Chapter Text
Summer, 1983
i.
The world is supposed to end today.
This news, delivered to him by the granny who lives two doors down, feels a little less impossible when Euijoo steps out of the house at the golden hour of 12:45 in the afternoon. Granny Baek saw it in the same bogus pamphlet that his mother keeps telling her to throw out, but for once Euijoo thinks it could be telling the truth.
It certainly feels like the sun is going to kill them today, with something like one hot bite and a blistering swallow.
No one is outside, because for once the heat and the neighborhood’s collective clockwork-like meal schedule coincide.
This is why it’s a golden hour, at least for Euijoo, who finished lunch early to experience it. When the streets look like this, bleached white-yellow in the sun and stripped of its usual population of all his neighbors, Euijoo likes to imagine he is the only boy left in the world. A guilty pleasure of his, because inevitably he’ll feel sorry for finding joy in a world in which his family doesn’t exist.
In this sweltering heat, though, his brain works sluggishly enough that he doesn’t have to think about it for three...four...five whole breaths. Lungfuls of them—the last of the oxygen left in the world, swept up into the cramped ribs of a too-skinny boy.
His peace is interrupted by who seems to be the second boy left in the world.
“You sweat a lot,” observes the only other boy alive in lieu of a proper greeting. He’s got a strange accent, speech informal, and he’s standing next to the sun, so Euijoo has to squint at him when he turns.
Upon quick examination the boy is even stranger, dressed head to toe in brands Euijoo’s only seen in magazines. He looks like what all the popular kids at his school think they look like. But without any fanfare, the boy just points a finger at the dented juice box in Euijoo’s hand and says, “Can I have some of that? I’ll give you my towel.”
Off-kilter, Euijoo exhales once through his nose the way his sister does. He’s been testing out things his sister does in the privacy of outside-his-home. “Towel?” he asks. The boy unfolds something from his pocket and holds his fist out. After some hesitation, Euijoo holds out his own and receives something surprisingly damp in return.
“You’ve gotta bring something like this with you outside or you’ll die,” says the boy in a cool, sage sort of way. His vowels curl and collide with one another. “Put it around your neck. Trust me!”
Euijoo blinks. He has been expressly told by his teachers to do the opposite, but in his neighborhood there’s no such thing as a stranger. If you walk through these streets, you already belong; or so they say.
He drapes the towel around his neck, instantly met with the blissful coolness of it, and looks up at the boy through his sweaty bangs in surprise. Now that Euijoo has decided to really look at him, the smile on the boy’s face is almost as blinding as the sun. He has to squint even harder.
The boy rocks on his heels in a pleased way. Compared to Euijoo, he’s much less sweaty, but already sporting the beginnings of a sunburn on the tops of his pale cheeks and arms. Euijoo’s never been sunburnt before. With a sudden spark of sympathy, he holds out the mostly empty juice box in his hand.
This is how he begins a friendship with the boy who lives a seven minute walk away from his neighborhood.
ii.
The day Euijoo asks him why he does it, why he makes the trip every day to come see him, it’s a month later and only two degrees cooler outside.
Everyone around them looks like they’re suffocating from the heat regardless. A bus driver fans himself with a small plastic fan he picked up from church, a cigarette dangling off of his lip. Mothers and grandmothers rest their super-permed heads on the edges of rolled-open windows, out of which stream the sounds of the radio.
“Huh? Oh. Because we’re friends now, aren’t we?” is Yixiang’s answer.
Cigarette smoke, sticky summer heat. His days with Yixiang are made up of these things, but also:
“Just these two Bravo Cones today?”
Yixiang’s got his elbows perched on the corner store counter with his cheek smushed against his forearm when he nods. Even he’s too hot to speak. Euijoo has to sidle up beside him to push a few crinkled bills across the counter, elbows pressing into elbows.
“I guess you two are over the shrimp crackers, then,” the corner store grandpa chuckles.
Euijoo shakes his head somberly. Both of them love eating shrimp crackers; sometimes they play a game to see how many they can stick inside of Yixiang’s mouth. “We forgot to bring enough money,” he explains, then sends a squinty look Yixiang’s way, who only responds with that mock-contented smile.
