Boarding the Ship
When you're a kid, everyone wants to grow up. You dream of that shiny ID card, thinking you'll finally break free from your parents' leash and the hellish school schedule, and take the reins of your own life.
But for me, it was a bit extreme. And my reasons were seriously impure.
"Coming back from cram school?"
Back in middle school. Like any other student, I'd finish cram school and head up the hill toward home, and there was always one person I'd run into.
Her name was Yu Jiyeon. The girl next door, a year older than me.
She had a city-girl look that didn't fit our small town, a bright personality that sucked people in. And above all, an uncontrollably massive bust that made it impossible not to stare—the neighborhood idol.
Until last year we'd gone to the same school, so we were as close as real siblings. And of course, she was my first love.
"Yeah. What about you, Noona? What are you doing out at this hour?"
"Dad came home drunk. Me and Minjeong are out on emergency evacuation."
Creak... No sooner had she finished speaking than a round-faced little girl came walking out behind her.
She caught my gaze, which until a second ago had been glued to her sister's bust, and glared at me with something close to contempt.
"Yu Minjeong, why do you pick a fight the second you see me?"
"I didn't say nothin'? You got somethin' to feel guilty about?"
For the record, both of them were from down south and had moved here around the time I was in elementary school. But unlike Noona, who'd adapted completely to standard Seoul speech, Minjeong's way of talking still carried that thick southeastern accent.
"Guilty about what... So how many hours are you stuck waiting outside?"
"We gotta hold out till Dad falls asleep, so maybe two hours? Figured I'd just take a light walk with Minjeong."
Our house only had Mom, but we were tight as a family. Noona's place, on the other hand, was especially loud. Her dad went out every day as a day laborer on construction sites, and her mom worked the register at the neighborhood supermarket.
Whenever the old man came home drunk, he always caused a scene. I never knew exactly how bad it got, but I'd seen Minjeong cleaning up smashed flowerpots and broken dishes more than once.
"Then I'll come with you. I didn't feel like going straight home anyway."
"You just want to hang out with Minjeong, don't you? That's why you should stop studying all the time and take her on a date once in a while. Next year you're heading off to school out of town—it'll be hard to see each other."
Noona was always desperate to pair me up with Minjeong, who was in my grade. But was I crazy?
Leave someone like Noona standing right in front of me just to spend time with Yu Minjeong, who was kind of cute but had a rotten personality? More than that, it was a massive hit to my pride that the girl I liked treated me like a total kid.
Clomp, clomp...
So the three of us took an awkward walk. Standing on the hill that looked out over the whole village, Noona stared endlessly at the moon floating in the empty sky and let out a long sigh.
"Haa... I want to graduate already."
"Meaning you want to go to college?"
"College? I don't even study. I just want to get the hell out of that house as fast as I can."
Noona was always dreaming of freedom. She was too good to be stuck in a nowhere small town even by Gyeonggi standards, and more than anything, she was sick of a home full of constant fighting.
"The second I graduate, I'm out of here. No matter how hard it gets, I'll grit my teeth and live doing only what I want, meeting only the people I want to meet."
"..."
Once she graduated high school, Noona would leave this place. Of course, there was a higher chance I'd leave first, but either way, the bond that connected us as neighbors was clearly going to break.
That was why I wanted to grow up fast too. So Noona couldn't treat me like a kid anymore. So I'd have the ability to take her wherever she wanted to go.
How happy would that be? Living just the two of us somewhere no one knew who we were. Then every single day I could look at that full, generous bust filling my entire field of vision...
"What've you been starin' at this whole time?"
"What the fuck... Why do you keep picking fights? Am I supposed to walk around with my eyes closed?"
Most of all, I wouldn't have to deal with Yu Minjeong constantly butting in and ruining the mood between us. Look at her even now, glaring like she'd just caught someone in the act of adultery and wanted me dead.
I turned soft eyes back toward Noona. That high, straight nose. That sharp jawline. Features so perfect you could only explain them as something a god—or an AI—had created.
I wanted to grow up already. To become a man worthy of her, to be called her "boyfriend" instead of just the little brother next door.
Of course, nothing like that ever happened...
Bang bang bang bang!
It was a few days before the entrance exam for the autonomous private high school I'd been aiming for. I was finally trying to review at home for once when some crazy bitch started pounding on the door like she wanted to break it down.
"What the hell!?"
I already knew who it was, so I opened the front gate with a dead-serious face. Exactly as expected, Minjeong stood there with her ears bright red and her eyes wide open.
"Where's Oppa?"
"Oppa? You mean my brother? He's probably at some company dinner after practical training."
Our family was just three people—Mom, my older brother, and me. Dad had died so long ago I couldn't even remember him, and Mom had raised the two of us alone working at a restaurant.
We were poor, but our family bond was better than anyone's. My brother never had much interest in studying, so he'd gone to the same Meister high school as Jiyeon Noona.
Now in his senior year, he was out on practical training, making decent pocket money and building a good reputation. Next year he'd head straight into the job market, so all I had to do was focus on my studies.
"You're his little brother and you don't even care where he is? You sure Oppa's not here?"
"You raised this whole racket just to ask that? Are you kidding me right now? I was just starting to get into the zone..."
Whip!
But instead of answering, Minjeong responded with action. In her hand was a plastic object I'd never seen in my life.
"What is this?"
"You study so damn hard and still slept through sex ed class, huh?"
"To use your brain efficiently you have to ruthlessly cut out meaningless time like that..."
