A brief silence passed.
“Not crying.”
Hong Seungpyo murmured it as though mildly disappointed. The way he said it — like he’d been hoping for tears — left Dooyoung slightly thrown. The clean line of Hong Seungpyo’s lips curved at an angle.
“Want one?”
He tilted the cigarette pinched between his index and middle finger as he asked. His voice was so languid it drained the energy out of anyone who heard it.
Dooyoung shook his head timidly and hurled the garbage bag at the truck. He’d thrown without aiming, in a rush to get out of there — and it bounced right back off the wall it hit instead.
Today felt cursed. As if every force in the universe had gathered to chant watch yourself crash and burn — whatever he did, it came out looking pathetic.
Dooyoung tried to look unbothered and trudged toward the bag lying far away from where it should be. He bent his sorry frame down and reached for it — and a hand shot out from beside him and picked it up first. Then, in one clean motion, it sailed directly into the truck.
Dooyoung stared blankly at the arc it had traced through the air. A clap from beside him snapped him back to himself. Hong Seungpyo, dusting off his hands, looked at him with an easy grin and said brightly:
“Is it because you couldn’t eat the milk you stole? You’ve got the upper body strength of a sheet of paper.”
He was still operating on completely wrong information about what had happened that morning. Dooyoung scrambled to correct him.
“I didn’t steal it! I was delivering it……!”
“Yeah?”
“Y — yeah……”
Dooyoung’s voice shrank smaller with every word. Hong Seungpyo’s steady gaze felt like too much weight, so Dooyoung quietly took a step back. It still didn’t feel like enough, so he took a few more.
Hong Seungpyo ignores Lee Juhak. Lee Juhak can’t ignore Hong Seungpyo. That meant his own position was clear. Stay out of Hong Seungpyo’s line of sight. That was his role.
Dooyoung kept darting careful glances at Hong Seungpyo like a puppy that had done something wrong.
“I have a shift to get to……”
“Milk delivery?”
“That’s only in the mornings……”
He’d answered without thinking. Then he caught Hong Seungpyo’s lips curving. It was the unmistakable expression of someone messing with him. Caught off-guard and flustered, Dooyoung gave a quick bow and walked briskly toward the school gate.
But then Hong Seungpyo started following him. He could have understood that up to the gate — but they’d been well past the school for a while now, and the trailing hadn’t stopped. Cold sweat broke out steadily down Dooyoung’s back at having Hong Seungpyo duckling along after him like this.
Does he need money for cigarettes? Money for a PC café?
Dooyoung racked his brain for why Hong Seungpyo might be following him, all while picking up his pace. The faster he walked, the faster it seemed Hong Seungpyo walked too. An overpass was coming up ahead — the thought of Hong Seungpyo crossing it right behind him made Dooyoung’s mouth go bone dry.
“Mutt.”
Hong Seungpyo said it out of nowhere, and Dooyoung visibly flinched. He pressed a hand lightly over his heart and glanced back.
“You actually turned around.”
Dooyoung’s face burned at that. Hong Seungpyo really was Lee Juhak’s crew after all. He put people down with such effortless ease. A flare of anger rose in him for a split second — but then the image of Hong Seungpyo’s half-bare torso from that morning surfaced in his mind, and he quietly folded his indignation down and swallowed it. Getting hit by those arms wrong could end his life.
“Is your name Mutt?”
Hong Seungpyo closed the distance between them at a leisurely pace as he asked.
Dooyoung had lost his own name somewhere along the way. He pressed his upper teeth into his lower lip. No child is born choosing their own name. But he, without any infant drooling to excuse it, had been given a name that wasn’t his choice.
Mutt was a nickname like a tick. It wasn’t as though he’d been called it his entire life — and yet it had already burrowed deep inside him. Every time he was called it, it felt like his sense of self blurred further, like a drooling baby. Heo Dooyoung existed nowhere.
Then Hong Seungpyo reached a hand toward him. Dooyoung threw his arms over his head on reflex and squeezed his eyes shut. But no bone-wrenching pain came, even after a long moment.
He cracked one eye open — and found his wallet in Hong Seungpyo’s hand. An oblivious expression crossed his face before he could stop it. He quickly checked the front pocket of his bag. He must not have zipped it after putting the wallet back, because it was hanging wide open.
The embarrassment hit him in a delayed wave. Dooyoung snatched the wallet back from his hand — and in the process raked across it like a wildcat. He looked like the world was ending.
