The Sigma Asset 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022

5: Mozhgan

Farsi translations at the end of the chapter.

Will watched the road as we drove north through Ángel[1] toward the interstate. He hadn't spoken since he'd offered to be my visa guarantor. I was just as bad, silent in the passenger seat, my mind hopping back and forth between the twin worries of Will's grudging hospitality, and Eomma's absence. It looked like the entire three-hour drive to Arenosa was going to be spent in uncomfortable silence.

We were both to blame really. I guessed that Will was out of his depth; shepherding me was turning out to be an extreme deviation from what looked like a rigid, and probably medically-recommended, routine for him.

I wondered what diagnosis he had. His symptoms were curious: he looked well, but he was defensive and secretive. He was clean and tidy, but he was lying about who cared for him, and lived in the crumbling grandeur of a Central María apartment that couldn't possibly have been his. I found it extremely hard to believe that someone like Will would have a second house in a wealthy place like Arenosa County. And if he didn't, where was he taking me? Will could have had anything from straight clinical depression to schizophrenia, and as terrifying as it had sounded at the time, maybe I should have opted for deportation and homelessness instead of whatever the fuck was in store for me as Will's unwanted guest.

I hadn't spent much time studying mental disorders; I'd learnt during final year at high school that not enough medical text-book space was dedicated to mental health. When I'd first arrived in María for pre-med summer school, I'd found that mental health seemed inadequately handled in American university textbooks too. That was back when I was briefly motivated enough to investigate what the first semester's classes at S.K.K.U.[2] would involve. Almost three years later and I was still no closer to finding out. I thought shamefully that the one good thing about getting kidnapped by Sigma was that I hadn't had to go to med school. Another thing that Eomma would hate me for when I got back to Korea.

Summer school in María felt so long ago, and had been such a pointless exercise. I'd been stupidly desperate to apply for summer school, when I could have just stayed in Busan and gone to the beach every day with Nuna. I could have chased Korean guys all summer, instead of coming to María and chasing the American guy who'd delivered me to Sigma. Except that I hadn't ever been chasing him. He'd been luring me.

Let it go, Zeph.

I looked across at Will, who gave me a little smile before setting his eyes back on the road. If Will was a few footsteps out of his depth with being lumbered with me, I was kilometers out of my depth with being homeless, stateless, motherless, fatherless, grandparent-less.

But there was some hope for me. I knew that if Eomma ended up not wanting to bring me back to Korea, Nuna would still be there for me, wherever the fuck she was. I would bet on my life that she and Kang-min were still together; those two were so sickening. If I ended up getting deported, I vaguely knew where Kang-min's parents lived in Busan. Maybe I could just go knock on doors there until I found them. Then Kang-min would call Nuna for me and I could go live with her.

Bravissimo. Fool-proof plan, idiot.

As if hearing the grating of my brain's overworked cogs, Will finally spoke. "Are you hungry?"

"That, again?"

Will looked away with big eyebrows furrowed. Of the few words he'd spoken since we'd met, three quarters of them were asking me if I was hungry.

"You ask me that all the time."

"So, you're not hungry?"

"No, Will. I'm not hungry."