Settling In
"All right. I understand. You take care of yourself too, Woojin."
"Yes, thank you, Professor. Please get home safely."
The end-of-call tone droned through the phone. He didn't know the details, but the professor seemed to have the general shape of it. I'd framed the whole thing as a matter of my health, and that had been enough to settle the conversation.
I'd already explained myself to the department office when I filed for the leave of absence. He must have been curious on his own account.
I held the power button to shut the phone off, and the messaging apps were blazing with notification badges pushed to their limit. Every last one of them would be that damned woman's messages, sent to comfort herself. The moment the power menu appeared, I killed the phone in a snap of irritation.
Still, with that, the things threatening my peace could be put off a while longer.
I curled in on myself, set my chin on my knees, and let out a long breath. There was nothing in particular I had to do, but with everything that shook me gone, the volcano of feeling inside me—ready to blow at any moment—seemed to be settling.
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beebeep!
Someone punched the door code in a neat little rhythm, an intruder come to smash my reverie to pieces. Light, brisk footsteps pattered closer, and the intruder bolted straight into the bathroom.
"Oh, here it ith! Ha, I looked forever. I thought somebody stole it!"
The intruder filling the bathroom with a voice bright with private joy was Yujeong. She had vanished after the incident the day before yesterday, and now here she was again. I'd woken late in the afternoon and never caught sight of her, but the place had been put so neatly in order that I'd wondered whether her coming and going was only a dream. The underwear had been the only trace left from then. Diligent as ever, she seemed to have showered before she left.
The bathroom door shut, and the sound of water split into two. A squeamish discomfort crawled over me, and I drew myself in tighter.
Yujeong came out having washed her hands within an inch of their lives, water still dripping from her fingers, and her eyes met mine where I sat on the bed staring straight at her.
"Oh, sunbae. You're up. The towel smellth—don't you have a new one?"
She glanced around as if the place were her own house, decided the towel on the drying rack was the better option, and scrubbed her hands dry. Don't you leave it like that, you little brat.
"Excuse me, Yujeong-hubae. How exactly did you know my door code and let yourself in?"
"Tae-hoon sunbae told me."
Lim Tae-hoon, that crazy bastard.
"And sunbae, jutht call me Yujeong. The other sunbaes all call me that, so it feelth weird."
Like a cat newly arrived in the house, Yujeong looked the place over, then came toward me from the kitchen at a crawl of a pace. She was measuring the distance. Sure enough, the moment she crossed the invisible line I thought of as the border between kitchen and living room, my face twisted before I could stop it.
"Mm. Right about here."
She said it, and though she clearly didn't want to, she eased one step forward and watched me. When my expression soured, she stepped back. Forward again. I was uncomfortable. Back again.
"Could you not play games with someone who isn't well?"
I said it with my anger pressed down as far as it would go, and she bit back a laugh. Then she quickly dragged the low table over to her side and sat. The moment I registered her seated right about on the kitchen line, my breath came easy again. Reassured by the way my face had cleared, Yujeong smiled and opened her major textbook to study.
"What—why are you just naturally studying there?"
"I've got a free period in the middle. Finalth are coming up soon, so I have to study."
What I meant was, why was she setting up camp in my house.
"Oh, I've been wanting to read that! I've never seen volume thirty-five!"
"You said you were studying."
Whether I said it or not, Yujeong crawled over, pulled out one of the comics I'd lined up under the TV, and started to read.
"Yujeong, I'm really sorry, but why are you doing this. I'm uncomfortable."
When I scolded her with irritation creeping into my voice, she answered without taking her eyes off the comic.
"But sunbae's place is close to school. I heard the other sunbaes used it as a hideout too, back before all that happened."
"Hey, Na Yujeong!"
Anger shot to the top of my head, and for a moment I sat up to threaten her—but all I felt was a pain like something gripping my heart, and I curled back in.
"And if sunbae died, I'd feel awful about it afterward. I'm thorry I said that."
So she hadn't been reading the comic. She'd been avoiding my eyes.
"I appreciate that. But. Hm. Your dad?"
"Nope. He went to work today. He had the procedure after that and got better, so he's healthy."
Was she making fun of me? I was too tired to deal with her, though, so I turned my back on Yujeong and lay down on the bed.
Then she asked me.
"If you don't want me to, sunbae, I won't come anymore. But if it's okay, can I come on Wednesdays and Fridays?"
"No. And that's just you saying you've got nowhere to go during your free period."
A stifled giggle rose behind me, then a rustle as she got to her feet.
"All right. I won't come anymore. Still, thank you for taking care of my underwear. I'll get going, sunbae."
"Yeah. Go on."
Her light, squirrel-quick footsteps traded themselves for the sound of the front door and left a lingering echo behind.
But the door beeped open again. She came clattering back in and snatched up her textbook. She couldn't even keep her own word for ten seconds. Our eyes met in the middle of it, and Yujeong flushed, mortified.
