9. Chapter Nine #3
People start to appear. Lights flicker on down the street, doors bang open.
Voices, shouts. A man I recognize as Mr. Goh from three houses down comes running in his undershirt and sandals.
Then more of them, neighbors roused by the smoke and the noise, stumbling out into the dark in their pajamas.
Men rush forward. Someone produces another hose. Someone else starts hauling buckets.
I watch from the curb, flat on my back, staring up at the smoke pouring across the stars. My chest rattles with each breath. Mrs. Nam’s hand is still gripping my sleeve and I can feel her trembling beside me.
All I can remember is trying to breathe, and then eventually it just fades out.
I wake up to whitewashed walls and the antiseptic smell of hospital. My mom’s face hovers above me, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, her hand squeezing mine so tight it hurts.
“You’re awake,” she breathes, and then immediately her expression shifts from relief to fury. “You crazy child, what were you thinking? Running into a burning building—”
“Where’s Ryowoon?” I gasp in a sandpapery voice.
“He’s fine, he’s—”
“Where is he?”
“Next door.” She smooths my hair back from my forehead, her hand shaking. “You’re both idiots. Matched pair of absolute idiots.” Her voice cracks and she bends down, pressing her forehead to mine. “Brave, though. So brave. You saved her life, Seyeon.”
The relief makes me close my eyes against it. I remember Mrs. Nam’s small body crumpled on the floor, the pulse fluttering under my fingers. “The store?”
“It made it. Ryowoon got the fire under control before it could spread too far. The neighbors helped with the rest.” She pulls back, looking at me with an expression equal parts pride and devastation. “But not without a price.”
She’s still talking when the door slides open and Ryowoon slouches in, one arm wrapped in bandages from wrist to elbow, grinning victoriously.
“Look who’s awake.”
They keep me for days. Smoke inhalation, they say, from prolonged exposure.
My lungs took a beating and they want to monitor me, make sure there’s no lasting damage beyond what they can already see.
One of my palms is bandaged where I touched the wall getting Mrs. Nam out, blistered and raw underneath the gauze.
A few cuts from climbing through the broken window. Nothing that won’t heal.
Ryowoon’s left arm got the worst of it. Burns all down his forearm from fighting the flames, the skin angry and weeping under the bandages.
It takes weeks to heal properly and when it does it leaves behind a collection of shiny scars, pale against his skin, twisting from his wrist halfway to his elbow.
“More for the collection,” he says.
Mrs. Nam comes by every day. She had minor smoke inhalation, they tell her, nothing serious.
She cries when she sees us, clutches our hands, calls us her boys, her brave foolish boys.
The fire inspector comes by too, explains that the old space heater in her bedroom had faulty wiring, that she’d turned it on for the first time that season and it sparked within minutes.
They tell her she was incredibly lucky. That if we hadn’t walked by at that exact moment, if we’d been even ten minutes later, she wouldn’t have made it.
I think about that sometimes in the hours before sleep. How close it was. How easily it could have gone the other way.
When we’re finally discharged, the neighbors have already started repairs on the store.
Mr. Goh and Mr. Han and half the street show up with tools and lumber, patching walls, replacing the burnt shelving, scrubbing smoke damage from the ceiling.
Mrs. Nam declares that from that day forward neither Ryowoon nor I will pay for a single thing in her store ever again.
Free meals, free snacks, free everything.
True to her word, our fridges never stay empty after that. If my mom opens the door and finds the shelves bare, by the next morning there’s somehow rice and banchan and fresh vegetables waiting in containers. Ryowoon’s too.
The scars fade but they don’t disappear.
Mine on my palm, a shiny patch of skin that pulls tight when I make a fist. Ryowoon’s arm, mapped with marks.
And my lungs, damage that won’t become clear until later when I’m wheezing after climbing a flight of stairs, when the cold air makes my chest seize up, when I wake in the middle of the night feeling like I’m drowning on dry land.
But we’re alive. Mrs. Nam’s alive. The store survived.
And through all of it, Ryowoon and I are still standing.
That spring I break up with Minjoo and feel almost nothing about it.
She cries a little, which makes me feel guilty enough to buy her a milk tea from the vending machine and sit with her on the bench outside the school gate until she stops sniffling.
But walking home afterward, the evening light stretching long across the pavement, I don’t feel the ache I felt after Jiae, or even after Sohee.
Just a vague looseness, like setting down a bag I didn’t realize I’d been carrying.
Three days later Haeil catches me behind the gym with my hands on Yujin’s waist, a second year with a short bob and a laugh that makes my ears warm, and he doesn’t even have the decency to be subtle about it.
He tells everyone. By lunch the next day Jinwon is shaking his head at me across the cafeteria table, Sihyung is cackling into his rice, and Haeil is pointing at me with his chopsticks calling me a stone-cold scoundrel, a menace to the women of Haemok, a villain in a school uniform.
“You didn’t even wait a week,” Yoohan says, looking impressed.
“Three days,” Haeil corrects. “Three days. The man is ruthless.”
I shove a spoonful of rice into my mouth and say nothing.
Ryowoon, lounging beside me with his chair tipped back on two legs and a toothpick between his teeth, just grins.
Spring settles in. Cherry blossoms come and go, the air turns soft, the days get longer. I can feel summer approaching in the shifting of the light, the breeze off the harbor starts carrying heat instead of cold.
And then one afternoon Ryowoon appears at the door of the classroom where I’ve barricaded myself with a stack of textbooks and a cold can of coffee, leans against the frame with his arms folded, and says, “Get up.”
I don’t look up from my notes. “Busy.”
“You’re coming outside.”
“Can’t. I’ve got two chapters left on this section and then I need to review my—”
He crosses the room, plucks the textbook out of my hands, and holds it above his head. Which, given the stupid height advantage he’s gained, puts it well out of my reach.
“Ryowoon.”
“Soccer. You and me. School field. Now.”
“Give me my book.”
“Come take it.”
I jump for it. He laughs and lifts it higher and I crash into his chest, which is infuriatingly solid these days and doesn’t budge.
I shove at him, he shoves back, and before I know it he’s got me in a headlock and is dragging me toward the door while I swear at him and try to hook my foot around a desk leg.
By the time we reach the field I’ve given up fighting and started changing into my gym shoes, muttering about how he’s going to be responsible for my grades dropping and therefore my entire future collapsing. Ryowoon kicks a ball at me in response and it catches me in the thigh.
“Ow!”
“That’s for being dramatic. Come on.”
There are no rules when it’s just the two of us.
No teams, no positions, no keeping score past the first few minutes.
We play like we fight, with everything, elbows and knees and blatant fouls that would get us thrown out of any real match.
The late afternoon sun hammers down on the field, not yet the ruthless heat of summer but enough to make me sweat through my shirt within minutes.