1

Michelle

I'd heard that, on my trip to Seoul, there was one place I absolutely had to go: Deoksugung Stone Wall Road. All the travel sites I had visited during my many months of preparation for the trip had told me that there was nothing better than Deoksugung in the fall. And of course, seeing it now, I knew they were right. Out of all the things I'd seen in the United States—not that that list was extensive or impressive by any means—I'd never seen anything as simply romantic as the Stone Wall Road.

I also knew that I had never been more hopelessly lost in my life.

"Come on," I muttered as I hopelessly fumbled around with my map. "You can figure this out. It's just another right turn and…"

But it didn't seem like the Seoul Museum of Art was just "another right turn" from where I was—wherever that was. In fact, I wasn't even sure if I was headed in the right direction.

I looked up at the yellow leaves above me, feeling the crisp air wash over me. I let it ease my mind as I chose a random direction and started walking forward. Even if I didn't make it to the Seoul Museum of Art, my trip wouldn't be a wash. That wasn't my main goal for being here.

Posters were taped to everything along the street, and it was only after the third one that I actually noticed who was on them: BTS with a list of their concert dates. Tomorrow night, I would be at an actual BTS show, seeing them in person.

For the last year, I had jokingly told my friends and family that I wanted a ticket to go see BTS in concert for my next birthday, never expecting them to actually band together to deliver. A month before my birthday—and three before BTS's closest concert date—I received a call from my mother.

"It won't be exactly on your birthday," she'd said, "but I hope you won't mind that too much."

Only after the call did I realize that she had coordinated everything—the fundraising, the ticket buying, the passport application. All I had to do was save up enough money for me to live off of in Korea for two weeks.

I was just grateful for the chance I had to even be in Seoul, let alone have the chance to go see BTS. I reached forward and grabbed the poster off of the stone wall, running my fingers lightly over the boys' faces.

I had been a fan of BTS for a long time. They were my favorite band, my idols. But out of all of them, my favorite was definitely RM. My fingers lingered on the outline of his face on the poster. He was smiling in the poster, so you could see his dimples.

I would have to remind myself during the concert that I was a grown woman and not a sixteen-year-old girl. Still, there was something about RM that made me feel sophomoric. While the woman I was told me to admire his beauty with reserved gentleness, the sixteen-year-old inside was giddy with the idea of what it would feel like to be able to poke them.

A chorus of distant screams erupted behind me, breaking me away from my daydreams. Some of the people beside me seemed to be just as concerned, but no one seemed to know where it was coming from. At the far end of the road, I thought I could just barely catch a glimpse of some school-aged girls, the cause of the commotion.

I folded the poster, stuffed it into my jacket pocket, and turned away from the event. I didn't need to indulge in that part of my personality—I needed to focus on finding the Seoul Museum of Art.

As I came across an intersection of three roads—unsure of how I had even gotten here—the screams behind me increased in volume. Giving into my curiosity, I stepped closer to a tree on the side of the road and decided that I wanted to see what people were making a big deal about.

I turned directly into the path of someone else. The force of our collision knocked my glasses off of my face and me to the ground. A wave of blurry figures and smeared colors passed in front of me, all of it made even more disorienting from the noise. I propped myself up on one elbow as I watched the remaining blurs of the screaming mob rush past.

I closed my eyes, finding relief in the darkness after all of the chaos. When I opened my eyes, the darkness morphed into a single figure, clad all in black. Before I could understand what was happening, it stuck out its hand and a husky voice asked, "Are you okay?"