20. Chapter Twenty #4
The day Seyeon leaves I’m at the garage.
I stay late on purpose, tell Mr. Lee I want to finish the brake job on the sedan in bay three.
He shrugs and tosses me the keys to lock up.
So I stay. I lie under the sedan and stare up at the rusted undercarriage and listen to the radio playing and I think about the bus station.
About Seyeon standing there with his bag over his shoulder, his mother fussing, smoothing his collar, tearing up.
About Haeil and Jinwon and Sihyung and Yoohan crowding around him, clapping his back, making jokes to cover up the fact that they’re going to miss him.
About the empty space in the group where I should be standing.
Where I’ve always stood. At his side. His shadow.
Around four o’clock I feel a weird jolt in my chest, like missing a step on a staircase.
I lie still beneath the sedan and press my palm flat against my sternum and breathe.
The bus to Seoul leaves at four fifteen.
He’s getting on right now. Handing his bag to the driver, climbing the steps, finding a seat by the window.
Maybe looking out at the station one last time. Scanning the faces.
Not finding mine.
I close my eyes and press harder against my chest as if I can reach in and hold it together.
By the time I lock up the garage and walk home the sun is going down over the harbor.
Orange light on the water, the gulls circling, boats rocking in the swell.
I walk past the docks without stopping. Past the corner where Seyeon and I used to buy hotteok from the cart.
Past the market stalls closing up for the night, the vendors pulling tarps over their displays.
Past every street and storefront soaked in twenty-three years of shared memory.
Sihyung is in the kitchen when I come in, stirring a pot on the stove. He looks over his shoulder when he hears me and I can see on his face that he went. Probably helped carry Seyeon’s bag. Probably stood there waving like an idiot as the bus pulled away.
“You missed it,” he says.
I pull open the fridge and grab a bottle of water. Unscrew the cap. Take a long drink. “Missed what?”
“Seyeon left today.”
“Yeah, I know.” I lean against the counter and take another sip. Keep my voice flat. Bored. “He was always going back. It’s not a funeral.”
Sihyung frowns. He turns back to the stove, stirs the pot. “He asked about you.”
My hand tightens on the bottle.
“I told him you were at the garage,” Sihyung continues, still facing the stove. A pause. The spoon clinks against the rim of the pot. “You two haven’t spoken in weeks.”
“People fight, Sihyung. It happens.”
“Not you two.” He says simply. “Not like this.”
I push off the counter, toss the bottle cap at the trash can and miss. Leave it on the floor. “It’s fine. He’s gone, I’m here, life goes on.” I head for my room, lifting a hand over my shoulder. “I’m not hungry. Night.”
His silence follows me down the hallway like a third person.
I close my bedroom door. Stand in the dark for a second. Then I walk to the bed and fall face first onto the mattress, burying my face in the pillow.
Breathe in the ghost of him in the fabric.
I let out an animal, anguished sound. I press my face harder into the pillow and let it come, all of it. My shoulders shake. My fingers twist in the sheets. Ugly sobs I muffle into the cotton and hope to God Sihyung can’t hear me through the wall.
I cry the way I cried when we left Nuri at that vet clinic.
With my whole body. With everything in me that knows how to feel pain, which is most of me.
I cry for the look on his face when I said those things.
For the way his eyes went bright and then went dead.
For the flinch when I told him he wasn’t special.
For every kiss I’ll never get back and every morning I’ll never wake up to and the feeling of his fingers curling against my chest in the dark, reaching for me in his sleep.
I cry until there’s nothing left. Until the pillow is soaked and my throat is raw and my eyes are so swollen I can barely open them. Then I lie there, hollowed out, staring at nothing, breathing.
I roll onto my back. Stare at the ceiling.
He’ll get over it. That’s what I tell myself.
He’s young and brilliant and the whole world wants a piece of him.
Seoul will swallow him up the way big cities do, all noise and light and forward motion, and he’ll meet people who match his stride.
He’ll finish his degree and start his career and build the life he was born for and one day this summer will be a faded thing.
