I could now fully understand my brother’s words—that if we pushed him, he’d chase us to the ends of the earth for revenge. I’d received a warning from him that was close to a threat, looking every bit like some boss of darkness.
“Teacher... don’t worry about the Director.”
With his left arm hooked over the steering wheel, he twisted his upper body toward me, looking like someone who’d been stopped on the street by a stranger and forced to listen to nonsense.
“I’m gay.”
I don’t know why I said that. Gay or not, I’d never even dated, never even liked anyone.
But the moment I saw his expression—where not just his brows but the eyes beneath them twitched—I knew I’d given the right answer. I’d only wanted to see him flustered.
“Well, thank you for the ride.”
I bowed, grabbed my bag, and got out of the car. I wanted to look back again and again as I climbed the stairs, but each time I tightened my grip on my bag strap and forced myself not to.
If I couldn’t wound him, I wanted at least to shock him. He was a rock as hard as diamond, and even if what I threw was only a raw egg, I wanted to throw it anyway.
■ ■ ■
“What are you drawing?”
I stopped my hand, which had been scratching lines across the notebook Morae had torn out for me, using a thrifty ballpoint pen that held red, blue, and black in a single barrel. Morae was looking down at me, smiling.
“Nothing. My hands were bored.”
Even to my own eyes the background looked dizzying—something like waves, like flames, like a whirlpool.
“Drink. I’m buying—call it a study-abroad celebration.”
Morae slid a fruit punch toward me in one of the café’s signature giant cups—the generous kind at What Happened in Bali—and then came to sit beside me, shoulder to shoulder. I left the cup on the table, bent my head to the straw, and looked up at her with my eyes. Study abroad?
“In the neighborhood, they’ve got me down as studying abroad now. To be precise, I’m in Seoul getting ready to study abroad.”
The sudden big gulp of a cold drink made the bridge of my nose and brow pinch; my eyes squinted.
I’d heard last week that they’d hired a private investigator to check how things were going back home after we left; I guess the call came today.
“What about me and my brother?”
“The ridiculous part is, since it wasn’t just me and Seo Ihyeon who vanished, but the three of us including you, the adults think that’s almost a relief. I’m supposedly in Seoul prepping to study abroad, and you and Seo Ihyeon supposedly got a sudden, good chance to make money in Yeongdeok, so you rushed off there. That’s the story right now. Like they arranged it on purpose to pry me away from home.”
So you can paste it together like that, huh. Well, even before we ran, Mr. Im had been stirring tension like he was about to do something any minute. In reality, it was Morae who pulled the trigger first.
“Who would believe that anyway? Even if it were true, most people write their own novel, spread it around, and want to believe that’s the hidden truth. Knowing no one will buy it, they still care that much about their flimsy face....”
Morae let the last words trail off in a murmur and leaned back loosely against the bench.
“If they try to find me, it’ll look like I’ll jump straight into the Han River... I made such a scene in that letter that for now they probably can’t move rashly... but they absolutely won’t give up like this.”
She lifted the cup to her lips instead of using the straw and took three or four cool swallows of peach punch, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and added one more line.
“Before that, we have to leave as soon as we can.”
I met Morae when she was a senior in high school. She was in conflict with her parents about college. They wanted her to go to any college at all, even a third-rate one nearby, and she wasn’t listening—so “conflict” wasn’t even the right word.
According to my brother, up through her first two years of middle school her grades had been excellent. But because she knew exactly what her parents expected of her, she began postponing rebellion so it would be easier to secure her freedom later.
She tanked her grades on purpose and chose to become a “problem kid.” Her curfew slid later; she decorated her room with B-movie posters her parents saw as delinquent and grotesque; her clothes got rough. She skipped class to go surfing all the time.
That’s how she transformed—from a proud daughter with a promising future who did everything above average, into the troublesome youngest for whom they’d be grateful if she simply stayed out of serious trouble.
Her parents thought this was adolescent rebellion caused by confusion over being classified as Alpha, but from start to finish, every bit of it was her choice.
“I’ll be with the person I want and in the place I want. In the end I’m going to live my own way; stringing my parents along as the model student who gets good grades—planting false hope—feels... cruel to both sides. Better you start learning now that I’m not going to live the way you want.”
That’s what Morae said, but even by the time she was twenty-four, her parents still couldn’t accept it. What she wanted, what kind of happiness she was after—they denied it. Because, they said, she was still too young to choose what was right for her life in the long term.
