9. Chapter Nine
Once, Ryowoon and I used to stand shoulder to shoulder.
He was always a little faster, a little more agile, but we spent most of our childhood being close to the same size.
As our seventeenth birthday comes and passes, I find myself every day having to tip my head back just a little more to meet his eyes.
Ryowoon hits a growth spurt and just keeps going.
By the time school starts, he’s half a head taller than me and seems like he has room to spare.
His voice drops lower, becomes rougher, loses the last traces of boyishness.
His lean frame starts to thicken with adult muscle, shoulders broadening, arms getting solid in a way that makes the other guys whistle and punch him in appreciation when we’re changing for gym class.
I start to feel small around him. Self-conscious.
Skinny and gangly and lighter in all the ways Ryowoon isn’t.
My uniforms hang off me like I’m a scarecrow.
When we stand next to each other now there’s this obvious difference that wasn’t there before, like somewhere between sixteen and seventeen he became a man while I’m still catching up.
The girls, though, seem to think I’m doing just fine.
I don’t have a change as dramatic as Ryowoon’s, but I’m starting to fill out too.
The roundness I had in my cheeks as a child transforms into my mother’s elegant bone structure, cheekbones cutting through where baby fat used to sit.
My shoulders start to fill out my uniform until my mother’s making adjustments every other week so I don’t rip the seams. Girls bat their eyelashes at me in the hall and slip notes into my books at school.
Boram from fourth class asks me to meet her on the roof between periods and we spend twenty minutes making out until the bell rings, her hands fisted in my shirt, my back pressed against the wall while she kisses me breathless.
Yoonjung, a senior girl I know from volunteering at the teacher’s office, slips me a candy wrapped with a note asking me to meet her at the docks after school.
I come back to school the next day tired, dazed, my brain foggy and my body feeling loose and strange.
When my friends catch on they corner me outside at lunch and force me to give them the details.
They cackle with delight, shoving me around, teasing me relentlessly about becoming the first of our friend group to become a “real man.” Ryowoon joins right in, grinning wide, looking more and more amused as I become more and more entangled in girl drama when the only thing I really want to do is study.
College entrance exams loom closer every day, and I’m obsessive about my grades, staying up late reviewing notes, drilling myself on vocabulary and formulas until my eyes cross.
Nonetheless, when Minjoo from our homeroom asks me if I want to be her boyfriend, I agree. If for no other reason than to avoid all the other girls running me ragged in their attempts to monopolize my attention.
Dating Minjoo is fine. She’s pretty, smart, laughs at my jokes. We hold hands between classes and she kisses me goodbye at the gate after school. But I don’t feel any urgency. With Minjoo it’s comfortable. Safe. I can kiss her and still keep half my brain on the history exam I have next week.
Ryowoon, on the other hand, doesn’t seem interested in dating anyone.
Girls approach him too, bolder now that he’s gotten taller and broader, drawn to his rough edges and the dangerous air he carries without trying.
But he brushes them off, says he’s got better things to do than waste time on that shit.
He spends most of his free time working on cars, taking jobs from neighbors and people passing through town, saving every bit of cash he earns.
When he’s not under the hood of someone’s beat-up sedan, he’s at the store with me or smoking behind the school with Haeil, the two of them looking increasingly like trouble waiting to happen.
We still run the streets together when we can, still meet up with Jinwon, Haeil, Sihyung, and Yoohan to mess around at the harbor or hike up into the woods.
But there’s a shift happening, subtle but undeniable.
We’re not kids anymore. Responsibilities start creeping in.
Jobs, entrance exams, the looming question of what comes after graduation.
The future presses down on all of us, makes everything feel heavier.
Ryowoon gets quieter as the year goes on.
He still jokes around, still shoves me when I say something stupid, still shows up at my window late at night when things get bad at home.
But there’s a growing hardness in his eyes now, distant.
Like he’s already looking past Haemok, already planning his escape.
I don’t blame him. If I had his life, I’d want to run too.
The cram school in Yeonsan costs more than I can make in three months at the store. I stare at the flyer pinned to the bulletin board outside the school office for a long time, thinking of all the ways I can make it work.
