6. Chapter Six #3
But I keep watch on it. Ryowoon and Haeil selling cigarettes behind the gymnasium, pocketing crumpled bills from younger students.
Ryowoon picking fights again, coming to school with scraped knuckles and a swollen eye, grinning about it like it’s sport.
Older kids from Yeonsan showing up at the harbor wall looking for the punk who mouthed off to their friend, and Ryowoon walking straight toward them while the rest of us hang back.
He doesn’t want my interference. Makes that clear every time I try, shutting me out with a look or a word or just walking faster until I can’t keep up.
I date Jiae through the winter. I hold her hand walking through the market. I kiss her behind the school. But something gnaws at me, and I realize after a while that it has nothing to do with Jiae. It’s the empty space beside me where Ryowoon used to be.
At lunch one day I notice Ryowoon’s empty seat. His bag’s still at his desk, jacket draped over the back of his chair, so he hasn’t left the building. I eat half my rice and then push away from the table, ignoring Jinwon’s questioning look as I slip out.
I find him behind the gymnasium sitting on the overturned bucket that’s become his throne back here, knees apart, cigarette between his fingers, staring at the concrete. He looks up when he hears my footsteps, a cautious look moving behind his eyes before he makes his face neutral.
I stop in front of him and hold my hand out.
“Give me one.”
His brows lift. He looks at my hand, then at my face questioningly. When he doesn’t find a reason not to he reaches into his jacket and shakes a cigarette loose from the pack, placing it between my fingers without a word.
I put it between my lips and wait. Ryowoon watches me for a beat, then flicks his lighter, cupping his free hand around the flame and holding it out. I lean forward, touching the tip to the fire, and inhale.
Everything goes wrong at once. The smoke flows down the back of my throat and my lungs seize up, rejecting it violently.
I cough so hard I double over, eyes watering, the cigarette almost falling from my fingers.
My chest burns and I can’t stop hacking and wheezing, bracing one hand on my knee while the other clutches the cigarette like my life depends on it.
Ryowoon’s laughs loudly, throwing his head back, shoulders shaking, smoke streaming from his nostrils.
“What the fuck was that?” He grins broadly, the split in his lower lip from a fight last week stretching. “You look like a dying cat.”
“Shut up,” I rasp, straightening. My eyes are streaming. I wipe them on my sleeve and bring the cigarette back to my mouth with what I hope looks like determination and not insanity.
“You’re gonna puke.”
“I’m not gonna puke.”
I inhale again, with a smaller breath. It still burns but I manage to hold it for a second before letting it go in a thin stream that doesn’t look anything like Ryowoon’s easy exhales. He shakes his head, still smirking, and takes a drag from his own.
“Pathetic.”
“I’m learning.”
I cough again, less violently. Lean against the wall beside him, our shoulders close and I stay.
Ryowoon doesn’t tell me to leave. Doesn’t ask why I’m here or what I want.
He just smokes, and I smoke badly beside him, and after a while he starts talking about the stray cat he found near the docks this morning, a calico with a torn ear, and how he wants to bring it some of the dried fish from Mrs. Nam’s pantry.
His voice sounds lighter, by the time the bell rings for afternoon classes it feels like breathing again.
So I keep showing up. Every day when Ryowoon disappears from the cafeteria or drifts toward the back of the school I follow, and he hands me a cigarette without being asked now, the lighter passing between us in an easy exchange.
I get better at it. Stop coughing by the second week, learn to pull the smoke in slow, hold it, let it go.
It still tastes awful but the awfulness becomes familiar, becomes the price of sitting next to him in comfortable silence or trading insults while our legs dangle off the edge of the loading dock behind the cafeteria.
He stops shutting me out. The cold shoulder gradually thaws.
One afternoon he steals my textbook and holds it over his head, laughing when I jump for it.
The next he shoves a bag of shrimp chips into my hands at Mrs. Nam’s store and tells me I look skinny and my mom would kill him if I withered away on his watch.
Things slot back into place, rickety and imperfect, I can breathe again.
When the whole group gathers on the school roof or down at the harbor wall I light up alongside Ryowoon and Haeil.
Jinwon wrinkles his nose but doesn’t comment.
Sihyung tries one, gags, and swears off them forever.
Yoohan just watches with mild fascination.
I lean back against the railing with Ryowoon beside me and the smoke drifts out over the water and I tell myself this is fine. This is worth it.
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.