She had no interest in an elite university or a so-called high-paying “good job.” Nor did she intend to take a seat in any of her father’s businesses that pulled in billions a year.
What she wanted was peace. Simple days filled with genuine gratitude and healthy laughter, surrounded by the things she loved, faithful to herself.
Waves and warm weather and Han I. A bottle of beer and a surfboard. A single paperback of a favorite book. That was all she wanted. Because she didn’t need anything more than that to be happy, she was gifted.
“Your dad’s going about his days like usual.”
“Mm... thank you.”
Staring down at the tip of my pen, Morae smiled, reached out, and lightly mussed my hair. Then that hand dropped to wrap my shoulder, and she rested her temple on my other shoulder.
We sat side by side facing the front of the café, and because the folding front windows were thrown wide, the street was visible through the green leaves of the plants scattered around. A laid-back island tune with a ukulele melody drifted by, and at the foremost table by the alley, a group of three or four around my age laughed without stopping. It was peaceful.
If my brother and Morae opened a café on some southern island, it would feel like this.
Open to anyone passing by; not sleek or trendy, but soaked through with the owner’s taste and life; nothing forced anywhere; and when there was free time, you could grab your board and jump straight into the sea out front.
The final destination of their escape wasn’t Seoul. Here, you could end up back at square one anytime. Thanks to Morae’s fierce letter and the highly rated PI director, we’d bought ourselves a little time, but there was no room to relax.
They had to leave soon for a place with warm weather and waves. That had been their long-standing dream. Since much earlier, the two of them had belonged only to each other and felt most natural and at ease viewing the world through each other. This escape was just one leg of the route toward that dream.
And that was probably a key reason I decided to move into the teacher’s place.
If I couldn’t choose a road, then even after they finished all their preparations, the two of them wouldn’t be able to leave easily. And they might very well ask me, again, to go with them. They probably would.
We’d come this far together, but I couldn’t keep pushing the choices of my journey onto them, tagging along as a sort of appendix to their lives in the same way over and over. Even if we did end up leaving together, it must not be a stopgap born of having nothing else to do. That much I understood clearly.
It was the one resolve I’d made that rainy dawn when I stepped out the front gate with my brother, leaving my father behind without him stopping me.
Juhan—outed by a filthy method and all but cut off by his family (I could hardly imagine what it felt like to have your most private self laid bare to your parents); Yuni, who—though I didn’t hear all the details—had a chance at stepping into her dream only to have it crushed by her parents; and even Morae and my brother, my closest people, were paying harsh prices for choices that were not crimes at all.
It wasn’t only me who’d been toyed with, mocked, thrown around, and wounded by the senseless meanness of life, regardless of my will.
Even Phantom’s CEO—who looked like he could crook a finger and pull whatever he wanted to his side—must have hauled Phantom to where it is now while swallowing insults like “Satan” and “a hustler who sells paintings with his body.”
An attack that wedges into life out of nowhere.
Whether you overcome it, sink with it clamped to your ankle, or accept it as part of yourself like an eleventh finger or a large lump at your side—either way, it was time for me to decide on an attitude.
As far as I knew, Morae and my brother, Yuni and Juhan were people who chose to stand against the attack. Their approaches and colors were a little different, but in that none of them wore a gloomy scar of a dirty tackle on their faces, they were alike.
But the CEO of Phantom had a different texture from theirs.
From things Juhan tossed off in passing, I could guess he wasn’t some prince who’d known only glory as polished as his looks. In that case, maybe he wasn’t someone who’d leaped over life’s attacks, but someone who carried them as part of himself. Like getting bitten by a zombie and becoming one yourself.
He treated me with a keen wariness, but at other times he acted like I was such a harmless nonentity I couldn’t hurt anyone no matter how I tried.
The tremor that rose in my chest whenever his unkind eyes and words prodded me lacked the sharp edges to be called defiance, and it wasn’t fragile enough to be mere hurt feelings.
From the start, I’ve been the type to step aside when someone curses me out or gets angry. Had I just not known myself all this time?
“Morae, do I like... unusual things?”
Maybe someone else might know the side of me I’d misunderstood or missed. I packed the page even denser and asked her.
“A bit, yeah.”
“Me?”
Startled by the unexpected answer, I reflexively asked back; Morae lifted her head from my shoulder and peered into my face.
