Chapter 24 #2
I couldn’t explain it, but something about the way he sounded made me feel sad for him.
Maybe it was the loneliness. I recognised it, because outside of Joon, I had been lonely in Korea.
In a way, that had made sense, because who the hell was I?
Just some intern who barely spoke the language.
But Tae? He was the last person who should be lonely.
It softened me towards him. It didn’t make sense.
I barely knew the guy. He seemed nice enough, certainly willing to make friends, but willingness did not create a shared history. Willingness did not make us friends.
Even if I did sort of want to be.
“What about your group members?” I asked, massaging my sore knee.
“Do you know how they form groups, mate?” He huffed a laugh. “Friendships aren’t mandatory.”
My fingers stilled from where I’d been prodding my sore knee. The information didn’t surprise me, it was common knowledge that groups were put together based on a variety of factors; friendship rarely being among them.
“Is that why you called? You want to be friends?”
“Hell, why not?” He laughed.
I felt my lips twist in a grimace that wasn’t quite pity but was a close relative.
“I figured,” he went on, “that of all the people involved in this weird, love quadrangle, you and I are just window dressing.”
A bark of laughter escaped me, and it took me a moment to be able to speak.
“Explain,” I said, slightly breathlessly.
“Okay, see here’s the thing,” Tae began, enthusiastic, “Hyejin and Jihoon are the main attraction, right? The rags have been circling them for bloody ages, trying to catch them together, and spinning this whole unrequited love angle. But then you come in, the ‘dark-haired girl’.”
“You know about that, huh?” I asked weakly.
Tae made a dismissive sound. “There may be loads of us, but the idol world is small, and that was big.”
“Great,” I said, drawing the word out in a long, monotonous sound that made him laugh.
“So now we’ve got this angle where either Hyejin is the dark-haired girl or someone is cheating on someone.”
“And where do you fit into this quad we’re sharing?” I said. I picked idly at the frayed hems of my jeans.
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said confidently. “I’m the archetypal playboy, remember?
My role is interchangeable in any story.
In this case, I happened to have dinner in the wrong restaurant, at the wrong time.
So now I’m cheating with Hyejin on poor, old Jihoon.
Or, Hyejin is stringing us both along. It’s like those choose your own story books,” he said, and I snorted.
“You get to pick whichever version you like. Or whichever version sells more papers. Hey! That’s your job now, right? ”
“Hardly!” I said, affronted. “I don’t write splash-pieces.”
Nor would I, so long as I had a choice.
“Yeah, yeah, fair enough,” he agreed easily.
“So,” I said, picking up the threads of his analogy, “you and I are ‘window dressing’ because Joon and Hyejin are the main characters?”
“Bingo!”
“Holy hell,” I moaned.
“How does it feel to be a side character in your own life?” Tae asked cheerfully.
“Familiar,” I replied, darkly.
He laughed, and despite the subject we were discussing, I could see the funny side. I’d spent the whole day worried about this, but somehow I was laughing as if it was just more irreverent nonsense.
I inhaled, and it felt like I was able to get more air in than I had in hours.
“Do you ever get used to this?” I asked, expecting an equally irreverent quip, but instead he fell quiet, and I got the impression that no, no you didn’t.
“Can we just talk about something unrelated to any of that?” He asked, sighing so heavily I imagined I could feel the gust on my cheek.
“You wanna shoot the shit?” I guessed.
He laughed. “God, yes.”
“Okay.” My mind scrambled for some nonsense to talk about, some minutiae that had nothing to do with whatever was going.
“Tell me about Australia,” I said eventually. “Were you born there?”
“No,” he answered, sounding a little surprised at the question. “I moved there when I was four or five.”
“Why?” I prompted.
Tae laughed. “I don’t know what I expected from this conversation, but a bio wasn’t it.”
“What’s wrong with asking where you’re from? I didn’t think it was a secret. You sound like Crocodile Dundee, so if subtle was the plan, you’ve failed.”
He laughed again, loudly, and there was another sound, like the flumping noise a person makes when they sit down heavily on a sofa.
“It’s not that, but just so we’re clear, he was from the Northern Territories, I’m from Sydney. Not many crocs in the city.”
I made a dismissive sound but I couldn’t help smiling.
He continued. “Nah, it’s just weird being asked something like that, because usually people already know. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me about where I come from because they didn’t know, or just asked about me, actually.”
I couldn’t explain it, but I felt like I could see him frowning as he considered.
“Well, tell me now. I don’t know a damn thing about you.”
He laughed again, and this time I joined in. Just a little.