Yixiang doesn’t talk about his family much, but Euijoo knows they’re crazy rich. If he couldn’t deduce that from Yixiang’s expensive shoes, then he could just ask anyone in his neighborhood; it’s a topic of conversation the aunties like because it’s such a mystery. The mystery of the reclusive family that lives in that ultra fancy house, which has got three whole stories. But Yixiang always comes outside with empty pockets.
The old man sighs and pushes a bag of shrimp crackers over, which finally makes Yixiang spring up. “Just this once,” he huffs, and then shoos them out.
“Thank you! Thanks, Juju!”
They sit on the bench outside because it’s offering the closest thing to shade near them, ice cream dripping over cones onto fingers. Yixiang’s knees knock into Euijoo’s space, unabashedly. Euijoo has never met someone so unabashed. He knocks his knees back, feeling a little unabashed himself, and then asks, “Do you wanna play the orange game?”
Yixiang contemplates. “No,” he says. “Can we go to your house?”
“Mine?” Euijoo shifts in his seat just in time to see Yixiang chomp down on his cone with a curiously intense look in his eyes.
Over the course of the past month, they’ve spent every day hanging out together save for Sundays when Euijoo’s family goes to church or the occasional time when Yixiang has to watch his cousins. As such, Euijoo must have been subconsciously categorizing all of Yixiang’s expressions in his head, probably to better understand him. There are times when his Korean fails him and the two of them have to really, really…squint at one another to parse what he’s trying to get out.
Euijoo, who hates having his own face looked at, looks at Yixiang’s now. With Yixiang, he is allowed to be repeatedly unabashed, because he never tells him off for it. Still, he squirms a little underneath this look like a mildly sweaty caterpillar and then promptly kicks Euijoo’s ankle.
“Okay,” answers Euijoo. “But I gotta ask my mom first.”
They make their way over to the payphone across the street. The whole way, Yixiang continues his caterpillar wiggle, which eventually becomes full body swaying. “I’m a worm being burnt alive in the sun,” he explains.
“That’s silly,” Euijoo says, but laughs anyway. He slots his last coins in and punches in his home phone number, which Yixiang watches like a hawk. When he starts talking to his mom, his eyes shift over to meet Yixiang’s, whose expression has morphed upon hearing the sound of Euijoo’s mother. His smile is gone, but his eyes are wide and expectant and something else, though that’s another mystery.
“What’d she say?” he asks when Euijoo hangs up, voice taking on a precarious quality.
“She said you can stay for an early dinner if you’re allowed. You wanna call your…aunt?” This is also something that Euijoo has learned from the neighborhood aunties: Yixiang is not the son of that mystery family.
Yixiang looks elsewhere, kicking a rock that’s made its way into the booth. “Nah. I’m allowed to do whatever I want.”
This is such a revolutionary concept to Euijoo that he thinks about it the entire bus ride home, even as Yixiang makes up stories about the people they see in the windows. Usually Euijoo joins in on this game, but today he’s thinking hard about what he’d do if he had an inch of Yixiang’s freedom.
When they make it to the edge of Euijoo’s neighborhood, they stop to survey it together from the top of the street. It’s only made up of ten houses at the most, all squished up cozily against one another. Varying rooftop sizes, varying decorations, but all of them have broken plant pots lining the outer brick walls to keep intruders away, real rural-style.
Yixiang is curiously quiet as they start their way down, so Euijoo fills the silence with his own quiet voice, pointing things out for him. There’s the house that keeps a dog. There’s Euijoo’s favorite gate in the neighborhood, because it’s painted bright blue. There’s a rusty moped laying against the equally rusty gate to the Baek house, which Euijoo explains is probably a gas tank delivery.
The gate to Euijoo’s house is neither blue nor rusty, but a cleanish, greenish gray. When they step inside together, Euijoo has to take him around to the entrance of their part of the house because they live on the first floor, underneath the Kim family. The door is ajar, giving them an early peek into the organized chaos that is his family’s entrance room.
