6. Chapter Six #4
Ryowoon squats on the curb just past the gate, knees pulled up, arms draped across them.
His school uniform looks like he slept in it, wrinkled, his tie hanging loose around his neck.
His face stops me. It’s not angry, which would be normal.
It’s not bruised, which would also be normal.
Instead he has a horribly empty look on his face, drained of emotion, his eyes fixed on a crack in the pavement between his feet.
“Ryowoon, what are you—”
“My mom left.”
I close my mouth. Open it again. Close it.
Ryowoon doesn’t look up. He continues tonelessly, “Took off sometime yesterday. Her clothes are still in the closet. Didn’t leave a note, didn’t say shit to anyone. Just gone.”
A bus rumbles past on the road below us, the diesel smell trailing behind it.
Down the hill a dog barks. I stand there with my hand still on the gate, and I can’t find a single word that doesn’t sound stupid or useless in my head.
I’m sorry? Are you okay? Obviously not. Do you know where she went? He just said he doesn’t.
So I say nothing. I let go of the gate and wait.
After a minute Ryowoon pushes himself upright, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder.
He doesn’t look at me but he starts walking, and I fall into step beside him.
We take the familiar route downhill, past the corner where the persimmon tree drops overripe fruit onto the sidewalk every autumn, past Mrs. Nam’s store where the roll-down doors are already up and I can hear her radio playing trot music inside.
Neither of us stops. Ryowoon’s jaw is set and his stride is faster than usual and I walk faster to keep up without comment.
By second period the whole school knows.
Small towns are like that. News teleports.
By the time I’m sitting in math class I’ve already overheard three separate conversations about it, whispered between desks, murmured in the hallway.
Cha Ryowoon’s mom ran away. Just abandoned him.
Left him with that drunk father of his. Can you blame her though?
I grip my pencil until my knuckles ache.
Lunch is the worst. Ryowoon and I eat on the roof most days now, away from the cafeteria crowds, but today he went to buy ramyeon from the vending machine downstairs and I’m waiting for him when I hear the commotion echoing up the stairwell.
I start moving automatically, taking the stairs two at a time, rounding the landing to the second floor where a knot of bodies has gathered near the vending machines.
I see four of them, from the class next door—Jungpil and his crew, the ones who’ve had it out for Ryowoon since middle school, since Ryowoon broke Jungpil’s nose in a fight over god knows what back in seventh grade.
Jungpil’s at the front, arms crossed, a smug look plastered on his face, talking loud enough for the gathering audience to hear.
“—guess the apple doesn’t fall far, huh? Your old man’s such a piece of shit even your own mother couldn’t stand—”
Ryowoon’s fist connects with Jungpil’s mouth before he finishes the sentence.
The wet crack of a knuckle against teeth echoes through the stairwell, and Jungpil staggers sideways into the vending machine hard enough to rattle the cans inside.
The hallway erupts. Jungpil’s friends surge forward and Ryowoon meets them with his shoulders squared and that look on his face I know too well, beyond caring about consequences.
I don’t hesitate for even a second. I launch myself headfirst into the fray as I grab the nearest one by the back of his collar and yank him off Ryowoon, and when he spins around swinging I duck under his arm and drive my fist into his stomach, feeling the impact travel up my wrist into my forearm.
He buckles. Someone grabs my hair from behind and pain lances across my scalp and I throw my elbow back, feel it connect with something soft as someone grunts, the grip loosens. I twist free.
Ryowoon and I end up back to back, him trading blows with Jungpil while I try to keep the other two off us, all of us crammed between the vending machines and the wall.
It’s clumsy and messy and nothing like the movies.
I take a hit to the ear that makes the world ring and throw a punch that mostly hits shoulder, Ryowoon headbutts Jungpil and splatters blood everywhere, and then a teacher is shoving through the crowd screaming and it’s over.
We kneel in the disciplinary office with our hands raised above our heads, arms trembling from holding the position.
Mr. Kwon—whose office, to this day, still faintly smells of fish no matter how many times they’ve cleaned it—paces in front of us delivering a lecture about conduct and consequences that I tune out within thirty seconds.
My ear is still ringing and Ryowoon’s breathing sounds harsh beside me.
