Chapter Text
Yeonji. Sixteen.
Six Months Ago
The apartment was small in the way that all apartments were small when your mother worked two jobs and your father was a memory that lived in a photograph on a shelf in the living room. It had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that doubled as a living room if you pushed the table against the wall, and a hallway so narrow that Yeonji had to turn sideways to pass her mother when they met in the middle of it, which her mother always turned into a little sketch. She would press herself flat against the wall with her arms out like she was being robbed, saying after you, miss, and Yeonji would squeeze past laughing with her school bag bumping the walls on both sides and her mother would pat her head as she went, just once and quick, the way she always did, something that at the age of sixteen she should have grown out of but still secretly enjoyed.
Yeonji's bedroom was the smaller of the two. Her mother had tried to give her the bigger one when they'd moved in. She had stood in the doorway of it with her hand on the frame, gesturing at the extra half-metre of floor space like she was showing off a palace, and Yeonji had said no. She had said it firmly, in the tone of voice that her mother called her “ajumma voice”, the one that came out when Yeonji had decided something and the decision was not open for debate.
The bigger room got more sunlight and her mother liked the sunlight. That was just how it was. Yeonji couldn’t do much for her mother, but she could do that. Some mornings, she'd catch her mother standing in the kitchen with her eyes closed and her face turned toward the window where the light came in, just standing there for ten or fifteen seconds before the kettle boiled or the phone rang or the day started making its demands, and in those seconds her mother looked calm and at peace, and Yeonji would have slept in a cupboard to make sure those seconds kept happening.
So the small room was hers, and she'd made it hers the way she made everything hers. Thoroughly and loudly, leaving no corner unoccupied. The walls were covered, an almost living, breathing record of Yeonji's interests and obsessions that had been accumulating over the months since they'd moved. A poster of a kpop group she'd loved at fifteen and still loved at sixteen but would deny loving if asked. There was a board of post-it-notes in her own handwriting, reminders and quotes and fragments of things she'd overheard that she wanted to keep and remember, because Yeonji collected language the way some people collected coins, picking up the interesting pieces and holding them up to the light. There were pictures she had taken and had liked the look of. Pictures of the sea, pictures of the clouds, pictures of her mom. And her favourite picture, one of her and Joobin taken by her mom, the two of them sitting on the sand in Busan, eating ice-cream.
A picture from when things had been better for the both of them, before it had all gone to shit.
Her desk was too small for the amount of homework that she piled on it, so she'd migrated to the floor months ago and never gone back. The carpet was thin and beige. It had come with the apartment and Yeonji guessed that it was probably the same carpet that had been fitted at the time it was built. She hated the colour and how thin it was, but it had become her workspace, her study hall, her operations centre. Textbooks spread in a semicircle around her crossed legs. Notebooks open to pages covered in handwriting that shifted between neat and chaotic depending on how fast her brain had been moving when she'd written it. There were words and sentences highlighted in four colours because she had a system, or at least the vague semblance of a system before she'd forgotten what half the colours meant.
She was a decent student. Not the best. She would never trouble the top of the school ranking systems, but she was nowhere near the bottom and she took a certain pride in that fact. It surprised other people though, because girls like her… girls who had a… reputation, weren't supposed to care about the Joseon dynasty trade routes or the quadratic formula or the history that led to the division of the Korean peninsula. Girls who fought, who lived with violence, were supposed to sit in the back row with their feet on the desk and their eyes on the clock, waiting for the bell the way prisoners waited for the end of a shift. Yeonji sat near the front. She took notes and she circled the things she didn't understand and came back to them later.
She liked learning. It wasn’t something she announced, because admitting you liked learning when you were a girl who'd been expelled from her last school for fighting was an invitation for a very specific kind of cruelty from a certain group of people. The kind that smiled with fake lips and said oh, I didn't think you were the type, and the smile meant your kind doesn't get to want this, and Yeonji had been on the receiving end of that smile enough times to know that the safest response was to keep her thoughts to herself.
Unless the other person happened to be Joobin.
Joobin knew because Joobin knew everything. Joobin was the one person in Yeonji's life who had never once looked at her bloody knuckles and her school record and her history of violence and drawn a conclusion about what she was allowed to care about. Joobin had seen her excited about a history essay and said tell me about it and had meant it, and Yeonji had talked for ten minutes without pause about the Imjin War and Joobin had sat in silence and listened to every word. Sometimes, Yeonji would wonder why Joobin would happily sit and listen to her ramble on for stretches at a time. But anytime she approached the subject, Joobin would just shrug her shoulders and say she liked to listen to Yeonji talk.
Which was fine by Yeonji, because she liked to talk. A lot.
Tonight she was alone with the Joseon trade routes, cross-legged on the carpet in joggers and an oversized t-shirt that had been her mother's before it had been hers, and she had a yellow highlighter between her teeth. She was forty minutes into her studying, forty minutes of uninterrupted focus, which for Yeonji was something close to a miracle, because she knew well enough that her brain was not a brain that sat still. Her brain was a Chrome browser with forty-seven tabs open and music playing from at least three of them. It was a puppy in a park, delighted by everything, committed to nothing, ricocheting between stimuli with a joy that was genuine and an attention span that was not. But tonight the trade routes were clicking. The connections were forming. Busan to Tsushima to the Japanese markets, the silver flowing one way and the textiles flowing the other, the economics of it snapping into focus, and she moved the highlighter across the page with purpose.
Her phone buzzed against the carpet and the trade routes no longer mattered.
She sighed, openly frustrated, and her hand was already moving to flip it facedown, the instinctive swipe of a student who'd learned that phones were the enemy of the forty-seven-tab brain, that a single notification could unravel the forty minutes of focus in the time it took to read a text and respond to it and then respond to the response and then check one other thing while the phone was in her hand and then it was an hour later and the trade routes were a distant memory and she was watching a video about a cat that could open doors.
She'd had to develop strategies. Which meant her phone face down and notifications on silent. The discipline of not looking was harder for her than it was for most people because she was the kind of person who looked at everything, who couldn't pass a shop window without stopping to examine what was inside. So she almost flipped it over.
But the preview caught her eye before her hand completed the motion. It was a photograph from a number she didn't recognise.
She picked up the phone and the image filled the screen and Yeonji's brain tried to refuse it, tried to reject what she was looking at.
Joobin on concrete.
Joobin on her side, the grey weathered concrete of Yeonhwa High's rooftop beneath her. The rooftop where they ate lunch when the cafeteria was too loud, cross-legged with their backs against the wall, splitting kimbap on a shared napkin because Joobin always forgot to bring one and Yeonji always brought two, had been bringing two since the first day they had become friends. She just started packing an extra, because some things you did for your friend without announcement or explanation. Joobin’s hair was fanned around her head and it would have looked almost peaceful if not for the colour. There was red in her light brown hair, matted and heavy at the temple where something had hit her or where her head had hit the ground, and it didn't matter which because both meant the same thing. Someone had put their hands on Yeonji’s friend.
Her best friend. Her only friend. Her favourite person. The girl who still covered her eyes during the scary parts of movies and asked Yeonji to describe what was happening in a way that wasn't scary, as if horror was a translation problem that better word choice could fix. The girl who grabbed the sleeve of Yeonji's blazer in crowded hallways because she didn't like crowds but she liked Yeonji and the sleeve was the compromise between the two. The girl who had sat in the rain with a bleeding lip and asked can we be friends like it was that easy, like four words were enough, and Yeonji had said obviously and meant it with every cell of her body and had spent every day since then proving it.
Joobin’s eyes were closed in the photo but her mouth was open. There was blood on her lips and her chin and the collar of her school uniform. Not a lot, but enough. The kind of enough that meant something inside was wrong, because blood doesn't come from a person's mouth for no reason. It comes when something has been hit hard enough and often enough that the body starts leaking the thing it needs most.
The phone buzzed again, a text from the same number, arriving beneath the photo.
It's Minho. Roof of the east building. Your friend's been keeping us company but she's getting boring. Come take her place and maybe we let her go. Or don't come, and we'll find other ways to keep ourselves entertained. You know me, Yeonji-ya. You know I'm creative.
She read it twice, the words registering in fragments. Roof, friend, place, entertained, creative. She read them and her stomach clenched so hard she tasted bile, a sourness at the back of her throat. The implication was clear and worse than the photo or the blood, because the photograph was what had already happened and the text was what might happen next, and the space between we'll find other ways to keep ourselves entertained and what those ways might be was a space that Yeonji's mind could fill with every terrible thing she'd watched Minho do over three months, and the worst part was that her imagination didn't have to work hard. She knew because she'd watched him fill it. Had watched him spend the last three months escalating, from words to shoves, from shoves to something worse, from the petty daily cruelties that teachers noticed and ignored to the kind that happened in empty classrooms and stairwells where there were no witnesses and no cameras and his size and his smile and the comfortable certainty that nobody would stop him were the only tools he needed. She'd seen the way he looked at Joobin. The way his eyes tracked her through hallways. The way his cruelty toward Joobin had a texture that was different from his cruelty toward everyone else. It was slower and more attentive, more… interested. And Yeonji had recognised the shape of that interest the way you recognised the shape of a weapon even before you understood exactly what kind of damage it was designed to do.
You know I'm creative.
The phone was shaking. No, she realised, it wasn’t her phone that was shaking but her hands. And not just her hands, but her whole body, a tremor that started in her fingers and radiated up through her arms and into her chest and her jaw, and she could feel her teeth grinding together, could feel the muscles in her face pulling tight, and the highlighter was still between her teeth and she bit down on it so hard the plastic casing cracked and the chemical taste of yellow ink flooded her tongue but she barely noticed, because every part of her that was capable of noticing things had narrowed to a point, a single bright focus that contained Joobin’s face on the screen and Minho’s words underneath it and the rooftop where they ate lunch and the distance between here and there.
She got to her feet in a rush, the textbooks on her knees scattering to the floor, joining the highlighter that was in two pieces. Her grip tightened around her phone, and she was in the hallway and putting on her trainers before she could even think through the anger that had taken root in her chest, anger that was deep and hot and growing faster than she could contain. She distantly heard her mother shout something from the kitchen. Maybe her name, or maybe where are you going, or dinner's almost ready, something warm and ordinary and belonging to the world that had existed thirty seconds ago, the world where Yeonji was a girl doing homework on a carpet in a small bedroom in a small apartment. But that world was gone now, and the one that replaced it had no room in it for anything except the distance between here and the rooftop, and the fury that was going to carry her across it.
She was through the door before her mother's voice reached her. She would think about that later. The sound of her mother's voice hitting the back of a closing door. The way it must have hung in the empty hallway for a second after the door shut, a question with no one left to answer it. She would carry the weight of that small failure for longer than she'd carry most of the bruises, because bruises faded and the sound of your mother calling your name into a space you'd already left was the kind of thing that lived in you the way shrapnel lived in a body. Too deep to remove, too sharp to ignore, a permanent resident in the place where guilt kept its things.
The night was cold. November cold, the kind that found the gaps in clothing and settled into the bones and stayed there. She was wearing nothing but her jogger pants and her mother's old t-shirt and sneakers with no socks and she didn't feel any of it. She started running, and none of that mattered. There was only the rage and the one, simple thought that mattered.
Get to Joobin and make her safe.
________________________________________
Yeonji ran, holding nothing back and every reserve spent in the first thirty seconds because she was many things, but a runner was not one of them. She lacked every quality that running demanded. The patience, the rhythm, the discipline of matching breath to stride, the willingness to hold something back so that you had it later when you needed it. Yeonji didn't hold things back. Yeonji was a girl who had been born with the throttle welded open, who threw herself at the world with both hands and dealt with the consequences when they arrived, and right now the consequences were a tightness in her chest that radiated outward through her ribs with every stride.
It was fifteen minutes from her home to Yeonhwa High. Fifteen minutes with Joobin was a conversation that covered everything and nothing.
She'd walked the route a thousand times with Joobin beside her, the two of them taking the long way home, passing the empty lot on the corner of Myeonmok-ro where someone had been building something for two years and never finished and the half-skeleton of the structure stood against the skyline like the ribcage of an animal that had died mid-breath, and passing the convenience store on the corner where the halmeoni behind the counter gave them extra tteokbokki if they came in during the quiet hour. But mostly, it was because the long way had a stretch of sidewalk that ran alongside the Jungnangcheon stream, where the light between four and five in the afternoon went soft and low and turned the whole path into a place that didn't look like their neighbourhood anymore, turned the concrete warm and the water bright and made the weeds growing through the cracks in the embankment look like they belonged in a painting, and Yeonji had never been able to describe what happened to that stretch of path in that specific hour but never stopped trying.
Look Joobin-ah, look at what the light's doing, and Joobin would look and smile softly and say it's pretty in that quiet, honest way she said everything, when she really meant I know what you mean even though you can't say it, and they'd keep walking.
But fifteen minutes at a sprint alone in the dark was something else entirely.
The streets in Myeonmok-dong were quieter after dark. They weren’t empty, but there was a subdued energy to the area, as if everything had been pulled indoors, lights on behind curtains, the occasional passing car throwing headlights across her path that swept over her and moved on without interest. There was a couple walking a small dog on the other side of the road. A delivery scooter idling outside a chicken restaurant with its hazard lights blinking orange. The world going about its business, ordinary and intact, and Yeonji moved through it like something from a different story, her phone in a death grip and her face wearing an expression that didn't belong on a sixteen-year-old.
By the ten minute mark her chest was a furnace. Each breath pulled in less air than the last and what it pulled in tasted like hot metal, and she could feel her heart hammering against her ribs with a violence that seemed personal, as if the organ itself was angry, as if it understood what was happening before the rest of her body had finished catching up. Her calves were tightening. A stitch was forming in her right side, a sharp, needling pain that dug in deeper with every stride, and she pressed her free hand against it and kept running because the stitch didn't matter and the burning didn't matter and the fact that her vision was starting to pulse at the edges with each heartbeat didn't matter, none of it mattered, because Minho had Joobin on a rooftop and he'd used the word creative and the stitch in her side was nothing compared to the meaning behind that single word.
Her phone buzzed in her hand, surprising her enough that she almost dropped it. Her palms were slick with sweat despite the cold, and the vibration against wet skin made the device feel alive, as if it was squirming and trying to escape her grip. She slowed to a stumbling half-jog, tilting the screen towards the streetlight as she kept moving, only for the image to bring her to a stop.
It was a picture of Minho’s foot on Joobin’s face.
The trainer was white and expensive, the kind of pristine white sneaker that cost more than Yeonji’s mother made in a month. It was pressed down against Joobin’s cheek, pushing the side of her face into the concrete. Joobin’s eyes were still closed and her mouth was still open and the blood on her chin had spread, smearing across the concrete in a dark crescent where her face had been pushed sideways by the weight of him. He'd taken the photo from above, angled down, the way you'd photograph something you'd caught and wanted to show off. His other foot was visible at the edge of the frame, planted and casual, the stance of a boy who was comfortable standing on another person's face, who had done this before and had enjoyed every moment of it. It was a simple message. Look what I can do, look how little it costs me, look how your friend becomes a surface I put my foot on.
