Page 24 of The Way Back Home

We wrestle in the dirt until neither one of us can tell whose elbow belongs to who, rolling down the slope of the clearing, laughing and cursing and getting leaves stuck in our hair. Ryowoon pins me more times than I can count, sitting on my chest grinning down at me while I flail underneath him, but every so often I manage to buck him off, and once I get my knee up fast enough to catch him in the side and he grunts and rolls off clutching his ribs, wheezing out a laugh between breaths.

“There,” he says, still on the ground, pointing up at me. “That’s it. That’s what I’m talking about.”

My mom starts noticing pretty fast. I come home every afternoon covered in dirt from my hair to my shoes, my shirt collar stretched out from Ryowoon grabbing it, a new tear along the hem or a button missing, grass stains ground into my knees that never come all the way out.

“Heo Seyeon,” she says the third night in a row, holding up my ruined shirt by two fingers. “What on earth are you two doing up there?”

“Playing,” I tell her.

“Playing,” she repeats, unconvinced, eyeing the fresh graze along my elbow. “You come home looking like you rolled down the mountain.”

I did roll down the mountain, more than once, but I don’t tell her that. She sighs and makes me sit still while she dabs at the cuts with a wet cloth, muttering under her breath about boys and dirt and the state of my only good pair of pants, and I let her fuss, but the next morning I’m right back at the window when Ryowoon taps on the glass.

And slowly, over the weeks, I get better. My punches stop going wide. I learn to read the tell in Ryowoon’s shoulder before he throws a hook, learn to twist out of the way before it lands. One afternoon in early autumn, the leaves starting to turn gold, I catch him clean on the jaw with a punch that actually snaps his head back, and he stumbles two full steps before he catches his footing, blinking at me in surprise.

“Whoa,” he says, rubbing his jaw, but he’s grinning wide enough to show all his teeth. “Okay. Okay, there you go.”

I stand in the clearing catching my breath, my knuckles stinging, pride swelling up in my chest so big I feel like I could float right off the ground, and Ryowoon keeps grinning at me with pride and excitement.

“Again,” he says, raising his fists back up.

So I do it again.

The idea for fishing poles is Yoohan’s, though nobody remembers exactly why he thought of it. We sprawl out under the shade of the pine trees at the edge of the schoolyard, bored out of our minds because it’s the hottest week of summer and even Mrs. Nam’s shop feels too stuffy to sit in for long, Yoohan says his uncle used to catch trout up at the mountain creek with nothing but a stick and some string.

“You need a hook too,” Jinwon points out, but Yoohan just shrugs and says we’ll figure something out.

We spend an hour scavenging the neighborhood for supplies, breaking sticks off the low branches by the community center, stealing a spool of fishing line from Haeil’s older brother’s tackle box when he’s not looking, bending bobby pins we find in Sihyung’s little sister’s room into something that might pass for hooks if you squint hard enough. Ryowoon insists we need bait too, so he digs up a handful of worms from the dirt behind Mrs. Nam’s courtyard, dropping them into an old jam jar he punched holes into the lid of.

By the time we make it up the mountain trail to the creek, all six of us sweating and out of breath, our makeshift poles look like something a toddler assembled. Haeil’s line is already tangled into a knot the size of a fist. Jinwon’s hook, if you can call it that, has come completely unbent from the bobby pin shape and now just looks like a piece of wire dangling uselessly at the end of his string.

We wade into the shallows anyway, pants rolled up to our knees, standing there with our poles dipped into the water like we know what we’re doing. Sihyung solemnly declares that the fish can probably smell our confidence and it’s going to scare them away, which earns him a shove into the water from Haeil that starts the whole downward spiral early.

Nobody catches a single fish. Not one. We stand there for hours, shifting our weight from foot to foot on the slippery rocks, occasionally getting excited over a tug on the line that always turns out to be nothing but the current pulling at our hooks. Ryowoon keeps insisting he almost had one, a monster trout that darted away right as he was about to reel it in, but none of us believe him, least of all me.

“You’re just bad at this,” I tell him, grinning, and he splashes water at me in retaliation, catching me right across the face.

That’s really all it takes. Within a minute the fishing poles are abandoned on the bank, forgotten in the grass, and it’s an all-out war, the six of us screaming and shoving each other under the surface, dunking heads, kicking up sprays of water that soak straight through our clothes. Jinwon tries to stay out of it at first, standing off to the side looking exasperated, right up until Haeil grabs him by the back of his shirt and hauls him in anyway, and then he’s fighting back just as hard as the rest of us, laughing.

By the time we drag ourselves out of the creek we’re drenched head to toe, our clothes clinging to us, hair dripping, and none of us have caught a single fish to show for the whole afternoon. We collapse onto the bank in the sun to dry off, chests heaving, the cicadas singing overhead.

A few days later, I can do nothing but watch, knowing it’s a bad idea the second Haeil pulls the string of firecrackers out of his back pocket, the red paper wrapping crinkling as he holds them up.

“Where’d you even get those?” I ask, backing up a step.

“My cousin,” Haeil says, grinning. Haeil’s cousin is seventeen and works at the scrapyard by the highway and has, according to Haeil, done time in a juvenile detention hall for something involving a stolen moped, so nothing good ever comes from anything that passes through his hands.

Ryowoon’s eyes light up the second he sees them, and that’s really all I need to know about how the rest of my afternoon’s going to go.

“Absolutely not,” I say, because someone has to.

“Nobody asked you,” Ryowoon says, already grabbing for the pack, turning it over in his hands, reading the little warning label printed along the side even though I know for a fact he can barely make out half the characters on it.

We crouch behind the low stone wall that runs along the back of Mr. Han’s property, the same wall we’ve climbed a hundred times to cut through to the market faster. Old Mr. Han is somewhere on the other side of it, tending to whatever he’s always tending to, muttering to himself the way he does. Mr. Han doesn’t like children. He’s made this abundantly clear over the years, chasing us off his steps with a broom more times than I can count, yelling at us for kicking a ball too close to his flower beds, for being too loud, for existing near his property line in general. He’s got about a dozen huge ceramic pots lined up along the side of his house, fermenting kimchi and doenjang, and he guards them like they’re gold.

“You’re going to get us all killed,” I say, but nobody’s listening to me, Ryowoon’s already climbing.

He goes up and over that wall, one hand braced on the top stone, swinging his leg over in a single fluid motion that makes it look easy even though I know it’s not, I’ve tried it myself and scraped both my palms raw. Haeil follows right after him, less gracefully, catching his shirt on a loose bit of stone and cursing under his breath as he yanks it free.