I pick up every after-school shift Mrs. Nam will give me, working the register until close, restocking shelves by lamplight while she dozes in her chair behind the counter with her drama playing on the staticky TV.
On weekends I tutor middle schoolers at the community center, two kids whose parents pooled together to pay me what amounts to pocket change but pocket change adds up.
I hunt down used prep books at secondhand shops, beg the school librarian to let me borrow reference materials overnight, spend my lunch periods copying practice problems out of books I can’t afford to buy into a cheap notebook I keep rubber-banded shut.
Pretty soon there’s no version of spending time with me that doesn’t involve studying.
Jinwon tries dragging me to the harbor one Saturday and I bring my flashcards.
Haeil gives up on me within a week, calling me a lost cause.
Sihyung and Yoohan still swing by Mrs. Nam’s on their way home from school but they know I’m not going anywhere.
Ryowoon adapts.
He just shows up. The free study hall on the other side of town opens its doors to anyone with a student ID, a long, low room with lights that hum and rows of particleboard desks crammed together.
I go every day after my shift at the store.
And every day, without fail, Ryowoon is waiting for me at the crossroads, hands in his pockets, cigarette between his teeth, falling into step beside me as we make the twenty-minute walk across town.
He claims a desk next to mine each night. Opens a notebook. Hunches over it with his brow furrowed in what looks like concentration if you don’t know any better.
But I know him, and I glance over one evening and see him sketching a detailed cross-section of a carburetor, shading in the chambers with the eraser end of his pencil. Another night it’s an exhaust manifold. The night after that it’s a part I don’t recognize with pistons.
He’s not there to study. I know that, he knows that, and neither of us says it out loud.
He’s there because if he isn’t, I’ll sit at that desk until my vision blurs and my hand cramps and I forget to eat.
He’s there because someone has to be the one to break the spell when I go too deep into my own head, when the anxiety about exams and money and the future starts to eat me alive and I can’t tell anymore whether I’m studying because I want to or because I’m terrified of what happens if I stop.
He does it in the most annoying ways possible, naturally.
A corn chip bounces off my temple. I ignore it. Another one. Then another, this one landing in the crease of my open textbook.
“Ryowoon.”
“What.”
“Stop throwing food at me.”
“Stop ignoring me when I talk to you.”
“I’m trying to finish this section.”
“You’ve been on that section for two hours.” His boot connects with my shin under the desk and I jolt, hissing. “Come outside with me. I need a smoke and you need to not be a psycho for five minutes.”
“I’m fine.”
Another kick. Harder.
“Ow! God, what is wrong with you?”
“Break. Now. Or I start aiming for your kneecap.”
I shove my chair back and follow him outside, my shin throbbing.
We lean against the wall of the building in the dark, the night air cool enough to need jackets now, breath fogging.
He lights two cigarettes and hands me one without asking.
I take it. I know I should quit. My lungs already feel tight most days from the years of on-and-off smoking and the dust that collects in our cramped basement room at home.
But standing here with Ryowoon in the quiet, the two of us wreathed in smoke, the muffled sounds of the town settling around us, makes the knot in my chest loosen just enough to breathe.
The weeks tumble along. School, store, tutoring, study hall, sleep, repeat.
I become a machine built for one purpose, and Ryowoon becomes my only tether to the world outside of it.
He walks me to the study hall and walks me back.
He brings me food when I forget. He kicks me until I take breaks.
He draws his engine parts beside me, silent when I need silence, loud and obnoxious when I’ve been quiet too long.
One night at the end of fall, I’m so absorbed in studying I don’t glance at the clock for hours.
I hunch over a mock quiz for the Korean language section, pencil scratching, mouthing the passages to myself as I work through comprehension questions.
A long groan sounds from beside me. “Seyeon.”
“Mm.”
“Seyeon, I’m going to die.”
“Hold on.”
“I mean it. I’m going to die right here. My stomach is going to eat itself and I’m going to collapse on this shitty desk and they’re going to find my corpse in the morning.”
“Just give me one more—”
“It’s past ten.”