Page 22 of Teach Me K-Pop

“You always make marriage sound so appealing,” I comment as I go around trying to make sure there’s an equidistant amount of space between both the rows and the actual chairs. No one needs to be crammed in here like the economy section of a cheap airline.

Tyler snorts, like what I’ve said is hilarious. “I know you guys can get married now and all, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

I might choke on my own spit a little bit at the “you guys,” as though the LGBTQ+ community is a beer league or something casual—not a group of people who have fought long and hard for the right to do exactly what he’s complaining about. “Tyler…”

“Shit. Sorry. I just realized how that sounded. My bad.” He holds up his hands in apology. “You know I don’t mean it.”

For the most part, I do know. He’s come a long way since we’ve known each other, and as dumb as he might be sometimes, I have to give him a shred of credit for trying more often than not. It’s more than I can say for some of the other faculty—and several members of my extended family.

As I’m trying to figure out what else I can say to encourage and correct him, I see Tyler squinting at the screen and taking notice of the RYSING playlist I’ve had on all week in a desperate attempt to engage anyone in a conversation about the group or even k-pop in general. The closest I came was when one of my library workers, Quinn, mentioned her cousin was super into a different idol group, but they weren’t her taste, and also, would I like to see her new playlist called, “is this spaghetti al dente”?

“This is that ’best wishes’song, isn’t it?” he asks, his head nodding along to the beat he seems to have now picked up on.

“Uh, yeah,” I reply, more than a little surprised. “You know k-pop?”

“Just thatrisergroup or whatever the name is. Jessi and her sister are into them. I had to film them doing a dance challenge to this song about a hundred times until they got it right because Desiree wanted to post it on social media,” he says with a shrug. “They’re okay. Some of the rap is actually really good.”

I don’t even know how to process this information. Part of me wants to know more, and I nearly ask who Jessi and Desiree’s biases are, but one of the principals walks in asking for a favor and my moment is lost.

???

“Oh, you’re going to Florida again?” I ask as I toss Noel’s barely recognizable sea turtle across the living room floor. She takes off after it, and I’m pretty sure she’s the cutest thing in the world.

“Well, you know how your dad loves to golf with his buddies,” my mom says, sounding both fond and exasperated.

Noel comes careening back toward me, narrowly avoiding crashing snoot-first into my thigh. Her grip on the toy is not unlike some kind of vicious predator on a wildlife special, dragging their next meal through the plains. I try to wrestle it away from her, causing her to growl in a way I’m sure she imagines is very ferocious.

“I do indeed know he is extremely enthusiastic about hitting little white balls around in one-million-degree heat while he and his cronies complain about the weather,” I tell her. He’d tried to get me to play for years, but I just couldn’t get into it, and he never lets me forget how much this disappoints him. All things considered, if that’s the most I’ve ever let him down, we should probably both be pretty satisfied.

“Oh my, Noel. So fierce!” She laughs lightly at the sound of her grand-dog-ter trying to tear the head off of this poor stuffed turtle. “What about you, honey? What are you doing these days?”

I have to catch the sigh that starts to escape before it alerts her Mom Radar and she starts asking questions I don’t want to answer. Probablycouldn’tanswer, even if I did actually want to talk about it. I love my parents, and I enjoy talking to them every once in a while, but we are not what I’d callclose. The two-ish hours of distance between us is fine. We see each other on holidays and some birthdays. We check in every few weeks. They send postcards when they travel, and I give them the most basic overviews of what’s going on in my life. It works for us.

“About the same as always,” I reply, an automatic response that feels less like a lie than it probably should. “School is good; my tutoring students are doing well. I can’t really complain.”

“That’s what I like to hear!” she chirps, then there’s a muffled sound behind her that I assume is my father trying to pull her away from whatever she’s doing while we’ve been on the phone. Probably some kind of needlepoint that she saw on the internet and thought wasdarling. “I’ve got to go, sweetie. We’ll talk soon. Love you!”

“Bye, mom.” I end the call and chuck Noel’s toy again after she paws impatiently at my leg to make me hurry up.

I wonder if I should feel bad about all the things I don’t say to my mom—all the stuff I don’t share. My parents have always been quietly accepting of me—never making a fuss when I came out or brought a boy home for the first time—but they don’t ask, and I don’t tell. I guess we’re just not those kinds of people. In the past, it might have bothered me more, when my friends were complaining about how invasive their own families had been over holidays, inquiring about their love lives. But now, I’m honestly glad for the lack of questions.

I can’t imagine trying to explain my current situation to her. Like,Hey mom, there’s this guy that I think I could really be into. He’s sweet, and smart, and funny, and his eyes remind me of the night sky out at grandpa’s farm where it was so dark and clear and the stars were so bright, but he lives on the other side of the world. Yeah, we met because I was his English tutor. Oh, and he’s in one of the biggest k-pop groups on the planet. But if things were different… I think I’d want to try. To see if we could be together. I think we could really have something.

?? ??

“Mr. Kitson!”

The speed with which my head snaps up at the sound of Alita’s voice should probably be embarrassing. But I am shameless now, eager to talk to them because I know it won’t be hard to steer the conversation to exactly what I’ve been waiting for a chance to discuss. “Hey, Alita. Savannah, Harper, hello.”

“We have a substitute this hour and she’s, like, a thousand years old and wasn’t going to let us use our phones in class, so we told her we had a project to work on in the library,” Savannah explains as she signs in at the desk.

Harper smiles at me, entirely too sweet for the words that follow. “It’s you. You’re the project.”

Alita and Savannah laugh so hard I end up chuckling, too. “Wow. Thanks. You make me sound like a fixer-upper.”

“I mean…” Harper shrugs.

“That’s rough. I should make you go back and deal with the ancient sub,” I joke.

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