Feeling less alone, for a change — that was magic, too.
20
Dennymaterializedonthethreshold between the Hans’ living room and their back porch, making such a disruptive entrance that the crickets briefly stopped chirping. He swept the glass door aside with the air of a behemoth rolling a boulder for sport. His stance matched the exact energy of an ancient, judgmental monolith casting its shadow across vast, windswept plains.
Eunjae sat bolt upright in his metal patio chair. Balanced on the porch rail, Jiyeon stifled a laugh.
“It's been fifteen hours,” barked Denny. “Go time.”
“Right. I pulled it up already, just need to hit the order button.”
“So do it, then. God.”
“Woosung-ah,” called Jiyeon, hopping down from the rail. She went to poke Denny in the cheek. Even without the heeled boots she’d worn to work, she stood only a few inches shorter. “You sound a little jealous. Wanna come sit with the big kids?”
“Ryan doesn’t count as one of the big kids.” He pitched a water bottle at Eunjae, who caught it with a yelp. “Stay hydrated! And she’s older than you, make sure you’re showing proper respect. No slacking off just because I wasn’t here to supervise.”
“I’m barely older than him. It’s like six-ish months. Ryan’s birthday is in July.”
“You know his birthday now? I told you not to get attached!”
“Hmm. I’m not allowed to know his birthday, but you are?”
“I needed to know it,” hissed Denny, “to run a background check. Duh.”
Eunjae set the water bottle on the table, right next to Denny’s laptop. He scrolled through the grocery order he’d assembled half an hour ago, before Jiyeon got back from the salon and came to see what he was up to. He’d moved to another tab as soon as she stepped onto the porch, minimizing an email from one of his brothers and a PDF attachment covered in columns of microscopic print.
It was better if she didn't see. The PDF probably counted as information she didn’t want tortured out of her. Also, Eunjae didn't know how to explain his browsing history or why he was ordering random junk food through an Australian grocery chain.
He’d picked the store ten minutes’ drive from his father's empty house in Brisbane. He knew it would be empty because Simon Song traveled for work at least three or four days a week. Probably more than that, actually, now that he had nothing to come home to except the floral arrangement left by the cleaners. Eunjae’s mother had moved to Sydney after the divorce. Not long after that, she’d enrolled eleven-year-old Ezra at Blackridge Academy, an exclusive international boarding school in Singapore.
Eunjae hit the checkout button and used his company card to pay. Emerald’s watchdogs should've seen the plane ticket purchase hours and hours ago; if they were monitoring him as closely as he thought, this transaction would be noted as well. Thanks to something Denny called a VPN, checking the IP address would only tell his pursuers that Eunjae was in Australia.
He was banking on one crucial thing: the agency would never admit that they'd lost him. Not at this stage. They would want to retrieve Eunjae without anyone guessing that he'd slipped through their fingers in the first place. Thus, there would be no asking the airport to view CCTV footage, no canvassing door to door within a ten mile radius of the hotel where he'd stayed. Those were extreme measures that risked media coverage. They would try to get at him by other means until he pushed them too far.
So, for now, Eunjae could count on them to watch this credit card. Whoever had been sent to find him would be under strict orders not to draw attention. That limited how thoroughly they could search. He thought of this as his main advantage.
His other advantage was how little the company's representatives seemed to know about him. Eunjae would never run away to his childhood home. Nor would he ever voluntarily take shelter with either of his parents. Any of his brothers could've told them: that house no longer symbolized home to Eunjae in any sense of the word. His parents didn't count as shelter.
The website accepted his card without complaint. Eunjae exited the tab and then closed the laptop, braced once again for the karmic payback slap he'd surely earned by now. But there was no clap of thunder except Denny’s voice.
“That's the book he wanted? Are you kidding?”
“I suppose it really is true,” Jiyeon mused. “You're either aBrass Keykid or you're aMolly Merriweatherkid, and there's no middle ground.”
Eunjae stared at them both. “Hold on,” he said. “You've read it, too? You've readThe Brass Key?”
“Sure we have,” answered Jiyeon.
“And we hated it,” added Denny.
Crestfallen, Eunjae said, “Oh. Okay.”
“We didn't hate it. You suck, Den. Go back inside.” Jiyeon dropped into the patio chair opposite Eunjae's. She offered him the same apologetic smile from Wednesday night, only this time it held a touch of mirth.
“While you were reading that series, we were readingMolly Merriweather. Those books came out around the same time. I remember all the kids at school were obsessed with one or the other.”
Eunjae had never heard of Molly Merriweather, a confession which offended Denny to the core. “Well, Molly’s amazing,” he declared. “Her mom was basically Indiana Jones, only smarter and not wearing an ugly hat. And Molly had like twenty different pets.” Denny began counting these off on his fingers. “There was a squirrel, three penguins, a chinchilla… oh, the Komodo dragon. How’d I forget him?”
