Rules for a Ghost

"Describe him again," Gemma says. "Slowly. Like I'm a police sketch artist and I'm also in love."

You're at the window counter of a kimbap place on Jahamun-ro, eating lunch you can't afford, and your best friend in Seoul is leaning so far toward you that her red hair is in your soup.

"Tall. Black hair. Wet. Polite." You think about it. "Very good face."

"Very good face," Gemma repeats flatly. "Ava. Babe. I need more than very good face. This city is ninety percent very good faces."

"Not like this one." You don't mean to say it. It just comes out. "It was like someone designed him for a poster."

Gemma goes still.

She's twenty-eight, from Ohio, teaches English to bored businessmen in Gangnam, and you've known her since your second week here, when she found you crying in a convenience store over a carton of banana milk because it was your grandmother's favorite. She has never once been still.

"Poster," she says. "Was his voice kind of low? And soft? Like he's telling you a secret even when he's ordering coffee?"

"...Maybe."

She takes out her phone, types something, and turns it around.

It's a billboard. Not a small one. It covers the entire side of a building, maybe twenty stories tall, a face in black and white looking down over a crowded intersection. Sharp jaw. Soft mouth. Ridiculous eyes.

Your stomach drops through the floor.

"That's," you say.

"That's JUN," Gemma says. "Of VANTAGE. Seven members, four world tours, the most-streamed group on the planet. That billboard is in Times Square, Ava. He has a perfume. He has a sandwich. My students write essays about him. You hid JUN behind the poetry."

"He said his name was nobody."

"He didn't say anything, because you didn't recognize him, and you are the only woman in Asia who would not." She grabs your wrist. "Did he leave anything? A hair? A breath? I would frame a breath."

You think about the phone, still in the drawer under your register, buzzing every twenty minutes all morning until the battery died.

"No," you lie. "Nothing."

He comes back at 9:50 that night.

Not through the front. You're sweeping by the storage room when you hear a soft knock on the back door, three taps, then two. You open it to the alley and he's there, in a gray hoodie this time, cap and mask, rain-free and sheepish.

Behind him, at the mouth of the alley, a black van idles with its lights off. A man in the driver's seat is drinking from a can and glaring at you through the windshield like you personally invented weather.

"That's Kyung-min hyung," Jun says. "He's my manager. He says hello."

The man in the van does not look like he is saying hello.

"He says you need to hurry up," you translate.

"That's how he says hello." Jun's eyes crinkle above the mask. "Can I come in? Just for a minute."

You step back. He comes in. You lock the door behind him and hand him the phone from your apron pocket, and he takes it with both hands, bowing slightly, which is somehow worse than if he'd just grabbed it.

"I answered it," you confess. "Last night. Your manager told me not to tell anyone."

"Did you?"

"Only my best friend, and only by accident, and she thinks I'm lying."

He laughs, muffled behind the mask. Then he tugs it down, and you were not ready. You thought maybe last night was the rain, the lighting, adrenaline. It wasn't. Under the warm yellow lamps of the shop he's even worse. Better. Whatever.

"So you know now," he says. He's watching your face carefully, the way he did last night. Like he's waiting for something to change in it.

"I know you have a sandwich."

He stares at you.

"Gemma showed me," you say. "There's a JUN sandwich at a convenience store. It has egg in it."

"It's a very good sandwich," he says seriously, and then his whole face breaks open and he's laughing, hand over his mouth again, shoulders shaking. "Jinjja. Nobody has ever led with the sandwich."

"What do they usually lead with?"

"Screaming." He says it lightly. It doesn't land lightly. "Or crying. Or they ask for a photo. Or they go very quiet and polite and start talking to JUN instead of me."

"Is there a difference?"

He looks at you a long moment. "Yes," he says. "There's a difference."

He doesn't leave after a minute.

He wanders the shelves instead, touching spines. You let him, because there's nobody else here, and because you're curious. He picks up books and puts them back exactly where they were. He stops at the low reading table by the radiator and runs his hand along the edge where the wood is worn smooth.

"Can I ask you something weird?" he says.

"You hid behind my radiator. We're past weird."

"Can I come back?" He doesn't look at you while he says it. He's looking at the table. "Not every night. Just sometimes. To read. I won't bother you. I just..." He stops. Starts again. "Everywhere I go, someone is looking. Cameras, staff, fans, other idols. Even at the dorm, the members are looking, because they worry. Last night was the first time in maybe eight years I sat somewhere and nobody looked at me."

"I looked at you."

"You looked at me like I was a guy who might be a cult leader." He finally glances up, and he's smiling a little. "It was the nicest thing."

You should say no. You know you should say no. You have a shop that's failing and a lease you're not sure you can renew and a grief that still sits on your chest some mornings like a cat that won't move. You don't need a famous man hiding behind your radiator.

But your grandmother let anyone read here. Students. Grandpas. Kids whose parents worked late. She used to say a bookshop that turns people away is just a warehouse.

"Rules," you say.

He straightens up like a soldier. "Yes."

"One. You buy one book every time you come. Actual money, actual price. I'm not running a charity for millionaires."

"Fair."

"Two. No cameras. No photos, no selfies, no posting anything. If your fans find this place, I'm done. I can't afford new windows."

"Agreed. I hate cameras."

"You're literally on a building in Times Square."

"I hate it there too." He holds up a finger. "Three?"

"Three. Back door only. You come in through the alley and you leave through the alley. You don't exist out front."

"I don't exist out front," he repeats softly. "That's the best rule anyone's ever given me."

You hold out your hand, like an idiot, like this is a business deal. He looks at it. Then he takes it, and his hand is warm and a little rough at the fingertips, and he shakes it once, firm.

"Deal, Ava," he says.

He buys a book. A paperback collection of short stories, ten thousand won, exact change this time, counted out in coins from his hoodie pocket with total concentration. You stamp the inside cover with your grandmother's little paper-lantern stamp, the way she did for every book she ever sold.

He goes very still when he sees it.

"She did that," he says. "The lantern."

"My grandmother. How did you—"

But the van outside honks once, short and sharp, and he flinches. "That's hyung's last warning. He's going to kill me." He's already pulling his mask up, heading for the storage room. "Same time next week? Or sooner? Sooner. Is sooner allowed?"

"The rules don't say."

"Then sooner." He grins at you over the mask, and you feel it all the way to your toes.

You walk him to the back door. He steps out into the dark alley, turns back to say something.

A white flash lights up the alley like lightning.

Then another.

Somebody, somewhere in the dark between the bins and the wall of the tea house, is taking pictures.