Giddy, I reached for my phone to call Joon, only to stop, finger hovering over the contact list, as I saw the Seoul clock next to the UK one. Just after 1 am.
I locked my phone and put it down, feeling deflated. I hadn’t spoken to him since late last night. He’d been too locked into rehearsals for the online concert, and I’d been distracted watching the comments flood in. I hadn’t even told him about it. It had felt silly. In light of what he was doing. Inconsequential.
Now that it was something more, now that something might come from it that felt consequential, I couldn’t talk to him. He was so far away.
A world apart.
Chapter 16
“Here, mum.” I passed her the steaming mug before I sat down next to her.
For a while, we sat in companionable silence, drinking our coffees, watching Dad quietly prune the roses growing along the fence. They’d gotten a bit frisky as of late.
Mum had been out here all morning. She was like a flower, the way she constantly sought out the sun, though she couldn’t tolerate much of it at the moment. The brightness bothered her, and her skin was sensitive, much to her annoyance. She was confined to sitting in the shade under the garden umbrella.
She had also taken to wearing beautiful, silk head wraps now that she’d shaved off her hair. It had taken a while to fall out, but then it had gotten to the point where it had been so straggly that she’d gotten fed up and instructed Dad to get the clippers.
We’d all had a good laugh when she’d tried, briefly, to wear wigs. It wasn’t that they’d looked bad – they’d actually been quite convincing – but they had apparently made her scalpitch. We had constantly found her with her hand jammed up underneath, scratching at her head, leaving the wigs all askew, until one day she had pulled it off her head, flung it across the room and declared, “my scalp needs to breathe!”
Mum’s birthday had been a couple of weeks ago, and unexpectedly, Jihoon had sent her a gift. Even I hadn’t known about it, so I’d watched with surprise as Mum had unwrapped a beautiful, vibrantly coloured square of silk from a tissue-padded Hermès box.
She’d played it down, but I could see how much she loved it.
So now it was head wraps. Not only were they quite lovely, but they also protected her delicate, pale skin. All it had taken was one, mild dose of sunburn on her freshly shorn scalp and she’d never gone without one since.
“So,” she said. “Have you decided?”
I sighed, long and hard, feeling the pinch between my brows.
“What the fuck do I know about journalism?”
“First of all,” Mum said, “Language. Second of all, I bet there’s courses you can do online. People are doing all sorts these days. Did you see that big university who put half their courses online for free?”
I scoffed, “I don’t think a degree in classical studies will get me far, Mum.”
“Where did you learn to be such a smartarse?”
“I’m looking at my teacher.” I batted my eyelashes at her as she gave me a droll look.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I’m just saying. You could probably take a course online. Everyone’s learning something these days. It’s not all just sourdough starters anymore.”
“Yeah, sometimes it’s viral dance trends.” I hid my grin behind my coffee mug.
I’d recently walked in on my folks in the kitchen trying to learn a handful of steps to some dance craze that was sweeping social media. My, how I had howled. My stomach had hurt for ages afterwards.
Mum looked at me sternly, which only turned my grin into a giggle.
Mum sighed. “It’s like trying to have a serious conversation with a hyena.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I conceded. “Carry on.”
“I’m just saying, there are things you can learn. And anyway, this editor chap, he offered you the job without you having any qualifications, didn’t he? It sounds like you’re trying to find reasons not to do it.”
Offering me a ‘job’ wasn’t quite how I would have put it. Eventually, I had responded to the editor. We’d emailed back and forth a few times to discuss how it would work, but it was pretty cut and dry. I send them a piece of writing, they decided if it’s good enough to publish, and if it was, I’d get paid.
“It’s not a job, Mum. It’s freelance work. I’d write an article-” I kept stumbling over that word. It made it sound too real, too professional for the occasional tangent I put into words. “And they’d pay me for it. As long as it doesn’t suck.”
Mum rolled her eyes. “There you go again.”
