Second Overtime | JENSOO & CHAELISA

Chapter LXIV

Recovery did not arrive all at once, the way Jisoo had once imagined it would.

Instead, it came in small, stubborn pieces, each one hard-won and easily overlooked by anyone who wasn't paying attention.

She learned to bend her knee without gripping the edge of the treatment table, her knuckles white and her jaw clenched against the instinctive fear that the joint would give way. Then she learned to stand without favoring her left side, distributing her weight evenly across both feet while her physical therapist counted out the seconds. 

She walked between parallel bars with someone's hands hovering at her waist, ready to catch her if she fell. She walked down hospital corridors with a cane and around her grandmother's apartment with nothing but the slim black brace beneath her trousers.

And then, on a Tuesday morning in late February, with the winter light pale and watery through the windows, she walked across the school courtyard with nothing at all.

The first time she jogged, she managed twelve seconds before fear shortened her stride into something choppy and uneven. Her heart pounded not from exertion but from the memory of her knee buckling in that dining room, the candlestick coming down, the sound of her own body hitting the floor. 

She stopped and pressed her hands against her thighs and breathed through the panic until it passed. The second time, she reached the end of the rehabilitation room. By spring, when the cherry blossoms were beginning to bloom along the riverbank, she could run. Not the way she used to run, not yet, but run nonetheless. Her legs remembered what her mind had tried to forget.

There were bad days. 

Her knee swelled after training sessions, the skin growing hot and tight beneath her palm, and she learned to ice it without being told. Bright classroom lights sometimes drove a sharp, needling ache behind the scar at her temple, the one her hair mostly covered now. 

She occasionally reached for a word and found an empty space where it should have been, her mind grasping at nothing, and the old terror would rise up in her throat like bile. What if it's permanent? What if I'm broken forever? What if—

The difference was that she stopped lying about it.

When something hurt, she told her physical therapist. Not the next day, not after she'd already made it worse, right then, in the moment, while the pain was still fresh. 

When she became dizzy or the lights grew too bright, she sat down. She didn't push through it. She didn't pretend she was fine. She sat down and closed her eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning. 

When Coach Minzy asked how her knee felt, Jisoo no longer replied fine before checking. She flexed the joint and paid attention to what her body was telling her. Then she answered honestly, even when the honest answer was tired or sore or I'm not sure I can finish practice today.

The first time she admitted she couldn't finish, she expected disappointment. Instead, Coach Minzy nodded and said, "Then you're done for today. Ice it. We'll try again tomorrow." And Jisoo understood, maybe for the first time, that strength was not the same as suffering. That taking care of herself was not the same as giving up.

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Jennie underwent a different kind of rehabilitation, in a different kind of room, with a different kind of pain.

Her therapist's office was on the sixth floor of a building overlooking a narrow street lined with bare winter trees. It smelled of citrus tea and the lavender hand cream Doctor Bang kept beside the tissue box, the same tissue box Jennie had refused to touch during her first session, had moved farther away during her fourth, and had finally, tentatively, used during her twelfth.