avocado toast & other stories

ii.

"I think I failed."

Carmen pauses. "Be more specific."

Kai pouts. "In my failure?"

His classmate nods with a muted grin. "Yeah," the sophomore says, hooking the puffy, beat-up headphones around his neck. "Yeah, in your failure. There's literally nothing bad about your song, Kai."

But Carmen is so, so wrong. Carmen's so wrong that it makes Kai's head hurt as the music bleeds out of the miniature speakers—the track is slightly off-beat, the bass is completely missing, and the bridge kind of drops off to awkward silence as the vocals end. It's no surprise he's upset.

He's kind of been upset all week, if he's being honest. Procrastinating until the deadline (literally) hasn't been good for himself, and he's practically been running on old coffee and expired energy drinks. Simply put, he's been skipping breakfast, and Kai without breakfast is essentially the world without sunlight: a disaster.

And no breakfast means no avocado toast, which also means no Genesis.

(Not that he's been thinking about her. No way in hell.)

But this self-produced song is due to his professor in six hours, and so Kai gathers himself together and dries his panicked tears to fix the screwed-up background instrumentals and weird lyrics while his partner works on the melody. Him and Carmen have been inseparable since freshman year (she's, like, the only friend he actually has), and Kai appreciates the fact that both of them can function at four o'clock in the morning with cheap ramen and questionable california rolls splayed out on the table.

"Okay," he sighs out, stretching his arms above his head before his fingertips massage his aching temples. When growing up, Kai was always teased about his slim frame: he made an effort to hit the gym in high school and even the summer before college, but lifting heavy weights just wasn't for him. So when Kai finally discovered that running while listening to his music makes him not want to curl into a ball, he didn't really care about his lean build anymore. Sure, he's still a bit lanky and lingering on the awkward definitions of average and tall, but he's learning not to compare himself with the cursed poster of Chris Evans on pinned billboards. "We're done, right? Please tell me we're done—I feel like collapsing, Carmen."

His partner laughs. "I've been telling you that the track is perfect, but you kept on insisting we polish it!"

Kai pouts again, whispering, "Because it was terrible," he admits. "But now it's not anymore, so now we can crash for sixteen hours and not give a shit about it anymore."

So they do, and when Kai wakes up in the morning and stumbles around in his old apartment, he passes by the purple sticky note still stuck on his fridge.

It's taunting him.

***

The second time Kai Jeon runs into Genesis Whose Last Name is Still Unknown, it's at the local convenience store around eight o'clock in the morning. Sunday is grocery day, and he managed to roll out of bed in his watermelon-printed socks before driving to buy kimbap and paper towels.

Chicago reinvents itself as The Windy City, and he's nearly blown off of his own two legs as he grabs a cart and takes in the busy, hurried life: flickering traffic lights, smells of small ethnic food stops, and modern, golden jazz music. It's an enigma and a transparent box all at once, but Kai is too busy to notice as his gait falters mid-step and his eyes focus on a set of hazel eyes.

Wait, go back, oh my God please don't look over here no no don't—

It's too late. Genesis tilts her head as recognition washes over her delicate countenance, and Kai literally wants to shrink himself and hide in his pocket; hands form sweater paws (again) within the thick fabric of his sweater, and of course he chose the day where he has his Harry Potter glasses on, because why the hell else would the universe demand any differently?