the department’s cybercrimes liaison through what to request once they had a warrant: device metadata, the account’s upload history, IP logs tied to the university’s network during the relevant window. It didn’t take long. Two days later, the trail led back cleanly to a phone belonging to one of the four girls from the library incident — the same one who’d once had her fingers hooked hard enough around Soo Yi’s wrist to leave a mark. The timestamps placed the image’s creation inside a two-hour block during a study session where she’d had unsupervised access to a friend’s tablet, the metadata undisturbed and unarguable.
The university’s Title IX office received the police report the next morning, forwarded directly by the department, which meant there was no version of events where the school got ahead of the story or handled it quietly behind closed doors. Within forty-eight hours, all four girls were placed under interim suspension, pending a formal hearing.
Telling her parents was its own separate ordeal, one Soo Yi had dreaded almost as much as the image itself. She drove home that weekend rehearsing it the whole way, certain her mother would somehow find a way to make it about the androgyny after all — that this, finally, would be the thing that made Ji-an say I told you so about the haircut, the flat chest, all of it. Instead Ji-an went very quiet at the kitchen table, staring at nothing for a long moment, and then reached across and gripped Soo Yi’s hand hard enough to hurt.
“Who did this,” she said. Not a question. A demand.
“They’ve already been identified. Brad’s father is helping the police build the case.”
Jung Woo hadn’t said much of anything through the explanation, sitting very still with the same stillness Soo Yi recognized from every serious conversation of her childhood, the one that meant he was working something out privately before he let himself speak. When he finally did, his voice was rougher than usual. “I have spent your whole life worrying someone would hurt you for the wrong reasons,” he said. “I never imagined it would look like this. I never imagined it would be legal to fight back against.”
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