by Frances Cha
“She is actually not in today but I am sure I can help you. Shall I clear the room?” The manager looks at Kyuri, and I can see that he is trying hard to protect her and, by extension, us. He likes her, it is clear. We are all holding our breath.
“How many times do I have to fucking tell you to call the madam? She has a phone, doesn’t she? In fact, I have her number myself. I’ll call her now.”
To our horror, he fishes his phone out of his pocket and scrolls and dials.
Kyuri mutters “shit” under her breath. Sujin stands and pulls me up by the wrist, and we slowly make our way toward the door.
This is it. Taein did not even talk to me. I did not get to type anything to him. I glance desperately back at him as I walk out the door, and he is joking with his friends, not even noticing me leave.
As the door closes, I hear the friend yelling on the phone. “What’s up with the quality control! I thought this was a ten percent! Not a house of amateurs and freaks! How much money have I spent here over the years to be treated like this!”
I am walking fast in spite of my heels, trying to keep up with Sujin and Kyuri. “You both better go,” Kyuri says softly as she stops abruptly in front of another door. “I’ll see you at home.” She opens the door and slips inside. Sujin takes my hand, and we both start walking fast again. I know how she feels and she knows how I feel and soon we are both running.
* * *
—
THE DAY THAT I lost my voice, it was like this too. I was running with Sujin and she was holding my hand leading me out. She was the one who had brought me there in the first place—under the arch by the dirt road after dark, where she said we were going to get initiated into the bad kids’ gang, so that we would be the leaders of the school the following year. I had not wanted to go because I was not sure I wanted to be labeled a bad kid, since that meant all of the teachers would hate us and single us out and beat us if they ever saw anything out of line. An iljin boy in the year above us had had one of his eardrums burst after he was hit by the vice principal.
We did not know that the other schools had all heard about our initiation night and had come for vengeance for past years of lost fights. They brought wooden boards and some of them had beer bottles that they smashed on the pavement to turn them into weapons. They surrounded us and we did not know they were actually going to use the broken bottles on us until one of the sunbaes screamed “Run!” and then all the world collapsed into chaos. I never saw the face of the girl who hit me, but Sujin later told me that the girl had a bat.
When we were back on the grounds of the Big House, Sujin woke up my parents before calling an ambulance. I do not remember much from that night, but I do remember Sujin’s fingernails, blood and skin under them from where she had scratched the face of the girl who attacked me. When the shouts of “Police!” began, the girl had become distracted, and that was when Sujin slashed her before frantically pulling me away. I could not see straight because of the pain exploding in my head.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she was screaming. That is the memory that is the most difficult to bear from that night. The sound of her choking with anguish for me.
Kyuri
It is the first time in three long and subdued weeks that I’ve actually felt like going out after work, so when Sujin texted earlier that she would be done around the same time as me today, I told her to come meet me at my favorite samgyeopsal place. She’s been in the bathroom for twenty minutes now and I have been grilling and eating and drinking by myself. I can feel people at the other tables feeling sorry for me.
It’s 1 A.M. on a Thursday night, so of course the place is packed and the staff are charging around with distressed faces, but I don’t care—I hail down a young waiter and make him grill for me while I go find Sujin. In the bathroom, she is prodding her face with a crystal-flecked fingertip in front of the mirror.
“What are you doing?” I snap.
“Oh, sorry, sorry,” she says, flustered. “I had all this food stuck in my mouth and I was scooping it out and then I thought maybe I got some sensation back in the right part of my chin, but I think I was wrong. Coming!”
Back at the table, she retrieves the tongs from the perspiring waiter and starts flipping the pork belly, setting the pieces that are cooked onto my plate. As I watch her pick up the scissors and start cutting her own pieces into tiny slivers, I feel my chest softening. Of course I remember what it’s like—how difficult every meal is—the food getting stuck, the slow chewing, the clicking of the jaw, the numbness and discomfort.
“You get used to it,” I say to her, again. After my own surgeries I had to work hard to stop myself from stretching my neck like a crane and constantly poking my chin because I couldn’t feel it. Sensation never came back, but that’s what hand mirrors and selfie modes were for—to check if food or drink were dribbling down my chin. Wordlessly, I reach into my own bag and hand over my favorite mirror—it is small and round and has a border of lace.
“Oh, it’s okay,” she says, tilting her head and breaking into a smile. With most of her swelling down, beauty has emerged dramatically from her face this past week. I am amazed, as I always am, at how suddenly it blooms when it finally happens.
I can see the men at adjacent tables sneaking looks at her and then at me. She’s taken my advice and sought out my lash place, and they’ve worked decadent magic on her newly symmetrical eyes. Even her nose looks cuter; a common side benefit from jaw surgery. With a smaller face, untouched features like the forehead and nose tend to look prettier in tandem.
I wish Sujin had been this pretty three weeks ago, that night of the Taein incident. Perhaps she’d have gotten hired at Ajax and we’d all be partying together with Crown now, in some secret private room at some blazing new club. Instead she’s working as one of those freelance girls who get carted around in a bus to room salons that are short on girls for the night. And even that was a favor I’d called in to an old friend of mine from my Gangseo days.