Underneath the photograph, a message.
Hurry up Yeonji-ya. I'm getting bored.
And below that, a second one.
You know what happens when I get bored.
Bored. He said it with his foot on her best friend's face. Said it the way someone talks about a game that isn't holding their interest anymore, a game they might put down and replace with something more stimulating. And Yeonji knew. Knew with the sick, heavy certainty of someone who had watched Minho get worse for three months and could see where it was going.
She'd watched him get bored before. Had watched the way his cruelty shifted gears when the initial entertainment wore off, the way his eyes changed, the way the smile stayed the same but the thing behind it shifted, less interested in hurting someone and more interested in what a person became when you stopped treating them as a target and started treating them as a project. She'd seen him corner a first-year boy in a bathroom and she'd seen what boredom looked like on Minho’s face. The half-lidded patience of someone who had all the time in the world and nothing inside him that said enough. She'd intervened then. She had walked into the bathroom and said leave him alone and Minho had looked at her with that smile and said or what and she'd said nothing, because the answer to or what was written on her knuckles and they'd both known it. He'd let the boy go. Not because he was afraid of her, but because Yeonji's arrival had made the situation more complicated than he wanted, and Minho was a boy who preferred his cruelty uncomplicated.
That, though, had put her on Minho’s radar. Which meant Joobin was on his radar.
Joobin was different. Joobin had always been different. The way he looked at her was not the way he looked at the first-year boy in the bathroom. It carried a different weight. A different patience. An attention that made Yeonji's skin crawl. His boredom was the most dangerous thing on that rooftop. More dangerous than his fists, more dangerous than his friends, because fists left bruises and bruises healed, but the things Minho did when he was bored and had power and had a girl who couldn't fight back alone on a rooftop at night were things that didn't heal. Things that changed a person irrevocably. Things that lived in the dark and bred in silence and Yeonji could not and would not let that happen. Not to anyone. Especially not to Joobin.
You know what happens when I get bored.
She shoved the phone into the pocket of her joggers because her hands had started shaking with a violence that went deeper than the cold or the exertion, a tremor that originated somewhere in the centre of her and radiated outward through every limb. She started running harder and her body protested, her lungs and her legs and her heart hammering so fast it felt less like a beat and more like a sustained vibration, a hummingbird trapped behind her ribs, and she ignored the protest the way she'd always ignored the parts of herself that told her to stop, to slow down, to be less, to take up less space, to make less noise, to keep her head down and her fists unclenched and her mouth shut. Her body could file its complaints later. Right now her body was a vehicle and the vehicle had one destination and the road between here and there was measured in five minutes and she was burning through them, her breath coming in ragged gasps that sounded wrong in the quiet street, the sound of a person being chased by something that wasn't behind her.
She ran faster. Past the empty lot, past the darkened shopfronts, past the bus stop where the halmeoni who predicted rain would be sitting tomorrow morning with her umbrella and her opinions, and the world narrowed around her like a tunnel, the edges going soft and dark, the centre getting sharper with every stride. The school. The gate. The building. The roof. Joobin. And the thing she was going to do when she got there that she didn’t need to name because the name was old and familiar and tasted like copper.
________________________________________
The front gate of the school was steel and padlocked, the way it was every night after the staff left, but Yeonji knew the gap. Everyone who'd ever needed to get into Yeonhwa after hours knew the gap. The left side of the gate, where the frame met the concrete pillar, had been bent outward by years of students doing exactly what she was about to do, pulling and shouldering and shoving until the metal had given up pretending to be a barrier and settled into a permanent bow that left just enough space for a body to squeeze through if the body was willing to be scraped and bruised in the process.
She'd used it before. With Joobin, on the Saturday they'd snuck in for the forgotten notebook. Joobin had gone first, turning sideways and sucking in her stomach and inching through the gap with her backpack held above her head because she refused to leave it behind, and she'd gotten stuck halfway, the metal pressing into her ribs, and Yeonji had been laughing so hard she could barely stand, whispering Joobin-ah just breathe out, breathe out, you're not that wide, and Joobin had whispered back I'm going to die in this gate and it's going to be your fault and when I die I promise I am going to come back and haunt you for the rest of your life, and Yeonji had put both hands on Joobin’s side and shoved her through the other side like a cork from a bottle. She stumbled forward three steps and turned around with her hair in her face and her school shirt rucked up to her ribs and said, with perfect seriousness, that was assault and Yeonji had laughed so hard she'd had to sit down on the pavement and Joobin had stood on the other side of the gate trying to look offended and failing because her mouth kept twitching and eventually they were both on the ground, Joobin on one side and Yeonji on the other, laughing through the bars of a gate like two inmates in the world's stupidest prison.
She grabbed the bent frame and pulled, putting her weight into it, and the metal groaned and gave another centimetre. She turned sideways and shoved herself into the gap, the steel edge biting into her chest and her back through the thin cotton of her mother's old t-shirt, scraping a hot line along her shoulder blade as she pushed through. Her joggers caught on a bolt and she heard the fabric tear and felt a sting across her hip where the metal found skin, and she didn't care, because caring needed a part of her brain that wasn't available anymore. She popped through the other side and stumbled forward, catching herself before she started running again.
Across the dark yard. Past the sports equipment shed with its rusted padlock that hadn't been changed in years. Past the bench where she and Joobin sometimes sat after school, the one under the cherry blossom tree near the east building entrance, where Joobin would close her eyes and lean her head against Yeonji's shoulder for five minutes of quiet before the walk home. Joobin’s days were louder than they looked from the outside. The hallways, the whispers, the slow campaign of small cruelties that Minho and his gang had been running against her for months, the weight of all that pressing down on a girl who absorbed other people's unkindness the way cloth absorbed water, taking it in, holding it, carrying it home with her. The five minutes on that bench were the only quiet she got in school. Yeonji would sit there and not talk, which was both the hardest and sweetest thing she could do for another person, and Joobin would breathe slowly, in and out, and after five minutes she would open her eyes and say okay and they would walk home together. The okay was never about being okay. It was about being ready to keep going, and Yeonji had always understood the difference.
She entered through the side door of the east building, the one with the latch that didn't catch if you shouldered it at the right angle. She hit the door with her shoulder. The latch held, so she hit it again, harder, putting her hip into it, and the latch gave with a metallic snap and the door swung inward and the darkness of the building breathed out at her, stale and cold, the trapped air of a school that had been sealed since six.
Inside was black. Not dimness, not shadow, but the real black of an interior space with no windows and no emergency lighting on this floor, the kind of dark that had weight and pressed against her eyes and made them strain and produce nothing for the effort. The hallway stretched ahead of her and her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum and the sound bounced off the walls and came back multiplied, so that she sounded like three people running through a dark building instead of one.
The stairwell was worse. Narrower. The concrete walls turning her breathing into something bigger than a single pair of lungs, amplifying the ragged, torn sound of it until she felt surrounded by her own exhaustion. She took the stairs two at a time with one hand on the railing and the other pressed against the stitch in her side. The stitch had settled in during the run and hadn't left, a sharp needling presence just below her ribs on the right side and pressing on it didn't help but gave her hand something to do that wasn't shaking.
Her thighs were trembling by the second floor, the muscles filling with a heaviness that made each step feel like wading through sand. She could feel her heartbeat in her fingertips and in her temples, in the scrape on her hip where the gate had torn through her pants, the pulse pushing blood to the surface of the wound in time with the hammering in her chest.
She thought about Joobin’s hand grabbing her blazer sleeve in crowded hallways. She thought about the weight of Joobin’s head on her shoulder on the bench outside. She thought about can we be friends asked in the rain by a girl with a bleeding lip who had nothing left to lose. And her legs kept climbing.
When she reached the fourth floor, the stairwell narrowed. It was older and steeper, the steps uneven and worn smooth by years of feet that had no business coming up here, an afterthought leading to a roof that the school had never properly secured because securing it would have meant acknowledging what it was used for after dark.
She could hear them now through the walls. Through the door at the top that she could see now, a thin rectangle of slightly-less-dark where it had been propped open. Voices and laughter, the low, comfortable sound of people who were enjoying themselves, who had nowhere else to be on a Thursday night in November and had found their entertainment on a rooftop with a girl who couldn't fight back.
And underneath the laughter, barely audible, was a sound that wasn't a voice. Low and intermittent. A whimper that kept starting and stopping, as if the person making it was trying not to make it, was swallowing it down between each breath and failing. Yeonji knew that sound. It was the sound Joobin made when she was trying to be quiet about being hurt, the same sound she'd made in the hallway outside the bathroom on the day they'd met, pressing her hand over her own mouth as if she could hold the pain in if she just didn't let it out. As if not making noise meant it wasn't really happening. Yeonji heard it and she felt her fury grow, because that sound was Joobin, and the moment she heard it the stitch in her side went quiet and the burning in her legs went distant and the taste of copper in her mouth became just another thing her body was doing while the rest of her turned toward that door
She stopped on the top step. Her body demanded it. One second, just one, one breath that wasn't ragged and torn. Her chest heaved. Sweat had soaked through her mother's old t-shirt and the November air was finding it through the gap under the door, turning the wet fabric to ice against her skin. She could feel goosebumps rising across her arms, across her stomach, across the back of her neck where the sweat was cooling fastest.
Through the door she could hear Minho’s voice. She couldn't make out the words but she could hear the tone, relaxed and unhurried, the voice of a boy who was comfortable and in control and wanted every person within earshot to know it. The way he sounded in the hallways at school when he had someone cornered. The way he'd sounded in the bathroom with the first-year boy, that smile that stayed the same while the thing behind it got worse. She thought about his text. She thought about hands curled into fists at her sides, the knuckles going white.
Her hands were still shaking. Her legs were still shaking. Her jaw was clenched so tight the muscles in her face ached and she could feel her own pulse in her teeth. Fifteen minutes of sprinting through November air, a gate that had scraped the skin off her forearm on the way through, four flights of stairs on lungs that had given up pretending they were fine somewhere around the second. She was sixteen years old and fifty-two kilos and she could hear them through the door. Voices, low and laughing, more than a few, enough that the sound layered on itself into something that wasn't a conversation but an audience. She didn't know how many. She knew it was more than she could handle. She'd known that since the photograph loaded on her phone, had known it while she was running, had known it while she was squeezing through the gate and climbing the stairs and hearing Joobin's voice through the concrete, small and hurt in a way that made the knowing stop mattering. The odds had never once, in the entire history of Yeonji doing things like this, been in her favour. She'd never once let that stop her. She wasn't sure if that made her brave or broken, and right now, with her hand on the door and Joobin on the other side of it, she didn't care which.
She was going through that door anyway.
Not because she was brave. Because Joobin had grabbed her sleeve in every crowded hallway for a year and a half. Because Joobin had leaned her head on Yeonji's shoulder on that bench and said okay when she meant I can keep going if you're here. Because Joobin had sat in the rain with a bleeding lip and asked a stranger to be her friend, and the stranger had said obviously, and the obviously was a promise, and the promise was older than Minho and it lived in Yeonji's hands, in the scarred knuckles and the crooked middle finger and the fists she was making right now, and it simply said you go where she is. You go where she is and you get her out or you bleed trying. That's the deal. That's always been the deal. You made it in the rain behind a gymnasium when you were fifteen years old and you didn't know you were making it and it doesn't matter because a promise is a promise whether you said the words or not.
The door was propped open with a brick.
Yeonji bent down and picked it up. The weight settled into her palm, rough, cold, solid and heavy. Heavy enough to change the first five seconds, and she knew the first five seconds were going to be everything.
She took another breath and walked through the door.
________________________________________
The rooftop opened up around her and the cold was immediate, November wind cutting across the flat expanse of it, finding the sweat soaked into her shirt and the scrape along her hip and every place where her skin was exposed or wet or torn. The light up here was the flat amber glow that Seoul pushed into its own sky, enough to see by but not enough to see well, everything washed in that sickly orange that turned blood and shadow the same colour.
She counted them as she stepped out. Ten of them. They were spread out in the loose, comfortable arrangement of people who'd been here for a while and weren't expecting to leave anytime soon. Yeonhwa uniforms with the blazers stripped off, sleeves rolled despite the cold. Some leaning against the railing. Two sitting on the utility housing with their legs swinging like they were watching television. Faces she half-knew from hallways, from the edges of the campaign that had been grinding at her and Joobin for months. A few she didn't recognise at all, extras, hangers-on, people who'd shown up for the spectacle because cruelty was a spectator sport at Yeonhwa and Minho always drew a crowd.
And on the concrete, near the far railing, between Minho's feet, was Joobin.
She looked worse than the photographs. She was always going to be worse than the photographs because photographs were flat and small and fit on a phone screen, and this was real. She was curled on her side with one arm tucked against her ribs. Her eyes were closed, and even from where Yeonji stood, she could see that her face was swollen on the left side, the eye and the cheekbone puffed and darkening, not from one hit but from many, the slow patient work of someone who'd been hitting her for long enough to do serious damage. Blood from her nose had tracked down across her lips and dried in the lines of her chin. There was more blood at the temple, matting her hair. The arm against her ribs was held at an angle that Yeonji recognised, the way a body protects something broken underneath, and her stomach clenched.
There were fifteen metres between her and Joobin. Which was the length of a classroom, which was nothing, which was everything when ten people were standing in the middle of it.
"There she is." Minho's voice. He was standing over Joobin with his phone in one hand and that smile, the one that never matched what was behind it. Tall, broad, the build of a boy who'd grown fast and filled out early and had spent three months learning that his size was a currency he could spend on anyone he wanted. "Took you long enough, Yeonji-ya. Joobin was getting lonely."
The others laughed. The sound was automatic and hollow, the laughter of people responding to the loudest voice in the room because that was what you did when you were near Minho, you laughed when he expected laughter and you moved when he expected movement and you did what he told you to do because the alternative was being the person on the ground.
Yeonji looked at Joobin's hand on the concrete. The fingers half-curled. The same fingers that held a pen in neat, careful strokes. The same fingers that grabbed her blazer sleeve in crowded hallways. Her grip tightened around the brick.
She stepped forward, and in that step she broke the promise she had made to her mother. It was never going to be strong enough to survive the sight of Joobin curled on concrete with blood drying in the lines of her chin. One step. That was all the distance between the girl who'd promised her mother and the girl with the brick.
One of the boys in Minho’s gang approached, tall and loose-shouldered with the rolling walk of someone who had never in his life been hit by a person who meant it. He was grinning, like this whole situation was funny. Like she was funny. He was saying something, but Yeonji didn’t give him time to finish. She tightened her grip around the brick and swung, her whole arm behind it. There was a moment of surprise in the boy’s eyes but not enough time for the smile to drop from his face before the brick connected with a sickening, wet crunch. The force of the blow reverberated up Yeonji’s wrist, jarring her elbow. His head snapped violently to the side, and the grin was gone. In its place was a dark, gaping split across his crushed cheekbone.
