Chicago

Chicago It had been a year since Tae had last seen a Russian boy named Valentine Zhdanov. There had been a falling out between them and he had left Atlantis Academy despite the boy’s pleas for him to stay; there was no chance of reconciliation between them and he had known that remaining would only cause him pain. So he had left Val kneeling on the floor of his dormitory room, dark head bowed with defeat, and had fled to Korea. This was the first time he had even been back in the United States since then, and he wasn’t even anywhere near the city that the academy had been in… but just this country reminded him of the boy he had left behind. His credits had transferred to a school in Seoul and he had just recently graduated; some of his friends had decided that, in celebration of their graduation, they would go to the States and visit some of the more amusing cities there, starting with New York and working their way to the West Coast. They had just gotten to Chicago and checked in at the Ambassador East Hotel, and decided to go and see some of what the city had to offer. There was supposed to be some good nightlife around, along with some exceptional theater and restaurants and other such things that metropolitan areas were famous for. They had tickets for that very night at the Ford Oriental Theatre. Val had liked the theater. Tae shook his silver head to clear those kinds of thoughts from his mind. He hadn’t seen Val in a long time, and, in the first few weeks after transferring, his mind had strayed to the Russian boy often… but in time the thoughts grew less and less frequent until he did not think of him much at all, and only then in passing. The memories of Val were like an old scar, one that had long since healed and ceased to ache, and was given perhaps a cursory glance whenever he remembered it, but was otherwise unnoticed and disregarded. As he walked through the streets of this American city, however, with his loud and boisterous friends around him, he couldn’t help but think of the dark-haired Russian, wondering where he was and what he was doing. There was a fond image in his head of a studious boy sitting at his desk with books and papers spread around him like white feathers cast from some giant bird’s wing, his pen marring their surfaces with small, neat handwriting that was only half in English. Or perhaps he was in a lab, wearing clear plastic goggles and a white lab coat, latex gloves leaving a snowy powder on his pale hands as he mixed chemicals, murmuring under his breath as he filled a notebook with data and observations. They were walking down some main street—Tae didn’t know which—when, out of the loud, blaring traffic, a bus pulled over as they waited at a corner to let out its load of people. The Korean boy watched the misfits and miscreants as they poured out of the vehicle and onto the sidewalk, then headed on their way to be swallowed up by the crowds in the city. Some were young, hardly in their teens, and some were as aged and wrinkled as fruit left out too long in the sun. The last

one to get off the bus was a boy, perhaps in late teens or early twenties, though much of his face was concealed by a dark, loose-fit zippered hoodie, the hood pulled up to cover his head. Black hair fell long and lank to cover the left half of his face, a veil of inky locks thick enough to be impenetrable by the naked eye. As he got off he looked down the street past the group of Koreans, gathering his bearings, and… paused. He was staring at the group, and at first Tae thought it was because of the strange silver hair that some of them possessed; and then he saw that the one eye that he could see on that boy was gunmetal grey, and his cheekbones were high and his nose was straight and noble, and his lips were an altogether too-familiar shape. And there was a jagged scar running across the bridge of his nose and along one cheek, deep and uneven like the long stroke of a knife, ending somewhere down his neck near the collar of his shirt. Before Tae could open his mouth to speak, the boy had turned and walked into the crowds, quickly becoming lost amongst the seething sea of humanity. Then the crosswalk light turned green and his friends called for him to follow, and his lips formed a name that he had not spoken in a year’s time, though his voice was swallowed up by the noises around him. “Val…” -The next day Tae had managed to slip away from his friends to find that intersection that he had been at the day before—the corner of LaSalle and West Division Street—and waited for the bus to pull up alongside the sidewalk. It was around four in the afternoon, and that was right around when this vehicle had come before, dropping off that one boy who looked far too familiar for coincidence. So Tae waited, anxiously, spurred to see the Russian that he had left behind for some reason, telling himself that it was just to make sure that he was doing all right. After all, he was a long way from Salt Lake City, where Atlantis Academy had been… Was he still in university? Had he simply transferred as Tae himself did, moving to another location to get away from the travesty that had occurred there? Or did he… just run away, disappearing into another city, blending in with the thousands upon thousands of faces in the crowd, in order to avoid his problems? Perhaps there wasn’t much of a difference between the two options. And, again, the last person off of the bus was a dark-haired boy in a dark hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up to obscure his face. As he stepped onto the sidewalk he noticed Tae, the bright silver of his hair obvious in the crowd, and quickly turned to leave; the Korean boy was quicker, though, and darted forward to grasp his wrist, stopping him before he could disappear. He felt the boy’s wrist twist in his grip but he did not break free, though he kept his face turned away and hidden. He smelled like cigarette smoke and Tae could see the whitish packet