But Hong Seungpyo didn’t retaliate the way Dooyoung had feared. He just let out a burst of laughter, and didn’t return the scratch on the back of his hand to Dooyoung. He went one step further and waved his hand side to side. An ordinary wave. The kind you gave a friend.
“See you.”
The greeting reached him softly, carried on a warm exhale. It was warm. And easy. Easy enough to make you mistake him for a friend.
Hong Seungpyo walked past Dooyoung and strode ahead. In no time at all he had become too distant to make out.
Dooyoung couldn’t move from the spot. It was the first greeting he’d received from a classmate in the same uniform in two years. Whether there was any sincerity in it, he wasn’t sure — but it had been a long time regardless.
All of a sudden he missed that kid. The face that used to smile like a spring day had grown so faint that it now took a long time to summon. Dooyoung stood helpless in the wind slapping at his cheeks. He resented the fierce cold. It felt exactly like how that kid must have felt watching him get his hopes up over nothing — so Dooyoung hardened his facial muscles even more.
Don’t smile. Don’t be happy.
To keep the last promise he had made with that kid, Dooyoung had locked himself on a lonely island. There was no one to resent. He was simply receiving the punishment deserved for the sin he had committed out of his own stupidity.
On his way home after closing out his evening shift, Dooyoung tilted his chin up and breathed in the night air. The deep autumn wind carried the scent of the next season within it. Maybe it was being so close to the sky. The air in the hillside slum was distinctly different from what you’d breathe down below. Just a simple wind, the smell of nature — and yet.
Dooyoung pushed open the shabby silver aluminum door and stepped inside — then stopped. His father’s shoes were in front of the bedroom door. In that same instant, the bedroom door was thrown roughly open and Heo Samhyeok stepped out.
He spotted Dooyoung standing awkwardly in the doorway and his brow furrowed. A cigarette dangled from lips rimmed with dry, flaking skin. He shoved his feet into his shoes without bothering to undo them and walked toward Dooyoung.
As Heo Samhyeok drew close, the thick, ingrained smell of mold rolled sharply outward. The clothes he was wearing were smeared with filth of indeterminate origin, and his face was slick with grease. He had a windbreaker slung over one arm — given the sudden drop in temperature, it looked like he’d stopped by just long enough to grab a layer.
Yellowed eyes that could no longer pass for white swept over Dooyoung with contempt. Dooyoung picked at the skin around his thumbnail and asked in a voice just barely loud enough to hear:
“Is… Grandma… not back yet……?”
Heo Samhyeok clicked his tongue and swung his arm wide. With a sharp crack, Dooyoung’s face whipped to the side and he crumpled to the ground. It had happened in the blink of an eye.
He caught himself on the cold cement floor with his hands. Dark red drops began to spot the surface. The ringing in his ears slowed his thoughts down. He wiped under his nose with the back of his hand. Blood smeared across it.
“Disgusting little shit……. You see your father and you ask for the old woman first? What the hell kind of upbringing is that, you little——”
His voice was sandpaper, like he used his throat as an ashtray. Heo Samhyeok hacked something loose and spat out a yellowed wad of phlegm.
“Move. Useless piece of trash.”
Dooyoung crawled to the corner to clear the way. As Heo Samhyeok swept past him, a sharp, acrid smell of burning reached him. It was a smell that lived in one particular fragment of memory. Dooyoung’s gaze landed on his father’s hands — then fell straight to the floor. The guilt he had buried deep in his chest began to seep slowly upward.
It’s not stupidity that makes me take it. It’s not stupidity that makes me not run. It’s not stupidity that makes me drag myself through each day. No one finds safety in violence. It’s not stupidity that makes me call a place that keeps me walking on eggshells home.
Dooyoung struck his own chest. Again and again. The knot inside wouldn’t loosen no matter how hard he hit. He felt as though something was stuck, and looked for a needle to lance his finger — but couldn’t find one.
He bit at the hangnail on his finger with his teeth instead. He tore at the raw skin until it bled — and then remembered the nosebleed he’d just had, and felt contempt for himself. There’s already this much blood — as if anything is actually stuck. He had just needed an excuse to hurt himself. An excuse to hurt himself without self-loathing being the reason.
Dooyoung got slowly to his feet. He set his school bag down in the corner of the room and changed into comfortable clothes. He put off washing and lay his exhausted body down first. He pressed the cheek that had been struck against the cold vinyl floor. The room was cold enough to act as its own ice pack.
