Page 74 of The Way Back Home

“That’s bullshit and you know it—”

“You don’t get it, Seyeon.”

“What don’t I get?” I’m shouting now, I can hear myself getting louder, more desperate. “Tell me what I’m missing because from where I’m sitting you’re just giving up!”

“I FAILED THE ENTRANCE EXAM.”

His voice bounces off the empty stands. A flock of starlings lifts from the goalpost at the far end, startled into flight. I close my mouth.

Ryowoon stares straight ahead, his elbows on his knees, his hands pushed through his hair. I can see the tendons standing out in his forearms, the white knuckles. He lets out a rough, frustrated sound and drags his fingers down his face.

“No college is going to accept me. I’m not smart the way you are. My grades are barely passing on a good day. I skipped as many classes as I showed up for. Half the things you talk about when you’re studying, I don’t understand a word of it. I just sit there and nod because what else am I going to do?”

“You didn’t tell me you failed the exam,” I say quietly.

“Because it’s fucking embarrassing.” He drops his hands and looks at me and the expression on his face makes my chest hurt. “Do you get it now? It’s not happening for me. I don’t have a chance. I don’t know all the things you know. I don’t have a surprise bank account sitting there waiting for me. All I’ve got is my fucked-up head and a shitfaced useless father and a talent for surviving.”

He taps his temple with two fingers, hard.

“My head doesn’t work right. It never has. Numbers slip. Words blur on the page. I read the same sentence six times and can’t tell you what it said. You think I didn’t try? You think I sat in that exam hall and just didn’t bother?” He smiles bitterly and shakes his head. “No amount of studying is going to fix what’s broken in here.”

I don’t say anything. I’m gripping the ledger in my lap so tightly the soft cover buckles under my fingers.

Ryowoon stands up stiffly, like his whole body hurts. He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and looks out across the field, at the town hills rising beyond the school walls. His voice sounds flat when he speaks again.

“There’s no future for me out there. No big city life. I’m going to be stuck in this town in the same shitty cycle as my dad and his dad and his dad before him.”

He turns and walks down the stands without looking back at me. His shoes ring against the metal steps, one after another, and then he’s striding across the grass, past the field and then he rounds the corner of the school building and he’s gone.

I sit with the bank ledger on my knee. The morning sun crawling across the field, burning the dew off blade by blade.

The hollow feeling in my chest doesn’t leave.

Graduation is on a bright, clear day where the sun sits high and clean in a blue sky.

Ryowoon acts like our fight on the bleachers never happened. He bounced back within a day, which is how he’s always been, he absorbs the blow and then he walls it off and keeps moving. By the afternoon he was leaning against the counter at the store telling Mrs. Nam that Seyeon here is going to be a big city hotshot, watch out, Seoul won’t know what hit them. Grinning at me over her head when she clucked her tongue and told him to stop being dramatic.

I smiled back. Let him have it. But the thing he said on those bleachers stuck in my head. I can’t stop thinking about the look on his face when he said there’s no future for me. Some nights I lie awake turning it over, trying to find a way to fix it with no success.

But today isn’t for that. Today is loud and stupid and ours.

The ceremony is held in the gym, folding chairs arranged in crooked rows, a banner the third-years painted that says CONGRATULATIONS CLASS in characters that drip slightly where the paint was too wet. Our principal stands at the podium looking faintly like a man being held hostage as he reads from his prepared remarks about the promising futures ahead of us. Behind me I hear Haeil whisper to Ryowoon and Ryowoon’s low snicker in response. I force myself not to turn around because I know if I make eye contact with either of them I’ll lose it.

They call our names one by one. Jinwon goes up and bows perfectly and accepts his diploma with quiet grace. Sihyung trips on the edge of the stage and recovers so smoothly that only those of us who know him notice. Yoohan pumps his fist when he takes his, earning a sharp look from the vice principal. Haeil swaggers up and snatches his off the podium and I swear I hear one of the teachers mutter thank god under her breath.

When they call Ryowoon’s name he unfolds from his chair to his full height, long legs and sharp angles and a lazy charm that makes everything look like his idea. He takes the diploma, gives the principal a nod that’s just barely this side of respectful, and walks back to his seat. When they call mine and I walk up I can hear Haeil lose his mind three rows back, stomping his feet against the gymnasium floor until it sounds like a stampede. Ryowoon’s fingers are in his mouth, the whistle so piercing that the girl sitting next to him flinches.

After the principal formally dismisses the senior class, the gym dissolves into chaos. We spill out the doors, shoving and yelling, ripping off the stiff collars of our uniforms, ties already loosened. Haeil intercepts Yoohan’s graduation cap and flings it at a cluster of junior girls standing by the entrance who shriek and scatter. Sihyung is trying to take a serious photo and Jinwon keeps making him laugh by pulling faces just out of frame. Someone grabs me from behind and hauls me into a headlock that smells like cheap aftershave and cigarette smoke, and I know without looking who.

I elbow Ryowoon in the ribs and he releases me laughing, and then we’re all shuffling together for group photos, arms slung over shoulders, faces pressed close, grinning until our cheeks ache. In one photo Haeil has rabbit ears behind my head. In another Ryowoon is pretending to choke Sihyung. Jinwon stands in the middle of all of us looking serene, the calm eye of the hurricane, and I think: I’m going to miss these idiots so much it might kill me.

The real disruption comes as the principal is still shaking hands with parents at the front entrance. A feedback squeal rips through the air, followed by Haeil’s amplified voice blasting from a bullhorn he and Ryowoon smuggled in, screaming “WE’RE FREE, YOU DOG-LIKE BASTARDS!” at a volume that sends the pigeons on the roof scattering. The principal’s face turns the color of a ripe plum. Teachers converge from every direction. Ryowoon tosses the second bullhorn to Sihyung, who panics, fumbles it, and it goes off in his hands, emitting a deafening honk that makes a group of first-year mothers clutch their chests. We run for it, all six of us tearing across the schoolyard cackling, Haeil whooping as a teacher shakes his fist behind us.

We make it through. All of us. Miraculously, as a complete set, nobody held back, nobody failed out, not even Haeil or Ryowoon, who both spent more time outside of class than in it. We graduated. Every last delinquent one of us.

My mom and Mrs. Nam are waiting outside the gate. My mom’s eyes are already red. She’s in her good clothes, the navy dress she wears to the rare dinner out, and she has two bouquets in her arms. One she pushes into my hands as she pulls me down to press her forehead against mine, her palm on my cheek, her chin trembling so much she can’t speak. The second bouquet she puts into Ryowoon’s hands.

He freezes. He holds the flowers in front of him, looking at my mother with a softer vulnerable look in his eyes. His father is nowhere to be found. Not here, not coming. Nobody expected him to. But my mother wraps her arms around Ryowoon and hugs him, her head barely reaching his chest, he closes his eyes for a second and lets her.