Chapter 1

The letter came on a Tuesday, which Soo Yee would always remember because Tuesday was the day her mother made doenjang jjigae and the whole apartment smelled like fermented soybean paste and home, and it seemed wrong that something that bad could arrive on a day that smelled that good.

Ji Yeon didn’t cry. That was the first thing Soo Yee noticed. Her sister stood at the kitchen counter holding the paper — actual paper, which meant it was a thin envelope, which meant before Ji Yeon even opened it the answer was already no — and read it twice with her face completely still. Then she folded it carefully along its original crease and set it on the counter next to the mail pile.

“Jjigae smells good,” Ji Yeon said, and walked to her room.

Their mother looked at the folded letter. Looked at the closed door. Stirred the pot.

Soo Yee picked up the letter and read it.

It was the fourth one this month. Different school, same language. Regret. Competitive. Holistic. We wish you well in your future endeavors.

Ji Yeon had a 4.0 unweighted. She had taken seven AP courses and scored five on six of them. She had founded the school’s first Korean cultural exchange club, volunteered two hundred hours at a literacy nonprofit, and taught herself Mandarin because she said knowing only one Asian language felt like showing up to a conversation with half a vocabulary. Her SAT score put her in the ninety-eighth percentile nationally.

Soo Yee was eleven years old and she understood, in the concrete way she understood most things, that her sister was exceptional. Not in the way parents said it. Measurably. Objectively. In ways that could be ranked and compared and verified.