BY KAIN KIM
When I am seven and Ah-Rim is six, a new boy transfers to our homeroom.
Half of his face is ravaged with minute red dots, pricks of inflamed skin roughly textured like braille, and when he enters through the sliding door, the entire class breaks out in excited whispers. Half of me wants to avoid his embarrassed gaze, turn my back and pretend like he doesn’t exist, but the other half of me can’t stop staring at his horribly mutilated complexion. It looks as if he’s dunked the right side of his head into the hot oil they fry my potatoes in at the local cookery.
Contagion: noun. 1. The communication of disease by direct or indirect contact. 2. Harmful or undesirable contact or influence.
Our teacher curtly introduces him as Min-Jeong, that he’ll be staying with us as a fellow classmate this semester, and that she expects us all to treat him with courtesy and respect. This goes without saying, of course. By the time Min- Jeong has settled into his seat, looking as stiff as a corpse, it’s gotten around the entire room that his new name is Disease Boy. Ah-Rim elbows me in the ribs and snickers at the nickname. My desk mate leans across the table and hisses at me, “We’ll greet him properly at the statue after school. Pass it on.”
His eyes flicker with mischief and he grins expectantly at me.
I laugh and pass it on.
•
It’s always struck me as funny how adults assume you can’t remember anything from before you were five or six years old, when rather, the memories are like a series of frames from a film in my head, crystal in clarity and glaring with color and life. That’s not a memory, they’ll say laughing, and pat your head condescendingly. You probably saw a photograph and you’re mistaking it for something else that happened much, much later. I wonder if the more we grow, the less we remember, like those memories are captured in sheets of negative that will just keep piling on top of one another over the years, until the original picture is so disfigured and blackened by what came after that you can’t even remember what it was of in the first place.
•
It’s an unusually cold day for May. Min-Jeong stands by the statue, a stone memorial of the school’s founder, and waits, book bag clutched defensively to his thin chest. This Disease Boy isn’t stupid. He’s seen the looks and heard the hissed insults, felt the quick, lithe feet shooting out from underneath desks to trip his own large, clumsy ones and felt the unanimous, hushed response it drew from the class. His eyes are like the sleek, flat stones that my dad and I use to skip across the surface of the park lake. They are hard and glassy and reflect the gray sky in chiseled chunks.
“What is he…stupid?” Ah-Rim mutters to me. “Why isn’t he running?”
Already a small throng of kids has gathered around the statue. Nothing too important is happening yet, just some minor taunting and name calling. Min-Jeong is holding his own. A few adults walk by on the commute home from work and glare at us in disdain. We pull faces and sneer at them, too.
My desk mate, the one that had gathered us here today, steps forward first when a nice little crowd has formed. You can tell he’s glad to have an audience. He slowly picks up a rock, a solid piece of gravel about the size of my fist. He tosses it in the air and catches it. Toss, catch. Toss, catch. We all watch the rock as if hypnotized, following its path with our eyes as it arcs neatly through the air and lands with a smack in the boy’s palm. No one is taunting Disease Boy now – ominous silence echoes throughout the grounds, more deafening than the raucous chatter from before. Min- Jeong is staring stoically at the ground.
Without any warning, the rock suddenly sails through the air and hits Min-Jeong on the shoulder.
It’s like the world was on mute, and a switch has just been flipped. The sound rushes back at full force again in strangled cacophony, boys screeching in wild abandon, girls screaming and giggling in excitement. Everyone hunts for rocks on the ground to throw. Pebbles and stones and chunks of gravel hurtle through space and deflect off of Disease Boy, who’s not responding at all. He just stands there, an island of resigned peace and serenity amongst the chaos. The statue behind him smiles down benevolently on the scene.
“Help me look for rocks,” Ah-Rim is saying. The tips of her straight black braids nearly brush the ground in her concentration as she bends over the lot. “Everybody’s taking the good ones.”
What happens next, I don’t quite remember too well. I think I ran away, or pretended to help Ah-Rim look for a while. I did not help the boy with the spots on his face.
Throwing rocks at him with the rest of my classmates would have been less cowardly.
•
I will realize, later, much to my unrestrained horror, that he lives in my apartment building. We will wait together in interminable silence for the elevator to reach the lobby. The first thing he will say to me, quietly and without making eye contact, will be, “It’s not contagious.” My response will be, “I never asked.” Then, in the elevator, feeling as if I’ve got to say something, as if I have to redeem myself to this boy whom I watched get pelted with stones before my very eyes: “Why didn’t you just run away? You waited for them. Like an idiot.” He will not say anything, but simply step out onto his floor without any words of farewell. And I will realize, much, much later, that the silence was all the answer I needed. That what he protected out there, facing down all of class 2-AB in the enduring, tolerant silence of a god, was something more significant than maintaining any physical manifestation.
•
Slowly but surely, we become friends. It’s a unique, twisted relationship, to say the least. I do all the talking; he listens. If it wasn’t for the answers he’d give to our teacher in class, I’d be sure he was either deaf or mute. Sometimes, not often, I’d get the impression that I was conversing with a brick wall, and would scream at him to say something, anything, so I didn’t feel like I was talking to myself; but then he’d simply look at me, and smile, and that would be enough for me to apologize and fall into a shameful silence.
Ah-Rim and I don’t hang out anymore. On the rare occasions that we make eye contact with one another, she will glare at me and quickly turn to whisper something to the beady-eyed girls who have started to follow her more and more lately, like faithful pets trailing after their owner. Even these brief encounters eventually peter to a complete stop, and after a while I can’t even imagine that this giggling, pigtailed girl held a role in my life at one time.
