Queen Disease

They came to class in bandages They bandages. Girls came to class in bandages. It started six days in. One of the girls was missing, but we still expected her. I stood at the podium in my high heels, pretending to be tall and not thinking of my dead mother.

"Just another minute," I lied, even as I realized I should start teaching these people something, anything. Fourteen upturned faces waited patiently. Where was the girl? I wanted so much for her to make it; I understood there might be hell to pay otherwise. "Let's do a writing exercise," I said. "We'll practice complex sentences. In one sentence, as long as you can make it, tell me what you have to do to get from the subway to this classroom. Go."

So let those subway doors bang open. Give her the time to dash up the subterranean stairs, to rush past the panhandlers and suited salarymen into the pandemonium of the street, through the sliding doors of the Academy, time to fly up the elevator into the gleaming hall and at last to us, running on that desperado glee. It was seven minutes past the hour, and already I was breaking the rules. Minjin and the directors had told me from the start: no latecomers, no exceptions, and lock that door on the hour to make sure of it. But it was 7:07 in the morning. On a Friday. In the summer. Sixteen years old, these kids. I was Lillian Yunyi Li, and I had never felt more American.

They scribbled diligently. I gulped down one bottle of green tea and opened another. It was freeing to be from here, really; it lent me the leeway to hate the place. Six days in Seoul, city of my birth, and already I was discovering jingoism. National anthems thrummed at my throat and, exhilaratingly, I wanted to sing. I could even, if I tried, forgive the president. Was this jingoism, or patriotism? Oh, America. I realized: I hadn't appreciated—anything.

The door burst open, like a bandstand cheer. Here came a blur of a girl who bowed fast, then hurried to her seat. In triumph, I was turning to lock the door when I glimpsed her bandages.

I gasped; I sprinted to her. White bandages bulged in the center of her face. Everywhere else there was color: splotches of blues and apple greens, each flashy bruise backlit in yellow. She had pulled a baseball cap low, but its rim hid none of the damage. If someone had hurt her—

I knelt before her. "Jiyoung, who did this, what happ—"

Her face stopped me. She flushed, and tears filled her eyes. Was I embarrassing her?

"Do you want to step outside with me?" I tried. But she shook her head. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Someone muttered. Laughs, scattershot. I stood up before I spun to the rest of them. "Is something funny?"

They gazed back at me, their fifteen faces now closed. At last a hand went up.

"Benjamin!" I said gratefully. Lip-licking, ambitious, his hair pointing electrically in every direction, Benjamin was my class ambassador. All these kids attended American boarding schools, but he was the old hand and proud of his primacy, shipped overseas every fall since the fifth grade.

He began delicately: nothing was funny, he explained, and nothing was wrong. For Jiyoung, in fact, what was wrong had been repaired for the better.

"Better?"

He bit his lip, tipped his head to the side.

Why Seoul? my mother had asked, baffled. You won't like it, and you won't understand it. But Benjamin was trying again, this time abandoning delicacy. Surgery, he said. Jiyoung got plastic surgery. On her nose, it looke Surgery, he said. Jiyoung got plastic surgery. On her nose, it looked like.

"Is Benjamin right?" I asked Jiyoung.

She nodded enthusiastically.

"Is there a reason why you're not talking?"

"My libs hurd ib I moob em," she mumbled.

"I see," I said.

"Teacher, it's cool," said Benjamin. "Plastic surgery's more popular in Korea...