—Chapter nine—
"While we're here, do you want to stop in to see the kids?" I asked into the silence. It was the only thing I could think to do that might make him feel better. "I could wait out here while you talk to them, or go to the car if you want."
"Would you visit them with me?" he asked suddenly.
To be honest, I wasn't sure I could handle it, but I knew he really wanted me there. And he was feeling so down that the words came out automatically.
"Sure, I'll go."
"They'll be in the rec room now. That's where they usually are at this time," he said.
We walked down the corridors to the end of the hall, where two doors opened into a good-size room.
Perched in the far corner was a small television with about thirty metal folding chairs placed all around it. The kids were sitting in the chairs, crowded around it, and you could tell that only the ones in the front row had a good view of the thing.
I glanced around. In the corner was an old Ping-Pong table. The surface was cracked and dusty, the net nowhere to be seen.
A couple of empty Styrofoam cups sat on top of it, and I knew it hadn't been used in months, maybe years. Along the wall next to the Ping-Pong table were a set of shelves, with a few toys here and there--blocks and puzzles, a couple of games.
There weren't too many, and the few that were there looked as if they'd been in this room for a long time. Along the near walls were small individual desks piled with newspapers, scribbled on with crayons.
We stood in the doorway for just a second. We hadn't been noticed yet, and I asked what the newspapers were for.
"They don't have coloring books," he whispered, "so they use newspapers." He didn't look at me as he spoke--instead his attention was directed at the kids.
He'd begun to smile again.
"Are these all the toys they have?" I asked.
He nodded. "Yes, except for the stuffed animals. They're allowed to keep those in their rooms. This is where the rest of the things are kept."
I guess he was used to it. To me, though, the sparseness of the room made the whole thing depressing. I couldn't imagine growing up in a place like this.
Jungkook and I finally walked into the room, and one of the kids turned around at the sound of our steps. He was about eight or so, with red hair and freckles, his two front teeth missing.
"Jungkook!" he shouted happily when he saw him, and all of a sudden all the other heads turned. The kids ranged in age from about five to twelve, more boys than girls. After twelve they had to be sent to live with foster parents, I later learned.
"Hey, Roger," Jungkook said in response, "how are you?"
With that, Roger and some of the others began to crowd around us. A few of the other kids ignored us and moved closer to the television now that there were free seats in the front row.
Jungkook introduced me to one of the older kids who'd come up and asked if I was his boyfriend. By his tone, I think that he had the same opinion of Jungkook that most of the kids in our high school had.
"He's just a friend," he said. "But he's very nice."
Over the next hour, we visited with the children. I got a lot of questions about where I lived and whether my house was big or what kind of car I owned, and when we finally had to leave, Jungkook promised that he'd be back soon. I noticed that he didn't promise I would be with him.
While we were walking back to the car, I said, "They're a nice bunch of kids." I shrugged awkwardly. "I'm glad that you want to help them."
Jungkook turned to me and smiled. He knew there wasn't much to add after that, but I could tell he was still wondering what he was going to do for them that Christmas.
By early December, just over two weeks into rehearsals, the sky was winter dark before Miss Garber would let us leave, and Jungkook asked me if I wouldn't mind walking him home. I don't know why he wanted me to.
Beaufort wasn't exactly a hotbed of criminal activity back then. The only murder I'd ever heard about had occurred six years earlier when a guy was stabbed outside of Maurice's Tavern, which was a hangout for people like Lew, by the way. For an hour or so it caused quite a stir, and phone lines buzzed all over town while nervous women wondered about the possibility of a crazed lunatic wandering the streets, preying on innocent victims.
Doors were locked, guns were loaded, men sat by the front windows, looking for anyone out of the ordinary who might be creeping down the street. But the whole thing was over before the night was through when the guy walked into the police station to give himself up, explaining that it was a bar fight that got out of hand.
Evidently the victim had welshed on a bet. The guy was charged with second-degree murder and got six years in the state penitentiary.
The policemen in our town had the most boring jobs in the world, but they still liked to strut around with a swagger or sit in coffee shops while they talked about the "big crime," as if they'd cracked the case of the Lindbergh baby.
But Jungkook's house was on the way to mine, and I couldn't say no without hurting his feelings. It wasn't that I liked him or anything, don't get the wrong idea, but when you've had to spend a few hours a day with someone, and you're going to continue doing that for at least another week, you don't want to do anything that might make the next day miserable for either of you.
The play was going to be performed that Friday and Saturday, and lots of people were already talking about it. Miss Garber had been so impressed by Jungkook and me that she kept telling everyone it was going to be the best play the school had ever done. She had a real flair for promotion, too, we found out.
