With the shop closed, I had nothing to do for the rest of the day. I just walked aimlessly, not even caring if I would run into Han Jungho or any of his burly lackeys. The emptiness inside me clawed at me from within. I was glad that it was there, because I didn’t know what emotion I would have been feeling otherwise. When the moon rose, I was still walking in circles.
The emptiness within had now become physical. All the walking I did today had exhausted me, and I wanted something to eat or drink. But I didn’t have any money in my pockets, so I went to an atm to withdraw some money.
I slid in my card and punched in my access code. I tiredly rubbed my eyes as I waited for it to process. When I looked back at the screen, I found that I could feel one emotion after all. Anger.
My blood boiled as I read the message.
[ Your bank account has been locked at the request of local law enforcement. If you believe this is in error, contact… ]
I slammed my fist against the screen, startling the person behind me. The screen didn’t shatter, but the image behind it warped, and streaks of damaged pixels lit up across it. I walked off, and I found it hard to breathe.
It had to be Taejun’s doing. He was probably trying to force me to return to him. I rarely swore, but all the anger building up within me couldn’t be contained. “FUCK!” I yelled. My shout echoed uselessly into the night.
I wouldn’t let him push me around anymore. I refused to dance like a trained monkey anymore. Again, pathetically, I found myself walking back to Mr. Do’s house. He was my last ally in a world wholly seeking to control me.
He seemed relieved that I had reappeared after storming off earlier. “Jae-ya, thank goodness,” he said, as he let me in. “I was worried that Jungho might have found you.”
I didn’t say anything. I was too angry, too numb. Maybe it would have been better if Jungho had found me. I no longer had anything to pay him, and he could send me to the other side, where I could finally rest.
“Your brother called,” Mr. Do said, clearly nervous at my angry silence. “He asked if I knew where you were.”
I looked at him sharply. He continued quickly, “I didn’t at the time.”
That was a dilemma. I still needed to work, but if I did, he would surely show up at the shop to drag me off to Beijing or whatever hell he wanted to ship me off to.
“The bastard froze my bank accounts,” I said. Mr. Do flinched at the sound of my voice, low and angry.
“You need to go back to him,” Mr. Do advised. “You have to make this right. You won’t be able to hide from him forever, he’s-”
“Do Hoon-nim,” I interrupted rudely. “Could I borrow some money?”
He was thunderstruck by both my question, and how easily I had asked it. I had always expressed my disgust at the way my father took money that he hadn’t earned. I never asked him for money, even when we were falling behind on debts.
“How much do you need?” he asked hesitantly. Perhaps Mr. Do could tell how volatile my state was.
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I needed enough to be able to survive on while I figured out how to shake off Taejun, if that was even possible.
Mr. Do stared at me silently. I found that I suddenly couldn’t meet his eyes, so I looked away. He walked off, probably to find something to give me, and suddenly I felt the humiliation of having to ask for money hitting me belatedly.
“Take this, Jae-ya,” he said quietly. I took the bundle he proffered. It was incredibly thick.
“This is too much,” I protested. Mr. Do had always been generous, but this was going too far.
“It’s eight million won,” he said. I looked at him sharply. He knew, and I knew.
It was the amount I had been missing from my safety box. I dropped the money like it was a venomous viper poised to strike. The binding collapsed, and the bills fanned across the floor. All the misguided evils my parents had confessed to today had had no effect on me, but it had been expected from them.
“I… I….” My heart ached with this latest, and least expected betrayal. “I trusted you!” I screamed. I scrambled back from him. All this time, the culprit had been the one man I thought I could always trust and count on. It hurt. It hurt more than all the hurts that had been laid on me today. He had been my mentor. My second father-
“I always intended to return it before you knew. I… It was.. It was an emergency-” He was choked. I had seen him cry once before, when I confessed to him that I thought of him as a father. Now his eyes were welling with tears again, but for an entirely different reason.
So that was just the way fathers were. Like my own father, Mr. Do had had no qualms taking from me either.
“You could have asked!” Something hot was flowing down my cheek like lava. Somehow I was crying. “I owed you everything, I would have given it willingly…” Words tumbled out of my throat before it suddenly closed painfully, as though Jungho’s lackey’s hand was gripping it again.
“I.. didn’t want you to think less of-” Even Mr. Do couldn’t finish the sentence with the horrible result laid before us. Whatever relationship of trust and affection we had before was trampled, crushed.
Blinded by my tears, I stumbled away, out of his home and into the empty streets outside.
The soft light of the moon dried my tears, and soon the numbness from before returned. Again, like a lost ghost, I drifted along the streets. I hoped that Han Jungho would find me and put me out of my misery after all. If even Taejun found me now, I probably would have just let him ship me off to wherever.
At this point, I had nothing to lose. I might as well just go back to him, admit defeat after all, and go to Beijing. There really wasn’t anything left for me in Seoul except disappointment and sorrow.
Though I had been nervous on the way over, all of that was gone on the return. I slouched over in my seat on the subway, casting such an oppressively glum presence that my only other fellow late night traveler even got up and moved to the other end of the traincar.
As I exited the subway station, I took a moment to look around at the night lights of Inner Seoul. It might be the last time I would ever see it. Though Taejun had said it would only be a short while that I had to stay in Beijing, I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to come back myself. I walked slowly, pausing often.
Loud rap music blaring out from an alley caught my attention, as scattered as it was. Somehow I felt curious, and decided I might as well go see what the source was. If it was my last night in Seoul, I should at least take in every last memory.
