18. Chapter Eighteen #2
A kick to my side. I grunt, curl tighter. Another one. Pain blooms wide and bright along my ribs and I feel something shift in there, something that shouldn’t move. His boot comes down again, and I cough, choking, tasting blood now, not just from my split mouth but from somewhere deeper.
“I’m going to kill your ass. I’m going to fucking kill you—disgusting, you disgusting little—”
Each blow punctuates a word. Each word punctuates a blow. I curl in on myself on the cold pavement, knees to my chest, arms over my head, and I take it. Every hit makes me wheeze and grunt but I don’t scream and I don’t fight back.
I could. I know I could. I’m bigger than him now, stronger, faster.
If I got to my feet and swung I could put him on the ground.
I could end this in thirty seconds. But I don’t.
I don’t because honestly, genuinely, lying here on the cold stones of this alley with my father’s boot cracking against my ribs, I can’t find a single reason to bother.
What for? What’s the point of getting up?
Of fighting back? Of surviving this particular beating just to go home to that house and wait for the next one?
There’s nothing waiting for me on the other side of this.
No college acceptance letter. No savings account.
No future that looks any different from right now.
Seyeon’s leaving. Everyone’s leaving. And I’ll still be here, trapped in the same cycle his father was trapped in, his father’s father before him.
The broken son of a broken line going all the way back to a war that ended before any of us were born.
A legacy of violence and pain, passed hand to hand like a curse.
My great grandfather gave it to my grandfather who gave it to my father who’s giving it to me right now, blow by blow, and what did I do?
What did I do so wrong? I didn’t choose this.
Didn’t choose to be born into this family, this house, this life.
Didn’t choose to be the kind of person who likes boys, who wants to kiss them in alleyways in the dark. I didn’t choose any of it.
“Not raising a fucking faggot—”
His boot catches my side again and something inside me ruptures. I feel a sharp, wet pop somewhere deep in my torso that sends white light across my vision. My mouth opens but no sound comes out. Just a wheeze. A thin whistle of air from lungs that aren’t working the way they should.
The beating keeps going. Each impact duller than the last because I’m going numb, my body shutting things off, closing doors against the pain.
My thoughts drift. I think this might really be it.
The way he’s going, the viciousness, the intent behind each swing, he isn’t teaching me a lesson.
He’s trying to break something that can’t be fixed.
And lying here with my cheek pressed against pavement that smells like rain and cigarette ash, I’m not sure I care if he succeeds.
What does it matter? What do I have waiting for me?
A coffee tin with crumpled bills in it. An empty house.
A town that watched me get beaten my whole life and never stepped in to stop it.
A best friend on a bus to a city that’ll give him everything I can’t.
Let him, I think. Let him finish it.
Something cracks. Could be a rib. Could be the pavement under my skull. The edges of my vision are going fuzzy, a soft grey creeping inward.
And then it stops.
The blows stop. I can hear him panting above me, he’s winded himself with the effort of beating his own son to pieces. His breathing is animal. He delivers one last kick to my ribs, almost perfunctory, a period at the end.
“This is the final straw.” His voice sounds far away. “You’re an adult now, ain’t you? You’re on your own. You show your face in my house again and I’ll kill you with my own hands. I don’t want any damn sodomite as a son.”
His footsteps. The clink of bottles in the bag. Moving away. Gone.
I lie still in the humming silence. My limbs don’t respond when I try to move them.
I cough and something warm and wet hits the pavement near my mouth.
I roll onto my side because lying on my back hurts too much to breathe, but lying on my side hurts too, everything hurts, and my lungs make a sound I’ve never heard them make before, a thin crackling whistle on each inhale.
I stare up at the sky. The stars are out. Faint, because the harbor lights wash most of them away, but I can make out a handful. My vision blurs. I’m not sure if it’s tears or my brain shutting down. The grey creeps closer, narrowing the sky to a pinhole, and I let my eyes close.
I think I go away for a while.
I come back to hands on me. Shaking me. Someone’s touching my face, my shoulders, and the contact sends jolts of pain through my broken body but the voice attached to those hands is what pulls me up from whatever dark place I’d sunk into. Distant and muffled, like I’m hearing it through water.