He didn’t have time to scream as his legs folded and he dropped to his knees. His eyes rolled up, vacant and searching the sky and seeing none of it. She didn’t stop to think. She couldn’t afford it. Letting out a sharp breath, she brought her elbow down hard against the back of his skull.
The air rushed out of his lungs in a sharp hiss, and he collapsed face first onto the concrete. Yeonji stepped over his twitching body, her eyes already locked on the closest person.
Two seconds of silence on the rooftop. Every head turning toward the boy on the ground and the blood spreading against the concrete.
The two seconds were a gift that she used. The nearest one was staring at the blood pooling, open mouthed, and Yeonji closed the space in three fast steps that ate the distance up. He eventually looked up, managing a choked “fucking bi —” before she drove the edge of the brick into his ribs.
She didn't just hit him; she tried to push the stone through him.
The sound he made wasn’t a scream or a grunt. It was airless and hollow, his whole torso folding around the point of impact, as if he was trying to close a door that had already been kicked in. As he pitched forward, she swung the brick in a savage underhand arc to meet him as he came down. It met his mouth, a terrible, soft give of split lips followed by the dry crunch of teeth shattering against clay. He spun sideways, hands clamped over his face. The noise leaking through his fingers was high, thin, and animal.
She dropped the brick.
Not because she wanted to, but because the distance had collapsed. Three of them were coming now, the paralysis broken, and they were close, too close, and the brick was a weapon for the space between bodies, not for the space where bodies collide. Her hands flew up, her brain screaming at her about the boxing drills. Hands high and tight, get those elbows in. But the adrenaline had already eaten through the wiring and what came up instead was something older and meaner, hands open, fingers curled, ready to grab and gouge and tear.
The first punch caught her flush on the left side of her jaw.
She'd seen it coming, the shoulder dip, the weight shifting to the back foot, but she'd been too slow to move because moving meant retreating and retreating meant away from Joobin and away from Joobin was not an option. The impact snapped her head sideways and filled her left ear with a high ringing tone and she tasted copper where her teeth had cut the inside of her cheek. Instead of fighting the momentum, she rode the blow, lunging forward to grab the arm that hit her with both hands. Her fingers locked around the wrist with a desperate, crushing strength.
She dug her nails into his skin until she felt the wet slide of his blood, and she yanked. He stumbled forward, off-balance and caught by surprise that the slight girl in front of him hadn’t dropped, and she used that surprise to drive her forehead into the bridge of his nose.
There was no grace or skill to it, just the hardest part of her skull meeting the most fragile part of his face. The crunch of the impact travelled through her own teeth and made her vision flash white for a fraction of a second. She felt the nose break, then a spray of red warmth across her forehead at the impact, his blood mixed in with her own as a cut opened on her head. He recoiled backwards, his hands flying to his face the way they always did, because a broken nose whited out everything else, turned fighters into passengers in their own bodies for three or four precious seconds. She hadn’t let go of his arm, and she drove two short hooks into his stomach. They were thrown too close to generate real power, just the raw weight of her anger. It was enough to make him fold over, and as he did she kneed him in the face as he went down, and something in his cheek made a sound like a dry stick breaking underwater.
She kicked him in the ribs while he was down. Once. Felt the impact travel up through her foot and into her ankle. Twice. He rolled onto his side and curled up and she left him because he was done and there were seven more between her and where she needed to be.
Keep moving, she thought. Don't stop.
She'd learned that at thirteen, the first time she'd fought more than one person in the stairwell behind the gym at her old school. The moment you stopped, they swarmed. Groups fought like water. They flowed into whatever space you left open, filled whatever stillness you offered, and the only way to survive was to keep being the most expensive thing in the room to touch.
The next two came together. They were smarter about it, or more scared, which in a group fight amounted to the same kind of courage. One from her left, one from the right, spreading the angle so she couldn't face both at once.
Smart, she thought.
She sized them up quickly. The one on the left was bigger and heavier, built in a way that made her ribs hurt just looking at him. The one on the right was fast and wiry, already moving, already throwing a punch.
The fast one's fist connected with her ear and the world tilted. It wasn’t a strong blow, but it was enough to knock her off balance and she staggered, dropping her guard slightly. She had a moment to look up before the fist of the bigger one connected with a heavy looping punch to the side of her ribs. The air in her chest exploded outward as she grunted with the force of the blow. Now there was pain, immediate and bright, a white flash that started under her armpit and moved inward and stole the breath she'd been about to take. The one on the right struck her again, a sloppy blow that caught her upper arm, enough to stagger her back toward the bigger, more dangerous of the two of them.
She used the momentum to get close before he could cock his fist again and sank her teeth into the meat of his forearm where the skin was thin and the tendons ran close to the surface. She bit down with all the force she could manage and he screamed, pain and shock both, the sound of a person discovering that the fight had left the territory he'd prepared for, and he ripped his arm away, the motion tearing his skin against her teeth and leaving her with the taste of him in her mouth, salt and copper and the raw, sickening smell of a body opened.
She spat blood and skin to the ground, the taste clinging to her teeth, and shook her head to clear the white spots at the edge of her vision, but the faster one grabbed her hair.
She'd tied it back. She always tied it back, because she'd learned, a long time ago, that loose hair was a handle and handles were gifts you gave to people who wanted to hurt you. He grabbed the ponytail anyway, wrapped it around his fist and pulled her head back, and the pain was sharp, a thousand small fires across her scalp, and she was off balance and her neck was exposed, and the back of her brain screamed at her that this was where fights ended, this was where you lost.
She'd felt worse. She'd likely feel worse by the end of the night.
She went with the pull instead of fighting it, letting the momentum carry her backward into him, and she drove her elbow into his chest with her full retreating weight behind it. She felt it sink into the soft place below his sternum and felt his grip loosen as his diaphragm seized, and she spun inside the slackened hold and raked her nails across his face, four lines of fire from temple to jaw, not trying to blind him but not trying not to, and her hair dropped free. She swung a wild hook and the punch landed on his jaw just below the ear and the impact cracked back through her knuckles and up through the bones of her wrist and she felt the skin split over her middle knuckle where the old fracture had healed into a ridge, the same knuckle that split every time, the scar tissue thinner than the skin around it, and the sharp sting of air hitting raw flesh was so familiar it was almost comforting, like pulling on a glove that fit.
His head snapped sideways. She saw his eyes go glassy and unfocussed for a half-second, but his legs held, stubborn and stupid and refusing to fall down. Blood oozed from the scratch marks and she used the swing in momentum to hit him again, then again. He reached out wildly, grabbing the front of her t-shirt with one hand and swung with the other, a wide looping right that she saw coming from a mile off. She dropped under the blow and she was inside his reach now, close enough to smell the garlic on his breath and the cheap body spray on his collar and the sour undertone of fear that was leaking through both and drove an uppercut into his chin. The impact rattled up her arm, but the force of the blow snapped his head back like a hinged lid, before he crashed to the ground, unmoving.
The big one was still clutching his forearm where her teeth had torn him open, blood pulsing thick and dark between his fingers. He stared at her with an expression she recognised, because she’d seen it before, on other faces, in other fights. The expression of a person who was feeling afraid of what they were looking at. Who was realising, too late, that whatever Minho had told them about the girl they'd be dealing with tonight had not covered this. Someone that tore at his arm with her teeth and he was trying to decide if his fear of her outweighed his fear of Minho, whether what she'd already done to his arm was a preview or the worst of it.
She didn't give him time to decide either way.
She brought her guard up again, two quick steps into his face. He swung, slow and heavy and telegraphed by terror, and she drove the heel of her foot into his knee with graceless, functional brutality. There was a horrible, dry pop as his leg buckled inward at an angle that legs shouldn't make. He hit the deck with a low, strangled groan, and Yeonji didn’t give him a chance to settle or recover. She drove her fist into the side of his face, again and again, forcing his head back against the grit of the roof. He tried to push himself up, a mindless, stupid reflex, and she grabbed the back of his hair and slammed him face first into the concrete. Once, and the sound of bone on stone was dull and heavy and enough to make her gag. The second broke his nose, blood spraying and painting the ground. After the third blow he went limp and stopped trying to rise.
She let go, and his head lolled to the side. A dark halo was already blooming around him on the rooftop. Yeonji staggered back, her chest heaving, the world narrowed down to the sound of her own ragged breath and the wet slide of blood down her face.
Five down, five to go, she thought, and the part of her that was still counting was the only part of her that was still thinking clearly.
________________________________________
She was breathing hard. Too hard. She’d burned through energy the way she burned through everything, fast and wasteful, her body an engine that ran hot and consumed twice the fuel it needed because efficiency was a luxury that belonged to people who'd learned how to fight properly, in gyms, with coaches, with someone telling them to breathe and conserve and pace themselves. Nobody had ever told Yeonji to pace herself. Yeonji had learned to fight by fighting and the lesson her body had absorbed was not be efficient but be relentless, and relentlessness was expensive and the bill was arriving in the burning in her lungs, in the tremble at the edges of her vision, in the pain on her left side that was deepening from bad to dangerous with every breath.
She could see Joobin.
Past the remaining four and Minho who stood at the back with his hands in his pockets, a cruel smirk on his face, as if he was enjoying the show. Joobin hadn't moved. Hadn't moved since Yeonji had stepped through the door, which meant she was unconscious or she was too hurt to lift her head or she was doing the thing she always did when the world was too much, making herself small, making herself invisible, and every possibility was worse than the last. And the sight of her drove out the exhaustion and the pain and everything else that wasn't forward. Whatever she was running on, it wasn't adrenaline anymore. Adrenaline had a shelf life and hers had expired somewhere around the third body hitting the ground. This was something else. This was the same thing that had put her in front of bullies at thirteen and in front of older boys at fifteen and would probably, eventually, put her in front of something she couldn't survive, and it didn't care about her ribs or lungs, and it didn't care about the broken promise to her mom.
The only thing left was the promise she had made to herself to protect Joobin.
She sized up the remaining four. Three of them seemed confident, while the fourth was rocking on his heels, weight shifting between stay and run, his eyes flicking between Yeonji and the stairwell door behind her. She’d hoped that watching her take down five people, all bigger than her, would have made them back off. But confidence or arrogance or stupidity made them stay. That or the calculation that getting out meant having to go through her either way.
She took in another desperate breath of air. Blood was running from the cut on her forehead, warm and persistent, tracking down past her eyebrow and into her left eye and along her jaw and dripping off her chin. She wiped it with the back of her hand and it was already back in her eye before her hand dropped, and she couldn't see properly on that side now, which meant she couldn't see punches coming from the left. She was about to rush them when one of them rushed her first, a full tackle, arms wide, the move of someone who'd watched her drop five people standing and decided the answer was to stop her standing. He hit her in the midsection and her feet left the concrete and the rooftop swung sideways and she landed on her back with his weight on top of her, seventy something kilos of boy pressing her into the roof, and the impact sent a flare of white through the ribs on her left side that was so intense it almost took her with it.
He tried to pin her arms. She let him get one, the left, because the left was the sacrifice, the one she could afford to lose for half a second while the right did its work. She drove her thumb into his eye, the pad of her thumb finding the wet give of the socket, and he reared back in agony. “My eye, you fucking bitch, that was my eye.” The weight pinning her left arm was gone, and she struck a quick jab with her fingers into his throat. Not hard enough to crush anything, but hard enough to make him choke and release her, both his hands flying to his own throat as his body desperately tried to find air.
She shoved him off and staggered to her feet. Her left side was screaming. The ribs were worse now, every breath a negotiation between her lungs and whatever was broken or cracking underneath them, each inhale a compromise that cost more than the last. The back of her head was aching from where it had hit the ground from the tackle. She reached back to the throb at the base of her skull and her fingers came away dark and wet.
She shrugged her shoulders, rolling the pain loose, and was about to step forward and finish the boy still choking when a fist caught her in the side of the mouth. She didn't see it coming, as the blow came from the side where blood was spilling into her eye. Her head snapped sideways and blood sprayed from her mouth across the concrete in a line and her vision went white at the edges, a burning away of everything except…
________________________________________
She was fifteen and it was raining, cold and vertical and enough to soak your school uniform in under a minute, and it had turned the concrete behind the outbuilding from a path into a small river. Yeonji was cutting through on her way to the bus stop, head down and bag over her shoulder, moving fast because the rain was already inside her collar and working its way down her spine and she wanted to be home where it was warm and dry and her mother would have left rice in the cooker and maybe, if the day had been a good one at work, soup on the stove.
She was moving so fast she almost didn't see her.
The girl was sitting on the ground with her back against the outbuilding wall, in the narrow strip of concrete between the building and the sports field fence where the overhang provided about thirty centimetres of shelter that the rain was ignoring entirely. She had her knees pulled up and her backpack clutched against her chest. Her head was down and very still, as if she was trying to make herself small enough to make the world forget she existed.
Yeonji almost walked past. She had promised. That morning, at the kitchen table, her mother's hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had gone cold because she'd been holding it for twenty minutes without drinking, looking at Yeonji across the table with the expression that Yeonji hated more than any other expression in the world. Not angry. Tired. The kind of tired that lived in the bones and couldn't be fixed by sleep, the kind that came from calling several schools looking for a place and being told no too many times before being told yes.
Yeonji had promised that this school would be different. She would keep her head down and stay out of trouble.
The look her mom gave her was worse than the tiredness. It was in her eyes, the way she knew Yeonji the way that she knew her own heartbeat, that such a promise was fragile and temporary and one bad day from becoming another round of phone calls.
Yeonji had every intention of keeping that promise. She remembered the brightness in her mom’s voice when she came into Yeonji’s room to tell her she had found a school that would agree to take her. It was so full of hope, but underneath it, the brightness was being held together by just willpower. Yeonji didn’t want to break that hope, so she would sit in the front row and take notes and keep her hands in her pockets, not balled into a fist. And she would learn to walk away when she saw something that made her want to clench and swing. She would. She promised.
The girl on the ground sniffed, and Yeonji slowed. She watched the girl wipe her nose with the back of her hand. And then she tilted her face up toward the rain and closed her eyes, and the gesture was so quiet and so practised, the instinctive self-comfort of someone who had learned to be their own source of tenderness because no one else was offering, and Yeonji's feet stopped moving.
She stood there in the rain and looked at the girl and the promise pressed against the inside of her chest. The rain had already soaked through her clothes, and she didn’t care, she couldn’t take her eyes off the girl who clutched her backpack to her chest like a shield that had already failed, and Yeonji thought about her mother's hands around the cold mug of tea...
She sighed and then sat down beside the girl.
The ground was freezing. The rain soaked through her skirt immediately, cold water against the backs of her thighs, and the girl startled sideways so violently that her backpack slipped from her grip and landed on the wet ground between them. Her eyes were wide and dark and full of a fear that Yeonji recognised instantly, not the fear of the rain or the cold but the fear of another person getting close, the reflexive terror of a girl who had learned that when people approached it was to take something from her, to break something, to add another item to the long catalogue of small and large cruelties that had turned sitting alone behind a school outbuilding in the rain into her best available option.
