“I know he was in a car, and Jaesung was in a different one, ahead of Lloyd’s, and Lloyd’s car was hit by another car,” I finished and waited.
Lloyd’s father studied his feet and said, “He keeps saying that the boy, Jaesung, was in another car, but there was only one car. Somehow Lloyd must have been thrown from it, because the car was on fire by the time the fire trucks came.”
A buzzing sound began in my brain.
Lloyd’s father was still talking, still looking at his feet. “Lloyd called this boy’s father two nights ago. That’s how we knew he was up here. He told him that he had evidence that Jaesung was alive. Jaesung’s father called us because he said Lloyd sounded confused. Said erratic nonsense things. Mr. Kim was very kind. The man’s son has died, and he still has time to call me and apologize. It’s all my fault for sending Lloyd to Korea. I knew the protests were happening. It wasn’t—”
“We had to get him away from that girl from high school,” Lloyd’s mother said, a plea in her eyes.
“What girl?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t even mention her anymore. High school friend, that’s all. Now all he talks about is Jaesung. Everything is about Jaesung. My poor son.”
“Jaesung’s father is sure he was in the same car?” I hardly recognized my voice. It was so small. It suddenly came crashing down on me. You were gone, gone, gone, and now you felt gone too. There was nothing I felt out there that was your life somewhere. There was emptiness in the pit of my stomach, emptiness and a buzzing, an unbearable persistent buzzing, as if a lightbulb above us were about to be extinguished.
“I’ve got to go,” I said and didn’t look to see their response. I’d known Lloyd’s assessment of your father’s response was off. It was too good to be true, too easy. You don’t call up someone’s father after he believes he saw his son’s charred body and tell him that that was a mistake, that someone is fooling everyone.
Where could you be? I broke out in a cold sweat, this time the flu for certain. I crawled into bed.
91
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH HER? IS SHE HURT? IS THE BABY OKAY? Lloyd is shouting and stomping around with his hands in his hair. Where are the guns?
Faye whispers, “Please, Yoona, please be quiet.” She has her arms around me. Lloyd stands above us. “You’ve got to give her a minute,” Faye says to him.
And that’s when I realize what I have to do. The baby doesn’t exist. Not now. It’s up to me. If it wasn’t for that report, Lloyd wouldn’t know about it. But it helps me now. You help me now. This dream of Lloyd’s. Even from this summer, our night together, from that I have this small possibility of saving Heather’s and Faye’s lives. I get to my feet.
92
Willa and I weren’t allowed to have toys when we were children, but we could read as many books as we wanted. We were taken to the library and allowed to check out as many books as we could carry. Books were enough for Willa, but I wanted dolls. My father’s chess set waited on the coffee table in the living room for me to play pretend with each night. The king and queen were my dolls. I moved them around the board, pretending they were two feuding families or a school yard full of children. My father insisted I learn chess if I was going to handle the pieces. I hated the game, especially the end game. It had to be to the death. That’s the part I hated. The goal of the game was to kill. I squirmed in my seat at that part. In school I won tournaments against children older than I was. And then I quit. And I never played chess or pretended with the chess pieces again.
You and I never played chess or talked about it. I wonder if you knew the game. In chess, particularly effective in the end game, you can pin a piece to the king. Even the queen, the most powerful piece on the board, cannot move away if it means her king will be in check. A bishop or a rook, worth fewer points, can sacrifice itself, swap its death for the queen’s death.
93
I woke from a deep sleep to knocking. Daiyu was at my door. “Oh, Yoona,” she said. It was quiet in the hall, and from the hall window, I could see it was late, because it was very dark outside. Faye and Heather were with her.
“Go ahead,” Heather said.
“What’s going on?” I rubbed my eyes. “Don’t come too close, it’s the flu,” I murmured, but Daiyu didn’t answer.
Heather spoke. “Daiyu told Lloyd that you called his parents and that they’re here on campus, and he got really mad and said he was going to crash his car because he’s never going back to New York with them.”
Daiyu looked down at her sneakered feet.
“I’m sorry, Yoona. He asked me if I’d seen you, and I told him no at first, but then he said I was lying, so I had to tell him I’d seen you with his parents. They were his parents, weren’t they? Lloyd looks just like his father except for the white hair.”
I felt like I was in my own personal bubble, filling up with fog. I told my friends what Lloyd’s parents had said. I could see, even in my foggy bubble, that they were suddenly frightened of him.
“You can’t let him stay in your room anymore,” Faye said to Daiyu, and Daiyu nodded.
“He obsesses about people: the girl from his high school, and Jaesung, and now you,” Daiyu said to me.
Faye said, “Everything he’s said to us is a lie.”
94
When Tuesday came around, I called my mother and told her I would not be home for fall break. I told her I had too many assignments overdue. That part was true. I didn’t tell her I’d be taking a bus in the opposite direction on that Friday and couldn’t quite manage turning around and being on the bus for another six hours that same day to go to Lakeburg for the long weekend. I saw it as a fresh start.
I went by Professor Wong’s office later that day, and he waved me in. Did I tell you he looked as if he was only a few years older than us? He wore long gym shorts most days, even when it was cold, and flip-flops and long-sleeved Tshirts with video game graphics on them. Today it was Space Invaders. It was easy to talk to him because he seemed less formal than the other professors on campus. He told us to call him Julian, so when I walked in I said, “I’m sorry, Julian, I’ll get you two papers before I leave for break.”
He reclined in his beat-up leather desk chair, his hands behind his head. “Things overwhelming you?”
I tapped the edge of his desk, which had piles of paper on it as if they’d been dumped there. I’d had to walk around short pillars of stacked books on the floor. His office looked as if he’d moved in without boxes and deposited things in a hurry. “There’s a lot going on.”
“I know how it can be. I was given a warning after my first semester.” He straightened up in his chair again and leaned forward, his elbows on piles of paper.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“I wasn’t ready for college. High school had been intense. Racing to the end of it. A year between was what I needed. Maybe you should consider it.”
“It’s not the workload.”