Well-Rounded
SUNDAY
“I imagine,” Jessica said, “this is all probably surprising to you.”
“What’re you talking about?” SeungJae said from his bed. He lay on top of his sheets, fully clothed for once in deference to his sister. The moment she left, he was going to rip off these jeans that didn’t fit and the tank top that strained with every move he made. “I’ve been training for this my whole life.”
“No,” Jessica said. “No, you haven’t, Kevin.”
He blinked.
He blinked again.
And then, in a higher voice that no one had heard in six days, he said, “...What’s going on, Jessica?”
He looked down at his body in disbelief. He was wearing a ribbed grey tank top whose shoulder straps were working overtime to contain delts and traps that he hadn’t had when the week started. Because he’d tucked it into his jeans, it was stretched taut enough to look like it had been painted over the striated ten-pack of his stomach muscles. His biceps, big as watermelons and strong enough to crush one, looked as if they belonged to a completely different person, and yet they had somehow been grafted onto Kevin’s body.
Kevin. Yes. Kevin Kim, that was his name. Not SeungJae, not Kev. Kevin.
“I asked for a chance to tell you,” Jessica said. “I wanted to see you one last time before I went back to camp. And I wanted to apologize.”
“Apologize?” Kevin said, his voice rising. He sat up, and Jessica involuntarily flinched as the full bulk of his mass turned to bear on her. “What did you do? What did you do to me?”
She swallowed, then collected herself. “Do you know how hard it is to shine when you have a big brother like you?” she said eventually. “How every A stops mattering to mom and dad, because oppa already brought home an A+?”
“Jessica,” he said, shaking his head, “you already do well in school—”
“Are you listening?” she snapped suddenly. “‘Well’ was never good enough! I. Have to be. The best.”
He fell silent as he absorbed this. Jessica had mostly distinguished herself as a musician. The piano lessons he had shunned as a kid, she had flourished in. At Korean parties, her parents loved to brag and brag about the difficult concertos and sonatas their brilliant musician daughter had mastered at the age of eight. It had never occurred to her that his straight A’s had been the object of her envy.
He wanted to be angry. He wanted to rage, to destroy his room, to scare the shit out of her with the monstrous body she’d inflicted on him. But for some reason, his brain just couldn’t quite get there. All he could manage was a muted, “What did you do to me?”
“You had everything I wanted,” Jessica said, “and you were fucking miserable. You never hung out with people. You never did anything. You didn’t love anything, Kevin. You had everything I wanted, and you were telling yourself that it was making you miserable. So I didn’t feel bad about taking it from you.” Those words rang false, but she plowed on anyway. “I bargained with that gym. Got them to call mom and dad, put the idea in their head that you needed to be well-rounded.” She glanced out the window, away from him. “I told them to do something that would make you happy.”
“You think this makes me happy?” Kevin said, gesturing to the brutish body that had been grafted onto him. “You think spending my days counting calories and tracking my lifts and fucking every girl in town makes happy?”
“Yes,” Jessica said bluntly, returning his stare now with a steely one of her own. “I think you’ve spent the past week being more comfortable in your own skin than you ever have in your entire life, and now the only thing you’re afraid of is how much more fun you had as SeungJae Kim, the meathead man-whore.”
That last word really brought home for him just how much sex he’d had in the past week. In six days, he’d gone from a shy virgin to the last man standing at an all-out muscle orgy. Even through the muted anger he felt, he could feel the nag of unresolved lust. He was going to want to process these feelings soon, and the only healthy way he could think of was by fucking someone.
“With you like this,” she said, gesturing to his hulking physique, “I can be mom and dad’s favorite. They like you better because you’re the firstborn and because you’re a boy and all this other old-country bullshit, but they’re gonna be more proud of me now. And you...you’ll be happy.” There was a tinge of desperation to her voice, as if she were telling herself just as much as she was him.
“But what about my future?” Kevin said. “So I look hot and I fuck girls. I can’t do that forever. I’ve got a whole life to lead. What am I supposed to do with myself?”
“You’ll figure something out,” Jessica said. “You know how to make other people happy. There’s always someone who wants a person like that around.”
He thought back to his incredibly carnal first week of summer vacation. He thought of each encounter, where he’d almost magically known exactly what he needed to do or say to drive his partner wild. He thought of how he’d liked to put himself on display, so other people could enjoy the sight of his huge, perfectly sculpted body. That had been the common thread, hadn’t it? This whole week, he’d been making everyone around him so happy.
And it had felt good, hadn’t it?
“So what is it?” Kevin said. “Magic? Nanomachines? Some kind of deal with the devil?”
Jessica shook her head. “I don’t know. They told me it was better if I didn’t. They just said that the only price would be that I had to keep my memories of the old you. When we’re done talking, everyone else will only remember SeungJae Kim, champion wrestler and bodybuilding star who posts muscle pics for his hundred thousand instagram followers.”
Whoa, thought an unfamiliar voice inside him. He’d cracked a 100k? Last time he’d checked, he’d still only been at 96.
“But I’ll always remember you, Kevin,” she continued, and at once Kevin returned to the moment. He stared at his sister, all of his complex feelings just out of his brain’s reach. He imagined that had to have been part of whatever deal she’d struck.
“So there’s no way to reverse it?” he said, nudging his glasses up his nose.
She shook her head. “They warned me a million times. Once I said yes, it was permanent.”
He nodded somberly. This was something he couldn’t just muscle his way out of, then. “Will you miss me?” he said at last. “When I’m gone, I mean. Will you miss Kevin Kim?”
The question seemed to hit her hard. She turned away from him, and he was sure she was trying to stop herself from crying. But when she turned back around, she was clear-eyed as ever. “I told them to keep your glasses,” she said. “And your smile. Those things never needed changing. And that’ll be enough.” She sighed, then lifted up her hand, primed to snap her fingers.
“Really?” said Kevin. “You’re getting rid of half of me with a finger snap? Kinda on the nose, don’t you think?”
Jessica laughed begrudgingly. “I won’t miss what a huge nerd you are.”
“Can’t call me a nerd if you got the reference, too.”
This time, there was a note of sadness mixed into the chord of her laughter. “Anything else you want to say before this falls into place for good?”
At last, he felt his anger unfurl itself, and he understood. This was his very last chance to be Kevin Kim, completely free and himself. And certainly, he wanted to rage at his sister. Betrayal burned through him, as he looked down at the sexed-up cartoon of a guy he’d become. He’d been a whole other person, and his sister had erased all of it for what? To knock a few decimals off his GPA?
But damn him, he couldn’t bring himself to voice any of that rage. And this time, he could tell, it wasn’t his sister that was holding him back.
So he just nodded, met her eye, and said simply: “I forgive you.”
She physically reeled from the words. Painful shock spread across her face as if he’d slapped her with all his newly gained strength.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?” she said, and snapped her fingers.