sticking out from one of his pockets, the rebirth of a bad habit. At least he appeared sober—that much was certain. “Val.” The wrist in his hand twitched, as though considering pulling away and making a break for it. Val remained still, however, as though waiting for something else to be said, for some explanation as to why the Korean boy had suddenly returned from his long absence. Tae moved a step closer, his other hand clasping Val’s wrist and feeling the thick material of his sweatshirt that covered his arm. “Val, please don’t run.” Tae’s hands tightened their grip a fraction, as though he could prevent the boy from running off. “Look at me.” Slowly the boy turned his head back towards the Korean, his dark hair still covering the left side of his face, the hood shadowing most of his other features. There was that long scar over his face, ivory-pale and tough, like a bolt of white-hot lightning streaking across his cheek and neck. Val’s face, once unmarred and handsome, was now sullied by the appearance of that imperfection, the rigid and inflexible tissue that knit what once must have been a deep and terrible gash together so that he was whole again. And behind that dangling curtain of ink-black hair… Val jerked back when Tae’s hand rose to brush the thick locks aside, and the Korean boy hesitated for a fraction of a second before letting it drop. He felt that there was something hidden behind the dark veil, but he did not dare to try to lift it without Val’s permission. Whatever lay behind it was his, if anything was even there at all, and it was not Tae’s place anymore to interfere. They were not lovers, after all. “What are you doing here?” Val’s lips twisted into something like a smile, but it was bitter and bore little resemblance to the smiles that the silver-haired boy had seen on his face before. It seemed to bring out the harsh angles of his face, the cold lines that weren’t there a year ago but seemed to have sprung up like weeds, robbing his features of their youth. “I’m doing what everyone else is doing. Just trying to go home,” he said, his voice rough and cigarette-stained. Apparently the smoking habit had come back with a vengeance. “What brings you to Chicago? I thought you were in Korea.” “Friends,” Tae replied, his grip loosening slightly on the Russian’s wrist. “We’re here to celebrate graduation.” His eyes fell to the dark fabric of the sweatshirt, gazing down at it as though it were something interesting. “Are you still in…?”