There’s a lot of things in this first room of his house: in one corner are the laundry washer and both the normal and kimchi fridges, beside it the big red bowl and scoop they use for bathing, and in the other corner is the cramped kitchen and stovetop. Above it, a small, useless window and its wooden pane on which several decorations sit. The window is useless because it’s just facing another brick wall; Euijoo has never once seen it open.
They find Euijoo’s mother directly below this window when they come in, feet shuffling against the faded red-beige linoleum floor. “Mother, I’ve arrived,” reports Euijoo dutifully, and then stands awkwardly in the doorway beside Yixiang, who does the same.
Euijoo has never brought home a friend before. It’s not like he doesn’t make friends in school; in fact he has several, but in his brain these kids exist in the exclusive world that is “school” and which cannot intermingle with the strange, guarded world that is “home”.
His mother looks equally off-kilter when she turns to see both of them standing in the doorway like a pair of shrimp crackers that came stuck to one another. Yixiang always likes to save those to eat last, and then he always eats them whole—”It’s sad to separate two things that want to be together,” he says.
His mother recovers quickly. “That’s right, this is your friend,” she exclaims, in her softspoken way. She wipes flour-covered hands on her apron, smiling at Yixiang, who instantly smiles back. “Dinner will be ready soon. Euijoo, why don’t you go set the table for your friend?”
“And Dad?” Euijoo asks.
His mother turns back around to scoop up some rice and pack it into a tin-covered bowl. “He won’t be back ‘til late; set this aside for him.”
So Euijoo takes the hot bowl of rice, toes off his shoes, watches Yixiang do the same, and then steps into the rest of his house. At his side, Yixiang’s head moves this way and that as he takes in the new surroundings. While Euijoo’s sandwiching the bowl of rice between two thick blankets to keep it warm, Yixiang points at something and says, “Is that you?”
Euijoo glances that way. It’s a photo taken of him when he was even younger than he is now. Even though he knows what to expect he nods, and then Yixiang laughs and laughs: “You really like wearing that hat!” Euijoo, who is wearing a similar hat today, defends himself crossly until it’s clear that this is of no avail, then just listens to Yixiang point out other funny things while he busies himself with laying out the silverware.
The giggling naturally subsides. A sudden ominous feeling makes Euijoo turn back around to see Yixiang standing in front of the only full family photo they have in the house, hanging neatly beside the marked-up calendar from church. “You have an older sister, too?” asks Yixiang.
Euijoo gives his well-trained answer: “She doesn’t live with us,” and then, “Don’t mention it to my mom.”
Yixiang does not mention it to his mom. When they’re called back into the kitchen-bath-laundry-room to bus plates of food back, he just smiles at Euijoo’s mother and shuffles along politely. Euijoo pays attention very closely during dinner, but Yixiang says nothing out of the ordinary. Every question from his mother is met with an equally sweet and honest answer, even if Yixiang is eating so inhumanly fast that his answers are concise.
“I’ve never seen you act so nice,” Euijoo tells him later once they’re holed up in his bedroom, doing a bad job of stifling a laugh at Yixiang’s miffed expression.
“I’m so nice,” Yixiang says with a punch to Euijoo’s shoulder. “You’re just mean to me, so I have to be mean back.”
“No one’s ever called me mean before.”
“Hey, have you ever had a best friend?”
Euijoo thinks on this. He’s had only one other close friend, back in elementary school, who doesn’t go to the same school as him anymore. He and Yixiang won’t go to the same school together when the semester starts again either, but maybe… “Are you going to Chungham High after you finish middle school, too?” Yixiang nods. “Then…I guess we’ll become best friends.”
This satisfies Yixiang. There’s only one semester, a half-year, left of middle school.
“So we’ll get exclusive rights to be mean to each other,” he says with a pleased grin, “’cause that’s what it means to be best friends.”
Winter, 1983
i.
During the winter break before the first day of high school, Yixiang starts going by an English name. “If I’m going to live in America some day, I need to start getting used to American things,” he announces.
