Volume 2

Chapter 16

Three years earlier

The alarm went off at five forty-five, and Hyo-bin was already half awake.

He had been listening to his mother in the kitchen for a while: the soft scrape of the rice paddle against the pot, the tap running and stopping, the private sounds of someone moving around a small apartment while trying not to wake anyone.

He turned off the alarm before it could finish. After lying there for another second, he got up.

His tracksuit was where he had left it on the chair. He pulled it on in the dark, found his bag by the door, ran his fingers through his hair once, and called it done. The mirror above his desk caught him on the way out, but he did not look at it. He never did in the morning. Mornings were for getting to the pool.

Kim Eun-jung was at the stove when he entered the kitchen. The rice cooker was breathing on the counter beside her. When she heard him, she turned and smiled. "Sit, Hyo-bin. Eat it while it's hot."

"I can take it to go."

"I said sit."

He sat down. After putting the bowl in front of him, she added a smaller bowl of soup and a plate of radishes she had pickled herself the week before. She watched him eat while standing at the counter with her coffee. This was her reward for getting up early.

"Will you bring me a medal today?" she asked.

"There's no race today, Mom."

"Then bring me one tomorrow." She said it every morning and laughed at her own joke before he could.

Hyo-bin ate his rice and did not tell her to stop. The morning she stopped saying it would be worse than this one.

His father came out of the bedroom with wet hair. One button on his work shirt was fastened incorrectly. Hyo-bin noticed but did not say anything.

Choi Young-ho reached past him for the kettle, smelling like soap and toothpaste. This meant it was a good day. After pouring hot water into his thermos, he screwed on the lid. "Hyo-bin, give me your key."

"Why?"

"I think I lost mine yesterday. I can't find it."

"Dad, you lost it last month too..."

"Key, Hyo-bin."

"Take it from the front pocket of my bag."

Young-ho placed a hand on the back of his neck for a second. After walking over to the bag on the couch, he took the keys. As he started toward the door, Hyo-bin called out to him.

"Dad, I need new goggles. The strap broke, and I tied it like a string. My teammates are laughing."

"Haah, Hyo-bin!" Young-ho said. "I can't buy them right now. I'm paying the mortgage. Make do with them a little longer." He turned to his wife. "I gotta go, Eun-jung. There's an early delivery today."

He left before she could answer.

Eun-jung took Hyo-bin's empty bowl from his hands before he could carry it to the sink. "I'll buy them, okay? Now go. You'll be late."

—

Outside, Sillim-dong was the color of an old photograph. The sky had not picked a weather yet.

The old man at the corner shop was hosing down the sidewalk in front of the steel shutter. Hyo-bin nodded to him, and the old man nodded back without looking up from the hose.

As he walked to the bus stop, Hyo-bin thought about finishing school quickly and getting to the pool.

The day passed like every other day. He got bored in class and spent the breaks with his friends.

After the final bell rang, he ran through the school courtyard and went down the back stairs to the pool. The scent of chlorine reached him on the second step, the way it always did. Some smells turned a key inside a person.

By the time he placed a hand on the door, he was no longer the boy who had eaten breakfast across from his mother. He was someone else, the boy the water knew.

Coach Yoo was on the deck with a stopwatch around his neck. Two second-years were already warming up in the lanes.

Hyo-bin changed in the locker room without talking to anyone. He came out and entered the water in lane three, the way he had every morning since he was nine. The cold traveled up his ribs and out through the back of his head, taking something with it that he could not name and did not need to.

Forty minutes into practice, Coach Yoo blew the whistle. "Hyo-bin. Butterfly. Two hundred. On the clock."

Hyo-bin climbed out of lane three and walked around the pool to lane four. The world above the water was loud, the way it always was after he had been under for a while. Voices echoed off the ceiling, and the whistle still rang somewhere in his back teeth.

After stepping onto the block, he bent down and reached for the edge with his fingertips. While he waited, he looked as though he had been born to do this. Even though he was only nineteen, his body was fully built.

The whistle blew.

He entered the water cleanly. The first fifty was the part he never remembered afterward, only the shape of it in his shoulders. The second fifty was rhythm. His lungs started talking to him during the third fifty, and he stopped listening. By the fourth, there was nothing inside him except the wall and the need to reach it.

Then the wall was there. His hand hit it, and he came up.

Coach Yoo was looking at the stopwatch and did not say anything. Hyo-bin knew him by then. The coach saying nothing meant more than his saying something. After a while, Coach Yoo looked up from the watch. "If you can do this next week in front of a federation judge, I'll drive you to the center myself."

Hyo-bin pushed his goggles onto his forehead. Breathing hard, he reached for the edge of the pool to pull himself out and nodded once.

That was when he saw them.

Two people stood at the door. The vice principal wore the brown suit he chose on days when he had to do something that was not his job. Beside him stood a tall boy Hyo-bin did not know. His hands were in the pockets of a dark, well-cut jacket that clearly had not come from a shop in Sillim.

The boy was looking at the pool. While the vice principal spoke to him and explained things, he did not answer. He only watched the water.

Hyo-bin reached for his towel on the bench and began drying himself while watching them from the corner of his eye. Behind him, Coach Yoo walked toward the door.

Without trying, Hyo-bin caught pieces of the conversation.

"Transfer..."

"Starts Monday..."

"Freestyle and butterfly, hundred and two hundred..."

Then he heard the boy's name. His hand stopped at the back of his neck for a second before he continued as though nothing had happened. He had plenty of practice keeping his hands from giving him away.

Seo Seung-ho. Of course it was. Everybody knew that name.

He was the son of former champion Kim Ji-hye, the one who attended the private school in Gangnam with the marble lobby and the swimming complex with two pools.

People said he was a very good swimmer, like his mother, but that he did not care about it. Kim Ji-hye was the swimmer on the national team poster that had hung on the wall of Hyo-bin's middle school locker room for three years before someone took it down. Nobody was surprised that her son was a good swimmer.

Hyo-bin folded the towel over his shoulder and walked toward the lockers, but he had to pass the door to reach them. He kept his eyes on the floor tiles until he was almost level with the two visitors, then looked up.

When he saw the boy watching him, he tried to push his goggles under his swim cap without thinking.

The vice principal cleared his throat. "Hyo-bin, come here. Seo Seung-ho is a transfer student, and he just came to our school. He'll start training with you..."

"Are you Choi Hyo-bin?" Seung-ho sounded completely at ease as he interrupted the vice principal.

Hyo-bin looked at him properly for the first time.

Up close, the jacket was even simpler than it had looked from across the pool. The face above it did not fit a guy who was eighteen or nineteen, or whatever age he was supposed to be. It was an unsatisfied face that had already been somewhere and had not liked it there. A mark crossed his chin, perhaps from shaving or something else.

"Yeah," Hyo-bin said.

"Seo Seung-ho. Nice to meet you."

"I know," Hyo-bin said. "Everybody knows."

After adjusting the towel on his shoulder, he walked past Seung-ho toward the lockers.

Behind him, Seo Seung-ho remained by the door and watched him cross the entire pool deck, turn the corner, and disappear from sight.

The vice principal had to say his name twice before Seung-ho heard him.