11. Chapter Eleven #4
The ceremony is held in the gym, folding chairs arranged in crooked rows, a banner the third-years painted that says CONGRATULATIONS CLASS in characters that drip slightly where the paint was too wet.
Our principal stands at the podium looking faintly like a man being held hostage as he reads from his prepared remarks about the promising futures ahead of us.
Behind me I hear Haeil whisper to Ryowoon and Ryowoon’s low snicker in response.
I force myself not to turn around because I know if I make eye contact with either of them I’ll lose it.
They call our names one by one. Jinwon goes up and bows perfectly and accepts his diploma with quiet grace.
Sihyung trips on the edge of the stage and recovers so smoothly that only those of us who know him notice.
Yoohan pumps his fist when he takes his, earning a sharp look from the vice principal.
Haeil swaggers up and snatches his off the podium and I swear I hear one of the teachers mutter thank god under her breath.
When they call Ryowoon’s name he unfolds from his chair to his full height, long legs and sharp angles and a lazy charm that makes everything look like his idea.
He takes the diploma, gives the principal a nod that’s just barely this side of respectful, and walks back to his seat.
When they call mine and I walk up I can hear Haeil lose his mind three rows back, stomping his feet against the gymnasium floor until it sounds like a stampede.
Ryowoon’s fingers are in his mouth, the whistle so piercing that the girl sitting next to him flinches.
After the principal formally dismisses the senior class, the gym dissolves into chaos.
We spill out the doors, shoving and yelling, ripping off the stiff collars of our uniforms, ties already loosened.
Haeil intercepts Yoohan’s graduation cap and flings it at a cluster of junior girls standing by the entrance who shriek and scatter.
Sihyung is trying to take a serious photo and Jinwon keeps making him laugh by pulling faces just out of frame.
Someone grabs me from behind and hauls me into a headlock that smells like cheap aftershave and cigarette smoke, and I know without looking who.
I elbow Ryowoon in the ribs and he releases me laughing, and then we’re all shuffling together for group photos, arms slung over shoulders, faces pressed close, grinning until our cheeks ache.
In one photo Haeil has rabbit ears behind my head.
In another Ryowoon is pretending to choke Sihyung.
Jinwon stands in the middle of all of us looking serene, the calm eye of the hurricane, and I think: I’m going to miss these idiots so much it might kill me.
The real disruption comes as the principal is still shaking hands with parents at the front entrance.
A feedback squeal rips through the air, followed by Haeil’s amplified voice blasting from a bullhorn he and Ryowoon smuggled in, screaming “WE’RE FREE, YOU DOG-LIKE BASTARDS!
” at a volume that sends the pigeons on the roof scattering.
The principal’s face turns the color of a ripe plum.
Teachers converge from every direction. Ryowoon tosses the second bullhorn to Sihyung, who panics, fumbles it, and it goes off in his hands, emitting a deafening honk that makes a group of first-year mothers clutch their chests.
We run for it, all six of us tearing across the schoolyard cackling, Haeil whooping as a teacher shakes his fist behind us.
We make it through. All of us. Miraculously, as a complete set, nobody held back, nobody failed out, not even Haeil or Ryowoon, who both spent more time outside of class than in it. We graduated. Every last delinquent one of us.
My mom and Mrs. Nam are waiting outside the gate.
My mom’s eyes are already red. She’s in her good clothes, the navy dress she wears to the rare dinner out, and she has two bouquets in her arms. One she pushes into my hands as she pulls me down to press her forehead against mine, her palm on my cheek, her chin trembling so much she can’t speak.
The second bouquet she puts into Ryowoon’s hands.
He freezes. He holds the flowers in front of him, looking at my mother with a softer vulnerable look in his eyes.
His father is nowhere to be found. Not here, not coming.
Nobody expected him to. But my mother wraps her arms around Ryowoon and hugs him, her head barely reaching his chest, he closes his eyes for a second and lets her.
Mrs. Nam stands behind them with her arms folded across her chest. She doesn’t hug anyone, but when the boys gather around her she surveys us with narrowed eyes and says, “I expect at least two of you to amount to something. The rest of you, try not to end up in prison.”
Ryowoon grins at her. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Halme.”
“Don’t push it,” she says, her mouth twitching.
My mom makes us stand together for a photo.
She herds me and Ryowoon side by side, waving us closer, closer, until our shoulders touch.
I squint in the sun and throw up a peace sign and lean into him.
Ryowoon stands tall beside me, his bouquet tucked under one arm, grinning wide for the camera.
I glance at him as my mom counts down. There’s no trace of a shadow behind his eyes, no tension in his jaw, no sign of what he told me on those bleachers.
He’s just Ryowoon, here, mine, bright-eyed and alive.
I smile for the picture.
“Does placing fifty-third in a class of sixty even warrant a celebration?” I say out the side of my mouth as my mom fiddles with the camera angle.
He barks out a laugh, his shoulder bumping mine. “Hey. At least I graduated, you punk.”
My mom takes the photo. I don’t see it until weeks later, printed out and tucked into a frame on our living room shelf.
Two boys in caps and gowns, one leaning slightly into the other, both of them grinning so hard their eyes are nearly closed.
I look at it sometimes and try to see us the way a stranger would.
Two kids from a nothing town, poor and scraped up and carrying things too old for their shoulders, standing in the sun being untouchable for one moment in time.
A Few Weeks Later
The hinges on the gate to the Cha’s house screech when I push through.
My hands shake as I step through into the yard. My jaw clamped tight shut. Anger pulses in my gut, coiling tighter with every step across the cracked concrete.
The yard looks like a crime scene. An overturned plastic chair lies by the wall.
A ceramic pot, one of the old fermenting pots that used to sit in a neat row by the door, is shattered across the ground.
Beer cans and soju bottles litter the walkway, glinting in the afternoon light like broken teeth.
The chain that used to hold Nuri to her doghouse is still bolted to the post, hanging loose. Rusted and forgotten.
A voice carries from inside the house, gruff and waterlogged with drink.
“Who the fuck is that?” A pause. The sound of something heavy being shoved aside. “If that’s your pathetic ass, Ryowoon—”
Ryowoon’s father stumbles into the doorway.
He looks smaller than I remember, shrunk in on himself, the bulk that used to make him terrifying settled into a bloated gut straining against a stained undershirt.
His skin has a yellow cast to it, sallow, sick.
His hair has thinned so badly I can see scalp through the greasy strands combed across the top of his head.
His bloodshot eyes find me, the whites turned pink, the pupils glassy and unfocused.
I feel nothing that I used to feel when I look at him. Not the fear that lived in me as a child or the helpless rage that made me cry in my bed at night. What fills me now is cold disgust. Revulsion that makes my skin crawl just being in the same space as him.
Recognition dawns on his face slowly, squeezing through the fog the alcohol has left him swimming in. His expression shifts into a face meant to look welcoming but just looks pathetic.
“Seyeon-ah,” he calls softly, ingratiating. He steps back from the doorway, his hand waving vaguely inward. “It’s you. Can I get you something? Water, something to eat? Why don’t you sit down—”
“I’m just here to get Ryowoon’s things,” I interrupt him flatly.