Everything Belongs to Us Read online

  “Lucky you. Actually I never seem to sleep well even when I’m sober. Must be a bad conscience.”

  “I’m sure you have a much better conscience than the rest of us.”

  Immediately he regretted bringing that up again, the whole business with the strike, but she simply shrugged. “At least one of us is sure.”

  She perched herself on an iron garden chair and took slow sips from her cup, watching him. “She probably left because she knew I’d be here. This is where I drink my coffee.”

  Sunam was surprised to realize that Namin’s voice was already embedded in his mind; he could easily imagine what she would have to say about Jisun’s breakfast routine. The empress takes her coffee each morning in the glass room.

  “I should go,” he said. “I’ve stayed much longer than I meant to. Thank you for”—he gestured awkwardly at the room, the sofa that still bore the imprint of his body on the cushion, the view of the garden beyond the terrace—“everything.”

  She nodded and put down her cup. It made a precise clack on the glass tabletop. “If you see me on campus, you don’t have to say hello. I won’t.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not a problem.”

  “Isn’t it? You’ll see.”

  When weeks passed and he didn’t hear from Juno, Sunam understood that he had been dropped. He had performed poorly at the party, annoying Min and embarrassing Juno in the process. His Circle prospects, which had seemed so certain after his success at the Mun-A strike, were now surely dead. It should have devastated him. But while he wasn’t happy about it, Sunam found himself feeling surprisingly calm. Perhaps he was not yet in full possession of what it meant to have been so close and unceremoniously shut out. Maybe he really was as dumb as Juno had often suggested, in which case he could look forward to a massively delayed reaction in a month or two. But for the moment, Sunam was preoccupied with the unexpected connection he had made with Namin Kang at the party. It formed a thick buffer against disappointment, buoying as it was mystifying, and effectively crowded out most thoughts of failure and defeat. The Circle had always represented the future—but Namin was part of the momentous now. Surely things could not be so bad when, for the first time in his life, there was a girl to think about.

  The guys, Chang and the others, asked if he was coming to play cards, and Sunam said he would stop by. He was tired of worrying, of parsing past conversations he could not change and making plans for a future he could not steer. He missed having a group where he didn’t have to worry so much about every move. With these guys, the game was the game. Cards, not life. Some of them knew he had been going for the Circle, but they rarely mentioned it. Whether the omission indicated true lack of interest or secret envy he didn’t know, but it didn’t matter and that was the point. These guys would probably be friends until the day they died, not because their bond was so great, but because they were content to stay on the given track. It was not a bad one, after all—they would probably get good jobs, marry, have children. Sunam had been taught to feel critical of people like this, guys who took the first decent option that came along rather than waiting for the best. But now he wondered if he had judged too soon. What he might have dismissed as complacency in the past seemed a useful talent now. Constancy. A tribe to call his own.

  But when he arrived at their usual playing spot, he couldn’t stop Juno’s voice rattling in his brain. Frog pond. What’re you doing today? What are you doing tomorrow? Nothing.

  He hurriedly mumbled an excuse and left them under the trees.

  “Hey, are you coming back or what?” someone called after him.

  “Let him go,” Chang said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  —

  BUT SUNAM DIDN’T know what he was doing. For the first time in his life, he felt completely rudderless. No exam to study for, no Circle sunbaes to try to impress.

  As for Namin, his mind tossed from possibility to possibility, one moment in pursuit of love, the next suspended in doubt. She had probably been invited to join the Circle already. If so, Sunam figured his chances with her were slim. They had probably been flimsy to begin with. She, more than anyone else, knew her worth. She must have calculated how he rated against her. What did he have to offer that she didn’t already have in excess herself? His only consolation was that she had kissed him that night, though that worried him also. A girl like that, who decided to kiss someone she’d just met, would probably take away her affection as easily as she had given it.

  So he was caught off guard when he ran into her the following afternoon a few blocks from campus. It was a clear spring day, buds on the trees. Birds in the sky. Nothing unusual to inspire a witty comment. There was the smell of cooked sugar floating from the molasses lady on the lawn. A slight breeze pulled at the hem of her skirt.

