“Molly!” he shouts. But she’s already running for it, her sweater flapping behind her like a cape.
Kyung stands in the open doorway, watching the Buick back out and tear down the street. Half a block away, and she’s still gunning the engine, as if she expects him to follow. Molly doesn’t yield, much less stop at the intersection before turning, causing another driver to slam on his brakes. When her car disappears, he reaches up to touch his stinging cheek. There’s blood on his fingertips. There’s blood everywhere, actually. Fresh red drops of it on his hands and shirt and pants. He walks back inside and closes the door, scanning the kitchen, which is even messier than it was before. The pitcher that fell off the counter is lying in big, jagged shards beneath the sink. A fine powder of crushed glass dusts the area where they were standing. He looks himself over again, hopeful that the blood is all his, when he notices his feet, clad in thin, flimsy sandals. His bare skin is cut in so many places, it looks like he kicked in a window.
Kyung cleans up the glass and carefully deposits the broken pieces into an empty plastic bag. Then he ties the handles and pushes the bag deep into the trash where Gillian won’t find it. But covering his tracks is useless, he thinks. Molly is going to tell everyone. Her husband, his wife, maybe even his parents. Isn’t that what devout people do? Sin and repent; sin and repent again. He returns to his beer on the counter, emptying the rest of the can and immediately opening another before he can convince himself not to. Drinking is a choice, he thinks. His choice. Molly was too, and now he has to live with the consequences, however bad they might be. He’s fucked—he knows that—but for the first time, he’s fucked by something he chose to do, not something that was done to him, or something he had to do out of guilt or obligation or fear. He laughs even though his heart is pounding. This one belongs entirely to him.
*
Every summer, Kyung’s parents invited him to visit the beach house with Ethan and Gillian. And every summer, he declined, unwilling to spend an entire weekend in their company. His only glimpse of the property was the painting on his parents’ mantel in Marlboro, an abstract piece commissioned by his mother’s decorator as a gift. On canvas, the house seemed large, but unexceptional—a tall white block with a red front door. In person, it’s something else entirely. When the GPS tells him to turn onto a private road, Kyung hesitates, not quite believing what he sees. At the far end of the road, a single house sits high on a bluff, surrounded by a spectacular, expensive kind of nothing—no neighbors, no trees—just the sky above and a steep drop to the bay below. The three-story colonial looks like something out of a postcard, lit brightly from within as the last sliver of sun descends into the horizon.
He imagines Gillian’s reaction as she drove up the same road earlier that day. Mouth open, fingertips pressed against the window, looking like the girl from the Flats that she really is. He knows what she’s probably thinking now; he knows the inconsistency of her mind. Pride is her Achilles, but she wouldn’t hesitate to accept Jin’s help if he offered. With a few keystrokes or a checkbook and pen, his parents could erase all their debts and give them a fresh start. But their help would come with a price far worse than what they live with now. Every invitation his parents extended, every request for help or company or time—they wouldn’t be able to refuse if they took their money. Kyung isn’t about to indenture himself to them now, not after so many years of trying to avoid it. The minute he moved out for college, he juggled part-time jobs, shared apartments with too many people, took out loans to pay tuition, and took out more loans when he was short on cash—all because he didn’t want to owe his parents anything. Still, he feels a flare of resentment as he surveys the enormous property. He never asked for their help, but not once did they offer.