“Okay, well, I was born in Seoul, but my mum and I moved to Sydney when I was a little kid.”
“Why?” I repeated.
“So nosy,” he said in a teasing voice.
“Friends know this kind of shit about each other, so spill. Friend.”
Tae chuckled, and it was beginning to feel like a default for him.
“Sure, yeah. Okay. My folks divorced when I was little, and mum and I went to live with my aunt in Oz. Dad stayed in Seoul.”
Yikes. I’d been ribbing him as a kind of joke. Now I felt like an arsehole.
“Tae, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Don’t worry about it Ky it’s public knowledge. That’s what I mean though. Everyone I speak to already knows this stuff, or just doesn’t care about my life before Sol8. You don’t know shit. It’s refreshing, honestly.”
I could understand that.
“Did you miss Korea when you moved?”
He made a humming noise and took his time before answering.
“I don’t think so. I don’t really have a lot of family.
Dad and his parents are in Korea, but all my aunts, uncles and a couple of cousins are in Oz, so moving over there made more sense, and I was so young.
It’s not like I had a ton of friends to leave behind.
The hardest thing was learning English.” He chuckled.
“Even though we moved to, like, this little pocket of the city where all the families were Korean, it was hard, because my mum wanted us to speak English only.”
“Wow,” I exclaimed, sympathetic to the little boy he’d been. “That must have sucked.”
He laughed. “Yeah, but I think when you’re younger it’s easier.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Tell me about it. I’m twenty-three and I’m struggling trying to remember the difference between nouns and vowel endings in Korean.”
“Mate,” he scoffed, “you’ve never tried to learn English. Believe me, it’s harder.”
“Never said it was a competition, chum.”
“Life is a competition.”
I sighed. “I’m getting that idea.”
“Anyway, enough about me. Tell me about you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about how you’re doing at being a real journo.”
“How do you about that, by the way?” I didn’t bother trying to hide my surprise.
“I know everything, mate.”
“That’s creepy, Min Taeyang,” I scolded.
He laughed. “I’m kidding. I only know because I follow you on social media.”
“Do you?” I asked, astounded. You’d think I’d have noticed a name like that popping up in my follows.
As if he heard my train of thought, Tae clarified, “I use a different name for my casual account. No profile picture, that kind of thing. I saw you linked some of your articles. So, tell me; how’s it all going?”
That made sense. I knew some of GVibes had throw-away accounts, so I guessed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
“Wow, okay. Well, it’s going great actually,” I admitted, although it was still a struggle not to down play it. “I’ve written a handful of articles and they’ve all done pretty well, I think. I mean, no Pulitzer's yet, but it’s early days.”
“I read that first one you did. Not bad, Pom.”
I flushed at the unexpected praise.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“Hows your mum?”
“Better actually. Or, rather, she’s completed her course of chemo and radiotherapy. So, now we wait to see what the scans look like.”
“Hey, that’s great!”
“We’ll see.”
Unthinking, I raised my thumb nail to my mouth, before I heard Becka’s voice scolding me in my head. A hard habit to break.
Quietly, I wanted to celebrate, but it felt too soon, and too much like tempting fate. She seemed better, but… I couldn’t bear it if it turned out to be false hope, so I just chose the nearest form of neutrality I could.
“Message received,” he said. “What else is going on in Kaiya Thompson’s life? Did you notice I know your surname now? Buddy?”
I snorted. “Yes, well done, you.” I inhaled deeply, hesitating before saying- “I enrolled in college. For journalism.”
“What?” He exclaimed, loud enough to force me to pull the phone away from my ear. “Ky, that’s fucking amazing!”
His praise made me feel like I’d just graduated from Oxford with a distinction, as opposed to enrolling in an online course at a polytechnic.
“Yeah, yeah, alright,” I mumbled.
“I bet Jihoon is sweating bullets that his missus is suddenly part of the enemy hoard, huh?” He chuckled, and even I let out a wry huff.
“I don’t know that he sees it quite like that.”
“Still, I bet he’s proud as punch.”
I hesitated, the automatic agreement stalling on my tongue like the words had hit a stop sign.
Tae seemed to pick up on my lapse.
“What? What’d I say?”
“Nothing,” I hurried to say, giving myself a little shake.
“Is he not happy about this?” He probed.
I let out a little breath, not quite a sigh.
“Honestly, and I don’t know why I’m telling a total stranger this-”
He snorted.
“But we’ve barely talked about it.”
“What? Why the fuck not? I was kidding about you being the enemy, I wasn’t being serious.”