11. Chapter Eleven #2
“NUMBER ONE! FIRST IN THE CLASS, YOU ABSOLUTE FREAK!” Haeil shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth like he’s announcing it to the entire peninsula.
Jinwon grabs me by both shoulders and shakes me, beaming, says Seyeon you did it, you crazy son of a bitch. Sihyung is hopping around like he scored first himself, telling anyone within earshot that that’s his friend up there, that’s Heo Seyeon right there, best in the whole school.
One of the teachers sticks her head out the window and yells at us to keep it down and Haeil yells back something so rude that she disappears and we know we’ve got about thirty seconds before the disciplinary officer shows up.
We scatter.
The rest of the year is just waiting. Waiting for the acceptance letters.
Waiting for spring. Waiting for whatever comes next to announce itself.
The days unspool, easier and lighter, the pressure valve released.
I still study, because I don’t know how to not, but not with that fervent desperation anymore.
I can breathe again. My mom stops finding untouched meals on the counter in the morning.
I start sleeping before midnight. I gain back the weight I lost in the fall, fill back into my uniform enough that it stops hanging off my shoulders the way it had been.
The letter comes in late February. In a crisp white envelope stamped with the university seal, heavier than it should be for a rejection. My fingers close around it and my heart starts slamming.
I don’t open it right away, instead I tuck it into my jacket and I run.
Ryowoon is at the usual spot in the woods, sitting on the big rock above the creek bed with a cigarette, and from the way his head snaps up when he hears me crashing through the underbrush he knows.
The others show up within twenty minutes because that’s how it works here, news travels at the speed of a small town and the sight of me sprinting through the streets with a white envelope clutched to my chest wasn’t subtle.
They gather in a rough circle. Jinwon on the rock beside Ryowoon, Haeil perched on a fallen log, Sihyung cross-legged on the ground picking at the grass.
Yoohan leans against a tree, watching me with bright expectant eyes.
Ryowoon is the only one who doesn’t look anxious.
He looks at me with steady calm, his cigarette burning forgotten between his fingers, and waits.
I tear the envelope.
I read the first line. Read it again. The characters are clear and my brain is functioning fine, it just takes a second for the information to migrate from my eyes to whatever part of me needs to receive it before it becomes real.
I look up.
“I got in.”
For a split second nothing happens. Then the forest explodes.
Haeil screams a full-throated scream, the sound you’d make if you saw a ghost or won the lottery, and he launches off the log.
Sihyung grabs my arm and yanks me sideways, Yoohan tackles me from behind, Jinwon is there too, all of them piling on, hands on my back and shoulders and head, a chaos of shouting and laughter so loud that birds burst from the canopy above us.
Ryowoon’s voice cuts through all of it, this crackling “FUCK YES” that comes from above me and rings off the trees.
They hoist me up. I don’t know whose hands are where, just that I’m airborne, my feet leaving the ground as they grab me under the arms and knees and lift me onto their shoulders like I scored the winning goal in the World Cup instead of getting a letter.
I choke on my laughter, the paper still crumpled in my fist as they parade me through the clearing, stumbling over roots and rocks and each other.
“Put me down, you animals, you’re going to drop me—”
They do drop me. Into the creek.
The water is freezing, snowmelt cold, and the shock of it swallows my shout as I go under.
I come up gasping, sputtering, the acceptance letter now soaked through and plastered to my palm, and I barely get air into my lungs before Haeil cannonballs in beside me, drenching me all over again.
Sihyung goes next, shrieking as he hits the water, and then Yoohan, and Jinwon wades in shaking his head and grinning and saying they’re all going to catch pneumonia.
Ryowoon stands on the bank above us, looking down with his arms folded and his cigarette between his teeth, this look on his face that I’ve seen a thousand times, the one that says he thinks we’re all idiots but wouldn’t trade a single one of us.
“Get in here!” Haeil shouts, slapping water at him.
“I’m not getting in that freezing shit.”
“YES YOU ARE.”
Sihyung and Yoohan rush the bank and grab his ankles and he goes down cursing, all six-two of him crashing into the shallow creek with a splash that soaks everything within ten feet.