Yeonji didn't move or reach for her. Part of her wanted to wrap her arms around this stranger and tell her it was going to be okay. But she didn’t even know the girl’s name, so she sat and let the silence do what silence sometimes did when words were too much but presence alone was enough.
The girl's lower lip was bleeding, split in a clean line that was welling blood slowly, mixing with the rainwater running down her chin. Not a fresh wound exactly, but recently reopened, the kind of split that came from being hit in the mouth more than once, the skin tearing along the same line because scar tissue was thinner than the skin around it and always broke first. Yeonji knew this from experience, from her own hands, from the knuckle that split every time she hit something, from the way the body kept a record of its damage in the places it healed weakest. She knew what a re-opened wound looked like and she knew what it meant, which was that this was not the first time.
"Your lip's bleeding," she said, saying the first thing that came to mind, because that’s how she usually operated.
The girl looked at her. The fear in her eyes was layered now, the initial terror giving way to confusion because Yeonji was sitting in a freezing puddle in her school uniform and not hitting or laughing at her, not doing any of the things that the girl's experience had taught her to expect from another person's proximity.
"I know," she said.
"Do you want me to…"
"It's fine."
It was not fine. Over the girl's shoulder Yeonji could see them, three girls standing at the edge of the sports field in a loose triangle, glancing back, and she filed their faces. The tall one with the ponytail. The shorter one who kept touching her hair. The one in the middle who was smiling, a small, satisfied smile, the smile of someone reviewing their own work and finding it acceptable.
Yeonji wasn’t sure how to respond to “it’s fine.” She let the silence last, which was a struggle, because silence wasn’t something she was very good at. She could feel words building up, threatening to spill over, because she was someone that narrated her walk to school and spoke to strangers in dentist waiting rooms and had once talked for so long at a bus stop that the halmeoni next to her had missed her bus because she wanted to hear the end of the story. Silence was not her language. Silence was a second language she'd been forced to learn at this new school.
The silence lasted about forty-five seconds. A personal record, for all the wrong reasons.
"I'm Yeonji," she said, because the dam broke, because she was who she was and the rain was cold and the girl's lip was bleeding and silence was a language she'd never been fluent in. "I just transferred here three weeks ago and I don't know anyone yet and I'm pretty sure the girl who sits behind me in maths hates me because I accidentally knocked her pencil case off her desk on the first day and all her pens went everywhere and I tried to pick them up but I made it worse because I was talking while I was picking them up and she had this look on her face like I was personally ruining her life, which I probably was, because I do that. Ruin things. Not on purpose. I just talk too much and things happen."
She was rambling. She knew she was rambling, because she didn’t know this girl and she had no idea what to say that would actually help, so instead of saying something helpful she was saying everything, dumping the entire contents of her brain onto the wet concrete between them in the hope that somewhere in the pile there was something worth keeping.
The girl was staring at her. The fear in her eyes had been replaced by confusion and pure bewilderment, as if she was struggling to process why a stranger had sat down in a puddle next to her and started talking about a pencil case.
"She had twenty pens," Yeonji added, because she couldn't stop. "I counted while I was picking them up. Twenty. In one pencil case. Who needs that many pens? That's not stationery, that's a collection. That's a cry for help. I wanted to say something about it but I think she already wanted me dead so I just handed them back and sat down and now she moves her pencil case to the far side of her desk every time I walk past, like I'm some kind of pen predator…"
The girl laughed.
It was short and wet and startled, a sound pulled out of her by force, as if the laugh had been hiding somewhere deep inside her and Yeonji's absurdity had reached in and dragged it to the surface. Her split lip cracked fresh with the movement, the scar tissue tearing along its old line, and blood welled up brighter than before and she pressed her sleeve against it and kept laughing anyway, her shoulders shaking, her eyes squeezing shut, and the laugh turned into something longer and messier, not just amusement but a release, the sound of a girl who hadn't laughed in a long time discovering that she still knew how.
Yeonji watched her laugh and felt a flare of something warm and fierce in her chest. She knew then, listening to this girl laugh, that this girl was going to be important to her. That she was going to be someone Yeonji was going to know for a long time. Not a wish or a hope, but she just knew, for a fact, that this girl was going to be her friend.
"Did she really have twenty pens?" the girl asked through her sleeve, her voice muffled by the fabric and the blood and the remnants of the laugh that was still shaking loose from her.
"Twenty. I'm not exaggerating. I never exaggerate." Yeonji paused. "Okay, I always exaggerate. But not about this. Twenty pens. In one pencil case. I think she needs an intervention."
The girl lowered her sleeve from her mouth. Her lip was still bleeding, a slow persistent welling that she'd stopped trying to manage, and her eyes were red-rimmed and her hair was plastered to her face. She looked like someone who'd been crying for a long time before Yeonji arrived and had only just stopped. But she was looking at Yeonji now, not the quick, flinching glance of a cornered animal checking for threats, but a real look, steady and searching, taking Yeonji in as if she was trying to work out what kind of person sits down in a freezing puddle next to a stranger and starts talking about pens.
"You said you just transferred," she said quietly, testing the words before she let them out, the way you test a step before you put your weight on it. "Why? Did your family move?"
And there it was. The question that Yeonji had been dodging from teachers and classmates for three weeks, the question that had a truthful answer she couldn't give and a dozen half-truthful answers she'd been rotating through depending on who was asking. My mum's job. We moved apartments. It was just time for a change. All of them technically containing a piece of truth and none of them containing the piece that mattered, which was that Yeonji had been expelled from her last school for breaking a boy's nose in the hallway outside the library because he'd been shoving a kid with a stutter into the lockers every day for a month and Yeonji's body had walked up to him one Tuesday afternoon and her fist had rearranged his face before her brain could file the paperwork.
She looked at the girl. At the bleeding lip and the wet hair and the backpack held against her chest and the eyes that were watching her with a guardedness that was also, somehow, an invitation. And she thought about lying, the way she'd been lying for three weeks, and the lie was right there on her tongue, easy and practised and safe.
"I got expelled," she said instead. "From my old school. For hitting someone."
She didn't know why she said it. She knew that the words expelled and violent were not a combination that made people want to sit next to you in class or share their lunch or invite you anywhere after school. But this girl had asked the question without the nosiness or the hunger for gossip that usually came with it, had asked it the way you ask someone where they're from when you genuinely want to know, and the honesty of the question pulled the answer out of Yeonji before she could stop it.
The girl didn't flinch or lean away. She didn't do any of the things people usually did when they heard the word expelled. She just looked at Yeonji with those too-big, too-honest eyes and asked, with the same quiet care she'd brought to the first question. "Did they deserve it?"
And Yeonji felt the warmth in her chest flare brighter. Because that was not the question people asked. People asked what happened, or why did you do it, or are you going to be like that here, and the answers to those questions were about Yeonji and her behaviour, about the problem she represented. But "did they deserve it" was a different question entirely. It was a question about the person who'd been hurt first, and asking it meant that this girl's instinct, when she heard about violence, was not to judge the person who'd thrown the punch but to ask whether the person who'd received it had earned it. That instinct said more about her than forty-five minutes of conversation could have.
"Yeah," Yeonji said. "He did."
The girl nodded. A small, serious nod, as if the answer had confirmed something she'd already suspected, and she looked down at her hands on the backpack and then back at Yeonji and her eyes were different now. Still cautious. Still careful. But something had opened up behind them, something fragile and brave and desperately lonely, reaching toward Yeonji the way a hand reaches toward a fire on a cold night, wanting the warmth and not quite trusting it not to burn.
"I'm Joobin," she said. Offering her name the way you offer something precious to someone you've just decided to trust. Not casually, the way names were exchanged in classrooms and hallways. Deliberately. As if the name was something she'd been keeping safe and was now choosing, carefully and on purpose, to share.
"Yeonji. But I already told you that when I sat down, which means I was already committed to this friendship before you even introduced yourself, which I think legally makes me the more invested party."
Joobin blinked, her mouth opening into a oh of surprise, before she found her voice. "Friendship?"
"Obviously. I've been your friend for like ninety seconds already. Keep up, Joobin-ah."
The honorific slipped out and Yeonji almost flinched, because she'd just met this girl, they'd known each other for the length of a conversation about pens and rain and expulsion, and attaching ah to someone's name was familiar, was intimate, was the kind of thing you did with people you'd known long enough to earn the right. But it had come out the way everything came out of Yeonji, naturally and without prior consultation with her brain, and she watched Joobin’s face to see if she had made a mistake.
She hadn’t. Joobin’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second, and the tension in her jaw softened, and the bleeding lip trembled once, and then she smiled. Not the startled laugh from before. A real smile, slow and uncertain, the smile of someone trying on a feeling they weren't sure fit yet, and finding, to their surprise, that it did.
"Can we be friends?" Joobin asked.
Like it was that simple. Like the whole dance of becoming friends could be reduced to those simple words asked in the rain by a girl with a bleeding lip who had nothing left to lose by asking. And maybe that was what made it work. The simplicity of it. The way Joobin had stripped the question down to its bones and offered it without decoration or protection, bare and honest and trembling slightly with the courage it took to ask for something you'd been taught not to expect.
"Joobin-ah. I just told you. We're already friends. I don't make the rules." Yeonji stood up and offered her hand. "Come on. I know a convenience store that does hot chocolate for eight hundred won and the halmeoni who works there lets you sit on the wall outside even when it's raining. I'll tell you about the other disasters in my life on the way. There's a lot. It'll take a while."
Joobin looked at the offered hand. Looked at Yeonji. Looked at the hand again. And took it. Her fingers were cold and wet and thin and they wrapped around Yeonji's palm with a grip that was tentative and light, as if she was afraid of holding on too tight in case the hand was pulled away, and Yeonji held on firmly enough for both of them and didn't let go for the entire walk to the convenience store.
Joobin didn't pull away either.
That was the beginning. Not the rain and not the bleeding lip and not the three girls on the sports field who Yeonji filed away and would deal with later in a way that she wouldn't tell Joobin about and that would result in three separate girls deciding, independently and without discussing it with each other, that approaching Joobin in the future was no longer worth the cost. The beginning was Joobin’s hand in hers on the walk to the convenience store, cold and wet and holding on, and the weight of that grip, the terrifying featherlight weight of a girl who'd been given every reason not to trust deciding to trust anyway, settled into Yeonji's chest beside the flame that was already burning there and made itself at home.
She made a promise, there and then, to herself. That no matter what came, Yeonji would be there to protect that trust.
________________________________________
Joobin’s laugh was replaced with the sound of her body being dragged across the gritted concrete roof. Yeonji’s eyes snapped open, her mouth full of blood from the earlier blow, which was already blurring in her memory like a fever dream that left bruises. There was a hand fisted in the back of her shirt, and white hot agony across her shoulder blade where she was being dragged.
She reached up to grab the arm pulling her and with a snarl she twisted into the drag and got her feet underneath her. The girl hauling her stumbled at the sudden shift in weight, surprise opening across her face because she'd expected Yeonji to stay down. Yeonji spat the blood pooling in her mouth into the girl’s eyes, and the girl reared back with a disgusted, high piercing shriek, her hands going to her face to desperately wipe it off.
Yeonji set her feet.
The girl was wiping blood from her eyes with both hands, blinded, her weight shifted back on her heels, chin up, and for a half-second the three months at the community gym were louder in Yeonji's body than the pain. Coach Park's voice in the dusty basement with the cracked heavy bag and the taped-up floor. Feet first. Always feet first. You punch with your legs, Yeonji-ya, not your arms. Plant. Rotate. Drive.
She planted her left foot, turned her hip, and drove her right hand straight down the centre, a proper cross this time, not the wild swinging she'd been doing all night but the punch Coach Park had drilled into her until her shoulder ached. It connected with the girl’s jaw, the impact snapping the girl’s head back. She staggered back a step, and Yeonji followed her. She threw a hook into the girl's ribs and felt the hook sink in below the girl's raised arm and heard the air leave her in an explosion. The girl doubled sideways, but Yeonji was relentless and cracked two quick rights into the girl’s jaw, and this time the girls knees folded and she sat down on the concrete with her hands still half-raised and her eyes unfocused and blood, Yeonji's blood, smeared across her face like war paint.
Yeonji pushed the girl to the ground and she didn't get back up.
Yeonji stood over her, breathing hard, her right hand screaming from the two clean punches she'd just thrown and she could feel the gym fading out of her already, the technique retreating back under the pain and the exhaustion. Three months of training. Three months before the fees ran out and the expulsion made the trip across town impossible. It surfaced sometimes in the middle of a fight, a flash of proper form buried under years of brawling, and then it was gone again and she was back to elbows and knees and teeth and whatever else she could reach.
She turned around slowly, swaying slightly as exhaustion made her body heavy. The boy that she’d struck in the throat had managed to catch his breath, one hand still on his neck, and Yeonji watched him take an involuntary step back when their eyes locked. He was scared. He didn't want to be here anymore. He'd signed up for a beating and found himself in something else entirely.
The other two were different. They'd hung back through the worst of it, letting the others go first, watching, and now they were circling toward her from the right, moving together with a coordination that told Yeonji they'd done this before. One of them had a pipe. The other was empty-handed but bigger than anyone she'd fought tonight, thick across the shoulders and chest, with the kind of build that came from a gym membership he actually used.
She understood with a clarity that burned through the fog of her exhaustion that the next sixty seconds were going to be the worst of the night. The pipe changed everything. She couldn't close the distance the way she had before, because the boy holding it was watching for exactly that. And the big one was between her and the pipe, which meant she had to go through him first, which meant she had to go through him while keeping his body between her and the metal, using him as a shield, because the moment the pipe wielder had a clear line to her it was over.
She couldn't let them come to her. If they set the pace she was done, because her pace was gone, spent across the concrete behind her in blood and bruises and the shaking in her legs that wouldn't stop. She dragged in a breath that barely seemed to fill her chest, the air catching somewhere above her damaged ribs, and she charged the big one.
He was ready for her. His hands came up in a guard that looked practised, and when she threw her left at his face he slipped it, his head moving just enough to let her fist sail past his jaw, and his right hand came back fast and caught her on the cheekbone. The punch was clean and heavy and she felt it in the bones of her skull and her vision doubled for a second, two rooftops overlapping, two versions of the boy in front of her. She stumbled sideways and he followed her, closing the distance, and hit her in the ribs. Left side. The side where everything was already stacked. The pain was so sharp and so total that she couldn't breathe or think, her whole torso seizing around the impact, and she bent toward it and he hit her again, same side, and a sound came out of her mouth that was barely human.
She grabbed him. It was all she could do. Got both hands on his shirt and pulled herself into him, chest to chest, too close for him to swing with any power, and she held on. He tried to push her off. She clung. Her face was against his collarbone and she could smell his deodorant and his sweat and the fabric softener his mother used on his school shirt, and the mundanity of those smells inside the violence was so absurd that her brain flickered with it for a half-second before refocusing. She drove her forehead into his chin. Not a clean headbutt, she didn't have the space for it, just a grinding upward shove of her skull against the underside of his jaw that clicked his teeth together and made him grunt.
