A PLAN FOR LOVE ✓

thirty six : beomgyu

My shoes are completely frozen to the marble floor under me as I take in the guy standing in front of me.

“Oh my God, Taehyun. You look…” I smile, meeting his bright eyes. “Handsome.”

He lets out a giggle that echoes through the foyer.

“Back at you. The outfit looks so good. We made the right choice,” he tells me. I look down at this red clothes.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Shall we?” he asks, offering me his arm, a thin gold bracelet dangling from his wrist.

I blush and wrap my hand around his upper arm, letting him lead me into the gallery.

Whatever step five was in the plan, I think it’s safe to say we’re well past it.

We walk up to one of the many bars floating around the gigantic room.

“Hey, could I get two glasses of chardonnay?” Taehyun asks, surprising me, but unfortunately, he can’t quite manage to pull it off like… well, like some other people can. The bartender, dressed in a white shirt and a black bow tie, sees right through it. He pours two ginger ales into champagne flutes without a word and slides them across the bar to us.

“It was worth a shot,” I whisper.

As we begin to walk around the show together, I spend most of the time looking at all the students dressed up in their fancy clothes, wondering if they’re actually having a good time. I’m not sure how anyone could like all of this. I’ve never been much of an art connoisseur, but the idea of looking at the art right in front of the artist makes me real nervous.

“Oh, hey. This girl’s in my lit class,” Taehyun says, tugging me into an exhibit.

I follow him into an area with paintings hanging on makeshift walls in the middle of the room. Each painting looks a lot like the one before it, amorphous blobs of various sizes and skin colors on canvases ten feet tall.

“Lia?” Taehyun asks, approaching a girl a couple of inches shorter than me, dressed in a velvet blazer and oxford shoes. She lifts her chin, squinting at Taehyun for a second before recognition floods her face.

“Taehyun.” She smiles approvingly, obviously as entranced by Taehyun as everyone else. “Hey. It’s great to see you.”

“You too.” Taehyun peeks back at me. “This is Beomgyu,” he introduces me, and I reach out to shake Lia’s hand. “I didn’t know you’d be here. This is your exhibit?”

“Yes, it’s called Race Place. I’ve been working on it for almost two years now,” Lia says, proudly looking up at her masterpieces, her eyes shining against her milky-white skin.

“Tell me what it’s all about,” Taehyun says. Lka starts telling us about how each piece represents the erasure of race in Asian culture and the journey she’s been on while trying to figure out how to translate what she’s learned into this particular medium.

I try to listen at first, but it all sounds so rehearsed, so dry, that I just can’t rein my attention span in for long enough. Maybe I should’ve just asked Taehyun to go roller-skating after all. It would’ve been ten times the fun. Crappy chicken tenders, root beer, and maybe even a little limbo.

“It was nice to meet you, Beomgyu,” Lia says, snapping me out of my thoughts. She moves on to speak to another student who has wandered into her exhibit. I look back up at the largest painting with Taehyun next to me. I’m trying to understand how each painting represents something different when all ten of them look exactly the same.

Also, I think I could’ve painted them myself, but I’m pretty sure that’s a crappy thing to say at an art showing.

A funny thought hits me as I look up at the oversize painting, the brown, black, and tan shapes all pressed together. And once it hits, I just cannot unsee it.