20. Chapter 20
Denny materialized on the threshold between the Hans’ living room and their back porch, making such a disruptive entrance that the crickets briefly stopped chirping. He swept the glass door aside with the air of a behemoth rolling a boulder for sport. His stance matched the exact energy of an ancient, judgmental monolith casting its shadow across vast, windswept plains.
Eunjae sat bolt upright in his metal patio chair. Balanced on the porch rail, Jiyeon stifled a laugh.
“It”s been fifteen hours,” barked Denny. “Go time.”
“Right. I pulled it up already, just need to hit the order button.”
“So do it, then. God.”
“Woosung-ah,” called Jiyeon, hopping down from the rail. She went to poke Denny in the cheek. Even without the heeled boots she’d worn to work, she stood only a few inches shorter. “You sound a little jealous. Wanna come sit with the big kids?”
“Ryan doesn’t count as one of the big kids.” He pitched a water bottle at Eunjae, who caught it with a yelp. “Stay hydrated! And she’s older than you, make sure you’re showing proper respect. No slacking off just because I wasn’t here to supervise.”
“I’m barely older than him. It’s like six-ish months. Ryan’s birthday is in July.”
“You know his birthday now? I told you not to get attached!”
“Hmm. I’m not allowed to know his birthday, but you are?”
“I needed to know it,” hissed Denny, “to run a background check. Duh.”
Eunjae set the water bottle on the table, right next to Denny’s laptop. He scrolled through the grocery order he’d assembled half an hour ago, before Jiyeon got back from the salon and came to see what he was up to. He’d moved to another tab as soon as she stepped onto the porch, minimizing an email from one of his brothers and a PDF attachment covered in columns of microscopic print.
It was better if she didn”t see. The PDF probably counted as information she didn’t want tortured out of her. Also, Eunjae didn”t know how to explain his browsing history or why he was ordering random junk food through an Australian grocery chain.
He’d picked the store ten minutes’ drive from his father”s empty house in Brisbane. He knew it would be empty because Simon Song traveled for work at least three or four days a week. Probably more than that, actually, now that he had nothing to come home to except the floral arrangement left by the cleaners. Eunjae’s mother had moved to Sydney after the divorce. Not long after that, she’d enrolled eleven-year-old Ezra at Blackridge Academy, an exclusive international boarding school in Singapore.
Eunjae hit the checkout button and used his company card to pay. Emerald’s watchdogs should”ve seen the plane ticket purchase hours and hours ago; if they were monitoring him as closely as he thought, this transaction would be noted as well. Thanks to something Denny called a VPN, checking the IP address would only tell his pursuers that Eunjae was in Australia.
He was banking on one crucial thing: the agency would never admit that they”d lost him. Not at this stage. They would want to retrieve Eunjae without anyone guessing that he”d slipped through their fingers in the first place. Thus, there would be no asking the airport to view CCTV footage, no canvassing door to door within a ten mile radius of the hotel where he”d stayed. Those were extreme measures that risked media coverage. They would try to get at him by other means until he pushed them too far.
So, for now, Eunjae could count on them to watch this credit card. Whoever had been sent to find him would be under strict orders not to draw attention. That limited how thoroughly they could search. He thought of this as his main advantage.
His other advantage was how little the company”s representatives seemed to know about him. Eunjae would never run away to his childhood home. Nor would he ever voluntarily take shelter with either of his parents. Any of his brothers could”ve told them: that house no longer symbolized home to Eunjae in any sense of the word. His parents didn”t count as shelter.
The website accepted his card without complaint. Eunjae exited the tab and then closed the laptop, braced once again for the karmic payback slap he”d surely earned by now. But there was no clap of thunder except Denny’s voice.
“That”s the book he wanted? Are you kidding?”
“I suppose it really is true,” Jiyeon mused. “You”re either a Brass Key kid or you”re a Molly Merriweather kid, and there”s no middle ground.”
Eunjae stared at them both. “Hold on,” he said. “You”ve read it, too? You”ve read The Brass Key?”
“Sure we have,” answered Jiyeon.
“And we hated it,” added Denny.
