Everything Belongs to Us Page 15

  “But you just said you want to be treated like everyone else,” he said.

  “And she just said I couldn’t be everyone else!”

  “We’ll be going around all night at this rate. If you’re not lying, if this is serious—” Sunam felt the need to say this, to hedge himself from ridicule in case it was all a crazy joke. “I don’t know why you bother.”

  “Bother arguing? Because I want to—”

  “Bother protesting,” he said. “Namin’s right. Maybe it makes sense for real factory workers to do it. It doesn’t make any sense for you.”

  “Barely makes sense for the workers either,” Namin spit out. “They lose their jobs, they get blacklisted. It ruins them, their families—”

  “And that’s why it makes sense for me,” Jisun shouted. “Because I don’t have seven family members waiting for my measly paycheck. I don’t have a reputation to lose!”

  “But you’re flaunting it!” he said. He realized he was shouting, too, but he didn’t know why. What did he care what she did? The footlights bounced in his vision. The gravel was slippery under his feet. “You’re shoving it in their face.”

  “Funny,” Jisun said. “All my life people who’ve known me less than fifteen seconds decide I’m flaunting something. Money, lack of money. Power, lack of power. Whatever it is, surely I’m flaunting. So join the club, New Guy,” she said. “You’re just like everyone else.”

  “Fine. I apologize,” he said grudgingly. “You’re right. I don’t know you.”

  “And even if you did, you would be wrong. Remember that.” Jisun stumbled back toward the controls that closed the gate. “Now don’t think I’m flaunting anything,” she called from behind the pillar. “But it’s past curfew and you’re going to have to stay here tonight. Here’s another fact, not flaunting—there’s plenty of room.” The rumbling machinery slightly muffled what she said next, but Sunam thought he heard it correctly. “Even for a no-name new guy like you.”

  Sunam thought about running through the open gate—there was time, he could slip out before it closed. Namin’s hand touched his wrist. It was both intimate and authoritative, as if she had no doubt she could stop him with just three fingers on his pulse.

  “Go ahead,” she called out to Jisun, who was already on her way back to the house. “I’ll meet you inside.”

  Jisun waved an arm overhead without looking back at them. She disappeared into the darkness around the bend. Silently they listened to her skidding footsteps on the gravel fade away. Just when they thought her out of earshot, Jisun’s voice carried back to them, a shrill careening falsetto. “A looooove connection?”

  Sunam was grateful for the night hiding his embarrassment. He cleared his throat to make a joke about it, but Namin silenced him with a finger to her lips. “Don’t you dare say anything. Just let her go.”

  “You two seem very different,” he ventured when he was sure Jisun was beyond earshot.

  “There’s no seem. And you don’t know the half of it.”

  —

  THEY WALKED BACK toward the house with a deliberate slowness that made Sunam understand that Namin wanted to be alone with him. This was a new experience, to have things happen—things he actually wanted to have happen—without any scheming or effort on his part.

  As the eldest of four boys, Sunam didn’t even have any female cousins close enough in age to have taught him anything about the opposite sex. It was all strange, all confusing, what they did and said and thought. Even his mother seemed to reinforce the notion that there was something unknowably separate about the genders. She was considered lucky by all to have borne four sons—tall, healthy boys with her light skin and their father’s strong rural features. But she was forever lamenting the lack of a daughter. A daughter would understand the things her husband and sons could not, she complained. A woman could have ten sons and be the envy of the neighborhood while she was young, but a daughter was what you needed when you were old. You would die comfortably with a daughter tending your bed.

  Girls, Sunam had always thought, must be so different from him that he could not possibly understand what they thought about or wanted. He had thought of them as a cross between exotic bird—infinitely fragile, whimsical, and skittish—and mystical pilgrim, capable of intuiting those elusive female things his mother could never expect to share with her sons.

  And yet—there was something startlingly direct and corporeal about these girls, Namin and Jisun. Their motives, from what he could gather so far, appeared just as self-serving and sturdy as his.

  He and Namin walked around the front gardens and settled on the stoop of a low wall, three stone steps leading down to a sunken alcove etched with moss. Down here, close to the ground, the scent of spring—that damp night scent that smelled like rain and dirt and something else indescribably alive—was as intoxicating as the liquor in his veins. Already the alcohol had eased the memory of his failure with Min, casting his humiliation into the distant past. The sky, now bright with stars, seemed both low enough to touch and endlessly expansive, redoubling his sense that everything was new and would get only bigger and better. Arriving here this evening, he had had no idea what the inside of Ahn Kiyu’s house might look like or who his daughter was. He had never even heard of Namin—an omission that had disgusted Juno, and now he understood why. In just one night, he’d gotten all those connections clicked in together, all those crucial boxes checked. Imagine how things would progress with even more time. He would become more confident, more suave. He would be the king of the Circle.

  “Have you and Jisun really been friends all your lives?” he asked Namin. He realized she’d been quiet as she led them around the house to this corner of the garden, speaking only to point out where they were going. It had been a comfortable silence, at least he thought so, but now he wondered if he should have acted differently. Had he missed an opportunity?