Euijoo takes a while to answer because he’s busy peeling off a stamp from an envelope to add to his stamp collection. It’s pretty stubborn. He might have to take a blow dryer to it. “Why do you like America so much?” he asks, gingerly sticking a fingernail underneath the stamp adhesive. “My sister told me the Americans are part of the whole problem over here.”
Yixiang leans back with his arms crossed, supervising Euijoo’s hard work. “Well, over there, everyone is free,” he says, voice going faraway. “That’s what they call it, you know. The land of the free. And some day, I’m gonna live there.”
“You’re the most ‘free’ person I’ve ever met,” Euijoo huffs. “What more freedom do you want?”
“You don’t get it. Don’t worry, I’ll call you every day when I’m in America,” Yixiang says, poking his sock-covered toes into Euijoo’s side despite his loud protests. “Did you know that in America, even guys like me can work in fashion?”
Then Euijoo, ever the worrier, says, “Hey, don’t you think going by an English name will make you stand out even more over here? When high school starts.”
Yixiang shrugs. “If I’m gonna stand out anyway as the foreigner, might as well be the cool foreigner.”
So they spend an entire day poring over various magazines and English workbooks and, inexplicably, the ratty old telephone book that is completely in Korean. “We need all the inspiration we can get,” says Yixiang, which Euijoo thinks is so ridiculous he gets orange juice down the wrong windpipes from laughing.
In the end, he picks a name that takes up a whole four spaces in Korean. Euijoo has to agree, though: “Nicholas” suits him.
ii.
Nicholas is not wearing a scarf when he meets Euijoo outside the next day, even though it’s deathly cold. “You carry around a cold towel during summer but not a scarf during winter?” Euijoo snorts, shaking his head, and says, “Wanna borrow one from my house?”
He doesn’t know why Nicholas loves walking around in his neighborhood so much. Over the phone, Euijoo’d suggested they just hang out in his room again instead to make use of the heated floors, but Nicholas had said something about wanting to see the moon.
Now safely wrapped up in a thick red scarf Euijoo’s mother lent him, Nicholas steps out into the brisk, icy air with a happy sigh. “Juju, look! The moon’s so big tonight!”
To Euijoo, it’s just the usual moon, though the sky’s a bit clearer. “You’re one of those romantic types, aren’t you?” he laughs.
Nicholas sticks his tongue out childishly. “This is miles better than being holed up in your room,” he says, walking backwards and gesturing. “And this way, the cup ramen’ll taste like heaven.”
“You brought cup ramen?”
“Yeah man. That’s all I’ve been eating these days, so I thought: it’ll taste way better eating it with Juju!”
Euijoo laughs, watching Nicholas’s cheeks and nose turn pink-red from the cold. The moonlight renders his complexion close to blood-stained snow. “You junkie, eating cup ramen every day isn’t good for you.”
“Guess so, huh,” says Nicholas, tone turning strange. He stops in his tracks when he notices Euijoo’s stopped. “What?”
As much as Nicholas tells him he’s inattentive, Euijoo has been quietly observing a few important things about him this past month. The first: Nicholas looks like he never eats enough. He always has a hungry look in his eyes that doesn’t even go away when he’s at Euijoo’s and shoveling food into his mouth as politely as possible.
It’s not, as Euijoo has come to learn, necessary to be extra careful with Nicholas, who might be the most easygoing person in the world. But Euijoo is careful about everything, so he takes a few breaths to consider his words before he asks, “Can you tell me why you’ve only been eating cup ramen?”
A shrug. “Been really craving it lately.”
“Don’t lie to me, Nicho.”
Nicholas stares at him for a prolonged beat, and then turns back around to start walking again, hands shoved in pockets. Euijoo follows, thinking he’s made a mistake, but Nicholas just hums consideringly before saying, “My uncle’s an idiot. He doesn’t let me have dinner sometimes, when he gets mad. I love my auntie, though, she’s cool.”
“What do you mean, when he gets mad?”
“Remember how I told you he has three kids with my aunt?”
“Yes.”
“I like teaching them Mandarin sometimes, even though he’s banned it from the house.”
Euijoo’s brow furrows. “Isn’t his wife Taiwanese?”
“Yeah, but she hasn’t spoken Mandarin in forever, not since coming over here.”
