So Hyun-ki only knew half of the song, but he insisted on singing along anyway, the kitchen island his makeshift stage, and his brother and their babysitter his sole audience. Admittedly, they were not a very good audience: his brother was reading some thick, leathered book and the older-girl who supposed to be watching them was working frantically at a school essay though she still had the wherewithal to be mumbling along to the lyrics blasting off the boombox she'd lugged in with her. The So family had an exquisite stereo system, of course, but it wasn't as if they'd let this girl with her bubblegum-sticky fingers mess around with something so above her; the girl, who was around sixteen, smiled at these insults, calmly collected her hourly wage, and then brought her crap stereo system to her babysitting jobs; heaven forbid she existed without music.
"Noona," Hyun-ki whined. "Noona, look at me. Hyung."
"Fine," the girl said, and she snapped her gum. "Do it again."
Hyun-ki started up with his warbling singing; the girl rolled her eyes and laughed. "You're ruining the song," she said. "You're never going to have my Jae-won oppa's voice, so don't even try."
"I'm going to be in H.O.T. when I grow up," Hyun-ki said. "Then you'll call me oppa too."
"Aish," the girl said. "Just be quiet so I can finish this. I don't care what you do, as long as you don't join Sechskies. I may be flunking out of school, but I am loyal to my band."
"Hyung," Hyun-ki said. "Did you hear--I'm going to be famous. Girls are going to scream and fall at my feet because I'll be so beautiful."
His brother looked up levelly. "I wouldn't count on that if I were you," he said. "You can't sing. You can't dance. You don't even have any friends. Why on earth would people like you?"
Hyun-ki stamped his foot against the marble countertop, but the girl was immersed in her music again, and she didn't look up. His brother was giving him an oddly blank stare; there was something so young and green and horrible in his eyes that it made Hyun-ki think of unwinding snakes. He looked toward the nursery, where his younger siblings were somehow all asleep; his eyes went toward the door, where his parents had slipped away three hours earlier, en route to yet another black-tie corporation dinner; he was alone, then; alone with his weirdly quiet hyung and the oblivious noona.
"I will too be famous," he pouted. "Besides, you don't have any friends either."
His brother closed the book and looked toward the girl, cautiously. When he saw that she wasn't listening, he leaned in toward his brother, almost smiling. "But I can make people like me," he murmured. "I know lots of things. Do you want to know what I do?"
He made a striking picture: just past his eighth birthday, his eyes big and dark against his face, his fingers perched birdlike over the cover of his book; he was already horribly self-confident, unlike Hyun-ki, who was two years younger and still scrappily growing into himself. But his brother had the presence of an identity; as if by being so young he'd found a secret discourse into his soul, and he was dictating his boyhood by his mind. The air was sparkling in the kitchen, and the girl was humming to herself, the base of her music so heavy it made Hyun-ki shake. There was a liquid darkness in his brother's face, and to calm himself, Hyun-ki remembered how sensitive and weak his brother could sometimes be. Yesterday, they'd found a dead sparrow in the garden, its innards stripped out by some malicious cat, and his brother had sobbed.
But he was not crying now. "남동생," he said. "This is how I made a new friend. There was a new boy coming to our class, and we all had to write letters to greet him. I wanted him to like me. So I wrote to him about how lonely I was, and how none of the other boys understood me. How they made fun of me. How I understood what it was like to be new, and to be different, and that we could be friends. I told him I'd be his hyung--and watch out for him."
"That's it?" Hyun-ki said, largely disappointed. "That doesn't sound like a secret."
His brother raised a finger. "You don't understand. None of the other boys thought to do that. But then when he came to our class, I decided I didn't want to be his friend after all."
"Why, hyung?"
"I don't know. I just didn't. At first, he kept following me around, but I threatened to make up a lie about how he had asthma or something, so the other boys would think he was weak. Now he doesn't bother me."
"That's mean. Besides, you lied. You don't have friends after all. You don't know how to make friends at all."
"That's not true!" his brother snapped; his face was suddenly flushed, his tiny hands balled into fists. "I could have had a friend if I wanted to, I just didn't. It was only because I didn't want to."
Hyun-ki did not understand the danger in his hyung's voice. He only saw a chance to prove his point; he danced around, laughing, gleefully chanting friendless loser, friendless loner--until his brother had had enough, and he slapped him.
This was enough to get the girl's attention. "Yah!" she said, and she grabbed at the older boy's hand and pulled him out of the kitchen. "What do you think you're doing?" she hissed. Hyun-ki was still crying in the background, but the girl did not seem worried. She was only angry: there was a glazed horrified look in her eyes and he realized she was not upset because two little boys were fighting. For her, it was about justice. She looked at him like he was something wrong. It was as if she already knew him, and what he would become, and how he broke all of society's rules by merely existing. No one else looked at him that way; no one else looked at him at all.
"What are you doing?" she said again, changing the question just enough to show him she understood. That this was about so much more than the slap.
He shrugged. He didn't know what he had done, but he was sick of feeling disgusted with himself. It was all the same thing in the end, whether he was pulling apart his classmates or pulling apart the dead birds he found in the garden. He knew on an arbitrary level that what he was doing was wrong, but he felt nothing, and the blankness in his head was worse than anything else. They did not understand him; they were all shallow toys who could not see what he saw. They could not see the way he was suffering.
"Aish," she said softly, cupping her hand to his cheeks. She was crying. He was a coffin: smooth and lacquered on the outside, skeletons and rot roiling within; and she was soft, and hazed in blue, and beautifully young. He realized then that he liked her. He realized too that she saw him as an anomaly, and he hated his self-awareness.
"You're just a boy," she said. "A little chaebol with too much of his father's genes."
"What?" he said.
"Oh," she said, backing quickly away, realizing that repeating what was common knowledge on the streets could get her fired here; that this boy was only twelve, and he probably did not know much of his history. Yet he looked at her as if he was ancient.
"Aish," she said. "Don't hit your brother. Set a good example. You hear me?"
He nodded dutifully. She went back to the kitchen and hugged Hyun-ki and cranked her boombox up.
"Do you know this song?" she was saying to Hyun-ki, the older brother watching from a shadowy distance, some idea coming into his mind. "This one's called "Candy." It's my absolute favorite--"
She was immortalized then, dancing in the kitchen with her gold hoop earrings and her construction boots, swinging his little brother around to popular music that would become legend. He closed his eyes: flicked some of the darkness away, and made a room. White, marble, like the kitchen. The potted ferns his mother hung made a carpet; the red of the girl's lips becoming a dripping chandelier. And then she was standing there in the room's center, the glow of her symbolism heavy around her eyes and her wavy hair: she would be justice, and happiness, and compassion, and caring, and youth. He would go into that spinning room whenever he wanted to feel those things; she was electrified in his head, now, and she would help him.
It would be a grand city, he thought. This grand city of emotions laid like music in his head, to help him find his way.
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a/n: Thank you all so much for reading!!!!!! My apologies for any spelling mistakes...I tried to go back through and edit, but I'm tired, so....you know how that works. Let me know what you think of this chapter--gotta love a good child sociopath. ^_^
Music for this chapter: Idk...I'm currently listening to Boy's Republic (their song "Rattled" is PURE ART, go look it up right now). And then earlier I was listening to H.O.T.'s "Candy," to get in the mood for the 90's setting.
Please please vote and comment!!! I love hearing from all you!