Got it, cutting that. Here’s the continuation:

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The morning moved the way mornings did when nothing was wrong.

She ate. Her brother put his backpack down wrong and knocked over the salt and her mother made the sound she made and her father caught it without looking up from his phone. The television said something about traffic. The window let in the smell of the street.

She watched her family and felt the dream sitting in her chest like a stone she kept trying not to touch.

"You’re quiet," her brother said, not looking at her.

"I’m always quiet."

"You’re quieter."

She passed him the hot sauce he hadn’t asked for yet. He took it without commenting.

Her mother sat down and folded her hands around her cup the way she did when she was going to say something she’d been thinking about since earlier. Yuna had learned to recognize the shape of it years ago — the slight pause, the particular angle of her shoulders, the way she looked at the table before she looked at whoever she was talking to.

"Your teacher called," her mother said.

Yuna looked up.

"Mrs. Cho." Her mother looked at her now, steady and unreadable in the way she could be when she was deciding how to feel about something. "She said you’ve been distracted."

"I’ve been fine." 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"She said distracted. Her word."

Her father had put his phone down. Not the mealtime way, the other way, the way he did when the conversation was something he was going to be part of.

"Practice has been long," Yuna said. "I’m tired."

"She said it started before the tournament season."

Yuna looked at her bowl. The rice was good. It was always good. She focused on that for a second, the specific good of her mother’s cooking, the way she could have identified it blind.

"I’m fine," she said again.

Her mother looked at her for a moment longer in the particular way that meant *I hear you and I’m filing this away* and then picked up her cup and the conversation shifted, not closed, just set aside in the careful way her mother had of not pushing until she decided it was time to push.

Her father picked his phone back up.

Her brother was looking at her sidelong with more perception than it had any right to be.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," he said, and went back to eating.

---

The school day moved the way school days did when she was not entirely inside them.

She sat in her classes and took her notes and gave the right answers when she was called on and did all the things a person did when they were performing normalcy without quite achieving it. The dream kept surfacing in pieces. Not images exactly — more like an afterthought, a residue, the particular quality of the orange light pressing at the edges of whatever she was supposed to be paying attention to.

She was good at school the way she was good at practice. Not effortfully, just constitutionally, the way some people were. It had always made her slightly suspicious of herself, this ease, as though something she hadn’t paid for yet was accumulating interest somewhere she couldn’t see.

Minjung found her at lunch by the window in the third floor hallway where she went when she wanted to eat without the noise of the cafeteria.

"You look terrible," Minjung said, sitting down beside her without asking.

"My brother said the same thing yesterday."

"Smart kid." Minjung opened her lunch and looked at it with the mild disappointment she brought to most of her meals. "Bad sleep?"

"Dream."

Minjung looked at her. They had been friends since the second year of middle school, long enough that Minjung had learned which questions to ask and which to leave alone and had strong opinions about both. "The fire one?"

Yuna looked at her. "I didn’t tell you about a fire one."

"You told me there was one you kept having. Last winter." Minjung shrugged. "You didn’t say what it was but you made a face when you said it and it was the same face you’re making now."

Yuna looked out the window. The city was ordinary in the midday light, grey and familiar, nothing wrong with any of it.

"It was different this time," she said.

"Different how?"

She thought about how to say it. The gym. The empty hallway. The orange sky over everything. The thing she’d felt in the building before the glass broke, that pressure, that specific weight of something knowing you were there.

"More real," she said finally. "It felt more like remembering than dreaming."

Minjung was quiet for a moment, eating. She was good at silence in a different way than Yuna’s father was — not the comfortable settled silence of someone who had made peace with quiet, but the active silence of someone who was actually thinking before they spoke, which Yuna had always respected.

"Do you remember the thing my grandmother used to say," Minjung said. "About dreams."

"She said a lot of things about dreams."

"The one about the ones that stay."

Yuna did remember. She’d heard it once, in Minjung’s grandmother’s apartment with the smell of incense and the particular quality of afternoon light through old curtains, the old woman speaking in a voice that made everything sound like it had already happened. *The dreams that don’t leave you are the ones asking to be looked at.*

"Your grandmother also said my left eyebrow meant I would have three husbands," Yuna said.

"She wasn’t wrong about everything."

Yuna almost laughed. It wasn’t quite a laugh but it was close, which was something.

They ate in silence for a while. Below the window the school courtyard was full of the lunch hour noise of a few hundred people living simultaneously, ordinary and indifferent.

"I felt something," Yuna said. "In the dream. Before I woke up." She paused. "I’ve felt it before. Not just in dreams."

Minjung looked at her carefully, in the way she did when she was deciding whether to treat something as significant. "Felt what."

"I don’t know how to describe it. Like — pressure. At the edge of something. Like being watched but not by a person."

The hallway was quiet around them. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed.

"You’re not going to tell me I sound crazy," Yuna said.

"You don’t sound crazy," Minjung said simply. "You sound like someone who felt something they don’t have a word for yet." She picked up her chopsticks. "That’s different."

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