Later I got annoyed and told him to just forget it. Anyway, once it became a weekday and he went to work, I could just go to a café with WiFi and search on my phone. Surely he wouldn’t try to confiscate even my phone.
He was such an unknowable guy. Isn’t it in his interest too for me to find a job quickly? If I earn money quickly, I can pay back the debt quickly, I’ll leave his house quickly, and if the rent and interest I agreed to give him increase his income a bit more, he can buy even one more luxury item he likes.
Anyway, thinking like that, I waited for this time today. Weekday morning after Jukyung went to work, a leisurely time of freedom and peace. Worried that he might spitefully take my phone and the card he gave me, I carefully hid them in my own space before sleeping last night.
Recalling that memory and feeling triumphant for once, I was about to go to the dressing room where I’d hidden my things when there was something on the living room table that should be spotless.
A laptop. The laptop that made me so angry yesterday. And there was a note placed on top of it.
***
Play with the laptop.
If you’re only at home you’ll feel stuffy, so take a walk around the neighborhood too.
Don’t waste money going far for no reason, just play near the house.
There’s cafés and restaurants nearby, everything you need is there.
***
“……”
The note’s intention was ambiguous. Couldn’t he just say I can use the laptop? What’s this about only playing near the house? It’s not like I’m a senile old man or a child who can’t find their way. I tilted my head in bewilderment. Plus, I didn’t like the phrasing to “play” with the laptop. I needed the laptop for job searching, not to play around because I was bored.
I stared at the incomprehensible note for a moment, then crumpled it up and threw it away anywhere. It felt good to have the pleasure of throwing trash anywhere since Kwon Jukyung wasn’t here. Of course, I’d have to clean it up before Jukyung returned, but that was for later. For now, I flopped down on the sofa and looked at the blue sky outside the window. Leisurely morning time. Leisure enjoyed alone in a comfortable space. I felt pleased.
“……”
Then suddenly, I felt a bit chilly somehow, so I got up from my seat again. I glanced at the laptop waiting to be used and the piece of paper thrown on the floor.
It’s unlikely, but I heard these days people install a lot of equipment to look around the house even from work. Especially in homes with pets or children. Could this house have such equipment too? It’s not like there’s anything to look after…
I looked around. I carefully examined if there was any device with something like a camera lens, but I didn’t find any suspicious objects. I was the type who had no interest in such things, so even if there was one, I might not be able to recognize which one was a camera.
I quietly got up from the sofa and picked up the thrown note again. I was about to throw it in the trash can in the utility room behind the kitchen, but even that strangely felt uncomfortable. Since Kwon Jukyung does the cleaning anyway, I thought what if he finds it in the trash.
No, that cleanliness patient wouldn’t rummage through the trash, and throwing away a memo that already fulfilled its role by being read isn’t wrong behavior, yet I couldn’t understand why my nape felt prickly and uncomfortable. I came back to the living room, carefully smoothing out the memo. I decided to just keep it somewhere until the uncomfortable feeling passed. I could slip it between sketch notes or something, right?
I found my sketchbook, pencil, and phone and returned to the living room. The laptop I was seeing after a long time was welcome, but thinking that I’d have to do headache-inducing job searching anyway once I turned it on, I wasn’t very inclined. I wasn’t really the type to spend time glued to the internet even normally. If I had time, I preferred going out or drawing. Or rather, fiddling with clay.
I opened the sketchbook and spread out Jukyung’s face that I’d failed to draw yesterday. The face with lines tangled messily looked beyond recovery. I gave up cleanly and opened a fresh new page. I could just draw it again.
I turned on my phone and opened the photo album. Jukyung’s face that I took yesterday came up on the screen. At first I thought I’d redraw the face I’d stopped drawing yesterday, but as I looked at the photos, my mind changed.
The surprised face like a rabbit or the pouty face held my gaze for a long time because they were somehow uncharacteristically cute. After giggling to myself alone, I changed my mind and started swiftly transferring the photo with the pouty expression onto the sketchbook.
It’s a face that’s fun to draw. Hair naturally flowing down, unlike the usual style of cleanly swept back. Cool white skin and a chiseled face shape. The deep, long eyes surprisingly had long eyelashes, and the nose bridge and lips were delicate and neat. It’s a face that gives an overall cold feeling, but with an expression that suits the word pouty and a flush on the white cheeks, somehow a boyish atmosphere circulated.
Drawing a three-dimensional head on a flat surface, I couldn’t help but feel unsatisfied. I even thought about buying clay and sculpting it. If I sculpted it small, just hand puppet size, couldn’t I hide it secretly without cluttering up the room too much?
Thinking like that, I drew the pupils with a soft pencil lead and refined the corners of the eyes and lips. I strangely felt like I was caressing his face directly. It also felt like the eyes in the drawing were looking at me asking what I was doing. I felt embarrassed for no reason and my cheeks felt ticklish. It seemed hot, like I had a fever.