"Sunbae, you're not actually a pervert, are you?!"
Whatever lingered after she left curdled into anger. She was the one who took them off and left them here, and that's what she says to the person who washed them and set them aside? I swallowed a fury that had nowhere to land, and kept it to myself.
Two afternoons later, Yujeong sat with her arms folded, glancing around my room.
Lim Tae-hoon, that crazy bastard.
This time she had come with Lim Tae-hoon, my classmate. He'd become student council president and seemed to have his hands full these days.
"You've gotten a lot better, Woojin~. For a while there this place was a damn pigsty, but you cleaned up and turned into a person."
Tae-hoon flopped onto the bed, opened a comic, and started reading.
"Haah, freshman year the whole class piled in here—drinkin' every day, crammin' for exams, fightin'! Hell if I know how it all ended up like this. Oh, right. You hear about Mi-jin? While you were in the army she got caught usin' this place on the sly with her boyfriend. Heard the girls completely lost it."
Why would they pull something like that while trespassing in an empty house with no one in it? I gave some thought to rounding the lot of them up and throwing them in somewhere.
"Don't kill the mood with that bullshit. And why'd you bring her."
Tae-hoon pushed his glasses up once, then sat up.
"Ain't about anything else. Soon as finals end this time, we're doin' the Humanities and Social Sciences College Festival, and the kid's class rep, so she's gotta do department work—only she ain't got a place to sleep. Figured I'd ask you a favor."
"Are you in your right mind? She's a girl. What about the other girls?"
Tae-hoon scratched the back of his head and said it was complicated.
"See, the kid's real sweet and eager, but there was a misunderstandin' and she got crosswise with the other girls. We got to talkin', and she said she knows you a little. Anyway, she says she'll only come late at night, sleep, and head right back out. And she already stayed over, didn't she—showed up late after the department general meeting 'cause you'd collapsed."
No—her face was coloring. I couldn't tell which part of it embarrassed Yujeong, but her pale face suddenly went beet-red.
Tae-hoon patted my back and spoke in earnest.
"Kid's the sophomore class rep, so she's got a pile of stuff to handle. Do me this favor, yeah."
I sighed and shook my head.
"Even so, her parents are going to worry, aren't they?"
Yujeong answered in his place.
"I told them. They were happy about it, so it's fine. They also think I don't have friends, and both of them work, so I barely see them once a week. I'm home alone a lot."
I had a feeling she hadn't mentioned it was a male sunbae's place. For a moment I thought it would be better if they just let her live on her own, then figured there must be circumstances and let it go.
"Yeah, come on. If somethin' happens, you take the blame and march yourself down to the police station. You scared? And a guy can get into a little trouble, can't he."
"Are you actually insane."
I tapped Tae-hoon lightly in the side, and he hammed it up on the spot, staggering like a boxer who'd taken a body blow. He knew my situation inside and out, so he took all of it as a joke.
Uneasy as I felt, I agreed.
"Fine. But you'll see what kind of shape I'm in then. I'm asking you to be especially careful."
"Wow, thank you, sunbae!"
With that, Yujeong called Tae-hoon over and the two of them carried in one enormous beanbag from outside the door. What do you think you're doing? You never even considered I might say no!
Snickering, Tae-hoon tossed the beanbag down beside the boundary where Yujeong had claimed her spot, then took a call and jerked his chin at her.
"Yes, hyung, I'll be right there! Oh, should I pick that up on the way?"
Still on the phone, he waved at me and headed out of the house first.
Yujeong dragged the beanbag this way and that, trying it in one spot after another.
"What's that?"
"Oh, thith? It's like my sleeping bag. It was in the department office, and since I was the only one using it, I borrowed it to keep here. I sleep really well on it."
So she meant to make herself an assigned seat. Keenly aware that the fault was mine for allowing it, I grew tired of the whole thing, turned my back, and listened only to her rustling.
Whump.
Something fairly huge hit the floor, and I startled and looked her way to find her patting the beanbag, thoroughly satisfied. She seemed to have tried diving into it. The spot was the farthest corner beside the bathroom wall; she had laid the beanbag at the exact opposite point from my bed. It was where I used to stand the drying rack, so the corner did have a cozy feel to it. Now the rack had become a partition for her, splitting the space off a little like its own small room. The placement was one I could feel steady in, too.
Watching her lie there and pat the beanbag, I couldn't help thinking of a beaver, or something in the small-animal family. She was on the short side, and in that loose gray tracksuit she converted, in my head, into a chipmunk.
"Yay! Thank you, sunbae. I'll buy you a meal later!"
Satisfied, she even tossed her tote onto the beanbag and dashed off. I wondered if she wasn't about to leave her wallet behind.
As if the thought had struck home, Yujeong put on a squealing emergency stop at the front door, then came back to dig through the tote.
What a scatterbrain.