“Why haven’t you told me this before?”
Nicholas laughs. “You never asked, dummy.”
The cold pinches at Euijoo, but he pulls on his scarf, suddenly a little suffocated. There’s a new, childish, raw emotion in his chest. It takes him a while to register that it’s anger.
“Nicho,” he says quietly.
“Juju,” answers Nicholas, eyes crinkling happily the way they do whenever Euijoo uses nicknames with him.
“Do you want to sleep over mine tonight? My mom might make sujebi.”
“I didn’t tell you so you’d pity me, you know,” says Nicholas, but his tone is still light. He cracks a grin, and then lifts his face up towards the moon. “But your mom’s food sure beats cup ramen any day.”
iii.
Sleepovers become a common thing between them. Not too common, because that’d warrant too much attention from Nicholas’s uncle, but close to enough.
It’s one of these nights that Euijoo was supposed to die, according to his mother.
The way she sees it, everything happens for a reason. Life, she says, is a battleground between the devil and God, evil and good. She might be the only one in their entire neighborhood who goes to church, but all of his neighbors call this night a miracle, too.
At the top of the night, there’s nothing to suggest that it’ll be out of the ordinary, except that his parents won’t be home until past midnight. This, too, isn’t too unusual; sometimes when Euijoo’s dad is coming back from a faraway sales trip, his mother goes out with one of the neighborhood uncles to go pick him up.
The house does not get indecently loud in the absence of his parents, mainly because the Kims live a floor above them. Still, Euijoo always feels a little more unabashed when it’s just the two of them fooling around.
They spend half an hour chasing each other around the house because it’s Nicholas’s favorite pastime to steal something from Euijoo’s room. This time, it’s one of Euijoo’s favorite baseball caps, one from before his sister left home. Euijoo successfully splashes a scoopful of water on him for his ridiculous yet accurate “Euijoo impersonations”.
The rest of the night lies in a hazy place within Euijoo’s memory. He remembers them watching television together, remembers them settling onto the warmed-up blankets on the floor. And then, like a badly cut movie, the next thing he registers is dangling awkwardly from Nicholas’s back, both too tall and too heavy. There’s an odd, odd smell. Nicholas deposits Euijoo just a few paces before their gate. Belatedly, Euijoo realizes Nicholas has been calling out his name over and over again this entire time like a string of curses, a prayer.
Euijoo’s parents find them like this a short while afterwards: Euijoo slumped against Nicholas’s side, coughing, and Nicholas, a complete hyperventilating mess, stuck saying Euijoo’s name over, and over, and over again.
Later, Euijoo’s mother says through tears, “Euijoo, God sent you Yixiang to save you. It’s a miracle, he’s a miracle, a godsent guardian angel,” and all Euijoo can think is, This is gonna do wonders for his ego, isn’t it.
Euijoo’s father gives Nicholas a sincere apology, something about the house having a super old heating system, which is why there was a yeontan gas leak. None of them know how on Earth Nicholas was able to wake up and drag the both of them out before being poisoned, but his mother keeps insisting that it’s a sign from God.
“You can’t sleep at mine ever again,” says Euijoo once he’s sobered up. The fear and shame are not making this near-death scenario any better for him. “Even if my dad says it’s safe now, you never know.”
Nicholas just glares. “We can just sleep outside then. Stupid Juju. You owe me a million Bravo Cones now.”
Euijoo, who has never paid enough attention at church, begins to think his mother might be onto something.
Spring, 1984
i.
Despite being virtually attached at the hip these past months, Euijoo and Nicholas are assigned to two separate classrooms when high school begins. It’s a bit of a bummer not to have your best-friend-in-training amongst all the unfamiliar faces in the classroom you’ll be spending an entire year with, but it also shouldn’t be the end of the world.
As expected, Euijoo underestimates the situation. Above all, he underestimates the ease with which Nicholas navigates high school social life.
