Half an hour later, the sun crept over the horizon, revealing that most of Apollo had collapsed on the field. Brothers sprawled on the grass like beached whales. Eunjae limped over to the bleachers, breathing hard. He watched Ezra take a granola bar and some water from Simon before coming to sit on the bleachers as well. Although this was an unexpected development, Eunjae said nothing.
“I get that you're mad at me,” said Ezra, “but this was too much.”
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Don't lie about it. I know you can't wait for me to leave. You and everybody else.”
Eunjae bent to tug at a shoelace until the loose knot came undone. Then he tied it again, tighter. “I couldn't wait for you to get here,” he said. “That's what I remember.”
He was twelve, and he’d long since resigned himself to being his parents’ only child. But Ezra came home from the hospital, a squalling bundle immediately transferred into Vivian's arms, and Eunjae was no longer alone.
“I thought we'd do everything together. I made this list, and I'd put stuff on it almost every day. Miss Vivi helped me think of ideas.” Eunjae cracked a smile, thinking back on what he'd scribbled there. “She kept having to tell me it might be a while before you could do a lot of those things. I said I didn't mind waiting.”
Ezra sat up, keeping his back turned to Eunjae. The sharp ridges of his shoulder blades poked through the fabric of his shirt. “And then you left,” he said, embodying everything it meant to be fourteen and angry, fourteen and confused.
Over by the van, Eunjae saw Jiyeon sifting through the trunk of her car, a telescoping phone mount tucked under one arm. She would know what to say. She would ford this river, brave the crossing, and she'd do it both swiftly and surely. Clumsy by comparison, Eunjae could only wade into the water and fight the current as it tried to drag him under. His first instinct was to apologize. He went with honesty instead.
“And then I left.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to do. At the same time, he’d struggled to imagine another future. For so long, Eunjae had prepared to leave, his days structured around that imminent departure. Leila attacked the goal with every tool at her disposal, every ounce of her trademark tenacity. He was around seven or eight years old when he stopped having any time to play after school. It started with the voice lessons. Then came piano, Korean language tutoring, longer sessions with a vocalcoach. The lessons were private, one-on-one. Other kids were a mystery. They lived in a universe separate from his own.
And then Vivian was gone, vanished overnight. A new nanny was hired for Ezra, but Eunjae had little to do with her. The schedule became more grueling than ever. His mother bowed out of a stage role in order to manage him directly.I don't trust anyone else to get you where you need to be, Leila would say, eyes flashing with rekindled rage any time he dared to ask about Miss Vivi.
“But I didn’t stop asking,” Eunjae told Ezra now. It had been his one act of rebellion, during those dark months between the first audition and the second. Even at the airport, poised to board that flight to Seoul, he’d pleaded with his mother to bring Vivian back.
“They’d let trainees call home once a week. I called just to ask Mum about Vivian. Sometimes she told me that Miss Vivi was gone, that she went home to her family. Sometimes she said that you were happy with the new nanny and didn’t need our old one anymore.”
What he didn’t share: finally, maybe two months in, Leila began passing the phone to Simon when he called. If Eunjae planned to drone on and on about that woman like a broken record, he could save his breath and go practice instead. Didn’t he want to debut? Could he be invested in his own future for a change? If she'd been blessed with even half his talent, if she'd received even half the amount of support, what could she have been? His attitude disgusted her.
Dogs barked from a nearby yard. The wind picked up slightly, sending up an eddy of dry leaves that swirled along the pavement. Eunjae waited. The story had to be told, and he’d done that, but the telling left him feeling like an empty shell. He took a deep breath, and then another. He watched the clouds go scudding across the sky.
Ezra took a deep breath, too. “I didn’t know,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“It’s okay. I should’ve told you.”
“I feel stupid. I should’ve been asking a lot of questions, like when you got into that big mess with your contract this summer. That’s when Mum started acting… weird. She kept saying you were ruining everything. And I believed whatever she said to me, I just believed her and didn’t try to find out more.”
“Why wouldn't you believe her? She'd never given you any reason not to, right?” And try as he might, he couldn't keep the bitterness from coloring his tone. “She’s been a different mum for you than she was for me.”
Ezra finally turned to look at him. “But why didn’t you ever try to fight back? How could you just let her decide that for you? You ran away one time. You could’ve done it again.”
“I felt like I needed to do what Mum wanted. If I ran away, she’d be mad at me again. Then I wouldn’t have a chance at all. I’d never fix what happened with Miss Vivi.”
“But what good would that have done? You’d still be gone. Even if you fixed it, you wouldn’t get to be with her again. You were in Korea.”
“Youweren’t in Korea, though,” said Eunjae. He met his brother’s gaze. The pain had faded to a dull ache for a while, but now it was fresh again, an open wound for anyone to see. “You were still in that house, so I needed Vivian to come back. I needed her to be with you.”
Ezra stared at him, stunned. “It was about me?”
“I didn’t say that to make you feel guilty,” Eunjae hastened to clarify. “This doesn’t mean you have to take sides, or stop loving Mum, or anything like that.”
“Have you stopped loving Mum?”
The question hit him directly in the chest. Eunjae swallowed hard. “It could never be that easy."
Cameras whizzed past them, chasing Apollo members around the track. From the grass, Jiyeon caught Eunjae’s eye and waved. He waved back, then moved down to sit with Ezra as the sky brightened overhead.
“I’m sorry. I just want you to know the truth, especially about Vivian. She loved you, Ezra. You were her baby. I wish she could see you now. I wish she could’ve been magic for you like she was for me.”