* * *
—
“ARE YOU ACTUALLY INSANE?” Madam had said, when I had gone to apologize to her a few days after that disastrous night. It was early afternoon and she was sitting at a table in one of the rooms at the salon, writing numbers into a little black book and using her phone as a calculator.
It was Miho who had been adamant about going to apologize in person no matter what. “Just go. It will do so much, trust me. Older people, that’s all they want—for others to say they are sorry and make a gesture first.” I had been planning to just stay home forever, my debts be damned. “The worst that can happen is that things stay the same,” Miho said. She had stopped moping around over that boyfriend of hers, and her smug air of proactive martyrdom was becoming unbearable. Despite her shrill conviction, I still hadn’t gone in for a few days until the manager oppa had texted me to say that Madam had said nothing when he mentioned my name. If you come in now, it’ll be like nothing happened, he texted.
“I am truly, terribly sorry,” I said over and over, bowing as deeply as my waist would allow. “I have no words.”
Looking back down at her phone, Madam did not acknowledge me. She made me wait there for a good half hour while she balanced her books and made some calls, but I did not move either. I was comfortable prostrate. I pictured her brain whirring inside her large skull as she calculated the optimal way to humiliate me just to the brink of breaking point.
When she finally addressed me, she sounded exasperated but resigned. “Look,” she said, slamming her little book shut and making me flinch. “It’s no secret that this industry is not what it used to be and everything is hard. Everyone is having a hard time. I am having a hard time, and you bet you’ll be having a hard time too, although none of you idiots can think that far ahead, I know.”
Her pathetic, ugly face looked old then, and pinched. I thought of all the money she was saving b
y staying this ugly. Her eyes were not warm, but they had never been, even on my most popular days. “Run along now and make some money like an ace,” she said, dismissing me with a faint wave. And so I was released, into air.
* * *
—
DISCREETLY SPITTING OUT some meat into a napkin, Sujin says, “I think you need to find a different kind of job.”
I chortle into my shot glass. “You have spent all this time and money and pain to try to get into a room salon, and now you are telling me to leave a ten percent?” I say. “And what should I do then? Go clean toilets?” I ask playfully. It is not a question that I have ever seriously considered. Everywhere I look, there are only jobs that I cannot possibly ever land. I know this, because even though I try to avoid the news, headlines about unemployment are flashing all around the city. Just yesterday, I was stuck in traffic and had to stare at the giant TV at the Sinsa Station crossing with the announcer with giant subtitles talking about some ten-year-high and how people are going to start killing other people out of sheer boredom or whatever. Do those unemployment numbers include all the people who own buildings and don’t go to work? Every single skyscraper and shopping mall in this city has owners who live at hotel gyms and department stores and never worked a day in their lives. The most regular commute they have is probably to a room salon.
“But I don’t think your madam is good to you,” Sujin says, which makes me laugh harder. She shakes her head at me in exasperation. “I mean, I know I know, but what I mean is that you seem really stressed out these days. Much more so than I’ve ever seen you before.” The waiter brings another bottle and Sujin fills my glass.
“And what about you?” I say. “Is this making you rethink this job too?”
“No, but it’s different for me,” she says. “I am too busy enjoying being pretty right now.” She glances quickly around us, to see if anyone heard her, and blushes when she sees a man staring brazenly. “And plus, I don’t really get stressed. Or if I do, I know how to not think about it. Ara can tell you. You learn pretty early on in an orphanage, or else you sink completely. If I’ve made it this far, I’m set. And this, right now, is really the turning point of my life.” She looks at me with earnest eyes. I can tell she is on the verge of tearing up.
“I don’t know,” I say hurriedly. “Miho doesn’t seem like she’s handling her stress that well.”
“Miho?” says Sujin, sufficiently distracted. “She’ll be fine. You don’t need to worry. She is just meticulously planning revenge, that’s all. We are very solution oriented.”
I look at Sujin with amusement. “Revenge for what?” I say, wondering if Miho has told her. Sujin was being quite entertaining today, with her purported deep insights. The thing is, my current situation is not stressful. She should have seen me during my Miari days.
“She just said she found out he was cheating,” she says, reaching for a burnt slice of pork belly. “But she should have known better than to expect otherwise. I told her that he would, the first time I heard they were together.”
“Have you met him?” I ask, my eyebrow raised.
“No, but I don’t need to,” she says. “Nobody that handsome and rich is that nice.”
“I guess so,” I say with a sigh. Suddenly I feel exceedingly tired and I think of Nami. I haven’t spoken to her since the day she came over. She had texted me a few times and then stopped when I didn’t respond. Light leaked out of me whenever I thought about her.
“I have been compiling some ideas for Miho,” Sujin says matter-of-factly. “I just have to check a few things first, like which reporters will actually believe what I say, and which ones might pay and which ones accept anonymous submissions. Miho has to be patient, because it is her destiny to become famous. All of us at the orphanage always said so.”
We clink glasses again and drink. I indicate that she has some sauce on her chin and she wipes it off. Then she takes her phone and starts searching through her photo gallery.
