Chapter 3

Chapter 3

They all wanted to stay, and none of them could stand the thought of anyone else staying.

There really wasn’t enough room at my place for that many people, so in the end, they dragged and shoved at one another until they left.

Of course, even if they had wanted to stay, I wouldn’t have agreed.

Not a single one of them seemed to care what I thought, even though I was now the owner of this house.

After closing the door, I went back to my parents’ bedroom. So many of their things were still there, exactly the same as before, as if the two of them had only gone away on a business trip.

But I knew very well they would never come back.

Grief seemed to come with a delay. Only now did it surge up, raw and blunt.

I sat on the floor, hugging my knees, tears spilling from my eyes as an immense sorrow swallowed me whole.

In all my seventeen years, I had never felt this lonely. The stable, happy life I’d had, or thought I’d had, shattered completely like the moon’s reflection on water.

I hated the driver who caused the accident. Hated him for drunk driving. Hated that he wasn’t the one who died.

But aside from going to prison and paying compensation, he could never give me back my living, breathing parents.

My tears fell like they cost nothing, and I couldn’t stop them.

This house clearly had only me left in it, but I still didn’t dare wail out loud. I could only curl up in the corner and sob.

After that day, I went back to school.

But those relatives had no intention of letting go of a fat sheep like me.

For the sake of money, they didn’t even go back to the village. They rented cheap places nearby and came over every so often to harass me.

At first, they still spoke nicely, saying they wanted to take care of me. Then my eldest uncle brought up how my older cousin needed to buy a house so he could get married and asked to borrow money from me. My maternal uncle said he wanted to buy a car. My younger aunt said her child wanted to move into the city for school.

As if they had planned it in advance, each of them found their own way to dig money out of my pocket, without ever considering that the money had been bought with their own siblings’ lives.

They knew how to play the victim. Naturally, so did I.

So at last, they stopped pretending. They began trying to guilt-trip me, accusing me of being an ungrateful wretch.

At times like that, I was almost grateful that both sets of my grandparents had passed away long ago.

Every now and then, I would see them outside my door, as if I were the debtor and they were the creditors.

This couldn’t go on.

I was sick of it.

So, one weekend afternoon, I knocked on my next-door neighbor’s door.

When he opened it, he was shirtless, with short, messy hair, looking like he had only just woken up. A tattoo on his right arm climbed all the way up to his chest. From the pattern, it looked like a dragon.

He looked like someone you really didn’t want to mess with.

“Hey, bro,” I said, forcing down the nerves in my chest. “Are you, like… in a gang?”