His grip on her loosened a fraction. She kneed him in the thigh, trying for a dead leg, but the angle was wrong and her knee hit muscle instead of nerve and he barely reacted. He shoved her back and she lost her grip on his shirt and staggered and he hit her in the face. A straight right that she saw coming and couldn't get out of the way of because her legs had stopped responding at the speed her eyes demanded, and the fist connected with her mouth and her lip split fresh against her teeth and blood flooded her tongue.
She tried shaking the agony loose, blinking hard, and was vaguely aware of him drawing his fist back for another blow, his weight already shifting forward. Instinct born of too many fights took over. She dropped low, bending at the waist, putting everything she had left behind her fist, and hit him square in the groin.
The sound he made was guttural and involuntary, dragged up from somewhere below his stomach, and his whole body folded around the point of impact. His hands dropped from their guard to between his legs and his knees bent and his face went a colour she could see even through the blood in her eye, a greyish white that had nothing to do with cold. He was wide open. Everything above his waist unprotected, his chin dropped, his arms gone.
She grabbed his hair with her left hand and pulled his head down and drove her knee into his face. The kneecap caught his nose full on and the cartilage compressed and gave way beneath it and blood burst across her pants in a hot spray and he pitched forward onto his hands and knees. She didn't stop, couldn’t afford him coming back at her later. She kicked him in the ribs while he was down, her foot slamming into the space between his hip and his lowest rib, and he rolled onto his side with a groan that bubbled through the blood pouring from his nose. He curled into himself and his hands went from his groin to his ribs and back, unable to decide which pain to hold, and she stood over him and watched him choose and knew he was done. She drew back one final time and kicked him again, this time in the head, hard enough to put him out the fight for good. The impact travelled up through her foot and her shin and into her knee.
She was gasping. Swaying. Her whole body vibrating with a tremor she couldn't control. Blood was running from her mouth and her nose and the cut above her eye and the reopened split on her knuckle. Her ribs on the left side felt wrong, as if they were grinding against her chest when she breathed, bone shifting where bone shouldn't shift. Her vision on the left was a slit. Her right hand had swollen to the point where the fingers looked like they belonged to someone else, fat and purple and useless.
She'd forgotten about the boy with the pipe.
The sound reached her ears a fraction of a second before the impact. A whistle of air, thin and fast, the sound a metal pipe made when it was swung hard by someone who meant it. She started to turn and the pipe caught her across the left side of her torso, just below the ribs she'd already damaged, and the pain was…
________________________________________
The light that came through Joobin’s bedroom window was thin and cool and the cherry blossoms on the street below were just starting to open, pale against the grey of the buildings. Joobin was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her history textbook open on her lap, and Yeonji was lying on the floor with her feet propped up on the edge of Joobin's desk chair and a bag of shrimp chips balanced on her stomach, and they'd been studying for two hours, which really meant Joobin had been studying for two hours and Yeonji had been studying for about forty minutes in scattered intervals between commentary on the shrimp chips, the light, the sound the cherry blossom branches made against the window when the wind picked up, and a detailed analysis of why their history teacher's handwriting looked like a seismograph reading during an earthquake.
It was a good afternoon. Most afternoons with Joobin were good. They'd fallen into a rhythm over the months since the rain, a pattern where study sessions became walks to the convenience store which became weekends at the arcades or hunting for the best coffee and cake shops. It had become so regular and so natural that Yeonji sometimes forgot there'd been a time before Joobin was in her life, to the point where Joobin's bedroom had become a second home. She knew where Joobin's mother kept the extra blankets and which kitchen drawer had the good scissors and that the third step on the stairs creaked and Joobin always skipped it out of habit even though her mother had never once complained about the noise.
She knew that Joobin studied best in silence and had taught herself, through enormous effort, to be quiet during the study portions of their afternoons, saving the talking for the breaks, rationing her words the way a person on a long hike rationed water. It was hard, and Joobin knew it was hard, so Joobin had learned to watch Yeonji in those moments, waiting for the point where Yeonji would start to visibly vibrate with the effort of containing herself, and Joobin would look at her with that quiet half-smile and say "okay, let’s take a break" and Yeonji would exhale like she'd been holding her breath underwater and the words would pour out and Joobin would listen to all of them.
But Yeonji could tell that this afternoon was different. Joobin had been quiet in a way that wasn't her studying quiet. This was a different quiet, heavier, turned inward, and Joobin's eyes kept drifting from her textbook to the window and back, and her pen had stopped moving on the page ten minutes ago and she hadn't noticed.
Yeonji had noticed.
She ate a shrimp chip and waited. The waiting was hard but she'd learned, over four months of friendship with a girl who processed things slowly and carefully and couldn't be rushed without shutting down, that Joobin would get there. Joobin always got there. She just needed the silence to find her way.
"Can I ask you something?" Joobin asked, still looking at the window.
"You just did. But yeah, go ahead, ask me something else."
Joobin didn't smile at the joke. That was how Yeonji knew this was serious, because Joobin always smiled at her jokes, even the bad ones, especially the bad ones, and the absence of the smile was a signal that whatever was coming had been sitting in Joobin for a while, building weight, waiting for the right afternoon to finally surface.
"The fight last week," Joobin said. "With the boys behind the cafeteria."
Yeonji's hand stopped moving toward the shrimp chip bag. The fight behind the cafeteria. Three boys from the year above who'd been cornering first-years and taking their lunch money with the bored, methodical efficiency of a toll booth, and Yeonji had walked around the corner and seen a twelve-year-old boy pressed against the wall with tears running down his face and his empty wallet in one of the older boys' hands, and she had just acted, without hesitation, without calculation, without any of the sensible thoughts that a sensible person would have about odds and consequences and the fact that she'd promised her mother.
She'd won that fight. If you could call it winning. She'd put one of them on the ground and bloodied the second one's nose and the third had run, and the twelve-year-old had retrieved his wallet and fled without thanking her, which was fine, because gratitude wasn't the point and had never been the point. But she'd come away with bruised ribs and a split lip and scrapes across both palms where she'd been shoved into the ground, and she'd spent the bus ride home with her hands in her pockets and her hood up, hiding the damage until she could get to the bathroom mirror and assess how much of it would be visible to her mother.
Joobin had seen her the next day. Had looked at the split lip and the way Yeonji held her bag on the left side because the right side hurt too much, and her eyes tightened as she drew in her lower lip, and she'd asked what happened and Yeonji had told her. Joobin listened and asked no questions, and that absence of question lasted four days, through their walks to school and their lunch on the rooftop and their study sessions in Joobin's bedroom. Four days of Joobin gathering her thoughts the way she gathered everything, slowly and thoroughly, turning them over until she understood their shape.
"What about it?" Yeonji said, keeping her voice light, because she could feel the conversation getting heavy. It was her attempt at deflection.
"There were three of them." Joobin's voice was careful and measured, each word spoken with deliberation. She'd turned from the window and was looking at Yeonji now, and her eyes were full of a concern that had no anger in it, no judgment, just a deep, quiet worry that had clearly been building since the moment she'd seen the split lip and was only now, four days and one careful silence later, ready to be spoken. "There were three of them and one of you and you just walked up to them."
"They were taking a kid's lunch money, Joobin-ah. He was twelve."
"I know. I know he was twelve and I know what they were doing was wrong and I know you helped him." Joobin set her pen down on the textbook and closed it, as if she was clearing space for something more important than the Joseon dynasty. "That's not what I'm asking about."
Yeonji sat up. The shrimp chips slid off her stomach and she caught the bag before it spilled and set it aside, recognising that this conversation needed her full attention even though every instinct she had was telling her to make a joke, to change the subject, to fill the silence with noise until whatever Joobin was about to say got buried under it.
"What are you asking about?"
Joobin was quiet for a long moment. The cherry blossom branches tapped against the window. Somewhere downstairs Joobin's mother was running water in the kitchen.
"You didn't think," Joobin said. "That's what scares me. You saw what was happening and you didn't think. You just went."
"If I'd stopped to think about it…"
"You wouldn't have done it. I know. That's what scares me, Yeonji." Joobin's voice was shaking slightly, a tremor underneath the careful words that she was trying to control and not quite managing. "That the only way you can do this thing you do, this thing where you put yourself between someone who's being hurt and the person hurting them, is by not thinking about it first. Because if you thought about it you'd see the odds and you'd walk away. And you can't walk away. I know you can't. I've known that since the first day I met you. You told me you got expelled for hitting someone and I asked if he deserved it and you said yes and I could see in your face that you'd do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. Every single time."
Yeonji didn't say anything. She couldn't, because Joobin was right and they both knew it and there was nothing she could say that would make Joobin wrong.
"I've been thinking about it since last week," Joobin continued, and her hands were clasped in her lap, the knuckles pressed white, and Yeonji could see the effort this was costing her, the enormous gathering of courage it took for a girl who spoke in single sentences to sustain a speech this long. "About what happens when the odds gets worse. When it's not three boys behind the cafeteria, but five, or ten. Or when one of them has a weapon. Or when they don't stop when you're on the ground." Her voice caught on the last part, a small hitch that she breathed through before continuing. "You fight like someone who doesn't think about what happens to her body. You take hits that you don't have to take because you're too busy throwing the next one. You just… keep going and going and going until the other person stops or you do, and…” She sighed, bringing one hand to her hair and running it through, clearly frustrated. “And one day, Yeonji, one day you're going to run into someone or something that doesn't stop, and you won't stop either, and what then?"
The question hung in the air of the small bedroom. Yeonji looked at Joobin and Joobin looked back and the distance between them was the width of a bedroom floor and the width of everything Joobin was afraid of, and Yeonji could see all of it in her eyes, the whole landscape of Joobin's fear, and it wasn't fear of Yeonji. It was fear for her.
"I can take a punch, Joobin-ah," Yeonji said, trying for lightness, reaching for the joke, and hearing it fall flat even as it left her mouth.
"You can take a punch," Joobin repeated, and her voice had changed, the tremor replaced by a steadiness that was worse because it was the steadiness of someone who had thought about this very carefully and arrived at something they needed to say even though saying it was going to cost them. "You can take a punch and you can take a kick and you can take being thrown into a wall and you can take bruised ribs and split lips and you can come to school the next day with your bag on the wrong shoulder and tell me it's fine. And like an idiot I'll smile and nod because I don't know what else to do. But what happens when someone takes it further than that? What happens when it's not a punch? What happens when it’s a group of people who don't stop kicking when you're down? Or worse, what if they have a knife? You'll end up dying on some stupid stairwell or some rooftop trying to protect someone, and you won't even have thought about it first, you won't even have considered not doing it, because the thing inside you that sends you forward doesn't have a back and there's no middle ground where you see someone being hurt and choose to walk past."
Yeonji opened her mouth and closed it. She didn’t know what to say to that. Joobin had stripped every layer of armour off her with her honesty, and what was underneath was a girl sitting on a bedroom floor who knew that everything Joobin had just said was true.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked, and her voice came out smaller than she'd intended, stripped of the brightness she usually wore. "I can't... Joobin-ah, I can't just watch. I've tried. I've tried so hard. Every morning I tell myself today's the day I walk past. Today's the day I see it happening and I keep my head down and I keep walking and I go home clean and my mum doesn't have to make that face. And every single time, my body just... goes. Before I can stop it. Before I can even think about stopping it. It's like there's a door in my chest and when I see someone getting hurt the door opens and I go through it and by the time I realise I've gone through it I'm already in the middle of it and it's too late to go back."
Her voice was breaking. She could hear it happening and she couldn't stop it, because this was the thing she never talked about, the thing she kept behind the jokes and the rambling and the motormouth flood of words that she used to keep people at the exact distance where they could enjoy her company without seeing the mess underneath. Joobin was the only person who'd ever gotten close enough to see the mess, and now she was looking at it and asking questions about it and Yeonji felt exposed in a way that was more frightening than any fight she'd ever been in.
"I know I'm going to get hurt," she said. "I'm not stupid. I'm small and I'm not trained and every fight I've ever been in has been against people who are bigger or stronger or who outnumber me and I know that one day it's going to go wrong. But knowing it doesn't change anything. I don't know how to be a person who sees someone getting hurt and just... does nothing."
She stopped. Her eyes were burning and her throat and the afternoon had changed into something she hadn't expected and wasn't prepared for. Joobin was looking at her with an expression that Yeonji couldn't read because it contained too many things at once. Sadness, and love, and fear, and a helplessness that mirrored Yeonji's own, the helplessness of watching a person they care about move toward something dangerous and being unable to stop it or slow it or do anything except stand nearby and be ready for the aftermath.
"I don't want you to change," Joobin said, and her voice was thick now, the words coming through a throat that was working hard to stay open. "I don't. The person who sat down next to me in the rain, the person who got expelled for hitting someone who deserved it... that's who you are. And I love that person. I love that you can't walk past. I love that you see someone hurting and your first instinct, your very first instinct, is to put yourself between them and the thing that's hurting them. The world needs that. I needed that. You saved me, Yeonji. You sat down in the rain and you saved me and you don't even know what you saved me from because I haven't told you yet and I'm not ready to tell you yet but you saved me."
A tear ran down Joobin's cheek. She wiped it with the heel of her hand, quickly, impatiently, as if the tear was an interruption she didn't have time for.
"But I'm scared," she said. "I'm so scared that one day you're going to walk through that door and not come back. That I'm going to get a phone call or I'm going to show up at school and you won't be there and someone will tell me what happened. And I'll have to live in a world where you don't exist anymore because you couldn't walk past someone being hurt and nobody was there to stop you from going too far." Her voice broke on the last word and she pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose and the silence in the room was the loudest thing Yeonji had ever heard.
Yeonji crawled across the bedroom floor. Crossed the distance between the floor and the bed on her hands and knees, which was a stupid and graceless way to move and she didn't care, and she sat on the edge of Joobin's bed and took Joobin's hand and held it the way she'd held it on the walk to the convenience store in the rain, firmly, with enough pressure for both of them.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said.
"You can't promise that."
"I'm promising it anyway. That's what I do. I make promises I can't keep and then I keep them out of spite. It's my whole personality."
Joobin let out a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. "You’re really bad at making promises.”
"Maybe, but that’s just how mine work.” Yeonji squeezed her hand. "Joobin-ah. Listen to me. I hear you. I hear everything you're saying and you're right and I'm scared too. I'm scared of the same things you're scared of. I'm scared of my mum's face and I'm scared of getting expelled again and I'm scared of the day where it all catches up to me. But I can't be someone else. I've tried. I've tried so hard to be someone who walks past and I can't do it and I don't think I'll ever be able to do it. The… most I can promise is that I'll try to be careful. I'll try to protect myself better. I'll try to think before I go through the door, even if the thinking only lasts half a second. It’s not much, but it’s half a second more than I’m currently doing…”
Joobin looked at their joined hands. Her thumb moved across Yeonji's knuckles, tracing the scars she found there, the raised ridges of skin over the middle knuckle where the bone had healed crooked, the thin white lines across the backs of her fingers where old splits had mended. Reading the history of Yeonji's hands the way you'd read a map of a place you loved and feared in equal measure.
