Volume 1: I've Been Lying to My Whole Life
The exact weight of everything in my bag is forty-three pounds.
I know this because I weigh it every morning before I leave the house.
Not on a bathroom scale; we have an actual luggage scale, the kind my mother bought specifically for this purpose, which she hangs on the back of the kitchen door next to the calendar and the reminder to pay the gas bill.
Every morning: hook the bag, check the number, add or remove as needed.
Forty-three pounds. That's the target.
Books account for maybe six of that. Seven if it's a heavy week.
The rest is ballast.
I have twenty-four individual weights distributed through the bag's compartments. Four in each outer pocket.
Eight spread across the main compartment, wedged between the books so they don't shift. Four more were sewn into the lining of the bag itself, which my mother did one winter afternoon while I watched and didn't say anything because there wasn't anything useful to say.
The lining ones aren't coming out. They're permanent. A baseline.
The point of all of this... in case it wasn't obvious, is that without forty-three pounds of ballast, I float.
Not in a metaphorical way. Not "I feel light and free" float. I mean, my feet leave the ground.
I mean gravity... I have an ongoing disagreement about how closely I should be adhering to it, and gravity is losing, and has been losing since I was approximately eight months old... when I apparently drifted up to the ceiling of my parents' old apartment and my mother had to climb onto the bed to retrieve me.
I don't remember that. She told me about it when I was nine.
She told it like a funny story.
I think for her it was genuinely funny, at the time. She'd had nine years to process it by then.
For me, at nine years old, sitting at the kitchen table eating my after-school snack, hearing this story for the first time; it was not funny. It was the beginning of a very long project of understanding that I was built wrong and the project has not ended.
The bus is three minutes away.
I know this because I've been doing this route for two years and I know exactly how long everything takes: three minutes to the stop, forty-two-minute ride, seven-minute walk from the drop-off to school.
I also know that if I jog to the stop, I can catch the 7:15, which gives me an extra eight minutes at school that I don't need but which makes me feel more in control of things. I don't jog. I walk. Control is mostly an illusion anyway.
I hoist the bag onto my back.
Forty-three pounds hits my shoulders and everything settles. This is the only part of my morning that feels like relief. The weight of it. The way it anchors me to the ground just a little more than I would be without it.
I know how that sounds.
I've made peace with how it sounds.
---
Bus 472 is one of the older models, the kind with the greenish fluorescent lights that flicker when you hit a rough patch of road and seats that were probably comfortable in 2009.
I take the same seat every morning three from the back, left side, window. It's not assigned. I just always get here before anyone else takes it.
The driver is a middle-aged guy named Gyeol I know his name from the display panel at the front. He's been on this route for the two years I've been riding it.
He always has the radio on, always just below the volume where you can make out the words. He nods when people get on. That's the full extent of his personality as far as I can tell.
I sit down. Bus pulls out.
I count the landmarks the way I always do. GS25 on the corner. The taekwondo studio with the cracked sign.
The chicken place that has been under renovation for eight months and shows no signs of finishing. The school that isn't mine. The intersection where the light is always red when you need it to be green.
I count them because it gives my brain something to do besides think about the forty-three pounds.
We're eleven stops in when the bus pulls up to the corner of Yongan-gil and a girl gets on.
New. I've never seen her before on this route.
She's about my age. She's got one of those faces that looks like it has decided something and isn't particularly interested in discussing it. Dark eyes. Hair pulled back like hair is a problem she has solved and moved on from.
She's wearing a plain school uniform, not Yongan High's, or she hasn't sewn a patch on yet and she's carrying a bag over one shoulder that looks notably lighter than mine, which I notice because I notice everyone's bags.
She walks to the fare machine. Taps her card.
Insufficient balance.
The machine beeps. She looks at it. Something in her expression shifts not embarrassment exactly, more like: so we're doing this today. She checks her pockets. Checks them again.
Behind her, three people are waiting.
Nobody moves.
I have no idea why I do what I do next. I don't make a decision. My hand is just suddenly up, card in it, reaching past her.
"Here," I say.
She looks at my card. Then looks at me. She has the specific look of someone calculating whether accepting this creates a debt they don't want.
The people behind her are still waiting.
She takes the card. Taps it. Hands it back.
"I'll pay you back," she says.
She says it the way other people say don't talk to me. Like it's a closing statement, not an opening one.
I say: "It's okay."
She's already walking to the back. She sits down across the aisle from me: the right side, three from the back, window seat that is the mirror of mine and she looks out the window and doesn't look at me again.
I look out my window.
We ride in silence.
This is not unusual. I ride in silence every morning. The difference is that this silence has a different texture to it. Like it's being maintained by two people instead of just one.
I spend four stops noticing this without acknowledging that I'm noticing it.
She has a small cut on her right hand from what I can't tell. It looks like it's a day old, maybe, still slightly raised and pink. Nothing serious. The kind of thing you don't bother to bandage.
She's reading something on her phone. I can't see what.
At one point, the bus hits a rough patch of road and the lights flicker and her hand tightens on the seat rail for exactly one second before she lets go. Automatic. Like a reflex that trained itself.
I look at my own hand on the seat rail.
Same reflex. Different reason.
The bus pulls up to Yongan High's stop. I stand, hoist my bag, and feel the familiar anchor of it on my shoulders. The girl across the aisle doesn't move. I figure she's going further.
I step into the aisle.
She stands up.
She's going to the same stop.
I get off first. She follows. On the pavement outside Yongan High's gate, she glances at the school and then back at her phone, checking something the address, probably, confirming. Then she puts her phone away and walks toward the gate without looking at me again.
I stand on the pavement and watch her go.
New transfer, I think. Same school.
Then I think: she didn't say thank you.
Then I think: she said she'd pay me back, which is a different kind of thing. Thank you is an ending. I'll pay you back is a continuation.
I don't know why I'm analyzing this.
I hoist my bag higher on my shoulders and walk through the gate.
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