“Ryowoon. Ryowoon, please, wake up. Fuck. Fuck, please wake up.”
I know that voice better than my own heartbeat.
I push toward it, drag myself up through the murky layers of unconsciousness, fighting because his voice demands it.
Because Seyeon doesn’t beg. Seyeon doesn’t say please like that, broken and wet with tears, and if he’s doing it now then I have to come back because something is wrong and I need to fix it, need to get up, need to—
His face swims above me. I pry my eyes open. He’s there, blurry and bright, tears streaming down his cheeks, his eyes wide with terror. His hands are on my face, both of them, warm and shaking so badly I can feel them tremble against my jaw.
“Ryowoon!” His voice cracks on my name. “Oh god. Oh fuck.”
I try to speak. My mouth moves but all that comes out is just a wet cough and more of that warm copper taste. Seyeon makes a strangled cry. He isn’t supposed to be here. He’s supposed to be in Seoul. Why is he here?
More people. More voices over Seyeon’s. Mrs. Nam’s broom-sharp tone, wavering in a way I’ve never heard from the old woman. “Oh, child. Oh, look at you, child.” Her papery hands touching my arm, pulling back when I wheeze. Seyeon’s mom, her voice thick and choked, saying my name over and over.
Seyeon’s face stays above mine. He’s saying something to them, shouting over his shoulder, his voice ragged. “We need to get him to a hospital. We need to go, we need to go right now, help me, please—”
His hands tighten on my face. I can feel his thumbs brushing my cheekbones, smearing through something wet.
Blood, maybe. Tears. Mine or his. He’s looking at me with those soft brown eyes that have looked at me every single day of my life, and right now they’re burning with a ferocity that cuts through the haze.
“Stay awake. Ryowoon, stay with me, you hear me? Don’t you dare close your eyes.”
I want to tell him I’m tired. I want to tell him it’s okay.
I want to tell him to go to Seoul and forget about me and live the life he’s supposed to live.
But my mouth doesn’t work and my eyes won’t stay open and the grey is coming back, softer and gentler, and the last thing I see before it takes me is his face, hovering above mine, and I think: at least the last thing I’ll ever see is something beautiful.
My eyes close. I can’t make them open.
I spend a week in the hospital this time. My second stay in the same building, same floor, probably the same damn ward for all I know. I stared at the ceiling for hours, days, drifting in and out of a fog of pain medication and shallow, whistling breaths.
Five broken ribs. Fractured arm, the same arm, the same side he broke when I was fifteen.
My wrist that never healed right the first time now has a twin fracture running alongside the old one.
Internal bleeding that required monitoring for three days before the doctors were satisfied my organs weren’t going to shut down.
A concussion that made the overhead lights feel like someone was driving nails into my skull.
Seyeon didn’t leave. Not once that I can remember, and my memory of that week is admittedly Swiss cheese.
But every time I surfaced from the murk, blinking against the fluorescent glare, he was there.
Sitting in the chair beside my bed or pacing the room or standing at the window with his back to me, his shoulders rigid, his reflection in the glass tight with fury.
Mrs. Nam and Seyeon’s mom rotated in and out, bringing food Seyeon barely touched, speaking to doctors in the hallway in hushed voices, hovering.
But Seyeon was constant. His face was the first thing I saw each time I clawed my way up from the dark and the last thing I registered before I sank back down.
He wanted me to press charges. Kept saying it, over and over, whenever I was lucid enough to argue back.
“He almost killed you, Ryowoon.” His voice shook when he said it but his jaw was locked, his face flushed a deep red that crawled up his neck, his eyes blazing with wrath.
His hands balled up and opening and balling up again like he was imagining wrapping them around my father’s throat.
He paced the room, back and forth in front of my bed.
I told him there was no point. What was I going to say?
That the local cops would do anything? That the same department that sent a friend of my father’s to gently suggest I try being more obedient would suddenly care now that I was eighteen and technically not their problem anymore?
Seyeon looked at me like I’d punched him, and then he turned around and punched the wall instead. His mom scolded him for that one.