"Half a second," Joobin said.
"Half a second."
"That's not very much."
"It's more than zero. And I'm doing it for you, so if anything that means it counts double. That's the rule. Things you do for your favourite person count double."
Joobin leaned her head against Yeonji's shoulder. The weight of it was so familiar now, so known, the weight of being loved by someone who saw all of you and stayed anyway.
"You're my favourite person too," Joobin said into the fabric of Yeonji's shirt. "You know that, right? You're my favourite person and I need you to still be alive tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Okay? I need you to keep being alive. That's my condition. That's the price for my friendship. You have to keep being alive."
"Deal," Yeonji said. "Easiest condition ever. Being alive is literally the thing I'm best at. It's my best skill."
"Your best skill is talking too much."
"I… okay. Yeah that’s true. I don’t have a counter argument to that. Joobin-ah, you are right as always. It’s very annoying that you are always right, you know that don’t you?”
Joobin laughed against her shoulder, and the vibration of it went through Yeonji's collarbone and into her chest and settled next to the warmth that had been living there since the rain. Yeonji held Joobin's hand and looked at the scars on her own knuckles and thought about doors and promises and the half-second she'd offered, and wondered if half a second would ever be enough.
It wouldn't. She knew that. She knew it the way she knew the distance to school and the weight of a fist and the sound her mother's voice made when it was trying not to be sad. Half a second was nothing. Half a second was a held breath before the same plunge, a pause that changed nothing about the direction of the fall.
But Joobin's head was on her shoulder and Joobin's hand was in hers and Joobin had said "you're my favourite person" and the words were sitting in Yeonji's chest, too precious to let go of. So she would try. For Joobin. She would try to give the half-second every time, even knowing it wouldn't be enough, because trying was the only currency she had and Joobin deserved every coin of it.
________________________________________
She came back to the rooftop in pieces. Joobin’s voice was a fading echo in her ear. You have to keep being alive, but the reality was the cold grit of concrete against her cheek and the taste of blood pooling in her mouth and a searing agony in her left side so vast and so deep there was nothing else in the world. White heat stretched from her hip to her armpit and pulsed with every heartbeat.
She coughed weakly and spat blood and spit mixed together. She blinked as her vision swam, aware enough to know that she was on the ground, her left arm pressed against her ribs, her right splayed out on the roof in front of her. The boy with the pipe was standing over her. She could see his shoes. White sneakers, scuffed, a smear of something dark across the toe of the left one that might have been her blood. He was saying something to someone behind him and laughing. The laugh was echoing, as if it was coming from a distance, before it came roaring back crystal clear.
Her left side was screaming. Cracked or broken she knew, familiar enough with the injury to know what it felt like. The blood was running from above her eye again, whatever had clotted during the fight broken open when she fell.. It ran warm and steady, soaking into the collar of her mother's shirt.
Get up, she thought. I need to get up.
She tried gathering her feet but her body refused, her legs pawing uselessly at the ground beneath her. Every nerve, every muscle, every bruised and bleeding part of her was sending the same message, unified for the first time all night. Stay down. Stay here. Rest. Sleep.
She blinked slowly, and through the blood and the blur she could see Joobin, still on the concrete, still curled in the same position she'd been in when Yeonji came through the door. That was minutes ago. It felt like hours.
Get… UP, she screamed at herself. Joobin… needs… me.
She got her right hand flat on the concrete and pushed. Her left side shrieked at the movement, and her vision went dark at the edges as the taste of copper surged up her throat and she spat blood onto the ground and pushed harder. She got her knees under her and the rooftop swam.
The boy with the pipe had turned away from her. He was facing Minho, saying something, gesturing with the pipe, and his back was to her because she was finished, because she was a girl on the ground who'd taken a pipe to the ribs and nobody got up and kept fighting after that.
She got to her feet. It took everything. Her legs shook so badly on the way up that she almost went down twice, her balance wrecked by blood loss and exhaustion, and when she was finally standing she was swaying and gasping and her ribs were screaming at her with every breath that barely filled her chest.
I’m… not… finished… yet.
The boy’s back was open and the pipe was hanging loose at his side. He was clearly not expecting any more threats to come for him. She staggered forward a step, then two, before she lunged for the pipe with both hands. For a horrible moment, she thought she had overreached and would miss, but her hands settled around the cold metal and she yanked with everything she had left.
It shouldn't have worked. He was stronger than her, and even uninjured she doubted she could have pulled it free. But arrogance made for a slow target, and his certainty that the fight was over meant he wasn't braced for the yank. The pipe ripped out of his hand with a jolt, and he spun around in shock, his face moving from surprise to confusion. Because the girl he'd put on the ground was standing in front of him holding his pipe and bleeding from half a dozen places and looking at him with one working eye and an expression on her face that he clearly couldn't make sense of, because it wasn't anger and it wasn't pain and it wasn't anything he had a name for other than… feral.
She didn’t give him a chance to think and swung the pipe into his knee.
The impact was ugly. She felt it in her wrists and her elbows and her shoulders and the vibration travelled up through the metal and into her swollen right hand and the pain in the hand was exquisite, a white-hot flare that almost made her drop the pipe, but her fingers were locked and she refused to let the pain open them. There was a crack as it struck, and the boy's leg folded sideways and he went down with a scream that was high and ragged and laced with pain.
He hit the concrete on his side and she swung the pipe into his ribs. The swing was slow and clumsy and it was all she had. She was running on dregs and grit and nothing else. But there was enough, and the metal connected with his ribs. He roared as the blow hit.
Yeonji pulled back to hit him again but he rolled out of the way and the pipe hit concrete instead, the jarring rebound shooting up through her wrists and elbows, and she stumbled forward, off balance, carried past her target by the swing's momentum. The stumble cost her a second and he used it to get his feet under him. He was limping as he backed up a few steps, unable to put weight on the knee she had viciously gone for.
He came at her faster than she expected from someone with a damaged knee, closing the distance in two steps, and he threw a right hand at her face, a hard, committed punch with his full weight behind it, intending to end the fight in one blow.
Yeonji brought the pipe up, both hands on the shaft, the pipe horizontal across her chest, and his fist connected with the metal instead of her face and there was a sharp, percussive crack, knuckle on steel, bone meeting something that would not yield, and the vibration sang through the pipe and into her palms. His hand crumpled around the impact. She could see his fingers buckle and the shape of the fist change, as the small bones of his hand compressed against a surface that gave nothing back. There was no roar this time, just a higher, thinner scream, the sound a person made when the pain was so sudden that the body bypassed every other response and went straight to the only noise it had left.
He staggered back clutching his mangled hand against his chest, his fingers already swelling and turning the wrong colour. His mouth was open because of the pain, and his eyes were wet and Yeonji didn’t care and swung the pipe.
She didn't think about it. There was nothing left in her that was capable of thinking. The part of her brain that weighed decisions and considered consequences had gone dark, swallowed by the agony in her ribs and the desperation clawing at her heart. The swing was slow, her arms were heavy and her shoulders burned and her grip on the pipe was slippery with blood and rain and the swelling in her right hand. It was slow enough to dodge, but he was too absorbed in his ruined hand to see it coming.
The pipe caught him across the side of the face. Left temple to jaw. She felt the connection through the shaft, a dense, heavy contact that was nothing like hitting a limb or a torso, and his head snapped sideways as he crumpled, his eyes already closed before he hit the ground.
Yeonji stood over him and felt nothing. Not satisfaction, not horror, not anything. She planted the pipe against the concrete and leaned on it because she wasn't sure her legs would hold without it. Her body was screaming at her to let go, to just fall, but stubbornness and sheer grit kept her standing.
There was one left. The boy she'd hit in the throat. The one that had backed away in fear. He was standing near Minho rubbing his neck, and Minho had one hand on the boy's shoulder, pushing him forward. She could see the pressure of Minho's fingers on the boy's school shirt, the way the fabric bunched under his grip, and she could see the boy's face, and it was the face of someone who did not want to be where he was.
"Go," Minho said. She heard it clearly across the rooftop. A command. The voice of a boy who was used to other people doing his hurting for him.
The boy took a step forward. Then another. His hands were half-raised but not in fists, in the open, uncertain posture of someone who'd been told to fight and couldn't find the will for it. His eyes were darting between Yeonji and the bodies on the concrete around her and the pipe hanging from her right hand, and every piece of information they gathered was telling him the same thing, which was that the girl in front of him had put down eight people tonight and the ninth was not going to end differently.
Yeonji watched him come. She didn't want to hit him. She had seen the fear in him when they had locked eyes and she did not want to add to it. He was here because Minho had pushed him. He was fighting because the alternative to fighting was whatever Minho would do to him tomorrow, and Yeonji understood that because she'd seen it play out a hundred times in a hundred hallways, the economy of fear that kept boys like this in orbit around boys like Minho.
But he was also between her and Minho. Her and Joobin, and that was enough to make the mercy secondary. He swung at her. It was slow and telegraphed and she could see it coming from the moment his shoulder dipped, and she shuffled to the side to avoid it. The first went past her and she swung the pipe into his thigh. She chose the thigh deliberately, the meat of it, the muscle, because a pipe to the knee would shatter something and even in her current state, she knew he didn't deserve shattered, he deserved the dead leg and the bruise that would follow and nothing more. He went down on one knee with a grunt, his hand going to his thigh, and she put the end of the pipe against his chest and pushed. Firmly.
He went over backward and lay on the concrete looking up at her with an expression that held more relief than pain, the look of someone who'd been given permission to stop.
"Stay down," she said, her voice raspy and barely there. Like gravel in a dry riverbed.
He stayed down.
She turned and Minho was standing by the railing with Joobin between them and the rooftop was empty now except for the three of them and the bodies scattered across the concrete in various states of damage. The laughter and the voices and the easy confidence of ten people who'd owned this roof a few minutes ago were gone, replaced by the groaning and the wind and the sound of Yeonji's breathing, which was the loudest thing she could hear, each inhale a short torn rasp that didn't fill her lungs.
It started to rain.
A light, cold misting that came in on the wind and settled on her skin and her hair and the blood on her face and the concrete under her feet, turning everything slightly slick, slightly colder, as if the night had decided to add one more thing to the list of things her body had to endure.
Yeonji looked at Minho across the wet concrete. Minho looked back. The smile was gone. She couldn't tell what had replaced it because her vision was narrowing, the left eye sealed shut and the right starting to blur, but whatever was on his face now was not the expression of a boy who was comfortable.
She opened her hands and let the pipe drop. It hit the concrete with a clang that rang across the rooftop and rolled to a stop against the base of the utility housing, and her empty hands hung at her sides, the right one swollen and purple, the left one scraped raw, both of them shaking with a tremor she'd stopped trying to control.
The rain fell on her face and mixed with the blood and ran down her chin. Joobin was on the concrete behind Minho, three metres away, and Minho was the last thing standing between Yeonji and where she needed to be.
________________________________________
He was different from the others and she could see it in his posture, in the way he stood. Where they had been full of adrenaline and fear in equal measure, Minho was loose. Balanced. His weight centred and low, his shoulders dropped, his hands out of his pockets now and resting at his sides with his fingers uncurled, and she recognised the stance because she'd seen it in the community gym, in the footwork drills and the shadowboxing sessions and the way Coach Park carried himself even when he wasn't in the ring. It was the posture of someone who had been taught how to stand before they'd been taught how to hit, and the teaching had settled so deep into his body that it didn't look like a stance anymore.
He was alone now, and that sat on him like an ill-fitting coat. He was built to be the centre of attention, for the laughter that followed his jokes and the silence that followed his orders. The ringmaster without a circus to entertain. Without the crowd he looked smaller. Still dangerous, but reduced somehow, a seventeen-year-old in a wet school shirt with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, standing in the rain on a rooftop that no longer belonged to him.
The rain came in sideways off the edge of the roof, thin and cold, and it was almost a relief. It found the blood on Yeonji's face and thinned it, drew it down her chin in pale pink lines that dripped onto the collar of her mother's shirt. It found the cut above her left eye and stung. Found the scrape along her hip where the gate had torn through her joggers and stung there too. Found the pipe wound on her left side, cold water seeping through the torn fabric into the bruised and broken tissue underneath and reminded her that every wound she'd collected tonight was still open and still bleeding and still hers.
He was watching her the way he'd watched the whole fight, with that steady, measuring attention that took everything in and gave nothing back. Yeonji looked for fear in his face and found patience instead, and the patience frightened her more than anger would have because patience meant he was thinking, and Minho thinking was Minho at his most dangerous. His eyes were moving across the rooftop, looking at the ruin of bodies Yeonji had left behind her, the blood trails, the pipe lying in a growing puddle of rainwater, taking stock of the battlefield and working out how to turn the wreckage into an advantage.
"You can barely stand," he said, speaking directly to her for the first time that night.
His voice was calm. Almost bored sounding. The voice of a boy ordering lunch, not someone preparing for a fight. She was swaying. She could feel it happening and she couldn't stop it, her centre of gravity drifting in small circles as the signals from her legs grew less reliable, and each sway cost her balance and balance was currency she was almost out of. And Yeonji knew what he was doing. He was stalling. Every second she stood here listening to him talk was a second her body cooled and her muscles stiffened and the adrenaline pulled further out to sea, leaving her stranded on a shore of pain and exhaustion that was getting harder to stand on with every breath.
"If only you could see yourself, Yeonji-ya." He tilted his head. The gesture was almost gentle, almost concerned, the performance of someone reasonable assessing a situation, and the performance was flawless because Minho had always been good at performances. "Your hand's swollen, maybe even broken. You're bleeding from your head and you can barely keep your eyes open. And the way your breathing means you’ve cracked a rib. Maybe even broken them."
He paused, letting his casual survey of her wounds settle. "You've seen me in the gym. You know what I can do. So think about what happens next. Really think."
She had seen him. That was the thing that tightened her stomach and made the blood in her mouth taste sharper. Three months of trying to protect Joobin had meant watching Minho. She had seen glimpses of him through the gym windows after school, his hands taped, working the heavy bag with a rhythm that spoke of years of training. Clean footwork, light on the balls of his feet. His guard was tight. His jab was fast. She'd watched him spar with the boxing club captain once, a third-year who'd been training since middle school, and the captain hadn't been able to touch him for the first two rounds. She also noticed that he liked causing pain. A spar was supposed to be practice, a back-and-forth between partners, but Minho didn't spar. He punished. And when he put someone on the floor of the ring, he smiled the way he smiled in the hallways when a first-year flinched.
"So here's what I'm thinking." He'd started walking. Not toward her, but along the railing, to the left, slow and unhurried, and the walking was pulling her attention sideways, drawing her eyes away from Joobin's body on the ground, and she understood what he was doing. Making her choose. Making the distance to him compete with the distance to Joobin in the geography of her decision. "You've made your point," he continued. "You came up here, you fought my guys, you proved whatever you came to prove. So now you pick up Joobin and you leave. We pretend this didn't happen. Simple."