“Among the Shin-chan characters, your favorite is Bo-chan. Not many people like him best. And your T-shirts—you always wear stripes, right? Short sleeves in summer, long sleeves in winter, but all stripes. You’re quietly particular. And a lot of kids who draw are a bit particular.”
“How long has it been since I last drew....”
“Ah... so you’re not drawing now, you’re writing, sir?”
Her dead-on jab made me sheepish; I pressed my lips together, smiled, and looked away. It was just doodling....
“Then... am I the type who likes being bullied?”
“Where’d you hear what that even means? You mean a masochist?”
“What? Who taught you to say garbage like that?”
My brother, coming out of the kitchen with a plate of nasi goreng, grimaced at the word masochist.
Since I was moving into the teacher’s house tomorrow, my brother and Morae had dragged me to What Happened in Bali for a farewell party. It felt odd to have a send-off when I wasn’t quitting a job or transferring schools, but even if I pretended not to make a big deal of it, I was just as reluctant about this goodbye.
My brother looked ready to track down whoever had taught me a toxic word like masochist and grab him by the collar.
“So what if someone teaches him that? He’s an adult. Whatever two consenting people do under the covers is their private freedom.”
That was Morae’s defense.
Whatever rare creature cut off from the world they thought I was, I was old enough to know words like sadist and masochist just from things picked up here and there without anyone sitting me down to explain.
I took the spoon from my brother and pressed Morae.
“So... am I like that?”
There was no point expecting my brother to be objective.
“Mm, not that you enjoy it, more like you don’t care even if someone gives you grief? You’re the type that doesn’t react much, so there’s not much fun in picking on you.”
I agreed with Morae. Up to now, I’d thought of myself as that kind of person—a little dull, almost stolid. Or at least someone who’d curdled into that.
But my recent reactions felt unfamiliar even to me.
“I’m gay.”
That saucy line, almost a provocation, was something the old me would never have managed.
“Why? Does it make your whole body tingle when someone gives you a hard time?”
Elbows on the table, Morae leaned in toward me just as I was about to take a bite, her face full of mischief and curiosity.
“No... not like that.”
There were moments like a prick under the nail from a needle, but that wasn’t the same as a thrill. It was more like that feeling when you go over a speed bump without slowing down—your whole body lurches, lifts. I even felt a childish urge to take his hand and poke under his nail with the needle’s point in return.
Just as his attitude toward me wasn’t consistent, I couldn’t narrow down a single reason for my reactions either.
Hunger rolled in so hard I had no energy left to think. I started shoveling in food, and beside me Morae and my brother balanced the day’s receipts.
The owner here saved up a set amount running What Happened in Bali and then took off to Bali to enjoy a trip and surfing; since last week he’d been gone, so for the time being my brother and Morae were acting managers.
When I’d nearly cleaned my plate, my brother spoke in a softer voice than before.
“Even if you move out, come by. Here, and to the house.”
“Of course. I’ll show up so often you’ll be sick of me. I’ve got nowhere else to spill my guts except here anyway.”
“Funny. You’re not even that talkative.”
He snorted and gave me a light tease; I met it with a grin of agreement.
“You have to come at least once a week. Got it? And text me every day.”
This time it was Morae issuing threats. I knew it wasn’t for herself; she was worried I’d feel lonely. I nodded big, and she smiled.
That night we grilled pork belly and drank soju at What Happened in Bali, and back at home we had more beer. It was the first small luxury we’d allowed ourselves since coming to Seoul. It was also the first time we’d drunk enough to get truly tipsy, even drunk.
I learned the next day from them that when I drink I get very compliant and laugh a lot. I’d even kissed Morae on the cheek, and my brother—rarely, asserting his rights as her boyfriend—kneed me in the butt.
It wasn’t much of a move, but since I was changing places, I’d cleared my moving-crew shift too. We ate breakfast together, I packed everything into a single backpack, and the three of us left the house and split at the bus stop. I headed south for the teacher’s place; Morae and my # Nоvеlight # brother went west to clock in at What Happened in Bali.
The rooftop room and the café were both within a distance I could get to anytime if I wanted, but from now on they would be places I’d have to decide to go to.
On the bus, watching the street recede, I felt strange at the fact I was peeling away from my brother and Morae and heading somewhere alone. It felt less like moving house and more like setting out on a trip. A very long trip.