They start out the first few weeks spending all their lunches together in the cafeteria, Euijoo’s favorite time of the day because the highly popular Radio Club plays music for everyone on the speakers, Deul Guk Hwa or Yoo Jaeha or sometimes Bee Gees (Nicholas really liked them). Sometimes he and Nicholas stop playing foot war underneath the table and fall into silence to really listen, and that means it’s a good music day.
After school, he waits for Nicholas to join him and they walk to Euijoo’s house together. Because their lunches are so characterized by music, most of their conversations circle back to it, and on the bus ride home they share earbuds plugged into the Sony Walkman Euijoo’s grandma bought him for Christmas last year.
Sometimes Nicholas will be really touched by something that played during lunch and he’ll tug on Euijoo’s shirt, saying, “We’ve gotta add that song to a new tape.” Other times, they’ll sit together in front of a radio and agree on songs to record onto Euijoo’s cassettes.
It’s around the third week into school that Nicholas starts missing lunch. “Sorry Juju, some kids in my class asked me to eat lunch with them outside tomorrow. We’re gonna try out some basketball stuff. Is that okay?”
Euijoo just answers, “Why wouldn’t it be?”
It must go well the first time, because they ask him again, and again, and again.
“Even though he’s got a scary look, that foreigner kid is actually an alright guy,” Euijoo overhears someone say. “I think he’s loaded. He’s always got brand-names on.”
Euijoo is amused that he’d worried for no reason, that he’d sat Nicholas down for in-depth lessons on Korean slang all throughout winter break so he’d know if someone was badmouthing him. He should’ve known that Nicholas could never be ostracized, could never be boxed into one arbitrary label. There’s something about him that inexplicably draws attention. Euijoo supposes he isn’t immune to it.
The pieces fall into place quite naturally in his head: Euijoo and Nicholas were never meant to be friends, not really. Their time together had been a strange fit of destiny in which their paths intersected, briefly, before they’d eventually pass one another along. Maybe Nicholas had done his time saving Euijoo’s life, and now he was on to bigger and better things.
Euijoo starts staying late after school to study. He eats lunch in another corner of the cafeteria, a nice seat by the window with a few new friends from his classroom. They’re all equally quiet and easy to get along with, none of them the type to kick their ankles against his. There’s a strong sense of correctness he feels when he eats with them, even as he ends up staring out at the trees instead of participating in whatever conversation they’ve finally initiated. It’s nearly cherry blossom season, but Euijoo likes it best when the trees are green like this and waiting to flower, forever in limbo.
Nicholas confronts him once and only once. “Euijoo,” he calls, and the three other kids sitting with him look up with mild alarm at their wallflower-peace being disturbed by someone popular.
A feeling of wrongness, just then, arises out of nowhere and balloons inside of him. He calmly sorts the stir-fried bellflower roots his mother packed for him into clumps. Even without looking he can sense Nicholas shifting from one foot to another a few feet away from him.
“We’re not playing basketball today,” he explains, and then laughs awkwardly. “Hey, why have you been studying so hard these days? Got a test coming up?”
The bellflower roots crunch nicely in his mouth. After taking a moment to swallow them, Euijoo says, “Yeah, something like that.”
There’s a beat of uncomfortable silence. Euijoo’s friends have developed a sudden immense interest in their own lunchboxes.
“Well, um, I’ll phone your house tonight?” Nicholas says quietly. “Hope your mom’s doing okay.”
At this, Euijoo finally looks up. Backlit by the rowdy chattering and movement of students, he looks alarmingly small. Despite himself, despite the wave of strangeness that feels close to nausea in his gut, Euijoo says, “Alright.”
ii.
Dinner with his mother that night begins normally. As usual, she asks, “How was school, darling?” and he answers, “Fine.” It’s only when she follows this up with: “So why hasn’t your little guardian angel been coming over?” that he tenses. She notices. Of course, she notices.
“Has something happened between you two?” she asks. All of a sudden, Euijoo gets the unfamiliar urge to tell her everything, every just and unjust detail about this incredibly mundane situation. He imagines that millions of sons tell their mothers everything. It’s just a haphazard friendship growing apart just as haphazardly, he thinks, not some government-classified secret.