  “Hi,” he said.

  —

  NAMIN SAID SHE’D like a molasses candy.

  All day the molasses ajumma sat in her vinyl tent and poured the sugary mixture on a hot flat griddle, creating a perfect caramelized disk, wafer thin and just wider than a child’s palm. When the candy was almost set, she stamped a shape into it: a star, a hexagon, a heart. The next one was free if you could eat perfectly around the outline. This was not as easy as it seemed. The candy, as delicate as ice, would break in unpredictable angles. As a kid, Sunam had eaten himself silly trying to win the prize. But whenever he managed to succeed, the free ones never tasted as good. It was the meticulous task of gnawing around an arbitrary line, the hope of finally capturing that elusive victory, that made the candy delicious.

  The molasses lady had skin the color of her candy and a missing front tooth. The gap in her mouth flashed as she talked, wishing her young customers good luck. Namin showed Sunam her disk stamped with an octagon. “Too easy,” she said, snapping off a side. She was right; the short lines were easiest. The heart or circle was the most difficult, the extended curves nearly impossible to follow cleanly.

  Sunam’s stamp was a simple outline of a house—triangle over a square. He turned it around, considering the best plan of attack. He could start with the roof point and work his way down. Or tackle the long foundation, get the most difficult part out of the way. He could see how it would look if he managed it—an edible ornament like an image from a picture book.

  Impulsively he bit into it, disregarding the shape. The smoky sugar dissolved in his mouth, satisfying and sweet. “It tastes as good as I remember,” he marveled. The familiar ritual and reward of the candy eased the need to talk about anything else. Even Namin seemed softer today in her yellow skirt that matched the forsythia blazing around the quad.

  “You sound just like an old man,” she said. “Surely it hasn’t been so long.”

  “No, it’s been years,” he said. “Can’t even remember the last time I had one of these. I don’t know why I stopped.”

  “I can’t go a week without it. I’ll probably eat these until I’m an old lady with no teeth. Do you know”—she smiled, the edge of the disk in between her teeth—“it’s a secret talent of mine, breaking out these shapes.”

  Sunam had noticed how quickly and precisely she worked. In seconds she had the perfect octagon lying flat on her palm like a jewel. The lines appeared as clean as if she’d chopped them with a knife. “I have a record, the most I’ve ever done in a row,” she confided. “Want to hear it?”

  “Let me guess. Four?”

  She shook her head.

  “Seven? Eight?” He wasn’t sure if he could actually believe someone could do more than eight in a row. “Come on, more than eight?”

  “Twenty-seven,” Namin said proudly. “I was nine. I’m way out of practice now, but I’m sure I can still do at least ten or fifteen.”

  Sunam had always assumed there was just one freebie, one reward. You ate it. The end. He’d never even tried for more. “You were a greedy child,” he said, and it struck him that maybe she was still greedy. He remembered the stories Juno had told him about Namin, how she ha
d pushed into the Circle with that self-assured comment about her perfect exam scores. In many ways, she and Juno were alike. Not content to swim around the tadpole section of the little pond. Shark track. Unafraid to demand the best from any situation. Only Namin seemed to hide her ambition better than Juno. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she was a girl.

  “I told the neighborhood kids if they bought me the first one, I’d give them all the free ones after—the shapes, anyway. Of course I had to eat the outline. Finally the ajummas said I could only do the ones I ate myself. I guess it was only fair.”

  Sunam went with Namin to collect her prize. The molasses ajumma pretended not to see them, taking her time with the other customers, stalling them with honeyed small talk. Hoping Namin would give up and go away. Finally, when there were no new customers remaining, she scowled at the crisp lines of the octagon in Namin’s hand. She clucked her tongue, two sharp clicks indicating what she thought of them. SNU students demanding freebies from a poor candy vendor.

  “You said good luck,” Namin reminded her.