All I can think about is the look on his face in the hallway, the split second before the punch landed, the way his body coiled and then exploded forward.
Like he’d been waiting for someone to give him a reason.
My mom arrives forty minutes later. I hear her voice in the front office, quiet and polite, and my stomach sinks.
When she appears in the doorway and sees the two of us—kneeling, bruised, shirts untucked and bloodied—her face cycles through several expressions in quick succession.
She thanks Mr. Kwon tightly, bows to the principal, takes us both by the arm and walks us out.
She doesn’t say a word until we’re through the school gate. Then she looks at Ryowoon, at the swelling around his eye, the blood dried on his lower lip, and her grip on his arm lightens. She steers us home.
In the kitchen she sits us at the table and brings out the first aid kit, the same dented metal box she’s been using on scraped knees since I was small.
She starts with Ryowoon. Tips his chin up with her fingers, examining the cut on his brow, the bruise already darkening beneath his eye.
She dabs antiseptic on the cut and Ryowoon hisses through his teeth but holds still, his eyes fixed on the far wall, his jaw so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
“Does it sting?” my mom asks softly.
“No.”
She smooths a bandage over the cut, her touch careful. “You’re staying for dinner. I’m making doenjang-jjigae.”
Ryowoon’s jaw clenches harder. He nods once without speakin, his throat working as he swallows, his hands balled into fists on his knees under the table where my mom can’t see them.
She moves on to cleaning the scrape across his knuckles and she doesn’t ask what happened.
Doesn’t push. She hums faintly as she works.
Ryowoon sits there letting her tend to him with a tight expression.
She pulls me into the hallway after, once Ryowoon is settled on the floor of my room with a bag of frozen peas against his eye.
“Fighting.” She keeps her voice low but the disappointment is loud in it. “Seyeon. You’ve never—you don’t do this.”
“They were saying things about his mom.”
My mother’s mouth thins. She glances toward the bedroom door, then back at me, the anger fading. She looks tired and sad as she rubs her forehead with one hand.
“That poor boy,” she murmurs. “He’s never going to catch a break in this life, is he?”
I don’t have an answer for that either.
She sighs, pats my cheek once gently over the bruise, and tells me to go sit with him, that dinner will be ready in an hour. I go.
Things settle slowly the way they always do in our town, grudgingly, gossip fading only when something new comes along to replace it.
Ryowoon stops flinching every time someone mentions mothers in conversation.
The cut on his brow scabs over, scars faintly, joins the collection.
He doesn’t talk about her again and I don’t bring it up.
Fall bleeds into winter. The hills turn brown and skeletal, the harbor wind works its way through every jacket I own.
I start dating Sohee from the class next to ours.
She’s funny, a little loud, teases me about my study habits and steals bites of my lunch without asking.
When I tell Ryowoon he shrugs, says “Cool,” and keeps walking, but the wall that was there last time isn’t there.
I’m careful to split my time. Walk Sohee to her bus after school, then double back up the hill to find Ryowoon at Mrs. Nam’s or at the harbor or wherever he’s landed.
Some afternoons I skip seeing Sohee altogether because I can tell from the way Ryowoon holds his cigarette that something happened at home.
Those nights I don’t go home until late.
We sit on the retaining wall above the harbor, legs dangling, passing a cigarette back and forth because Ryowoon’s running low.
Ryowoon doesn’t describe what happens behind that door but I see the fingermarks on his upper arm.
The stiffness in his walk, favoring his left side.
He shows up some mornings moving like every step hurts.
I ask once if he wants to stay at my place and he shakes his head, blowing smoke toward the water.
“He’d just come get me again.”
So I sit beside him and we watch the fishing boats and I don’t push.
My sneakers squeak on the linoleum as I round the corner, chest heaving from the sprint from the bus stop. The receptionist barely looked up when I gasped out Ryowoon’s name and pointed toward the elevator.
Third floor. Room 304.
I slow as I approach the door, my pulse thundering in my ears.
The number stares back at me ominously. I had a bad feeling when Ryowoon didn’t show up to school this morning.
That feeling became a stone in my gut when I came home from school and found my mom there.
Home in the middle of the day when she should’ve been at the restaurant, her face drawn, eyes brimming with tears.
I shove the door open.