What am I really doing? Over just drawing one picture.
I put down the pencil and shook my head. This isn’t the time to be spacing out like this, what am I even doing? I needed to pull myself together and look for jobs first.
I looked at the laptop, but I still wasn’t inclined. I seemed to be hungry too. Looking at the clock, it was already approaching 11 o’clock. I thought maybe 15 minutes had passed, but I seemed to have spent an hour drawing. When I’m immersed in something, time always passes quickly. It was a mysterious thing.
I thought I’d fill my stomach first then seriously search for job information. I showered first, got dressed, then went outside to eat breakfast-lunch. Remembering Jukyung’s words to only stay nearby, I thought about venturing to a different neighborhood out of rebelliousness, but actually there really were many good places to eat nearby, so wandering around other unfamiliar neighborhoods would truly be a waste of time.
Plus, thinking about it, since all my card transactions would be sent to Jukyung via text, he’d inevitably know where I spent my time. There’d be nothing good about letting him know I rebelled for no reason.
I had lunch with a homemade burger filled with thick patties and avocado, then leisurely wandered around the neighborhood walking path with cool tree shade. After absorbing vitamin D while receiving sunlight through the leaves, when it felt too hot, I’d go into a roadside café and cool off with a cool drink.
When was the time I thought I was using time productively only if I was definitely doing something, whether studying or playing? Though there were occasionally people who passed by throwing strange looks at a young person spacing out idly in broad daylight with nothing to do, when our eyes met I just grinned at them.
Perhaps due to the aftermath of briefly living as a homeless person, I’d come to really love this time of emptying my head and spacing out for some time each day. It’s still hard to take long walks because it’s hot, but soon summer will pass and autumn will come, and the taste of walking under the blue sky and looking at the small wildflowers growing by the roadside will be quite special.
After meeting Kwon Jukyung, a picky perverted patron who only has decent looks, the world was dyed in hopeful pink anyway. What more could I want when my stomach is full and my back is warm? I had no doubt that finding employment would also be easy.
***
And in just a few hours, that belief of mine was mercilessly shattered. After returning from a happy walk, I had to experience my fully charged positive mindset crumbling to pieces.
First, finding a proper job search site on the Korean search engine I wasn’t familiar with yet was work in itself. Anyway, the problem with the internet is there’s too much information.
I never thought even a month ago that I would find employment this way. Since around the time I entered Leroy, my career path was almost fixed. Unless I manifested—after passing twenty years old, I was certain I had no possibility of complete manifestation—I would go straight to graduate school, and after finishing graduate school, I thought I’d return to Korea and work at Father’s company.
Thanks to that, my knowledge about employment in Korea was worse than a middle schooler’s. Even after finding what seemed like an appropriate job search site, when I excluded occupations where Father might interfere through connections, my choices narrowed considerably. The massive hiring period commonly called large company open recruitment was also timed with Korea’s university graduation season, so the timing didn’t match in the first place.
There weren’t that many places I could apply to as a new hire rather than with experience, and the documents they requested were tremendous. Among them were several documents difficult to obtain urgently when my school was overseas and I’d left home. And I needed a place where money would come out immediately.
I thought maybe I should work part-time at cafés or restaurants after all. Working part-time for a few months while preparing documents and applying to winter recruitment might be a better choice in the long term.
But I grimaced remembering the hourly wage the café looking for part-timers had offered. If that wasn’t a joke or a scam but real, I absolutely couldn’t maintain my livelihood on that money.
Not only could I not pay back the debt I owed Kwon Jukyung immediately, but I might have to leech off Kwon Jukyung for life. Of course, realistically Kwon Jukyung wouldn’t accept me, so the result would be getting dragged away by police or sold somewhere with a pile of debt.
I held my head and started clicking around searching the site. When leisurely thinking while eating, I thought I could find an appropriate place in a couple hours and complete online applications to several places, but that was an absurdly naive thought.
When Jukyung rang the bell after coming home from work, I was exhausted and had returned to my haggard appearance from two or three days ago. When I opened the door, Jukyung flinched in surprise at seeing me.
“What? Did you run a marathon somewhere?”
“What marathon?”
I said sullenly while receiving the paper bag in Jukyung’s hand, probably dinner. I didn’t even feel like looking inside. I don’t know what it is, but I might have to say from now on I’ll only eat one cup of ramen a day. Because if I increase the debt more, an irreversible situation might come.
Jukyung looked over my face and entered inside, then slightly raised his eyebrow when he saw the living room. Following that gaze, I also looked around the living room and thought “oh no.” The living room was in a messy state. Not just the laptop but the phone, sketchbook, pencils, memo notebook, pen, water cup and such were scattered messily on the table, living room floor, and sofa without distinction.
Hearing Jukyung click his tongue, I hurriedly walked to the table and first covered the sketchbook with Jukyung’s face drawn on it that was spread open.
“I was going to clean up before you came… I lost track of time. Really.”