Joobin lay still on the concrete, the rain collecting in the folds of her uniform, running down the swollen side of her face in streams that looked like tears she wasn't conscious enough to cry. The shallow rise and fall of her chest was still there, and every small breath in and out was a thread Yeonji could feel pulling at her own chest, as if she and Joobin were breathing on the same line and Joobin's effort was costing her too.
Minho wasn’t finished. The prick likes the sound of his own voice, thought Yeonji.
"Or." Minho's feet stopped, but his voice didn't change from the same bored register, as if Yeonji was beneath the effort of even trying to sound interested in the conversation. "You try to get through me, and I put you down. And then… Joobin here is lying on the roof with nobody coming for her. Because you were it, Yeonji-ya. You were everything she had. You go down and there's no one left. And maybe… I get to have my fun after all."
The logic pressed against her like a cold hand on her chest. He was right that she could barely stand. Right that he was trained and fresh and outweighed her by god knows how much. Even fresh, she wouldn’t really stand a chance. But now she was running on worse than empty, and she knew it. She was a bleeding, shaking wreck with one working eye and a hand that would barely close into a fist and ribs that ground against each other with every breath. And he was offering her a way out. To take Joobin and leave.
As if it was a kindness.
But she knew a trick when she saw one. Because if she left, tomorrow he'd tell the whole school that he won. He'd stay untouched and undamaged, the boy who didn't even have to fight because Yeonji had known she couldn't beat him. Tomorrow Joobin wakes up in a hospital bed and Minho is still out there and the three months of hallway shoulders and whispered cruelties and the slow, patient escalation that had led Yeonji to the roof would continue. And Joobin would have to keep paying the price of his cruelty.
She had been drifting while he talked. She had used the swaying to her advantage, closing the distance with every breath and every word, each sway covering inches he wasn't counting.
"Last chance," he said. "Walk away. Take her and go."
Yeonji looked at him through the rain. The water was running into her mouth and it tasted like blood and iron. Her left side pulsed with every heartbeat and her left eye was sealed shut and her right was starting to blur and the rooftop was tilting beneath her in a slow, nauseating rotation that had nothing to do with the wind.
"She's nothing, you know," Minho drawled, looking back over his shoulder at Joobin's body on the ground. The gesture was deliberate and slow, giving Yeonji his profile, the casual confidence of a boy who didn't believe she had enough left to close three metres in the time it took him to turn back. "She's the quietest, meekest, most forgettable person in our school. Nobody notices her. Nobody cares. Except you." His eyes came back to Yeonji. "I would have grown bored after a while and moved on. But then you came along Yeonji. Her little white knight. And suddenly it got fun. It got interesting.” He chuckled. “It became a little game, to see how far I could push before you snapped. And all I had to do was send a photograph."
He turned to face her, the grin back now, stretched wide across his face. “So, what’s it going to be Yeonji. Fight or walk away?”
"You put your foot on her face," she said. Her voice was almost gone. A rasp so low that the rain hitting the ground was louder than her voice. "You mocked her. You hurt her."
There was a flicker behind his eyes. Brief. There and gone.
"You've been hurting her for three months. Every day. In the hallways and the classrooms and the stairwells. You've been grinding her down and you enjoyed it. And now you want me to leave so tomorrow you can stand in front of everyone and say she's still yours."
She spat blood onto the concrete, the rain dissolved it almost instantly.
"Fuck your deal."
Minho sighed. His weight settled and his hands came up, not the relaxed display of a moment ago but the real thing, the guard, and he opened his mouth to say something final, when Yeonji moved.
________________________________________
The drifting had done its work. While his words had filled the space between them, her swaying had been quietly eating the distance, and what remained was close enough for what she needed. She threw herself at him with every ruined thing she had left.
She went low, driving off her back foot, her right shoulder aimed at his midsection, not a tackle but a closing of distance, a girl who needed to be inside his arms before those arms could do what they'd been trained to do. Her right hand was useless so she led with the left, an open-palmed shove at his chest to try and throw him off-balance as she crashed into his space.
Minho moved.
Not the clumsy, panicked movements of the boys she'd fought tonight. He stepped offline, a half-pivot on his right foot that took his body out of her path and put him at an angle she wasn't prepared for. His right hand parried her arm aside as he pivoted, and her momentum carried her past him into the space where he'd been standing a half-second ago.
She turned, and his right hand was already in motion. One moment there was rain and the blurred shape of him rotating, and the next there was a detonation against her jaw that she didn't register as a punch until she was already falling. It was cleaner and harder than anything she'd been hit with all night.
She hit the concrete on her right side. The impact jolted through her ribs and a sound left her mouth that she didn't choose, half groan, half scream, pulled from somewhere deep and released into the rain.
"Pathetic," Minho said. He'd barely moved. Two steps to the side, one punch, and she was on the ground. "I thought you’d at least be entertaining, Yeonji-ya."
She got her left hand flat on the wet concrete and pushed. Her right arm wouldn't take weight so she used her elbow, grinding it into the rough surface, feeling the skin tear with the weight she was putting on it, and she got one knee under her and then the other and then she was standing again, except standing was generous, standing implied balance and control and what she was doing was closer to remaining vertical through nothing but sheer stubbornness.
Minho watched her rise with an expression she hadn't seen on him before. Surprise and something else. He'd expected her to stay down. The fact that she hadn't was making him recalculate.
She came at him again, relentless in her anger, and this time he met her. He didn't wait for her to close the distance. He stepped forward and threw a jab, a short snapping punch that she actually saw coming and tried to slip, turning her head to the right the way Coach Park had shown her once, a lifetime ago, in the dusty basement gym. She was too slow. The jab caught her on the forehead, above the sealed eye, and it wasn't devastating but it was precise, thrown with the intent to put her back on her heels, and it did. Her weight shifted backward and before she could plant her feet he was on her with a combination, three quick shots to her head followed by a right hook to the body that folded her sideways, finding the space between her elbow and her hip where the pipe had already done its work, and the pain from that single blow was so total her vision collapsed to a pinhole and her legs buckled and she was going down again, when his left hand came over the top of her dropped guard and landed flush on her cheekbone and the pinhole went dark.
She didn't remember hitting the ground. One moment she was being hit and the next there was concrete cold against her face and the rain was in her ear and she could hear her own breathing, wet and wrong, and she could taste blood, a pooling warmth that filled her mouth and spilled out the corner of her lips onto the rooftop.
Through the blur of her one working eye she could see the base of the utility housing. The square concrete structure that held the building's ventilation, six metres to her left. And at its base, arranged in a row along the wall, were planters. Three of them. Ceramic pots, old and cracked, the remains of whatever well-meaning teacher had once tried to bring something green to this roof before the green gave up and left nothing but dead soil and brown stems and the pots themselves, heavy and thick-walled and glazed in a faded blue that the rain had turned dark.
Minho was talking again. She could hear his voice but not the words, as if he was speaking from behind glass, the syllables arriving soft and muffled, and she didn't care what he was saying.
Get up. Get up get up get up.
Her body refused. It lay on the concrete in the rain and refused, and her mind screamed at it and the body screamed back with a chorus of damage too long to list. Her body was finished. Her body had been finished for minutes. Whatever she did now would have to come from somewhere else.
She thought about Joobin on the bench with her eyes closed. The weight of her head on Yeonji's shoulder. The five minutes of quiet in a loud world.
Okay, Joobin had said, when she meant I can keep going if you're here.
Yeonji got her hand flat on the concrete and pushed herself to her feet, rising slow and broken and shaking so badly that the rain trembled on her skin.
Minho stopped talking.
She could see his feet. White sneakers on wet concrete, the same white sneakers that had been on Joobin's face, and the sight of them sent a pulse of heat through the cold wreckage of her body. She lifted her head and looked at him and he was staring at her like she was an apparition. She'd taken a combination that should have ended it. She'd been on the concrete with blood filling her mouth and her eyes closed and she was standing again and that had introduced a truth that his training hadn't accounted for, which was a girl who simply would not go down and stay down.
She didn't charge this time. Instead she shuffled toward him, one foot and then the other, and each step was an act of war against her own body, a decision made and remade with every placement of her foot on the wet rooftop. Her left hand came up, not a guard, just a hand raised between her face and his fists, and she walked into range.
He hit her.
A jab to the face that she walked through. Her head rocked back from the force of the blow and the rain sprayed off her forehead and she kept walking. He threw another, harder this time, turning his hip into it so the jab carried the authority of a cross, and it caught her above the working eye and her vision fragmented into bright splinters for a half-second and she kept walking. His footwork carried him back a step, trying to maintain the distance that made his punches effective, trying to keep her at the end of his reach where his training lived, but she followed him. Step for step, absorbing what he threw, letting the punches land because the alternative was not getting close enough and not getting close enough was not an option.
A left hook found her temple and her knees dipped and the rooftop tilted and she almost lost consciousness then. She felt her weight dropping and she locked her legs through pure, unreasonable refusal to fall and stayed upright. She could feel the muscles in her thighs shaking under a load they were no longer built to carry, and still, she took another step.
Minho backed into the utility housing. The flat concrete wall stopped his movement and for the first time all night Yeonji saw something change in the way he held himself, a tightening across his shoulders, a stiffness in his footwork as the open rooftop shrank to a corner and the distance he needed disappeared. She was inside now, too close for the straight punches that had been dismantling her, and she threw her left hand at his face. It was slow and graceless and he blocked it easily with his forearm, the trained response, the reflex of a thousand hours of sparring. But the punch was never the point. While his arm was up she lunged forward and hit him across the chin with her right elbow.
The impact was ugly. The hard edge of her elbow met his lips and his teeth and she felt his mouth compress against the bone of her arm, and for the first time Minho made a sound that wasn't calculated, a sharp grunt of pain and surprise that leaked out of him before he could catch it. Blood appeared on his lower lip, bright against the rain.
He shoved her. Both hands on her shoulders, a hard, violent push that sent her reeling backward, and she tripped on her own feet and went down on one knee. Her left hand hit the ground and slid on the wet surface and she was close, close to the utility housing, close to the row of planters at its base, and her fingers found the rim of the cold, ceramic pot.
Minho wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at it. The rain washed the red off his knuckles in thin rivers. He came at her then, properly, abandoning the distance for the first time, a combination starting low with a hook to her body and rising to her head, and she knew it was coming because the pattern was one she'd seen in the gym, the body shot that drew the guard down followed by the overhand that came over the top.
She took the body shot. Took it in her damaged ribs and the pain was nuclear, a white-hot sun that detonated below her armpit and sent fracture lines through every nerve she had left, and her vision went to static and her lungs seized and for a terrible, infinite second she thought this is it, this is where I stop. This is where I die.
But her left hand had curled around the rim of the pot, and she could feel the solid weight of it through numbing fingers. So when the overhand came for her head she didn't duck. She swung the pot.
She didn't swing upward. His overhand was coming for her head and every instinct screamed at her to block it or move out the way, but the overhand wasn't the target and neither was his fist. His feet were. His front foot was planted in front of her knee, braced and weighted because the combination demanded it, all of his power rooted through that single point of contact with the rooftop, and Yeonji brought the pot down on it with everything her left arm had left.
The ceramic was heavy. Heavier and denser than a brick, and the dead soil packed inside it added a weight that was all mass and no mercy, and she drove it down with a two-handed grip she didn't remember taking, her right hand screaming as the fingers closed around the rim. The base of the pot landed squarely on the bridge of his foot, the thin bones between the ankle and the toes, and the sound was wet and dry at once, something crunching beneath something yielding, and she felt his foot give way beneath the pot.
His overhand never landed. His planted foot buckled and his weight shifted and the punch that had been aimed at her skull sailed wide as his balance dissolved. Minho lurched backward, rearing away from the pain in his foot, and for one second his hands forgot about fighting and reached for nothing, grabbing at the air, and his face was open in a way she'd never seen, wearing an expression that was just pain and the shock of discovering that pain could arrive from below.
She used the second. Pivoted on her knees, both hands still gripping the pot, and swung it upward in a rising arc that started at her hip and ended at his head. The arc was graceless and desperate and fuelled by nothing except the refusal to waste the opening his agony had given her, and the pot caught him on the side of the cheek.
The pot exploded. The ceramic split along fault lines that years of weather and frost had been quietly preparing, the glazed surface fracturing outward in a burst of blue and brown, shards of fired clay spinning into the rain like shrapnel, trailing arcs of dead soil that scattered across the rooftop in a dark spray. She felt the pot come apart in her hands, the solid weight of it disintegrating into fragments between her fingers, and the largest piece, the base, stayed in her grip for a half-second longer before it too cracked and fell away and left her holding nothing but air and the memory of weight. Soil rained down on both of them, mixing with the blood and the rain on his face and in his hair and on her hands, and a fine dust of terracotta hung in the wet air between them for a moment before the rain dissolved it.
Minho's head snapped sideways from the blow and his whole body followed, reeling two steps to the right on the foot she hadn't crushed, the damaged one dragging behind him, his arms windmilling for balance he wasn't going to find. His eyes were unfocused, the pupils blown wide, and there was a cut across his cheek where the rim of the pot had opened the skin and blood was already sheeting down the side of his face, thinned by rain into pale red rivers that dripped from his jaw onto his collar.
He swung at her. A wild right, thrown from instinct rather than stance, his body still reeling and his feet nowhere close to set. The punch missed her entirely and his fist hit the concrete wall of the utility housing behind her with a sound she heard through the rain, the sharp, brittle sound of knuckle bones meeting a surface that gave nothing back. His hand crumpled against the wall and he made a sound, high and involuntary, and pulled the fist back, his knuckles split in two places and weeping red.
He cocked his left and threw it at her face, and this one landed, catching her on the jaw, but it was different from the punches that had put her down earlier. The precision was gone. The clean mechanics were gone. The pain in his foot and his head and now his right hand had peeled back the layer of training and what was underneath was just a normal boy, hurt and shaken and swinging out of desperation rather than technique. The punch knocked her head sideways but it didn't drop her. Another followed, catching her ear, and another, wide and looping, glancing off her shoulder. He was fighting with one good hand and one good foot and neither was enough and the punches were losing their strength, degrading into something uglier and more honest.
She absorbed them. Each one landed and each one hurt in ways she would catalogue later if there was a later, and she didn't retreat and she didn't cover up. She let him hit her because every punch he threw from this close pulled him forward, pulled him off balance, brought his body incrementally closer to hers, and that was where she needed him. Not at the distance his training owned but at the distance where training stopped mattering and the fight became about who was willing to keep going when every signal in the body was begging them to stop.
He threw a left hook aimed at her jaw and she ducked under it with a slow, grinding drop of her head that let his fist sail over the crown of her skull. She came up inside his arm and wrapped her left hand around the back of his neck and pulled his head down and drove her knee into his stomach. The knee landed in the soft space below his ribs and navel, and his whole frame jack-knifed around the point of contact and a sound came out of him that was just air, just the sudden emptying of his lungs.
