Page 39 of The Way Back Home

I still go home. Still study. My grades don’t slip because I won’t let them, my mom works too hard for me to throw that away. But I leave late, after she’s asleep, slipping out the basement door and jogging through the dark streets to meet Ryowoon and Haeil at the corner they’ve claimed for the night. We roam the neighborhood, the empty market, the shuttered storefronts. We climb the wall behind the school and sit on the athletic field under the stars. Ryowoon and Haeil talk about money schemes and I pretend not to listen too closely, and when the sky starts lightening I sneak back home and crawl into bed with an hour to spare before my alarm.

Jiae breaks up with me in the spring at the ginkgo tree where she first gave me her letter, which feels pointed. She’s met someone from the academy in Yeonsan, she says. She’s sorry. She hopes I understand.

I nod. Tell her it’s okay. Walk away with my hands in my pockets and a hollow pit in my stomach even though I think I knew it was coming, probably knew for weeks. She was my first everything—first letter, first kiss, first person to lean against my shoulder and make me feel like something other than a kid from a basement apartment with a dead dad.

I mope for three days. On the fourth Ryowoon finds me in the courtyard behind Mrs. Nam’s store, chin on my knees, and says, “Get up.”

“No.”

“Get up, Seyeon. Haeil needs us.”

The us does it. I drag myself upright and follow him, sulking, and he leads me to the school where Haeil and Sihyung and Yoohan and Jinwon are crouched behind the hedge outside the administrative building. the way Haeil’s grinning tells me someone’s about to have a very bad day.

They’ve been planning this for weeks apparently. Mr. Kwon, the student disciplinary officer who patrols the hallways with a wooden ruler and the temperament of a prison warden, confiscated Haeil’s entire stash of comics last month and shredded them in front of his face. Personal grudge aside, Mr. Kwon is universally despised, which makes him the most justifiable target.

Jinwon’s dad has a fishing boat and Jinwon has access to Jinwon’s dad’s bait coolers.

By the time we’re done Mr. Kwon’s office smells like the bottom of the harbor on the hottest day of the year, two dozen fish tucked into every conceivable hiding spot—desk drawers, filing cabinets, behind the radiator, inside the ceiling tiles. Haeil shoves one into the coffee mug on Mr. Kwon’s desk and the six of us flee the building wheezing with laughter, sprinting down the hill as Ryowoon hooks his arm around my neck and drags me along.

I don’t think about Jiae for the rest of the night.

Three weeks before summer break my mother finds my pack of cigarettes. She’s doing laundry in the tub, wringing out my school pants, and I hear the crinkle of cellophane from across the room. I watch her pull it from my pocket, turn it over in her hand. Watch her face change.

The broomstick comes out and she doesn’t hold back. The backs of my legs light up with pain as she swings, each crack punctuated by a shout—have you lost your mind, do you think your father worked himself to death so you could ruin your lungs, do you think I slave over that kitchen so you can throw yourself away—I grit my teeth and take it. By the time she stops, chest heaving, eyes red, the skin from my calves to my thighs is striped with raised welts.

The next day Haeil shows up at the creek with ointment he pocketed from the pharmacy downtown, the price tag still sticky on the tube. Jinwon winces as he sees the damage. Sihyung helps spread the cream across the worst of it while I lie face down on the grass biting down on the sleeve of my jacket. Ryowoon sits beside my head, smoking, his face tight.

“You’ve gotta be smarter,” he says flatly. “Jacket pocket, not pants. She never checks the jacket.”

“Now you tell me.”

He’s gone for twenty minutes and comes back with two cream buns from the bakery stall at the market, still warm, wrapped in a paper bag. He drops them on my chest without ceremony and sits back down.

I don’t stop smoking. When summer comes and the heat settles over the town and the streets shimmer with it, Ryowoon meets me at the cross streets in the morning and we walk down to the harbor with cigarettes behind our ears and the whole day wide open in front of us, and it feels like nothing has changed.

15 Years Old

The morning air bites at my face when I push through the gate, bag over one shoulder, still fumbling with the top button of my uniform jacket. My alarm didn’t go off so I’m running late because and my hair’s still damp from the quickest shower of my life, thinking about the history quiz I barely studied for and I nearly trip over him.

Ryowoon squats on the curb just past the gate, knees pulled up, arms draped across them. His school uniform looks like he slept in it, wrinkled, his tie hanging loose around his neck. His face stops me. It’s not angry, which would be normal. It’s not bruised, which would also be normal. Instead he has a horribly empty look on his face, drained of emotion, his eyes fixed on a crack in the pavement between his feet.

“Ryowoon, what are you—”

“My mom left.”

I close my mouth. Open it again. Close it.

Ryowoon doesn’t look up. He continues tonelessly, “Took off sometime yesterday. Her clothes are still in the closet. Didn’t leave a note, didn’t say shit to anyone. Just gone.”

A bus rumbles past on the road below us, the diesel smell trailing behind it. Down the hill a dog barks. I stand there with my hand still on the gate, and I can’t find a single word that doesn’t sound stupid or useless in my head. I’m sorry? Are you okay? Obviously not. Do you know where she went? He just said he doesn’t.

So I say nothing. I let go of the gate and wait.

After a minute Ryowoon pushes himself upright, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder. He doesn’t look at me but he starts walking, and I fall into step beside him. We take the familiar route downhill, past the corner where the persimmon tree drops overripe fruit onto the sidewalk every autumn, past Mrs. Nam’s store where the roll-down doors are already up and I can hear her radio playing trot music inside. Neither of us stops. Ryowoon’s jaw is set and his stride is faster than usual and I walk faster to keep up without comment.

By second period the whole school knows.

Small towns are like that. News teleports. By the time I’m sitting in math class I’ve already overheard three separate conversations about it, whispered between desks, murmured in the hallway. Cha Ryowoon’s mom ran away. Just abandoned him. Left him with that drunk father of his. Can you blame her though?