His mother was lying to him before he was all the way into the kitchen.
Not out loud. She had her back to him at the stove, and there was one plate on the folding table by the window, and she was scraping the last of the rice onto it. When she heard him she said "Morning," bright, and pushed the scoop down into the empty cooker as if there were more underneath.
"You eat?" Ethan said.
"I ate."
"When?"
"Earlier." She turned around with the smile she used for this and put the plate in front of his chair. Two eggs, brown and lacy at the edges. "Sorry about the eggs. We're out of oil, I did them in a dry pan. I'll get some tonight."
He sat. 6:20. The light through the curtain hadn't decided what colour to be yet. The boxes along the wall had been there five weeks and still said KITCHEN — MISC in his handwriting, from a different kitchen. He ate an egg. It was fine. She watched him eat and he watched her not eat.
"Your grandmother wants you Sunday," she said. "Just the afternoon. She's going to make you say fork again."
"It's po-keu."
"She says you say it like an American."
"I am an American."
"Don't tell her that." She reached over and pushed his hair off his forehead. He was seventeen and should have minded. The skin under her eyes had gone the colour of a bruise on its way out. "I'm at the shop till six. Six-thirty if Mr. Baek wants the shutters done. There's rice in the — " she stopped. "There's ramyeon in the cabinet."
"Okay."
"Ethan."
He looked up.
"How is it. Really."
He'd had an answer ready for two weeks: It's fine, Mom. Getting easier. She was waiting for it. He could see how badly she needed it to be true. If it was true then the divorce and the move and the second job and the parents who didn't always know her name were the price of something. If it wasn't, they were just the price.
"It's fine," he said. "Getting easier."
She let her breath out, squeezed his hand, and got up to find her keys.
Her phone was face up on the counter. When she picked it up he saw the red sliver in the corner. Twelve percent. She saw him see it.
"I'll charge it at the shop," she said. "Go. You'll be late."
—
Fifteen minutes to school on foot. He'd learned the route by shape, not by name. Left at the pharmacy with the green cross. Straight past the building with the tiled fish on it. Right where the road tipped downhill and the shop signs stacked up on both sides. He could read maybe one sign in three, slowly, and had quit trying to read them while walking because it made him drift into people.
Her bus went the other way, into the centre, twenty minutes to Jungang-ro. He'd ridden it with her twice and looked out the window both times instead of at the route. If someone handed him a map right now he couldn't find her shop on it. He knew that. It was on the list.
The gate came up on the right, then the school, four stories in a rectangle around a bald courtyard, and two hundred blazers like his funnelling through. He slowed half a step and let a group go in ahead of him. He did this every morning. It meant walking behind people instead of among them.
New poster on the notice board. He stopped, because he made himself read one thing a day. Festival. A date three weeks out. Performances, or maybe presentations. Something about food stalls, or food safety. He was still on the third line when a shoulder hit his back and a voice said "Sorry" in the tone that meant move, so he moved.
Inside, at the bottom of the east stairs, somebody had strung yellow tape across at waist height and hung a laminated sign. Closed. Maintenance. A third word, longer, that he didn't know. The stairs behind the tape looked like stairs.
He took the main staircase with everyone else.
—
Homeroom 2-5 was at the far end of the second floor. It was loud before he reached it and went a little quieter when he came in, and then picked back up.
He knew where everyone sat now. Two weeks was long enough for that. Nam-ra at the window with her headphones in and a textbook open that she wasn't looking at. Cheong-san two rows back, chair tipped onto its rear legs, talking at Wu-jin, and every twenty seconds his eyes went front-left to where On-jo was digging in her bag up to the elbow. Nayeon at the back with her phone tilted so nobody could see it. Su-hyeok against the wall under the clock. He never sat until the bell.
Ethan went to his desk, third row on the aisle, the one nobody had wanted, and put his bag down.
"Hey. Reyes."
Cheong-san. He said the name like there was a joke in it he hadn't found yet.
"Morning."
"You watch it?"
Ethan waited for the rest. It didn't come. Cheong-san was looking at him with the pleased face of someone who'd asked a question with an obvious answer.
"Watch — sorry. Watch what?"
"The game. Last night. Did you not — " and then a run of fast Korean with a team in it and a score and a word Ethan was fairly sure meant robbed.
"I didn't see it," Ethan said, carefully. "I'm sorry to hear that it went badly."
A short silence. Then Cheong-san laughed, and Wu-jin laughed harder, and Ethan got there half a second late, as usual: sorry to hear that was what you said to somebody's grandmother. He'd offered condolences about baseball.
"He's sorry to hear," Cheong-san said, wiping his eye. "No, that's — you're right, Reyes. It was a tragedy."
Ethan smiled, since the alternative was worse, and sat down and looked at his desk.
Ms. Park came in at 8:30 with her clipboard and her cardigan. The class settled about halfway, which was as far as it ever settled for her. She was young and kind and he didn't trust the kindness, not because it was fake but because he thought she'd been told to be careful with him, and being handled gently was its own kind of information.
The announcements went the way they always did. He got the skeleton. Uniforms. Quiz Thursday. Festival, clubs, something about a play. Then stairwell, east, closed, a stretch he lost completely, and until further notice, which was a phrase he knew from the immigration office. He wrote east stairs — closed — ?? in his notebook and left the question marks there.
"Attendance."
Nam-ra was up. He hadn't seen her stand. She came down the aisles with a stack of pink slips, collecting yesterday's and dropping today's, not looking at anyone.
The slip landed on his desk. Name, student number, date. The name went in boxes, three of them, one per syllable. His had five and a hyphen.
He'd been cramming it into the three boxes for two weeks. He picked up his pen to do it again.
"Don't."
She hadn't stopped walking. She said it over her shoulder.
"Sorry?"
"Write it in the margin. All of it. Nobody reads the boxes, they read the list, and I make the list." She was already at the next desk. "You've been writing Reyes-Ka for two weeks. There's no Reyes-Ka on the register. I've been fixing it."
He looked at the slip. Then at her back.
"Thank you," he said, in the grandmother register again, and braced.
Nobody laughed. Either she hadn't heard or it wasn't worth turning around for. He wrote his name in the margin, both halves, hyphen and all. It ran long, past where a name was supposed to stop. It was the first time since he'd landed that he'd written the whole thing on anything official.
—
The bell went. Cheong-san was already up and heading out with Wu-jin when On-jo stepped into the aisle by Ethan's desk with her bag on one shoulder.
"Hey. Lunch."
"Lunch?"
"Come sit with us. Me and Cheong-san, and I-sak probably." Easy, like it was nothing. Nobody had said anything like it to him in two weeks. "You always sit by the window by yourself. It's depressing."
"I — sure. Yeah. Thank you."
"Don't do the thank-you thing. Cheong-san'll do the voice." She hitched her bag. "We might be late, though. We've got to take the festival forms to the office after fourth and Ms. Kim always keeps you. So just grab a table. Anywhere. We'll find you."
"Okay."
"Okay." A quick smile, already turning. By the door Cheong-san had stopped and was looking back at the two of them, and Ethan couldn't have said what the look was.
He picked up his bag.
Four periods to get through. Then a table, anywhere, and a wait, and if Ms. Kim didn't keep them too long, a lunch where somebody had asked him to be. He walked out past the yellow tape at the top of the east stairs without looking at it. For once he didn't slow down to let anyone go ahead.