  “Who said I didn’t?” grumbled the ajumma, handing over the free candy. Sunam wondered if the ajumma would feel differently about Namin if she knew her true situation. Surely she wouldn’t mind treating a Miari girl, especially one who had come so far.

  He watched Namin nibble its circumference, running the melted edge along the length of her tongue. The dark sugar coated the pink inside of her lips.

  “You said something at the party I’ve been wondering about,” he said. “About everyone being scared? You’ve really never been scared?”

  “ ’Course I have,” she said. “Just not of a silly college party. Or silly college people.”

  Silly, twice in one breath. “Why bother being in the Circle, then?” he asked. He was hoping she would mention if she had been accepted or not.

  “You know better than that. You wouldn’t have been there if you didn’t.” When she spoke like this, assuming his intelligence but exasperated at his failure to demonstrate it, he didn’t know whether to feel insulted or flattered. “Everyone knows what these things are for,” she said. “Why does anyone make groups? It makes people feel important. When people feel important, they go up together. You’ve seen it. The same kids who were bossy in grade school are bossy now. They’ll be bossy thirty years from now, only they’ll have fancy titles and big offices.

  “Me, I don’t have a rich dad like Jisun. My family can only pay for one of us to go to college—that’s me—so I can’t afford to be scared and lose what they’ve worked for.” She showed Sunam the shape she’d pulled out of the candy. She’d done it again, this time without him noticing, slowly licking the sugar away. It was a four-point star, and she had just one short edge left to cut.

  “So you’re the eldest, then,” he said casually, as if people talked like this all the time. Revealing their private troubles as frankly as if they were telling the year they were born or how many siblings they had.

  “I have an older sister,” Namin said. “Seven years older.”

  “Didn’t she want to…?”

  “Maybe she did. Now she works at a factory. Running shoes.”

  “Seven years older. Makes her twenty-six. Not married?”

  Namin looked at him with an expression he couldn’t quite grasp—amused, but not entirely pleasant. “Look at you, calculating her age like a worried auntie. You have any proposals for a match? She’s twenty-seven, actually,” she said. “Born in the year of the tiger. Very charming when she’s happy. We won’t discuss the other side, of course.” She laughed with the candy in her mouth, a laugh with bared teeth. “You can tell them she’s a very old tiger.”

  “Now I can tell you’re the youngest.”

  “Beware the younger sister of a tiger—” she said, but the joke fell strangely flat. He gathered they did not get along, Namin and her sister. It must be awkward for them, the shoe factory and SNU under the same roof.

  After that, Sunam didn’t know what to say. Of course, he knew of other students who had come to college with their family’s expectations heavy on their shoulders. He knew of it hypothetically but had never met anyone in that situation, at least not anyone who admitted it so readily from the start. He felt a mixture of admiration for Namin and dread for himself—it would not be easy to date someone like this. Even if she consented to be his girlfriend, he would have to tread lightly introducing her to his family. He was certain his father would not approve. Since it had been so difficult for him to establish himself, alone in this city with no relations or family resources to help, Sunam’s father was devoted to the principle of prosperous families producing prosperous offspring. With Namin’s family background—the sister in the factory, the parents in Miari—even the perfect exams and everything the scores represented for her future might not be enough to win him over. Sunam knew the smart thing would be to give it up before things became too complicated. But he couldn’t bear the idea of someone else having the courage he didn’t if he gave her up without even trying.

  “You don’t have to warn me, I already know what I’m up against,” he said. “If I hang around with you, for sure no one will ever notice me again. I’ll become totally invisible. Only a fool would erase himself like that, right?

  “I guess I’ve always been a fool, though,” he said. “Hey, check me out.” He waved his arms overhead as if she were on a mountaintop, searching for him at the bottom. He mimed shouting, cupping his hands around his mouth, his voice projecting across vast distances. “Can you see me? Am I invisible yet?”

  Namin looked at him as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Am I invisible yet?” he said again, this time whispering conspicuously.