"It's a pregnancy test! A pregnancy test! See the two lines here?"
"...?"
Only then did the thing in her hand start to register. And helpfully enough, the meaning of "two lines" was printed right on the surface.
"P-pregnancy? Hey, Yu Minjeong, you're getting a little sibling?"
"You outta your mind? You think Mom and Dad are all lovey-dovey like that?"
"Huh? Then you got pregnant?"
"Are you crazy? Some guy whose eyes go bloodshot every time he looks at Yu Jiyeon's tits, and I'm supposed to go pick stars by myself? It came out of our bathroom. And Unnie's gone missing right now!"
"..."
What... the hell... was she saying? So the person who used this pregnancy test wasn't Minjeong—it was Jiyeon Noona?
Which meant some absolute piece-of-shit bastard had laid hands on my precious Jiyeon Noona...
"M-maybe it's a mistake? My Jiyeon Noona would never do something like that. This has to be some kind of—"
"Call Oppa right now! Someone saw the two of them getting on a train earlier!"
"...?"
But something was off. Just the fact that Jiyeon Noona was pregnant was already enough to short-circuit my brain, so why, in the middle of all this chaos, was this girl coming to our house looking for my brother?
Which left me with only one possible conclusion. The unforgivable piece of shit who had violated Jiyeon Noona—who deserved to be torn apart—was none other than my own blood brother...
"Y-yes. The moment Mingu contacts us, I'll call you right away, teacher."
And it was real. My brother and Jiyeon Noona vanished from the neighborhood on the exact same day, like they'd sworn some kind of peach-garden brotherhood oath.
Later, rumors that they'd become one of those high-school parent couples that started showing up on TV spread through the entire town.
"This can't be... There's no way..."
But no one took a harder hit than me. Seriously, how could this even happen?
My first love getting hit with an unexpected pregnancy attack was already enough to make my blood run backward—and the real culprit turned out to be my own brother?
It was betrayal. He knew perfectly well how much I liked Yu Jiyeon and still pulled this shit. This was clear-cut betrayal.
I'd seen families fight over money, but to stab your own little brother in the back over one girl?
"Mingu... says he can't come home for a while."
A few days later we finally got a call from my brother. And what that message meant was clear and certain.
They were going to have the baby. And if you reverse-engineered the word "for a while," it meant that "someday" he would come back to this house.
I didn't have the courage to watch that with my own eyes. I didn't have it in me to clap and cheer while the two people I loved most stabbed me in the back and then happily raised a kid who looked half like each of them.
In the end I did something stupid. I was so thoroughly pissed off that instead of the autonomous private high school I'd originally planned on, I applied to a completely random school—and got accepted on the spot.
"What the hell do you think you're doing? Why did you put this place down?"
My homeroom teacher only found out much later and blew up at me. The school I'd applied to was a merchant marine academy—in other words, a place that trained sailors, the so-called Maritime High School.
It wasn't like I wanted to become the Pirate King or anything. I just decided that if I wanted to avoid my brother's family, who might come home at any time, I had to get as far away as possible.
A lot changed over those three years of school. The Yu family, thoroughly embarrassed in the neighborhood, moved away, and naturally I lost contact with Minjeong too.
"Mingu... is back."
When summer break of my senior year arrived, that day finally came. I swallowed dryly and asked Mom over the phone.
"What about Noona...?"
I was asking about Noona, not my brother. The biggest betrayal of all was still getting stabbed by your own blood. Whatever happened to that bastard was none of my business.
"Well... instead, your niece is here. She's an incredibly cute little girl!"
"...?"
What... the hell... was this? So after years of going dark, my brother had finally come home—but instead of Yu Jiyeon, whose whereabouts no one even knew, he'd brought only the kid?
What the fuck was this joke? If those two bastards were going to stab me in the back that hard and leave, the least they could do was live happily. What was this supposed to mean?
"You're coming home for break, right?"
"Sorry, Mom. I've got shipboard training now—I don't think I can make it."
The shipboard training was real, but it wasn't so bad I couldn't go home. Still, even if it meant sleeping ten nights at Seoul Station, I wasn't setting foot in that house.
If he was going to come back, he should've come alone. I didn't need to see Jiyeon Noona, but in the end that place still held the living proof of the betrayal—half of her.
After that I really never went home. The moment I graduated, just to punish myself, I turned down every good offer and mindlessly boarded a deep-sea fishing vessel.
Two years after I boarded the ship, Mom called again.
"Mingu... Mingu... sob..."
"..."
The whole world was truly out to get me. The object of my love and hate that had made it impossible for me to go home had, with the worst luck imaginable, died in an industrial accident.
"It's your aunt. The funeral procession is the day after tomorrow, so you have to come. Your mom is having such a hard time..."
Instead of Mom, who was wailing, Aunt took the phone. But now, even if I wanted to go home, I couldn't.
"I'm really sorry, Aunt, but I can't. I'm in Buenos Aires right now."
When the person who had betrayed me and stolen my first love was cold and packed into a coffin, I was catching tuna on the other side of the planet.
Yet even inside the complicated mix of grief and regret, my head spun with surprising rationality.
My brother was dead and Jiyeon Noona was gone. Didn't that mean I finally had a reason to go home?
No. There was still one person left there.
The fruit of the love that had ruined my life. The panic button that would force me to remember the painful past every time I looked at her.
I didn't know it then. That the existence which would stretch my pain out over an entire lifetime was going to become my only family from then on...