We had one radio station in town, and they interviewed her over the air, not once, but twice. "It's going to be marvelous," she pronounced, "absolutely marvelous." She'd also called the newspaper, and they'd agreed to write an article about it, primarily because of the Jungkook-Dohyun connection, even though everyone in town already knew about it.
But Miss Garber was relentless, and just that day she'd told us the Playhouse was going to bring in extra seats to accommodate the extralarge crowd expected. The class sort of oohed and aahed, like it was a big deal or something, but then I guess it was to some of them.
Remember, we had guys like Eddie in class. He probably thought that this would be the only time in his life when someone might be interested in him.
The sad thing was, he was probably right.
You might think I'd be getting excited about it, too, but I really wasn't. My friends were still teasing me at school, and I hadn't had an afternoon off in what seemed like forever.
The only thing that kept me going was the fact that I was doing the "right thing." I know it's not much, but frankly, it was all I had.
Occasionally I even felt sort of good about it, too, though I never admitted it to anyone.
I could practically imagine the angels in heaven, standing around and staring wistfully down at me with little tears filling the corners of their eyes, talking about how wonderful I was for all my sacrifices.
So, while I was walking him home that first night, thinking about this stuff, when Jungkook asked me a question.
"Is it true you and your friends sometimes go to the graveyard at night?"
Part of me was surprised that he was even interested. Though it wasn't exactly a secret, it didn't seem like the sort of thing he'd care about at all.
"Yeah," I said, shrugging. "Sometimes."
"What do you do there, besides eat peanuts?"
I guess he knew about that, too.
"I don't know," I said. "Talk . . . joke around. It's just a place we like to go."
"Does it ever scare you?"
"No," I answered. "Why? Would it scare you?"
"I don't know," he said. "It might."
"Why?"
"Because I'd worry that I might do something wrong."
"We don't do anything bad there. I mean, we don't knock over the tombstones or leave our trash around," I said. I didn't want to tell him about our conversations about Henry Preston because I knew that wasn't the sort of thing Jungkook would want to hear about. Last week Namjoon had wondered aloud how fast a guy like that could lie in bed and . . . well . . . you know.
"Do you ever just sit around and listen to the sounds?" he asked. "Like the crickets chirping, or the rustling of leaves when the wind blows? Or do you ever just lie on your backs and stare at the stars?"
Even though he was a teenager and had been for four years, Jungkook didn't know the first thing about teenagers, and trying to understand other teenagers for him it was like trying to decipher the theory of relativity.
"Not really," I said.
He nodded a little. "I think that's what I'd do if I were there, if I ever go, I mean. I'd just look around to really see the place, or sit quietly and listen."
This whole conversation struck me as strange, but I didn't press it, and we walked in silence for a few moments. And since he'd asked a little about me, I sort of felt obliged to ask him about himself. I mean, he hadn't brought up the Lord's plan or anything, so it was the least I could do.
"So, what do you do?" I asked. "Besides working with the orphans or helping critters or reading the Bible, I mean?" It sounded ridiculous, even to me, I admit, but that's what he did afterall.
He smiled at me. I think he was surprised by my question, and even more surprised at my interest in him.
"I do a lot of things. I study for my classes, I spend time with my dad. We play gin rummy now and then. Things like that."
"Do you ever just go off with friends and goof around?"
"No," he said, and I could tell by the way he answered that even to him, it was obvious that no one wanted him around much.
"I'll bet you're excited about going off to college next year," I said, changing the subject.
It took him a moment to answer.
"I don't think I'm going to go," he said matter-of-factly.
His answer caught me off guard. Jungkook had some of the highest grades in our senior class, and depending on how the last semester went, he might even end up valedictorian.
We had a running pool going as to how many times he would mention the Lord's plan in his speech, by the way. My bet was fourteen, being that he only had five minutes.
"What about Mount Sermon? I thought that's where you were planning to go. You'd love a place like that," I offered.
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. "You mean I'd fit right in there, don't you?"
Those curveballs he sometimes threw could smack you right between the eyeballs.
"I didn't mean it that way," I said quickly. "I just meant that I'd heard about how excited you were to be going there next year."
He shrugged without really answering me, and to be honest, I didn't know what to make of it. By then we'd reached the front of his house, and we stopped on the sidewalk out front.
From where I was standing, I could make out Dohyun's shadow in the living room through the curtains. The lamp was on, and he was sitting on the sofa by the window.
His head was bowed, like he was reading something. I assumed it was the Bible.
"Thank you for walking me home, Taehyung," he said, and he glanced up at me for a moment before finally starting up the walk.
As I watched him go, I couldn't help but think that of all the times I'd ever talked to him, this was the strangest conversation we'd ever had. Despite the oddness of some of his answers, he seemed practically normal.
End of 09
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