  She took his hand. She laid her hand on top of his and slowly smoothed the flat of his palm, stroking it from heel to fingertips as if it were a piece of velvet. She gave him the star, the candy edges still damp from her mouth. He held his palm perfectly flat, so as not to dull a single crystal of that sugar.

  “I should say something romantic,” she said with a smile. “I should make a speech. What do you think?”

  “Like ‘With this star I give you my heart, my undying devotion’?” he said.

  “More like ‘With this star I give you a portal to future cavities, perhaps the early loss of an important front tooth.’ ”

  “Finally! Something you’re not good at,” he said. “Don’t ever become a poet.”

  “You didn’t like it? I thought it showed a bracing commitment to realism.”

  “In that case, it’s a masterpiece. What do I know? All this time I thought this was just candy. Never knew it was such an art form. Anyway, I’ll treasure it always.”

  Laughing, she broke off one of the points and popped it into her mouth. She broke off another and nudged it at his lips. “We may as well eat it. That ajumma will kill me if I go back for another.”

  He opened his mouth and took the candy between his teeth. He knew he had done the right thing by not bringing up any business about the Circle, pretending that nothing had changed or would change between them. Surely it would only embarrass her and make her feel sorry for him—the last thing he wanted. From the first, Namin had been clear she would not tolerate pity. In his arrogance, Sunam had assumed it was only pity directed at her that she hated. Now he understood that it went both ways. Just as she rejected it herself, Namin would never indulge in pitying him, no matter what happened.

  “Hey, put in a good word for me, would you?” he said.

  He could tell she knew instantly what he meant. She plucked the remaining candy from his hand and broke it in half, but she didn’t meet his eyes and she didn’t answer his question.

  “Will you?” he asked.

  The candy had broken unevenly, so that one side was significantly larger than the other. She handed him the bigger piece and popped the smaller shard in her mouth.

  “You don’t need them, anyway,” she said with a sudden fierceness
that seemed to clash with the melting sweet in her mouth. “You have me, remember?”

  So it was true. She was in—and Sunam was out.

  In the beginning, Jisun had felt brave. She had felt that there was something noble about her being so angry, when people thought she should be content.

  Rich girl, daddy’s girl, throw me a pearl, the neighborhood children chanted when the chauffeur dropped her at school. They waited, of course, for the car to pull away before throwing dirt clods aimed at her head. Though it was softer, they preferred dirt to rocks, which left marks and could get them in trouble. Anyway, seeing dirt on her was just as satisfying as seeing her bleed. They could watch it worry her all day. Lodged into her part and crammed into a thousand hiding places. Dribbling onto her paper when she bent over her desk. Dusting the white shoulders of her uniform, making her look dirty. It was fun to watch her scratch under her ponytail, poking with a pencil. They faked concern: Oh, teacher, should Jisun be checked for lice?

  Jisun never cried and she never ratted. “Complaining is the vice of the lower classes,” her father always said. The gold rims of his glasses glinted as he peered over them. “If you want to waste time bellyaching, go talk to the mailman.”

  Jisun would never understand her father’s disdain for ordinary folks when he had come from humble roots himself. Ahn Kiyu was born and raised in Janghowon, a farming village southeast of Seoul, the second son and fourth of five children. Against his father’s wishes, he set out for the capital at age sixteen and apprenticed himself at a bicycle repair shop, where the owner promised room and board in addition to a small stipend. By the time he was eighteen, he had bought the shop. At twenty-five, he married Jisun’s mother, a girl from his hometown two years his senior whom he had always admired. Once the town beauty, she had refused so many suitors that no one believed she would ever marry. In their wedding photo, Jisun’s mother looked surprised herself.

  Perhaps in those early years when they lived above the bicycle shop, Jisun’s parents had been happy. In time the business expanded to include automobile repair, then dropped bicycles altogether. There were photos of a new garage, four mechanics standing proudly with tools in hand, caps at jaunty angles. A new house with a persimmon tree in the courtyard. A car, which her dad polished himself every Sunday.