A memory he can look back on without the sting.
And he’ll be glad, eventually, that I didn’t let him throw it away on a broken mechanic in a dying town.
And I have to leave.
Because I know Seyeon. Know him better than I know myself, better than I know anything in this world.
And what I know is this: he’s angry now.
Hurt now. The wound is fresh and bleeding and everything I said is still ringing in his ears and right now, tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, he believes it. Or at least enough of it to stay away.
But Seyeon is the smartest person I’ve ever met.
And he knows me. Knows me the way you know your own hands, your own voice, your own breathing.
He’s going to sit with what I said and turn it over and over in that stubborn brilliant head and start picking at the seams. He’ll replay every word and watch for the flaws.
Remember the way my eyes couldn’t quite hold his when I said you’re not special.
He’ll think about every time I touched him this summer, about the way my hands shook, about the things I whispered against his skin when I thought he was sleeping. And the doubt will creep in.
It won’t happen right away. Might take weeks. Might take a month or two of distance and silence. But I know Seyeon, and eventually the fury will cool enough for him to think clearly and when it does he’ll see it. The lie. And then he’ll come back.
He’ll come back swinging, furious and righteous, and he’ll plant himself in front of me and look me in the eye and demand the truth and I won’t be able to give him anything else.
Because I can lie to everyone. I can lie to myself.
But I have never once been able to lie to Heo Seyeon when he’s standing in front of me asking for the truth.
He sees through me like glass. Always has.
He’ll crack me open in five minutes flat and everything I did will be for nothing.
So I have to be gone before that happens.
I start planning. I don’t have a lot. Some savings from the garage work, enough to get me through a month or two if I’m careful. The bike. The clothes on my back and whatever fits in my bag. That’s my whole life, inventoried and accounted for in under a minute.
I give the garage two weeks’ notice. Mr. Lee looks disappointed but not surprised.
People leave Haemok all the time. It’s what the town does, swallows you or spits you out, and the ones with any sense take the exit while they can.
He shakes my hand and tells me I’m the best set of hands he’s had in his shop and that if I ever need a reference I should call.
I nod and thank him and try not to feel anything about it.
I don’t tell Sihyung until the morning I leave.
I can’t. If I tell him in advance he’ll tell the others and they’ll try to talk me out of it or worse, they’ll tell Seyeon, and then it’s over.
So I write it down instead. Sit at the kitchen table at five in the morning with a pen and a scrap of paper torn from the notepad on the fridge, Sihyung still asleep down the hall, the apartment quiet.
The note takes me four tries. The first three I crumple and throw away because they say too much. Things like tell him I’m sorry and make sure he’s okay and I know you don’t understand but please trust me. The fourth one I make simple.
I’m leaving. Don’t look for me. I’m sorry about the rent. You’re a good friend. Take care of yourself.
I fold it and leave it on the kitchen counter next to the coffeemaker where I know he’ll find it.
My bag is already packed. Has been for two days, sitting in the bottom of my closet.
I sling it over my shoulder and take one last look around the room.
The desk with its scratched surface. The bed I shared with Seyeon, sheets still rumpled from the last time I slept in it.
The pamphlets, still stacked neatly where I left them.
I pick them up. Hold them for a second. Then I open the desk drawer and put them inside, face down beneath a couple of old car magazines, and slide the drawer shut.
There’s one more thing. I crouch by the bed and reach beneath the frame, feeling along the floor until my fingers close around the worn edge of a photograph.
I pull it out, sit back on my heels, look down at it.
Two eight-year-old boys at a kitchen table, a cake between them, candles lit.
Seyeon grinning so wide his eyes are squished shut.
My younger self beside him looks sunburned and gap toothed and happy.
Seyeon’s dad is in the background, slightly out of focus, one hand raised mid clap.
I tuck the photo into the inside pocket of my jacket, against my chest. Zip it in.
The ride across town takes fifteen minutes. I could do it with my eyes closed. The streets are mostly empty this early, just a couple of aunties heading to the market and a stray cat bolting across the road ahead of me.