Still, he just says, “I’ve been too busy studying for a test.” These are words she’ll like, the notion that her only son is finally striving to be more than mediocre. He quickly schools his face into something more contained. He thinks he must do a decent job of it, because after a while his mother stops looking so intently. He can't breathe quite right when anyone’s looking at him that way.
The house gets two phone calls that night. At the first ring, Euijoo tenses all over again, feels stupid for it, and then watches his mother get up from her seat in front of the television to answer.
“Hello?”
Euijoo briefly imagines Nicholas’s low, nervous voice and can’t help but stifle a laugh. That’s right. This whole situation is just a funny blip. Maybe when his mom passes him the phone, he’ll feel light enough to say, “You don’t have to call, you know, you don’t owe me anything. You’ve done your time for all those Bravo Cones.”
His mother does not pass him the phone. Instead, she bursts into tears.
Hours later, the phone rings again. Euijoo picks it up himself, a blocky yellow-painted thing. He stares at the chips in the paint and says, “Nicho,” but his voice comes out with a tremor.
The reply is instant, Nicholas’s candid, expressive voice filtering through the static: “Euijoo, what’s wrong?”
He doesn’t remember the last time he’s answered that kind of question fully, honestly. Even just an hour ago, he’d stopped himself from doing just the thing he ends up doing now. “It’s my sister,” he says.
The other side of the phone is quiet while Euijoo talks, save for the occasional “And then?” from Nicholas. He’s quiet through the part about his sister going to protests so often that police officers would show up at their door, asking when she’d come home, and Euijoo would have to say he didn’t know. Quiet when Euijoo talks about the fear gradually eating their family alive, the fights when she’d come home hurt, and the aching, lonely peacefulness when his sister moved out on her own. And he’s very, very quiet when Euijoo says, “She got caught, I guess. My parents went to the jail she’s being kept at.”
After all of this, there’s a long stretch of silence between the both of them. Finally, Nicholas just says, “Want me to come over?”
And Euijoo says, “Bring your toothbrush.”
iii.
Even though a chill still lingers in the half-winter, half-spring air, Euijoo and Nicholas carry blankets outside to sleep underneath the stars. It’s partly Nicholas’s fault for being a romantic and partly the yeontan gas incident, but Euijoo does agree that it’s much easier to calm down underneath the wide expanse of sky, breathing in fresh air.
They lay side by side in that strangely freeing darkness only interrupted by the faint glow of stars above them. Euijoo listens to the slow, contented breaths of the boy at his side and tries to measure out his own to match it. Just when he thinks Nicholas has fallen asleep, he whispers, “Nicho?”
“Yeah?” His voice is clear of any drowsiness.
“How much do you know about the protests?”
Nicholas turns on his side to look at him, which is only vaguely startling. “You mean, with the government?”
“Eum.”
“I know about that evil guy who calls himself president, Chun Dohwan. And everybody calls him just another military dictator.”
The truth is, this is similar to the extent to which Euijoo is familiar with current politics. It used to be that his father would openly curse at the television while watching the evening news, but even that upsets his mother nowadays, so they watch comedy shows instead. When the neighbors get restless about the government, Euijoo’s mom will pull him back inside and shut the door as if it’ll keep him from overhearing.
His sister rarely spoke to him about it when she still lived with the family. She’d mention something in passing, and Euijoo would have to focus hard on her words to understand them—he was always doing that, trying to understand this person who was miles away in years and eventually, in actual distance.
“And…” Nicholas continues quietly. “I know about the terrible things that happened in Gwangju. When the military went in.”
Euijoo turns just his head to look at him, and even like this Nicholas feels too close for comfort, but neither of them move away. “My grandma lives in Gwangju,” he says in a hushed voice, more stuff he’s never told anyone. “My sister used to spend all her summers there when both my parents were working. She has friends there, childhood friends. So…my mom says that’s where she gets all her ideas from. You know she was studying to go to medical school? Instead she started going to protests at her school and treating people who got hurt there.”
“Are there a lot of protests at her school, too? I saw some on the news.”
“Yeah. Our neighborhood’s lucky because we don’t live close enough to any university, but my mom says it’s happening so much these days that kids at Hwigyeong High can’t walk to school because there’s so much tear gas on the street.”