She held his head down with her left hand, her fingers tangled in his wet hair and kneed him again in the same place. His body tried to fold tighter and she wouldn't let it, holding him upright by the hair, keeping the target open. A third knee, and this time she felt his legs sagging. The hand that had been hitting her moments ago was now on her shoulder, gripping it desperately to stay upright.
She released his hair and he dropped to his hands and knees on the wet concrete.
For a moment she stood over him and the rain fell on both of them and the rooftop was quiet except for the sound of their ragged breathing. His was fast and shallow and wheezing from the knees to his gut. Hers was worse. A wet, laboured rasp that hitched every time her ribs shifted under the tissue that was supposed to hold them together.
He looked up at her. The rain was in his eyes and blood was on his mouth from where she'd elbowed him and his face was different. The smile was gone. What was left was a boy who’d built himself a kingdom out of fear and other people's pain and had run it from behind the safety of bodies and numbers, and the kingdom was groaning on the concrete around him and the girl who'd torn through it was standing over him in the rain, swaying on legs that shouldn't be holding her, somehow still standing. After everything.
He pushed himself up. Slowly. Got one foot under him, and the damaged one followed reluctantly, the weight on it drawing a wince that tightened his whole face. He straightened up and touched the cut above his ear where the pot had opened him, his fingers coming away red.
And then he set his feet and raised his hands and Yeonji understood that it wasn't over.
She had hurt him, but the spite and the grief and the image of Joobin's face on the concrete that had gotten her this far was almost gone. She had nothing left to throw. No technique, no power, no secret reserve, nothing except the willingness to be here, in this place, in this rain, for as long as it took. She raised her left hand, the last gesture of a girl who had spent everything she had and was offering the empty aftermath as defiance.
Minho threw a straight left. She didn't slip it or duck it. She turned her head into it, met the punch with the side of her skull above the ear, the hardest part of a human head meeting the knuckles of his weaker hand. His fingers buckled on impact and she heard him hiss through his teeth. She stepped into the space the pain created and grabbed his shirt with her left hand and rammed her head straight into his nose. She felt the cartilage compress and flatten and felt the hot burst of his blood across her face as he choked on the sudden rush of blood filling his throat.
He tried to shove her off again but her hand was locked in the fabric of his shirt and she wouldn't let go. Her grip was weak, but the shirt was bunched in her fist and she brought her foot down on his damaged one, driving her heel into the mess of broken bones the pot had already made, his whole body seizing as the fresh wave of pain met the old one and compounded it. She kneed him in the ribs as he grabbed her arm and tried to twist it and pain lanced through her shoulder but she held on. She drove her forehead into his collarbone and felt the sharp edge of the bone press back and she bit him, sinking her teeth into the muscle between his neck and his shoulder and clamped down through the wet cotton of his shirt and the skin underneath and he roared in pain and disbelief.
He hit her in the side of the head with his swollen right fist and the pain of the impact was clearly as bad for him as it was for her, his damaged knuckles compressing on her skull. She staggered as the blow landed, enough to force her to release her bite, and Minho staggered sideways in the opposite direction. For a second they were apart, two broken shapes in the rain, both gasping, both bleeding.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
His nose was streaming. The bite mark on his shoulder was showing through the torn fabric of his shirt, an ugly, dark crescent already bruising at the edges. His right hand hung at his side, the knuckles grotesquely fat and miscoloured. His left was still raised, but it was trembling. His legs were apart and his weight was uneven, the crushed foot hovering above the concrete because putting weight on it was no longer possible, and his breathing was audible and rapid and nothing about him looked like the boy who'd sent her a photograph of his foot on her best friend's face with the word bored underneath it.
He looked like a boy who was hurt and tired and standing in the rain.
She couldn’t afford to stay still or stop, because if she did she wouldn’t be able to start again. She lurched forward, an ugly uncoordinated move that threw Minho off and the blow he flung in defence glanced off her shoulder. She was on him again, inside his arms, too close for him to punch, and she wrapped both arms around his torso and drove forward with her legs and the two of them went over together.
They hit the ground in a tangle of limbs and rain. She landed on top of him and her ribs screamed and his elbow caught her in the face as they fell and she saw sparks and she didn't care. She got her knees on either side of his torso, pinning his hips, and she drove her left fist straight down into his face. The punch was short and ugly and had nothing behind it except the last remaining embers of fury of a girl whose body had gone past technique and strength, where violence was just repetition, just the act of raising a fist and bringing it down and raising it again. His head rocked backwards into the ground with the first blow, and she drew back to hit him again. Then again, her knuckles finding his cheek and his jaw and his mouth. Each blow was weaker than the last, the force draining out of her arm the way colour drains from a sky after sunset, but she didn't stop because stopping was the thing she didn't know how to do.
It was everything Joobin had told her that day in the bedroom. The thing that made her brave and made her broken. And kneeling in the rain, with her fist rising and falling on the face of the boy who'd hurt her best friend, she understood that it was both. It had always been both.
Minho's hands came up in a desperate attempt to shield his face. His forearms crossed over his face in a defensive posture, and she kept hitting him anyway. Each hit on the arm hurt, and she peeled his right arm away from his face because even know, in the haze of her own pain she knew that his right hand was damaged and his grip was weak. She managed to pin it under her knee and she struck him across the face again, one last blow with everything she had left, and it rocked his head sideways, blood spraying from the impact. She felt his body go slack beneath her.
Not unconscious. She could see his eyes, half-open, glazed, watching the rain through the gap between his forearms. He was breathing. His chest rose and fell beneath her knees, but the fight had left him. What remained was just a broken, bloodied boy in a school uniform and nothing in his eyes that looked like power.
Yeonji stayed where she was. Kneeling on his chest with the rain falling on the back of her neck and running down through her hair and over her face and mixing with the blood and the tears she hadn't noticed starting. Her hand was still raised. Trembling. Suspended in the space between the last hit and the next, between the part of her that wanted to keep going and the part that recognised the boy beneath her had stopped.
She lowered her hand, and it took everything. More than every blow she had taken since she had arrived on the roof. Lowering her hand when the person who'd hurt Joobin was underneath her and defenceless, when the promise and the fury and the months of watching him terrorise the person she cared about were screaming at her to keep going, to make him feel every moment of every cruelty he'd committed, to pay back the photograph and the texts and the foot on Joobin's face and the word creative with interest. Lowering her hand was the hardest thing she'd ever done.
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She rolled to her side and landed on her back beside him and the rain hit her face, cold and steady, falling straight down into her one open eye and her open mouth and the cuts that mapped her skin. The sky above Seoul was the colour of nothing, a flat amber grey with no stars and no depth, just the glow the city pushed upward into its own clouds, and she lay there and looked at it and breathed, and each breath was a wet, torn thing that tasted like copper and cost more than the last.
She tried to get up but the rooftop lurched sideways and her arm gave and she was on her back again, the concrete cold and gritty against her shoulder blades, and the sky spun in a slow, sickening rotation above her. She tried again. Got further this time, almost to her knees, before her ribs sent a flare of white through her vision so total that the rooftop disappeared for a full second and when it came back she was on the ground again.
Through the rain and the haze and the blood in her eye, she could see Joobin. Just a few small steps away from where she was lying. Close enough that she could almost reach out and take Joobin's hand. The distance was nothing, it was the length of a bedroom floor, it was the space Yeonji had crawled on her hands and knees to sit on the edge of Joobin's bed and take her hand and promise her something she couldn't keep.
She started crawling.
Her left hand found the wet concrete and pulled, and her knees dragged behind her, and the scrape of skin on grit was a sound she felt more than heard. Her right hand was useless so she tucked it against her chest and moved with one arm and her knees. She pulled and dragged herself one agonising inch at a time, each movement sending a searing flare from her ribs outward through her body in a spider's web of bright, branching hurt. She refused to stop, because the alternative was lying on a rooftop in the rain a fingertip away from the person she'd come here for, and she would rather die on the concrete than not cross that distance.
She reached Joobin. Her left hand found Joobin's shoulder and then her cheek, the scraped and bloodied palm settling against Joobin's swollen face with a gentleness that belonged to a different person than the one who'd been on the rooftop a minute ago. A gentleness that was hers, that had always been hers, that lived in the same hands that had held a brick and swung a plant pot and torn skin with her teeth, because that was the truth of her, the unsolvable contradiction that Joobin had named. The fist and the open palm. The violence and the tenderness. The same hands. The same girl.
"Joobin-ah." Her voice was gravel and blood and barely there. "Joobin-ah, I'm... here. You’re... safe now."
Joobin's eyes opened as she heard Yeonji’s voice.
Not wide. Not all the way. Just a sliver of dark iris beneath swollen lids, a slit of recognition that found Yeonji's face through the rain and the blood and the ruin of the evening, and Joobin's cracked lips moved and the words that came out was so quiet that Yeonji had to lean close, her ear almost touching Joobin's mouth, her own blood dripping onto Joobin's collar, to hear it.
"Yeonji… you… came… for me."
Yeonji could have laughed. She’d run here in her old t-shirt and jogger pants and fought through ten people, and now she was kneeling in the rain with blood in her mouth and her hand on Joobin's face and she wanted to laugh. Because of course she came. There was no world, no version of who she was, where she wouldn't have come.
“Of course... I came, Joobin-ah. Of... course... I came.”
Yeonji gathered Joobin’s head off the ground and placed it into her lap. Her body screamed at the extra weight and she didn't care, because Joobin was warm and breathing and her fingers curled weakly into the front of Yeonji's shirt the way they curled into her blazer sleeve in crowded hallways, holding on, and Yeonji held on back, held on with the same ferocious grip she'd used on the pot and the brick and the shirt of the boy she'd beaten, but softer now, carefully, the grip of a person holding the most important thing in the world.
She pulled out her phone and noticed from her pain-addled fog that the screen was cracked. It had happened during the fight, and now the display flickered behind a web of fractured glass. It was a miracle that it was still working at all, and her bloodied fingers slid across the screen as she tried and failed to unlock it. Eventually she managed it, and dialled 119, not even thinking about the consequences of what that meant, only interested in making Joobin safe.
The operator's voice was calm and steady, the voice of a person whose job was being the solid thing at the other end of the worst moments of other people's lives. Yeonji tried to match it and couldn't, couldn't get her voice to do anything except shake and crack and pour out words in the flood she'd been holding back since the photograph loaded on her screen.
"I need an ambulance. Yeonhwa High School, the east building rooftop. My friend… is hurt. She's… been beaten badly. Maybe… broken ribs and nose. She’s… bleeding from her… mouth and a cut… on her head. She spoke… earlier, but I can’t get her to… wake up now.”
The operator told her to stay on the line and she gathered Joobin's hand into both of hers, carefully, so carefully, because she didn't know what else was broken and she could not stand to be one more thing that hurt her tonight. Joobin's fingers were cold, because she had been lying on the roof in the rain for too long, and Yeonji wrapped both her hands around Joobin's and held it against her chest and tried to push warmth into it through sheer will because that was all she had left. Will and her hands and the stubborn refusal to accept that the girl she cared for most in the world was lying on a rooftop with her eyes closed.
Around her, two of the boys she had fought earlier were shuffling away in agony, dragging themselves to the stairwell, leaving trails of blood and spit and the low sounds of pain that would follow them home and into their beds and through whatever version of sleep they managed tonight. Most of them were still down. The two that left didn’t even spare her a glance in their desperation to get away.
Her mother was going to find out, she realised. The ambulance would bring questions, and the questions would need answers, and the answers would be the end of whatever fragile thing Yeonji had been building at this school. The good student. The quiet girl. The version of herself she'd been assembling from the wreckage of her last school. Her mother would get a phone call tonight, and tomorrow she would get expelled and… that would mean more phone calls. More desperate attempts to find a school that would take someone with her record.
She looked down at her own hands wrapped around Joobin's. At the knuckles split and the swelling of her right hand. The blood running from her own fingers into Joobin’s, mixing together on the concrete between them, in the flat amber light of a Seoul night that had been going on around them the whole time, twelve million people living their lives while two girls sat on a rooftop and bled into each other.
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Joobin sat cross-legged on the low wall outside the convenience store with an iced chocolate drink in both of her hands, watching Yeonji pace the sidewalk and talk with her whole body about something that had started as a frog dissection in biology and become a theory about why Mr. Yoon wore the same tie every Thursday.
"…and I'm not saying he's in love with the tie, but I am saying he has a weird relationship with it, which is different, and Joobin-ah are you even listening to me?"
"I'm always listening," Joobin said, a small smile on her face. "You make it impossible not to."
Yeonji scrunched her face up in mock anger. "Was that mean? Are you being mean to me, Joobin? Because that sounded like you were being mean."
"No, I’m being nice." Joobin took a long pull of her drink and looked at Yeonji over the carton with her too big, too honest eyes. "Nobody ever talked to me before you. Not like this. Not like I was..."
She trailed off, staring at the drink in her hand.
Yeonji had stopped pacing, because she could hear something underneath Joobin's words, something heavy and careful that lived in the same place as the bleeding lip behind the gymnasium. "Like you were what?" Yeonji prompted
"Like I was someone worth talking to," Joobin said quietly. The way you say something you've believed about yourself for so long it had become truth, even if it was anything but.
Yeonji sat down next to her. Close enough that their shoulders touched and didn't say anything for what might have been the longest silence of her life. Four, maybe five whole seconds. Then she bumped Joobin's shoulder with hers.
"You're my favourite person. You know that, right? Like, objectively. Scientifically. It like… Einstein’s law of… law of whatever. It's been peer-reviewed."
"That's not how science works…"
"It's how my science works. Besides, my methodology is flawless. Don't question my methodology."
Joobin leaned her head against Yeonji's shoulder. The weight of it was so small. Joobin weighed nothing, like she was made up of bird bones and the courage that let a girl with a bleeding lip ask a stranger to be her friend. Somewhere nearby someone was playing music through an open window, something slow and half-heard. And Yeonji thought, with the fierce certainty she brought to everything I will keep this. Whatever else happens. Whatever I lose. I will keep this person, this wall and this evening and the weight of her head on my shoulder.
I will keep this.
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The siren found her, threading through the city noise from somewhere below, rising and falling, getting closer with each strained breath, and the sound of it was the sound of the world remembering they existed, the sound of help arriving too late to stop what had happened and just in time to deal with what was left.
Yeonji held Joobin's hand against her chest and waited. The November wind dried the blood on her face into a mask that pulled when she breathed, tight across her cheeks and her forehead, the iron smell of it so close to her nose that every inhale tasted like the evening's cost. Her whole body ached, but Joobin's fingers were getting warmer in hers, the cold retreating as Yeonji's body heat seeped through the contact between their palms, and that warmth was the only thing in the world that mattered.
"I've got you," she said, and the rain fell on both of them, and somewhere below the rooftop the city of Seoul kept turning in its sleep, indifferent and vast and unconcerned with the two girls on the roof of the east building, one broken and the other unmoving, and neither of them letting go.
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