This is precisely why I’m so dubious when she rings my door one morning and asks me to go rollerblading with her.
“There’s something I want to do.”
“Okay.”
•
Our apartment complex is built on top of a hill, so that the buildings slowly slope up on a gradual incline towards the sun. This means that there’s only one way to leave the complex – down the main road, which is dangerously steep and flattens into the heavy rush of perpetual traffic. Parents go to great pains to keep the scooter and rollerblade-loving children of the neighborhood away from the main road. Once you gather enough momentum and speed, which won’t take long due to the steep nature of the hill, it’s nearly impossible to turn at the last second into the nearby alleyway to avoid the cars. We’ve had accidents before – none fatal, thankfully, but enough to establish the hill as a permanent hazard zone.
“We’re going to skate down the hill,” Ah-Rim declares, eyes shining. “It’s easy. Just watch me.”
She does it, sailing effortlessly down in her skates and making a slow, wide turn into the alleyway, a dark, vacuous pit that lacerates one of the tall brick walls that line the base of the hill. After a while, she emerges from the alley, skates in one hand, and starts making the long trek up the pavement in her bare feet, face turned up towards the sun expectantly. She motions for me to skate down too.
I don’t move.
She reaches the pinnacle of the hill, standing next to me once again, flushed and bright- eyed.
“Well?” She gestures impatiently toward the road. “Are you going to do it or not?”
There’s a string coiled between us, taut with tension and worn thin. She’s testing its durability, gently tugging and yanking, but it refuses to snap. It’s up to me to break it off completely, I realize.
Vicariousness: noun. Act of preforming, exercising, or suffering in place of another.
“Sure.” I fasten my helmet. “No big deal.”
Skating down the hill is the equivalent to flying. I feel weightless, buoyant in the whip of the rushing air current, arms spread about as if I’m going to take flight. The alley draws up beside me all too quickly, its gap-toothed entrance a gaping mouth waiting to swallow me. I angle my feet and turn into it, exhilaration and satisfaction plunging through my veins. What I am not expecting, however, is the concrete wall waiting too closely on the other end of the alley.
•
What my mother says to me, later, becomes nothing more than a harsh, discordant noise buzzing in my ears, a recorder skipping brokenly to emit the same despairing sounds. Ai-goo, how could you have been so stupid? How many times have I told you not to go down there?
When I had struggled back up to the top of the hill, half of my face mangled and bleeding, Ah-Rim had vanished. It stings more than the burn of the salve my mother applies with her birdlike fingers, her delicate touches light and airy.
•
We wait for the elevator together, watching as the numbers slowly light up, one by one, cheerfully chiming its way down. He thoughtfully contemplates the ragged scars that cover the entire left side of my face. The doctor says they will remain there for quite a while before they fade entirely.
“I didn’t run away,” I say.
He says nothing, as usual, but his understanding gaze says enough. It’s not the same thing. I shrug, and grin at him, an expression of un-debilitating joy and recklessness that only a seven- year old could wear.
He smiles back at me.
We match, him and I, the scarred sides of our faces that are turned toward the other like reflections in a mirror.
•
I will leave for America in less than a year, the scratches raked across my cheek just beginning to diminish, and will not tell a soul about my departure. When my parents ask me why, I will tell them I forgot, and to them it is a small offense, easily forgotten. After all, I am only seven.
I know, however, that what I did in leaving him, alone, without a single word of explanation, is unforgivable. I will berate myself for this act in the years to come, but ultimately, this too shall pass, overshadowed by the frenzy of my neonatal life. For the time being, however, he will remain with me. I will see him in the smooth gray pebbles that I kick up with my new sneakers on the walk to school, in the anomalous spring days that are colder than they should be, in the children eagerly testing out their rollerblades on the uneven pavement.
The boy with the spots on his face phases quietly out of my life somewhere between the blast of fireworks splitting open the dark of the night sky above my head and the echoing quiet of the afternoons spent doing homework in my bedroom. He is blotted out as the stills of my memories pile up and blend into one another in their mutual transparency.
•
My new school has a statue of its own. It stands, peering humbly down through spectacles at the same mass of students and faculty that enters and leaves his doors each day. I get into the habit of dropping a stone I’ve picked up from somewhere on the way to school at its base, like a sort of offering. It can get a little silly at times, and by the time I graduate the school, I have forgotten the routine altogether.
The scars have completely disappeared from my face now, my skin the unblemished picture of youth once more. A part of me wishes they had remained, because I know his will never go away.
•
What I’ve come to realize, though, is that forgetting doesn’t mean never remembering. Writing this was a practice in restraint, a battle against the urge to throw in every spare moment we spent together, to not fill in the blanks and grey areas with my own interpretations of what might have happened.
I cannot spend my lifetime in the darkroom of my mind, scrounging up old memories and waiting for them to develop properly. But I’m allowed to recall a reel of events now and then. I will do this, sometimes, when I need to remind myself why my little sister does reckless things, or why I can’t run away from the things I fear. I take down a film reel of afternoons walking home from school and remember. I play it back again.
Kain Kim is a high school senior living on the east coast with her parents and younger sister. She attends the Bergen County Academies, a STEM-centric magnet school, where she studies in the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology. A National Scholastic Art & Writing gold medalist, Kain writes short stories, articles, and memoirs currently featured or forthcoming in Imagine, Teen Ink, Canvas Lit, Skipping Stones, Elan, The Record, and elsewhere, and has appeared in anthology publications by Scholastic and Fiction Attic Press.