He comes up swearing, black hair plastered flat against his skull, his cigarette floating sadly on the surface of the water beside him.
He looks at me, water streaming down his face, and his wide, crooked grin, the scar on his jaw pulling with it, is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
We stay in the water until our lips turn blue and our fingers prune, and even then Haeil tries to start a splash fight. Eventually Jinwon, the only one among us with any survival instinct, herds us all out and we climb the bank shivering and dripping and leaning against each other.
But the euphoria has a half-life.
I sit at my desk that weekend and pull out the shoebox I keep under my bed.
I dump it out and count. Smooth the wrinkled bills flat, stack the coins, add it all up twice because the first number can’t be right.
Then I pull out the crumpled pamphlet I got from the school counselor’s office months ago, the one with the tuition breakdown and dormitory fees and meal plan costs printed in neat columns.
I sit there for a long time looking at the two numbers side by side. What I have. What I need. The gap between them is too wide.
I factor in what I make at the store, what I could make if I picked up more hours between now and fall, what I might scrape together tutoring over the summer.
Subtract rent, food, the bus fare to get to campus.
I scribble figures on the back of an old worksheet until the margins are full of crossed-out calculations and none of them come out any different.
Monday morning I find Mrs. Nam behind the counter sorting through her delivery invoice and ask if she can give me more shifts. She looks at me over the rim of her reading glasses, studies my face for a moment, and says she’ll see what she can do without question.
At lunch I’m quiet. I sit on the school roof with my bento balanced on my knee, chopsticks idle, staring at the food.
Jinwon and the others are talking around me about the soccer tournament next week, Haeil complaining about his math teacher.
I tune it out, doing arithmetic in my head again, looking for a different answer.
Ryowoon drops beside me, his own lunch a convenience store triangle kimbap and a carton of chocolate milk. He eats half the kimbap in two bites, then turns his head and looks at me.
“What’s with you?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
I can feel his attention still trained on me. He takes a sip of his chocolate milk and waits.
I set my chopsticks down.
“There’s no way I can afford it.”
The others’ conversation continue a few feet away, oblivious. Ryowoon chews the last bite of his kimbap, swallows, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“How short?”
I tell him. The number sounds worse out loud than it did on paper. Ryowoon whistles low through his teeth and leans back on his palms, looking up at the sky.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
We sit there as the breeze picks up, carrying the smell of salt and the distant clanking from the harbor. Ryowoon balls up his empty kimbap wrapper, tosses it into the air, catches it. Doesn’t offer solutions or platitudes.
That night I come home late from the store, bone-tired, my shoulders aching from restocking the back shelves.
The house is dim and I expect it to be empty.
My mom’s usually at the restaurant until nine or ten, sometimes later.
But when I kick off my shoes in the entryway and pad into the kitchen the light above the table is on and she’s sitting there waiting.
She’s still in her work clothes, apron folded over the back of the chair beside her, but she’s scrubbed her hands clean and her hair is tucked behind her ears.
The kitchen smells like sesame oil and garlic, a pot simmering on the stove.
She looks at me when I come in and pats the chair across from her.
“Sit down. I want to show you something.”
I lower myself into the chair, frowning. She reaches beside her and slides something across the table toward me. A booklet, thin, the cover soft with age, a standard-issue bank ledger you get at a savings account window. It’s been well-handled, the edges worn fuzzy.
“Open it.”
I pick it up and flip to the first page.
Rows of numbers in a neat grid, deposits logged by date, each one small.
Tiny, really. Five thousand won here, ten thousand there, occasionally twenty.
But they go on. Page after page, logged with consistency from someone who never missed a single month.
I flip further. The dates start from before I was born and stretch forward, year after year, through the years I remember my parents scraping by, through the years my mom’s shoes wore through because she couldn’t afford new ones, through the summer we ate nothing but rice and radish because there was nothing else in the house. The deposits never stopped. Not once.
I turn to the last page. The balance printed at the bottom.
I blink hard, wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand, look again. It’s enough. More than enough. Tuition, dormitory, books, meals for four years.
“What is this?” I say hoarsely.
My mom folds her hands on the table. “Your father started it the month you were born.”
I stare at her.