Crestfallen, Eunjae said, “Oh. Okay.”
“We didn”t hate it. You suck, Den. Go back inside.” Jiyeon dropped into the patio chair opposite Eunjae”s. She offered him the same apologetic smile from Wednesday night, only this time it held a touch of mirth.
“While you were reading that series, we were reading Molly Merriweather. Those books came out around the same time. I remember all the kids at school were obsessed with one or the other.”
Eunjae had never heard of Molly Merriweather, a confession which offended Denny to the core. “Well, Molly’s amazing,” he declared. “Her mom was basically Indiana Jones, only smarter and not wearing an ugly hat. And Molly had like twenty different pets.” Denny began counting these off on his fingers. “There was a squirrel, three penguins, a chinchilla… oh, the Komodo dragon. How’d I forget him?”
Jiyeon explained, “Instead of going through a magical door, Molly ends up transported to different worlds when she touches certain objects. Or sometimes it’s the same world, but she’s thrown into a different time period. Her mom is an archaeologist so she comes across a lot of artifacts. They travel all over.”
“It was about the evils of colonialism and the societal prison of traditional gender roles,” said Denny, as he left them on the porch. He was now a man on a mission. “I’m gonna find those books and make you read them.”
“I think I would’ve really liked that series when I was a kid,” Eunjae admitted to Jiyeon, once her brother had gone. “I only had the books my nanny brought me, though. She’s the one who gave me The Brass Key. Later, she tracked down the rest of the series at garage sales and the flea market. She wanted me to have them at home so I could read whenever I wanted, even if my parents didn’t have time to bring me to the library. Or if they didn’t want to.”
Home. When Eunjae was little, the house in Brisbane felt the way a home should feel, but only when Miss Vivi was there. She lived with them in a shoebox of a room that always smelled like perfume and the posy of flowers she kept on the altar by her narrow bed. A framed print of the Virgin Mary occupied this altar, and a wooden rosary with beads worn smooth by Miss Vivi’s fingers.
She was always singing. The house swelled with music throughout the day. Eunjae learned dozens of songs with her, from Disney movies and the radio. He studied the ballads that played during Miss Vivi’s treasured drama programs, in English and Korean, Japanese and Tagalog. Whatever she was watching, whatever she was singing, he would sing it with her. He remembered going through a phase when he was very young, stubbornly believing that it was fine to communicate only through snatches and snippets of song lyrics, or by humming melodies instead of pronouncing words. Miss Vivi always knew what he was trying to tell her.
But she didn”t live with them on the weekends. From Friday night until Sunday afternoon, she returned to her sister’s house in town, leaving Eunjae with his face pressed to the panes of the downstairs windows. Unmoored without Miss Vivi, he fled into the pages of his books.
“Do you still keep in touch with her?” asked Jiyeon. “Your nanny.”
“No. My parents… fired her. I was thirteen, almost fourteen. After they sent her away, I didn’t know how to reach her. I think she tried to write to me a few times but Mum was still mad and got rid of the letters. When I moved to Korea, I only knew that her name was Vivian. Miss Vivi.”
He hadn’t talked about her for so long. Why did it still hurt so much?
“So they wouldn’t buy you books, and they didn’t want to bring you to the library. They gave you a nanny to love you and raise you because they weren’t around, and then they took her away.” Something fierce glittered in her brown eyes.
He looked down at his shoes. “Pretty much.”
Jiyeon pushed the water bottle in his direction. Gently, she said, “I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it anymore. But… wherever she is right now, I bet she still loves you.”
“I still love her, too.”
Eunjae uncapped the bottle, grateful to drink and have an excuse not to talk. He”d drained almost half when his phone went off, rattling on the black metal tabletop like something possessed. Jungwoo’s name popped up, along with the words INCOMING VIDEO CALL.
Jiyeon saw the notification and vacated her chair right away, rushing to give him some privacy. Even so, six of Eunjae”s nine brothers still managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of her as she left the porch. Nothing substantial, just the back of Jiyeon’s pale blue blouse and a fall of long, dark hair, but that was more than enough.
Immediately, Jesse shrieked, “You”re with a girl?”