Page 113 of The Way Back Home

His bloodshot eyes move between me and Heetae. Slowly, the rage hasn’t sunk in yet but I can see it loading, see the chamber turning. His face curdles, lip pulling back from his teeth like he’s tasted something rotten.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, boy?”

I straighten up, stepping in front of Heetae. Put my body between them without thinking about it. My pulse is hammering in the hollow of my throat but I keep my face flat, keep my voice even.

“Hyung. Go.”

Heetae’s eyes are wide, flicking between me and the shape of my father in the mouth of the alley. I can feel his hand still hovering near my back.

“Are you sure? Ryowoon—”

“Go, hyung.”

Heetae hesitates. But he sees something in my face that tells him this isn’t a situation where his presence helps. He goes pale, nods once, and turns. His footsteps quicken down the opposite end of the alley, sneakers scuffing concrete, fading.

I hold my ground.

My father advances. The plastic bag swings from his fist, bottles knocking together. His shadow stretches on the pavement as he walks into the gap between streetlamps, his face half lit, the broken capillaries on his nose and cheeks. I can smell the soju and sweat and the sour undertone of a body that’s been pickling itself from the inside for decades.

“I said.” He stops three feet from me. His eyes are slits. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, boy?”

I don’t flinch or shrink back. I look at him and feel my pulse pound against the walls of my throat and I think about a hundred things at once. I look at my father’s face and say nothing because there’s nothing to say that he would hear.

His fist connects with my jaw.

The world jerks sideways. My teeth slam together and I taste copper instantly, my head snapping to the right, stumbling but staying upright because my body knows this dance by now, eighteen years of learning how to absorb the first hit. I get my feet under me, turn back to face him, and the second blow catches me in the ribs. My knees buckle. The third knocks the air out of me so completely that my lungs seize up and I fold, crumpling forward as the ground rushes up.

“Disgusting.” He’s roars, full-blown shrieking fury I know better than any lullaby. “Have you lost your damned mind? How dare you bring your filthy perversions out into the public—”

A kick to my side. I grunt, curl tighter. Another one. Pain blooms wide and bright along my ribs and I feel something shift in there, something that shouldn’t move. His boot comes down again, and I cough, choking, tasting blood now, not just from my split mouth but from somewhere deeper.

“I’m going to kill your ass. I’m going to fucking kill you—disgusting, you disgusting little—”

Each blow punctuates a word. Each word punctuates a blow. I curl in on myself on the cold pavement, knees to my chest, arms over my head, and I take it. Every hit makes me wheeze and grunt but I don’t scream and I don’t fight back.

I could. I know I could. I’m bigger than him now, stronger, faster. If I got to my feet and swung I could put him on the ground. I could end this in thirty seconds. But I don’t. I don’t because honestly, genuinely, lying here on the cold stones of this alley with my father’s boot cracking against my ribs, I can’t find a single reason to bother. What for? What’s the point of getting up? Of fighting back? Of surviving this particular beating just to go home to that house and wait for the next one? There’s nothing waiting for me on the other side of this. No college acceptance letter. No savings account. No future that looks any different from right now.

Seyeon’s leaving. Everyone’s leaving. And I’ll still be here, trapped in the same cycle his father was trapped in, his father’s father before him. The broken son of a broken line going all the way back to a war that ended before any of us were born. A legacy of violence and pain, passed hand to hand like a curse. My great grandfather gave it to my grandfather who gave it to my father who’s giving it to me right now, blow by blow, and what did I do? What did I do so wrong? I didn’t choose this. Didn’t choose to be born into this family, this house, this life. Didn’t choose to be the kind of person who likes boys, who wants to kiss them in alleyways in the dark. I didn’t choose any of it.

“Not raising a fucking faggot—”

His boot catches my side again and something inside me ruptures. I feel a sharp, wet pop somewhere deep in my torso that sends white light across my vision. My mouth opens but no sound comes out. Just a wheeze. A thin whistle of air from lungs that aren’t working the way they should.

The beating keeps going. Each impact duller than the last because I’m going numb, my body shutting things off, closing doors against the pain. My thoughts drift. I think this might really be it. The way he’s going, the viciousness, the intent behind each swing, he isn’t teaching me a lesson. He’s trying to break something that can’t be fixed. And lying here with my cheek pressed against pavement that smells like rain and cigarette ash, I’m not sure I care if he succeeds. What does it matter? What do I have waiting for me? A coffee tin with crumpled bills in it. An empty house. A town that watched me get beaten my whole life and never stepped in to stop it. A best friend on a bus to a city that’ll give him everything I can’t.

Let him, I think. Let him finish it.

Something cracks. Could be a rib. Could be the pavement under my skull. The edges of my vision are going fuzzy, a soft grey creeping inward.

And then it stops.

The blows stop. I can hear him panting above me, he’s winded himself with the effort of beating his own son to pieces. His breathing is animal. He delivers one last kick to my ribs, almost perfunctory, a period at the end.

“This is the final straw.” His voice sounds far away. “You’re an adult now, ain’t you? You’re on your own. You show your face in my house again and I’ll kill you with my own hands. I don’t want any damn sodomite as a son.”

His footsteps. The clink of bottles in the bag. Moving away. Gone.

I lie still in the humming silence. My limbs don’t respond when I try to move them. I cough and something warm and wet hits the pavement near my mouth. I roll onto my side because lying on my back hurts too much to breathe, but lying on my side hurts too, everything hurts, and my lungs make a sound I’ve never heard them make before, a thin crackling whistle on each inhale.