I'll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin Page A

streets. I feel like something is pushing me to join the demonstrations, but I often wind up getting separated from the others, like today. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, blow my nose, and throw the tissue at the trashcan. If it makes it into the can, I go to school, and if it doesn’t, I take to the streets. Other times, I stay in my room and wait for someone to come find me.”
    “I see.”
    “Sometimes I go to school just because you’re there.”
    I loosened my grip.
    “But I didn’t go today because I knew you’d be there …”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I thought, if I saw you, I might grab you and tell you everything.”
    I wondered what he meant by that.
    “But instead, there you were in the street. I was so surprised.”
    “You didn’t look surprised.”
    “You immediately started crying, standing there in your bare feet, so how could you tell whether I was surprised or not?”
    I liked the way he smelled. His smell made me not want to ask where Miru was. If I got to know her better, would I getto know him, too? It bothered me that he didn’t want to talk about her. I had a feeling that if he did, I would have to get off his back and walk home alone on bare wounded feet through this tumultuous, chaotic city. I was suddenly frightened by my overpowering curiosity toward Miru. Would the things I learned bring Myungsuh and me closer, or push us further apart? I used to think that sharing secrets always brought people closer. So I revealed secrets I did not want known in order to feel closer to someone. Oh, the loss I felt when I found out the secrets that I had held dear, that were so difficult to say out loud, that I had kept to myself, were being spread around the next day as if they were nothing! I think that was the moment I realized that pouring your heart out to someone might not bring you closer but in fact make you poorer instead. I even thought maybe growing close to someone was better achieved by empathizing in silence.
    The city looked as tangled as a spider’s web: the buildings with their countless windows, streetlamps standing in rows, narrow alleyways, and signs so jumbled that you could not tell which shops they belonged to. The streets had been closed to traffic, but the lights kept changing like clockwork. Though there was no one to look up at them, the large billboards filled the air with their glittering colors. I glanced down an alleyway, the darkness too thick to see where it ended. Myungsuh crossed a small intersection, brushed past an empty phone booth, walked beneath an overpass, and crossed another intersection. Though he was headed toward my place, we were like people with nowhere to go.
    We must have walked for over twenty minutes in silence.
    “Let’s stop there,” I said, pointing at a flower shop.
    The door sat wide open. All of the other shops had their security shutters rolled down or their doors only half open, as if they had given up on doing business. The fistful of soil from my mother’s grave was still sitting in a clay pot outside my apartment. I glanced at it each time I left. I had bought the pot with the idea of planting something in it, but I couldn’t decide what; meanwhile, the soil was drying out.
    “Why here?” he asked.
    “I have a flowerpot at home. I want to plant something in it.”
    I pointed at something green sitting on the doorsill of the flower shop. I had been looking for an excuse to get down, and that was all I found. It looked ornamental, but I did not know what it was called.
    “It looks like palm leaves,” Myungsuh said.
    Despite its small size, it was indeed a palm plant.
    “Let me down,” I said.
    He set me down in front of the flower shop. There was only a handful of soil in the flowerpot at home. I would need to buy more. The shop was barely bigger than a closet. If you weren’t paying attention, you might not even notice it was there. Inside, an older woman in glasses was sitting on a stool and gazing out. She stood up