The Haven [Minsung]

Chapter 1: Boss

I made the decision to move out after my family broke the lift to our flat.

Well, to be honest, it was me who broke it. The lift was already packed with my parents, little brother, older brother, and two cats in their carriers, but of course it was only when I got on that the fifty-year-old, bloody machine went and died, refusing to budge an inch. Now I'm being blamed as the middle child and the last one to get on.

I'm also eighteen, fresh out of high school. While all of my friends are at university living their best lives, I'm stuck at home with six other loud, unrelenting living things. I love my family, but I should already be living by myself, bombarded with exams and party invites. The issue is that I'm just so stuck. 'What the heck should I do with my life?' is a question I ask myself every hour. I've got nothing to do, nothing that I want to do either. People said I'd figure everything out by now. I feel like this is it: I was born to just exist in my bed, watch anime and K-dramas, and have daily existential crises. I wish someone could tell me what to do. I wish someone could give me a purpose.

"Get a summer job," my mum suggests over the dinner table, sympathetic for my lifeless self.

I raise my eyebrows. "It's not summer."

She rolls her eyes and sighs exasperatedly. "You know what I mean. Getting a part-time job could spark some inspiration in you, maybe? It could be good for you. And don't you want to save up some money so you can move out?"

"Mum. No part-time job salary would ever land me a new place. This is Seoul, for goodness sake."

When I said that I'd decided to move out, it was more like I can only dream of moving out. I'll never be able to in this city, unless I win the lottery or something. I don't have that kind of luck. And that 'inspiration' my mum's going on about? I don't think I'd feel inspired at all by getting assaulted while working at a fast-food restaurant or having to clean up someone's puke and crap off the floor of some shady bar. At most, I'd probably be inspired to never get a part-time job ever again.

I try my best to relay these thoughts to my family over the rest of dinner, toning down some of my apprehensions because of my younger brother's presence. Jeongin raises an eyebrow at me when he notices my cautious glances aimed at him. No matter how hard I plead my case, it doesn't work. My parents are set on forcing me out of my bed and out of the flat into the great, big world of work.

Feeling 'inspired' after dinner, I scour the internet for temporary jobs on my older brother's glitchy laptop, which I had earned by begrudgingly calling him Younghyun instead of 'Brian' after he had screamed 'Who's Brian?'. I curse at the device every time it freezes and crashes. Even after hours of intense Googling, nothing I manage to find interests me at all. It's just as I expected: deep-frying chips, cleaning up puke and waiting on hostile customers, most of whom are moody pubescent teenagers. It's definitely not like I'm still a moody pubescent teenager.

"Come on, give me at least one job that won't kill me," I groan, slapping the edge of the laptop's screen. That was probably a bad move since the computer starts glitching again, even more severely than the previous hundred times. I sigh and wait for it to get a grip. When it finally does, ten minutes later, the job-finding website I was last on has been replaced by an advert for a completely different genre of job.

"What the heck?"

It's not the creepy way that the advert suddenly appeared before my eyes that surprises me. What's got me dumbstruck is the fact that the hourly wage is more than double that of all the other part time jobs. I should probably be more suspicious than impressed, but my dream of achieving independence and getting my own place is too tempting to just ignore this job. It also sounds pretty harmless: just manning the till of a tiny bookshop that's literally twenty-five minutes away from home. It sounds like this job was fated to be mine. I might still be just a tiny bit worried about why the pay is so high for such a small role, but I'm not complaining. Surely I can handle whatever catch comes with the work. It's only a bookshop after all.