Nobody Like You

Yeju Roasting On Mom's Fire

Yeju

I can't sleep.

For the past hour, I tossed and turned on my bed. My mind is refusing to rest despite my exhaustion from writing all day.

I miss Lia. I miss her way too much, and my blanket does not do a good job of mimicking her body heat. The snowstorm outside is not helping too.

Letting out an annoyed huff, I roll over on the bed again. The magic wand on my bedside table stares back at me. I've already used it twice, and I doubt a third time will calm the chaos in my brain.

Argh, I give up.

I hop out of the bed. The night is cold and gloomy, but the snow outside is white and bright. It illuminates my room as I slip into my house slippers and head downstairs.

It turns out I am not the only one awake. Mom is sitting at the kitchen counter and using her laptop, a glass of red wine by her side.

She smiles when she notices me. "Oh, Ju-Zi, you're still up?"

"Yep, can't sleep." I slide next to her as she closes her laptop. "You still working at this hour?"

"Yeah, last-minute client stuff." Mom grabs another glass and pours me a cup of wine as well. "Don't be a lawyer, Ju-Zi."

"I'm not. I'm doing a Ph.D. in the STEM field to specifically avoid whatever you do."

Mom pushes the glass toward me. "Don't speak too soon. Lots of patent law offices need people like you too. The stuff they do is pretty cool, and you need an expertise in both science and law to do well."

"You know, I can't tell if you want me to go into law or not."

She chuckles. "So anyway, how's your thesis writing progress?"

I take a sip of the wine. Lawyer-money wine tastes so much better than graduate-student-budget wine. "It's going. I wrote part of a chapter, and there's already thirty references."

"That's great! That's fantastic progress, Ju-Zi."

"It's terribly written though."

"That's what editing is for. Future you can fix it." Mom leans forward and fixes her glazed eyes on me. "So," she begins, tapping her fingers against her wineglass, "what really happened, Ju-Zi?"

I avert my head from Mom and stare into the deep red of my wine. After my fight with Lia, I escaped into my room and called the first person I could think of—Mom. I didn't say much, only telling her vaguely about a fight with my roommate, but she didn't need to hear much. She could tell from my voice how close I was to breaking apart and immediately made plans to get me home.

But how do I even begin to explain what happened?

"I don't know. It's... nothing much."

"It's not nothing much," Mom chides. "Don't lie to your mother."

I sigh. My fingers close around the stem of the glass. "Remember the, uh, new apartment mate after Yuna moved out?"

She raises her brows. "Yeah..." she says, deliberately dragging the word out.

"Well, you're... right. Lia and I, uh, we did... we do have a... thing."

Mom punches the air to celebrate while I roll my eyes. Ever since telling Mom about Lia, she has been not-so-subtly prodding me about Lia. I don't know what signals she picked up on over the phone, but she was adamant that something was going on between us even before we got together.

Well, she's always been accurate about these things. Frighteningly so. I didn't even have to come out to her—she yanked me out of the closet by introducing me to her colleague's daughter when I was trying to find a date for prom.