The sound was coming from a garage. I caught my breath in surprise as I saw one of the cars within. A blue tiger sprawled languidly on its chassis, stretching its formidable claws and yawning wide to reveal massive white fangs. I recognized that tiger. It was the street racer Han Sungmin’s car.
My numbness made me unnaturally bold. I ducked under the half raised garage door. Instantly all eyes in the room turned to me. I recognized Han Sungmin, and the woman that had blown me a kiss before, but with him were also three men and another woman I wouldn’t have had any way of recognizing.
One of the men started forward with a growled threat, but Han Sungmin stopped him. He was looking at me, trying to remember where he knew me from. The woman leaning cozily against him grinned at me, recognizing me instantly.
“Who are you?” Han Sungmin asked. His voice was threatening, but after facing down both Jungho and Taejun yesterday, he seemed like nothing more than a barking dog. “What do you want?”
Cold determination washed over me. The me from two days ago would have apologized and hit his head on something bowing his way out. But I was different now.
“I’m Baek Jaehyun,” I said, feeling strangely cold and indifferent. “I want to race.”
I expected derision. I expected anger. So I wasn’t surprised when the people in the room burst into a mixture of both.
“Who does this guy think he is?”
“Is he a fucking idiot?!”
Han Sungmin looked at me in disbelief. He laughed dryly. “I don’t know who the hell you are, Baek Jaehyun. What makes you think you can just walk in here and say that?”
“I remember him,” chirped the lady on his arm. “He works for Do Hoon-ssi.”
For some reason, that made the rest of them shut up momentarily. “Oh?” Han Sungmin looked at me, examining me more curiously. He broke into a wide grin. “So you must have seen us when I paid the old man a visit. Got a little curious, did you? Came to see us in action, eh?”
I held my silence and just looked back at him dispassionately. One of the men whooped derisively. “Ice cold!”
Han Sungmin fixed me with a glare like he wanted to melt my iciness. He would have to do so much better than that. Taejun would have withered him in an instant. He saw his glare had no effect on me, and sighed. “You must know nothing about the street scene. Why come here instead of the meet?”
“Like you said. I don’t know anything about the street scene. I don’t know where the meet is.” Han Sungmin was the only connection I had to the scene at all. If he sent me off right now, I’d never know where to find any of them ever again.
He scoffed at me. He wrapped his arm around his girl, and turned away, clearly done with my random interruption. “Someone throw this damn clown out.”
One of the men started towards me, cracking his knuckles like he was in some low tier action movie. I looked at him contemptuously. He didn’t like that. He lunged at me with a clumsy punch.
I don’t know what came over me. I’d never been in a fight before. I’d only ever been on the receiving end of beatings. Somehow the image of Taejun’s ferocity and speed with his gun flashed in my mind. I sidestepped the punch (he had started his approach way too far), grabbed his arm, and jerked him forward with his own momentum. As he stumbled past me, I planted my foot on his back. All the rage I felt at my family, Mr. Do included, seemed to rise up within me, waking my blood and my heart. I sent him flying disgracefully. I felt the hairs on my neck prickle as someone else rushed at me. I might have been shorter than Taejun, but I was still taller than average, and certainly taller than the guy rushing me now. I intercepted him before he could reach me, grabbing him by the collar and holding him at length. He stared at me in disbelief and seemed to wilt under my deathly glare, like I had done so many times under my brother’s eyes. Despite watching her comrades fail to take me down, the girl not glued to Sungmin was whooping excitedly at the fight.
All the commotion had turned Han Sungmin back around. “Hey, hey, hey!” The last guy who hadn’t rushed me was just staring in shock. It didn’t seem like he wanted to try anything.
The guy I had kicked in the back was getting up and cursing. “This fucking michin-nom!” He started towards me.
“Give it up,” Han Sungmin advised. “You already look like a damn idiot. He’s just a fucking mechanic.” Despite him saying so, he seemed unable to meet my eyes. I let his guy go, and he stumbled back, looking at me angrily as he rubbed his neck.
“Baek Jaehyun, eh? Fine. If you want to race so badly, you can follow us to the meet. Where’s your car?”
I just glowered at him silently. I didn’t have one.
He seemed exasperated. “Seriously? You don’t have a car? What the hell you going to race with, your legs?” I continued to glower at him and Sungmin decided he had enough. “Fine. Don’t tell me. Freak.”
He climbed into his car, and his girl followed. She seemed amused. As they raced off, she declined to blow me a kiss this time.
“Get out of here and don’t come back,” said the man I had kicked. He was trying to sound commanding, but having just literally kicked his ass a minute ago, his words had little effect on me. I fixed him with a burning look to show him that if I was leaving, it was of my own free will, not because he had tried to make me.
I hadn’t yet made it out of the alley when I heard someone shout. “Lee Seol-hee!”
I turned around to see who was running after me. It was the girl. She walked the last few steps up to me, grinning. She was wearing incredibly tall heels, so the fact that she had been running, even for a short distance, was pretty impressive. Her heels made her only a few inches shorter than me. She leaned towards me and despite myself my heart jumped at her closeness. She was pretty, even more than Sungmin’s girl (who, quite frankly, wore too much makeup). “The meet is at the lot under the west side of New Banpo Bridge,” she whispered, her breath tickling my ear.
She laughed at how stiff I had become with her so close. “You really don’t have a car?” she asked in a teasing voice. I didn’t answer, so she laughed lightly, turned showily, and returned to the garage.
I didn’t know why she had told me, but I was grateful that she had. So at least now I had a second clue to making my in with the racers. I just needed a car.
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