  “I don’t know why she always says that. It’s not even close to the truth,” Namin said. “I think she likes the idea because it makes her feel less guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Like if we were truly friends since birth, we’d have grown up in the same neighborhood and I’d have a rich dad too, right? Actually we met in middle school. If I hadn’t tested into Kyungki, I’m sure we never would have crossed paths.”

  “Why, where did you grow up?” Sunam asked. He had never been to a house like this before, and he wondered if Namin thought not being this wealthy was something to be ashamed of. No one lived like this. No one he knew, anyway. His own family, for instance, was fairly well-off since his father was a director at a shipping company. They lived in a two-story house with two bathrooms with flush toilets. He remembered they were among the first families on their block to own a color television, the first to install a private telephone line. His mother had daily help—a girl who did the wash and cleaning and a woman who cooked and shopped. But he never thought of himself as rich, not really. Certainly not compared with this grandeur. He wondered if Namin was jealous because Jisun’s father was so successful and if she was dissatisfied with her own lesser circumstances, whatever they were. For all he knew, perhaps Namin’s family was better off than his, just not as fabulously wealthy as Jisun’s.

  “Where did I grow up?” Namin echoed. She seemed to take a long time to consider the question, though it should have been a simple answer. He began to feel uncomfortable, as if he’d inadvertently made another mistake.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? It’s a simple question. It’s just, usually I lie and say I’m from Jeongneung. But I was thinking I wouldn’t lie for once—that’s why I didn’t answer right away. I live in Miari, actually. That’s all. Bet you’ve never met anyone from Miari.”

  “It’s true, you’re the first,” he said. He was too surprised to think of a different answer. He suddenly remembered her earlier comment, about mice not being quiet at all. It hadn’t meant anything to him at the time, just
a correction he’d ascribed to her being such a know-it-all: she knew about mice because she knew everything. He hadn’t considered that she really knew about mice.

  “So the Miari girl made it all the way to Seoul National University. Pretty wild, right? I should tell you I was the first kid in the history of our elementary school to get into Kyungki. They would have thrown me a party except the town forbids celebrations of any kind. Only misery and destitution allowed in Miari.”

  “That was a joke, right?” he said weakly.

  “About the party? A bad one, but yes, of course it was a joke. Actually people acted like I was some kind of hero, they were so proud. For years they used to give me free things in the market whenever they saw me coming in my fancy school uniform. I still get free food from some of the shopkeepers. They have a long memory.”

  “So we’ll have to hang out in your neighborhood, then,” he said. “To take advantage of all that free food.”

  Namin smiled. “Maybe,” she said. “But watch you don’t get caught up in Miari gossip. It’s not all free food and SNU fanfare. Everything you’ve heard is true.”

  “Some fortune-teller will put a hex on me if she doesn’t like the looks of me?”

  “Yup.”

  “And I’ll start seeing the ghosts of POWs—or maybe fall in love with the spirit of a tragic heroine, lost too young?”

  “Anything is possible,” Namin said.

  He felt the urge to take her hand. It was the perfect time. Here they were, in this garden under a spring moon. She had just shared something valuable and private, something she admitted she didn’t tell just anyone. They were seated close enough that all he had to do was reach a tiny distance. Yet his hand felt leaden in his lap, as if the synapses that made his body move according to his bidding were irreparably snapped.

  Instead of the romantic gesture he intended, he blurted, “Are you cold?” and without waiting for her answer took off his jacket and shoved it awkwardly around her shoulders. She looked absurd piled with the second unnecessary jacket. Her coat was already thicker than his and looked warm enough. But she let him settle it around her shoulders, even though he took too long to adjust the seams. He was too nervous to meet her eyes. “There,” he said, arranging the collar under her chin. His fingers brushed her face. “I don’t want you to be cold.”

  She was looking at him with that crooked smile. Already these aspects of her seemed familiar and close. That smile, which was half-mocking. Her intelligence, which gleamed in her eyes even when she said nothing. “Don’t be so terrified, Sunam,” she said softly, and brought her lips to his. Her lips were startlingly warm. He touched her face and kissed her in return. She was swaddled to the neck in layers, only her face floating above their jackets. He threaded his fingers through her hair, laying his palm along the curve of her neck. He could feel her pulse bouncing along the meridian of his lifeline.

  “How come you decided to tell me?” he asked when they had pulled away.

  “Because I wanted you to believe me. I said I wasn’t scared, and I’m not. I don’t want anyone saying, later—you or anyone—that I tried, you know. To trick you.”

  “Trick me?”

  “People assume if you’re poor that you’re ashamed. That you’re always trying to cheat, somehow, to get ahead. I don’t want anyone saying that about me. Especially not you.”

  “I would never say that about you.”

  “How are you so sure? You don’t even know me yet,” she said. Although Sunam guessed it was meant flirtatiously, an invitation rather than a correction, he still felt wounded. It was technically true, but he was disappointed to hear it put so bluntly.

  “I wish you would give me more credit.”