“Well, I think your sister’s brave,” says Nicholas with easy conviction. “To stand up for her friends like that.”
“Sure, but.” Euijoo leans back to stare at the sky, clenching and unclenching his fists. “She’s causing my mom a lot of grief, even though she’s left the house. Sometimes my mom can’t sleep because she thinks about her so much.”
Nicholas rolls onto his back to stare up at the sky, too. He says in a soft, knowing way, “That’s just love, I guess. Distance only makes it hurt twice as bad.”
Euijoo presses the heels of his palms into his hot eyes. “Let’s go to sleep,” he says, but his voice breaks.
As if in a dream, he feels a cautious touch, and then a tug on his wrists.
It must be because Nicholas is a foreigner, but he never seems ashamed of touching. He touches everything and anything; he runs fingers along the brick walls of Euijoo’s neighborhood, dips his hands into any large pool of water, pokes Euijoo’s neck and cheek and tugs on his hair.
Now those hands are pulling his palms away from his face. Euijoo jerks away on instinct.
Nicholas just looks at him for a breath and then settles back with his eyes closed. “Look forward to lunch tomorrow,” is all he says.
iv.
Nicholas isn’t at lunch the next day. Euijoo doesn’t really know what he’d expected.
He ends up finding himself a seat near the back of the cafeteria, somewhere he knows he’ll be left alone. There’s a vacant feeling in his head. That’s not true; it’s probably the opposite of vacant, this feeling, but it’s like his brain has been trained to wipe everything out into a clean, empty slate.
It felt this way when his sister left home. He didn’t cry. If you’d have asked him what he felt in that moment, his answer would have been Nothing. He just sat on the steps to his house and listened to his mother cry, stared at his hands, wondered if these were the hands of a human.
He focuses on eating now, one bite and swallow at a time, evidence that he is, at least, a living being.
A crackling sound interrupts this blank reverie. Some more crackling, and then out of the speakers: “Courtesy of the Radio Club, we’ve got a special song for you today,” says a mild, lilting voice, a girl’s. “Someone put in a request. All it says here is… ‘To cheer up my friend, who doesn’t listen to me, but might listen to some guy on the radio.’ How sweet… Whether you think of your own friend or your special someone, we hope you enjoy Kim Hyunshik’s ‘Don’t Be Sad.’”
Euijoo’s chopsticks hang suspended in mid-air.
“This song is amazing,” Euijoo says, eyes wide. He scoots closer to the radio and nudges Nicholas. “What did they say the title was?”
Nicholas rolls around on the floor next to him, flipping through one of his mother’s fashion magazines. “Something something…sad?”
“Ack, you’re hopeless. Now I have to wait for it to come on again to record it.”
Nicholas’s grin, upside-down from where he’s splayed out. “Can’t ask the foreigner to remember all that Korean!”
“It was three words!”
“Then what’s your excuse, huh?” And then Nicholas gasps, “I’m infecting you!” and topples Euijoo with a round of incredibly childish tickles.
Jerk, Euijoo thinks, you knew the title this entire time.
Don’t be sad, when you feel alone.
“I walked around this whole place trying to find you! You couldn’t wait ten minutes for your best friend?” When Euijoo looks up, it’s to Nicholas’s mock-upset face, putting up a valiant effort to hide a smile. He’s so easy to read at times.
“Why are you crying?!” Nicholas exclaims, expression flashing so quickly between several emotions that Euijoo can’t even keep up. He scoots next to him and pulls out a handful of napkins in record time. “The song says not to be sad, you dummy… Dummy Juju…”
“...How’d you even get a song request in?”
“I have friends in high places, man. Anyway, this is the one song that you like that isn’t sad as hell!”
(What Euijoo doesn’t tell him: the rest of the song is deceptively depressing.)
Don’t be sad, when you feel alone
We’ve been alone since the start
Don’t be sad, when you feel lonely
Leave the loneliness locked within those years that flow past
Childhood days that just keep getting farther away
There’s no path to find that warm, sunlit dream anymore
Leave it in your memories.