Page 75 of The Way Back Home

Mrs. Nam stands behind them with her arms folded across her chest. She doesn’t hug anyone, but when the boys gather around her she surveys us with narrowed eyes and says, “I expect at least two of you to amount to something. The rest of you, try not to end up in prison.”

Ryowoon grins at her. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Halme.”

“Don’t push it,” she says, her mouth twitching.

My mom makes us stand together for a photo. She herds me and Ryowoon side by side, waving us closer, closer, until our shoulders touch. I squint in the sun and throw up a peace sign and lean into him. Ryowoon stands tall beside me, his bouquet tucked under one arm, grinning wide for the camera. I glance at him as my mom counts down. There’s no trace of a shadow behind his eyes, no tension in his jaw, no sign of what he told me on those bleachers. He’s just Ryowoon, here, mine, bright-eyed and alive.

I smile for the picture.

“Does placing fifty-third in a class of sixty even warrant a celebration?” I say out the side of my mouth as my mom fiddles with the camera angle.

He barks out a laugh, his shoulder bumping mine. “Hey. At least I graduated, you punk.”

My mom takes the photo. I don’t see it until weeks later, printed out and tucked into a frame on our living room shelf. Two boys in caps and gowns, one leaning slightly into the other, both of them grinning so hard their eyes are nearly closed. I look at it sometimes and try to see us the way a stranger would. Two kids from a nothing town, poor and scraped up and carrying things too old for their shoulders, standing in the sun being untouchable for one moment in time.

A Few Weeks Later

The hinges on the gate to the Cha’s house screech when I push through.

My hands shake as I step through into the yard. My jaw clamped tight shut. Anger pulses in my gut, coiling tighter with every step across the cracked concrete.

The yard looks like a crime scene. An overturned plastic chair lies by the wall. A ceramic pot, one of the old fermenting pots that used to sit in a neat row by the door, is shattered across the ground. Beer cans and soju bottles litter the walkway, glinting in the afternoon light like broken teeth. The chain that used to hold Nuri to her doghouse is still bolted to the post, hanging loose. Rusted and forgotten.

A voice carries from inside the house, gruff and waterlogged with drink.

“Who the fuck is that?” A pause. The sound of something heavy being shoved aside. “If that’s your pathetic ass, Ryowoon—”

Ryowoon’s father stumbles into the doorway. He looks smaller than I remember, shrunk in on himself, the bulk that used to make him terrifying settled into a bloated gut straining against a stained undershirt. His skin has a yellow cast to it, sallow, sick. His hair has thinned so badly I can see scalp through the greasy strands combed across the top of his head. His bloodshot eyes find me, the whites turned pink, the pupils glassy and unfocused.

I feel nothing that I used to feel when I look at him. Not the fear that lived in me as a child or the helpless rage that made me cry in my bed at night. What fills me now is cold disgust. Revulsion that makes my skin crawl just being in the same space as him.

Recognition dawns on his face slowly, squeezing through the fog the alcohol has left him swimming in. His expression shifts into a face meant to look welcoming but just looks pathetic.

“Seyeon-ah,” he calls softly, ingratiating. He steps back from the doorway, his hand waving vaguely inward. “It’s you. Can I get you something? Water, something to eat? Why don’t you sit down—”

“I’m just here to get Ryowoon’s things,” I interrupt him flatly.

His face twitches, the friendliness slipping. He nods, scratches at his neck where the skin is flaking and inflamed.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Right.”

He steps aside. I move past him without looking at him again, I can smell the sour reek rising off his body, alcohol and sweat. I breathe through my mouth and keep walking.

The inside of the house is gutted. Bottles everywhere, lined up on every surface, rolling loose on the floor, some broken with the shards still where they fell. The kitchen table is propped up on two legs and a stack of old newspapers where a third leg snapped off. A cabinet door hangs crooked by one hinge. Garbage bags pile in the corner, split open, spilling their contents across the floor. Clothes, food wrappers, crushed cans. The TV in the family room plays static, the screen cracked down one corner. The air is stale and reeks so badly that I have to swallow against the nausea climbing my throat.

I step over the wreckage. My feet know the way even after all these years, the muscle memory of a hundred visits still ingrained in my bones. Down the hall, turn left. Ryowoon’s room.

The door sticks as I put my shoulder into it, scraping over something on the floor behind it. Inside it’s dim, the window covered by a shirt that’s been tacked up as a curtain.

I grab his gym bag from the top of the closet and unzip it, working fast. I pull open the dresser and grab clothes, shirts, jeans, socks, whatever’s in there. Not much. I stuff them into the bag and move to the closet, pull out the two jackets hanging there and fold them in. Grab his books from the shelf above the mat, the worn paperbacks and the car magazines with pages folded over and paragraphs circled. I pull down the ad spread taped above where he sleeps, the one he tore from a magazine years ago, a Kawasaki motorcycle he’s been talking about buying since we were fifteen. I fold it carefully and tuck it between the books. Duck under the bed, pull out boxes and a sealed can.

I yank open the desk drawer and stop.

My hand hovers over a photograph, face up, the colors faded with age. Two boys sitting at a kitchen table, a small cake with candles between them. Eight years old. I recognize my family’s kitchen in the basement apartment. In the picture I’m grinning at the camera with frosting on my chin. Ryowoon sits beside me, leaning in, one arm thrown over my shoulder, his grin so wide it takes up his whole face. It was the one time my parents bought us a cake. They couldn’t afford two, so they made us share, one cake for both birthdays. Ryowoon didn’t care. He blew out every candle before I got to mine and I shoved his face into the frosting and my dad had to pull us apart.

I lift the picture out and hold it for a second. Then I slip it between the pages of one of his books and close the bag.

The hall is narrow. When I come out with the bag over my shoulder, Ryowoon’s father is standing there, hovering, filling up space without purpose. He watches me with rheumy eyes. I meet his gaze and take a second to look at him. He looks twenty years older than he is. Like something already dead that hasn’t had the decency to fall down yet.