Chapter 1

Snow was picking up, piling on my coat as I stood in the same spot, motionless, not really thinking, not really feeling. My best friend was gone, and I was alone in a foreign country.

We’d planned this short detour for months—or I had. Zoe was just excited to go sightseeing with me and coerce me into joining her Koreaboo cult. I’d deliberately packed light on warm clothes. Where we were headed next, we wouldn’t need sweaters or jackets. We were supposed to spend the next year in a tropical paradise.

That decision came back to haunt me when late November arrived and the cold literally bit me in the ass. The locals didn’t seem fazed—half of them still wandered around in sneakers and miniskirts. I used to joke it was because their blood ran on kimchi. Zoe had found that offensive. Her grandmother on her dad’s side was Korean, or something like that. You couldn’t really tell she was mixed, but she’d taken this trip seriously—more seriously than our final term paper in college—studying the language and culture for months.