“All of us asked her for a drawing to keep because we knew she would be famous one day. Look, this is what she was drawing back in high school.” She slides her phone over to me. The screen shows a detailed pencil drawing of a family walking in a procession in a field of flowers. The father is in the front, then the mother, and then an older daughter holding several books to her chest. Trailing behind is a short figure wearing a girls’ hanbok but topped with the head of a giant frog staring out with mad, bulbous eyes and a flickering tongue.
“Um, I wouldn’t want that in my possession,” I say, handing the phone back to her. “You asked if you could have that? How awful.”
“That was her toad series,” says Sujin. “She drew a lot of toad people in wells but this one is cheerful, with all those flowers. No dead people!” She smiles down at the photo.
I always knew they were both cracked.
“I thought going to New York would be good for her, which is why I kicked up such a fuss to the Loring Center, but I suppose that’s how she met Hanbin and now she is unhappy….” Sujin trails off. I ask her what she means.
“I was an assistant at the hair salon when I first came to Seoul, and one day I overheard a customer bragging to one of the stylists that her daughter was applying for this art scholarship to New York. I listened as hard as I could and looked it up afterward and I called the Loring Center to make them apply for Miho.” Sujin shakes her head. “The adults there never think ahead about our future—to be fair, they’re busy putting out fires, with girls like me—but that’s why those of us out here are constantly looking for information for the younger ones. That’s how I got that salon job too, an unni from the Center called me. I mean, the job was gruesome, but at least it got me here!”
Sujin grins at me, as if she is revealing a finale with a grand twist.
* * *
—
“ANYWAYS, I WAS at Cinderella Clinic this morning for my checkup and I heard that Manager Koo left,” says Sujin on the walk home.
“What?” I’m surprised. Manager Koo has been with them since Dr. Shim first opened Cinderella Clinic. I couldn’t imagine what he would do without her, since she was the one who was always bringing in new patients and convincing old ones to get the latest surgeries. Her signature move was to indicate her face and body with a little flourish and whisper, “I’ve had simply everything done, so you can ask me anything—anything at all and I will be completely honest with you.” She was marvelously compelling, to say the least.
“Yeah, I heard she moved to NVme, that new enormous hospital right off Sinsa Station,” says Sujin. “Cinderella Clinic seems to be in shock because everyone was scrambling when I got there. I guess she didn’t even find a replacement or train them or whatever because I saw the youngest assistant doing a consultation!”
NVme makes sense—it’s the huge new place that everyone is checking out because of an onslaught of recent publicity. I read somewhere that it’s the largest plastic surgery hospital in the world. The photos had shown a marble-covered twenty-story building with a spa in the basement and luxury hotel rooms on the top floors for the foreigners who came to Korea on the plastic surgery packages.
“Anyway, I told Dr. Shim that you’d be perfect for the manager job and he seemed to agree,” says Sujin.
“You what?” I stop walking and stare at her.
“At least, I think he agreed.” She looks stumped for a second, then brightens again.
“Okay, you need to tell me exactly what you said and what he said. Sujin! Are you crazy? Now I can’t go there again!”
An image of Dr. Shim’s stoic, intelligent face floats into my drink-muddled mind and I am aghast.
At the office-tel, I pull Sujin into my apartment. Miho isn’t home yet—she has started going to the studio at night again, fire in her eyes. All I ask is that she doesn’t bring her creepy canvases home. I don’t want to see any renderi
ngs of Nami’s head dangling from a stick or whatever disturbed release she’s working on.
“Go on,” I snap at Sujin.
She walks over to the kitchen and starts pouring some water into a glass. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry I said those things to Dr. Shim, but I was thinking about you and how good you would be at that job and how your madam is so mean, and it would be something different for you, you know? The worst that can happen is they say no,” she says. “All I said was that you were thinking about a job switch and how good you would be at it—after all, you introduced me and several other girls, didn’t you? And Dr. Shim nodded, like this.” She does a decent imitation of him looking brainy and nodding impassively.
I feel color rising in my cheeks as I contemplate what Sujin is saying. Me in a pink blazer, a steel name pin on my lapel, smiling at worried women who want to be looked at with warm eyes. I can’t help thinking I do not know how to handle women. But then again, I do not really know how to handle men, either. I think of all the debt I have piling up.
“Just go meet Dr. Shim and see what he says,” says Sujin, yawning now. She stands up to leave.
“I’m sure they have a thousand résumés pouring in,” I say lightly. “Probably ten thousand. I don’t have a résumé.”
“Yeah, but you are a walking advertisement for their clinic,” she says. “How many surgeries and procedures have you had done there? How many of their patients would apply for this job? I bet you are the only one. Think about it.”
As Sujin turns to go, we hear the beeps of Miho’s door code being punched in and the sound of her front door opening.
“Hello,” Miho says, her head tilting when she sees us. Sujin and I both gasp. Miho’s wild, flowing hair has been cut to her shoulders and she looks like an entirely different person. She looks younger. No, older. No, younger. Chic. Radiant. Shocking.