  “Look at us, look at this place,” she said. He was sure she meant the garden, the ambience, the lights glowing through the drawn shades of the house. They were close enough that he could feel the heat of her breath as she talked. He had taken her hand in his, and it was as easy and as natural as he knew it could be. He rubbed the fleshy part of her thumb, tracing the invisible swirl of the fingerprint, memorizing each new part of her. She lowered her voice and began to speak very softly, as if she knew it would make sense to him only that way. “I’m at the bottom rung, the very lowest,” she said. “I need to get to the top. I need to, for my family.”

  His fingers continued their automatic movement, tracing the loop of her fingerprints over and over, stuck. What she was saying was as familiar to him as his own mind—every day he thought about it, where he was and where he wanted to be, the distance between the two points. Their reasons were different, of course. His family did not need him the way she implied her family needed her. But the hope was the same. And to hear it from Namin, not only a girl but a girl who had not existed for him this morning, was a shock. He had not known he could find so much in common with someone so quickly.

  But already there were the nagging questions pulling at the edges of his mind: Was she too ambitious? Too smart? Would he be able to keep up? Perhaps they were matched in drive and determination, but Sunam knew he would not be able to equal her achievements. Already he was far behind. Having made it to SNU, Sunam had assumed that he would be more accomplished than any woman he dated. The thought was so natural that it was jarring to have to examine it now as a fallible premise, like having to take a closer look at the sky and question what color it truly was. Come to think of it, the sky wasn’t always so blue after all.

  “I’m sure you think it’s odd that I’m being so open with you when we’ve just met,” Namin was saying. “But people seem to have opinions about me without knowing anything at all, and I want things to be different between us. I’m telling you everything so you can make up your own mind.”

  “But why?” he finally asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you telling me all these things? Why me?”

  Namin laughed. “Listen to yourself,” she said. “Just now you were telling me to give you more credit. Now you’re implying I’ve said too much. I never knew a guy could change his mind so quickly.”

  “I said give me more credit. I never said I earned it,” he joked. “That’s why no one calls me the Machine.”

  “But I’m not one either.” She took the jacket off her shoulders and handed it back, squeezing his hand in the process. “Now don’t be too sensitive, it’s not that I don’t want it,” she said. “But I’m warm enough and you’re shivering.” He put it on because it was true, he was cold. “But thank you,” she said. “It’s nice to be treated like a human being.”

  —

  AFTER A WHILE, it was too cold to stay outside. Namin knew the place so well, she took them to the back of the house, up a wide stone terrace that led into a solarium. Inside, huge skylights let in moonlight, and potted trees emitted a soft floral scent. A massive round table was centered under the peaked roof, loaded with orchids that bobbed gently with the breeze from the door. When they took off their shoes, Sunam noticed the tiles underfoot were heated.

  “This is a good place to sleep if you’re tired,” Namin said. “No one will bother you here. This part of the house is private. Jisun’s father doesn’t like for anyone to disturb the plants. They look like regular plants, but trust me, some of them are really valuable.” She walked to the longest couch and settled in one corner, her legs tucked under. She motioned for him to join her.

  “So maybe we shouldn’t be here?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean us. He wouldn’t like for other people to be here.”

  “So you’re almost part of the family.” He wondered if he should ask about Min, if she had any influence with him. She seemed so familiar with the place, the family—for all he knew, she and Min were as close as brother and sister. Perhaps she could talk to him and smooth things over.

  “You make it sound like I’m an orphan,” Namin said. “I have my own family, Sunam.”

  “Of course.” Trying to understand her, her relationship with Jisun, was like walking a tight
rope. It appeared simple enough on the surface—two friends, maybe one slightly jealous of the other. A thing like that seemed understandable. Wouldn’t anyone be jealous of Jisun? He, in fact, was jealous of Jisun now that he knew who she was. He suspected he would be far more so if he knew as much about her as Namin seemed to. But what he didn’t expect and did not know how to navigate were the slippery, shifting allegiances. He envied Namin’s ease within this world, but his admiration seemed to offend her. “I just meant that you seem really close,” he said.

  “We aren’t as close as she likes to think. Actually we’ve barely spoken in months. We’re friends because I owe her for something she helped me with a long time ago, and I guess I always will.”

  They lapsed into a silence then. It was obvious he shouldn’t ask what or why Namin owed Jisun. He assumed it must have something to do with money. Probing for details would only embarrass her.

  He said, “If we get in—”

  “When we get in.”

  He laughed. “When we get in, we’ll make those new recruits do something crazy next year.”

  “Not me,” Namin said. “Leave the torturing to the idiots. I plan to be busy.”

  “Not too busy for me, I hope.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder and yawned loudly, without the least bit of self-consciousness, as if they were old friends. “Sure,” she said. “If you think you can keep up.”

  He couldn’t decide if she was flirting again or just too sleepy to lie.

  —

  THEY MUST HAVE fallen asleep because the next thing he knew, the glass room was flooded with morning light and Jisun was standing over him with a steaming cup.

  He looked around and blurted, “Where’s Namin?”

  “Namin?” she said. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?” Her eyes had that tight, glittering look of having drunk too much and stayed up too long the night before, but otherwise she seemed remarkably composed. “Sleep well? I can never sleep after drinking.”

  “Like a brick.”