“Dropped out a year ago,” Val said glibly, finally sliding his hand out of the Korean boy’s grasp. He made it sound nonchalant, as though he was discussing nothing more serious than the weather or the traffic. All around them, the crowds drifted by like water, rushing past with all of the apathy and relentlessness of a river. Then, shifting almost awkwardly, his mouth opened to speak again. “You know, I-…” “Let’s get something to eat,” Tae blurted, interrupting Val before he could finish that sentence that would undoubtedly have ended with ‘have to go’. The mention of eating seemed to make the Russian boy hesitate, as though considering that option very heavily; Tae wished he hadn’t seen the glimmer of what looked like hunger in the other boy’s eye. “It’ll be my treat. Then we can catch up a little bit.” That finally seemed to win him over, and Val gave a little nod of his head to indicate that he agreed. There had been a diner a little way back down the street, and it seemed as though it was nice enough and would provide decent food… so he mentioned it, and when Val gave a little shrug he assumed that it meant it was all right. The place was called Joe Mamma’s, a terrible pun of a name, but they were seated quickly and it was appreciably kitschy inside, the walls covered in pictures and miscellaneous objects to provide points of interest. They were next to a wall that contained, among other things, a few pictures of Marilyn Monroe and a guitar that, if it was to be trusted, had been signed by Mötley Crüe. A waitress approached wearing black pants and a horribly bright teal polo shirt with the name and logo of the diner emblazoned on it; it clashed vibrantly with the cherry-red suspenders that looped over her shoulders, covered in various pieces of flair. Her hair, a processed bleach-blonde, was piled up in a messy bun on the back of her head, but despite all she flashed a bright smile and asked if there was anything they’d like to drink. Her nametag beamed that her name was Katie in multicolored block letters. After a few moments she returned with coffee for Val and water for Tae before giving them a few minutes to look over the plastic-covered menus, and the Korean boy finally had the chance to look over the Russian who sat across from him. Val had pulled down his hood while they were in the diner, exposing his face and hair to some extent. The dark locks were far longer than he remembered, coming down probably to nearly shoulder-length, but pulled back for the moment in a messy ponytail at the base of his neck. Only his bangs hung free, the ones on the right side of his face tucked behind one metal-studded ear, the ones on the left concealing half his features. His right eyebrow was pierced through with two rings and a silvery metallic stud protruded slightly from his bottom lip. The entirety of his face did not look much different from before if all of the new metallic additions were disregarded, though there did seem to be a thinness there that wasn’t present a year ago. His cheekbones were maybe a little more prominent, his visible grey eye

perhaps a little more deep-set and ringed with a bruise-dark circle, as though he hadn’t been getting much sleep. The Russian boy had always had pale skin, but there seemed to be a hint of a sallow color to it now, just a few shades off from the porcelain-white that Tae remembered. And, of course, there was the long scar that ran along his face, winding in a serpentine trail down his neck until it disappeared beneath his collar. As a whole, he did not look as though he was floundering, but he did not quite look like the strong and vibrant boy that lived at the academy. Tae imagined, though, that Val had looked similar to this some years ago in St. Petersburg, when he had been living on his own at sixteen. At least he had the experience, if that was any comfort, of living by his own means, and had a better idea of how to survive in a rough town on little spare cash. And Val certainly looked tough now, the hands that held the slick plastic menu covered in calluses and his knuckles scabbed over as though he had recently thrown a punch and split them open. The Korean boy did not remember what he ordered, but had likely just arbitrarily picked something off of the menu, just taken whatever his eyes had happened to fall on. He wasn’t surprised when Val got a Reuben, remembering that it was one of his favorite sandwiches and mentally pulling away from the memory. Across from him, the Russian boy sat quietly, sipping gently on his cup of bitter black coffee as though it was the aqua vitae. That one grey eye was watching him sometimes, when Val thought that Tae wasn’t looking, but would quickly dart away whenever he did; the dark-haired boy swallowed another sip of his coffee, but the liquid felt suddenly thick in his throat. He was nervous, even though he was outwardly composed. Val hadn’t expected for Tae to turn up in an American city, especially not the city that he was in, just standing at the crosswalk by the bus that he got off of every day when he came back from his tedious eight-to-four job as a cashier at a mall he could never shop in. At least the tawdry store he worked at liked their employees to be pierced and tattooed; it was the kind that sold to the suburban teens who wanted to appear rebellious by swiping their mother’s credit card and spending more than Val’s entire two-week paycheck on a whim. What were the odds, though, that this boy would come to this city at this time, just at the right moment to catch sight of one particular dark-haired Russian as he stepped off of a city bus? There were a thousand street corners that Tae could have been standing at, but he had to be at the one that Val walked by every day. And, what was worse, he had to come back the next day to catch him as he got off the damned thing, instead of just leaving well enough alone. Val’s hands gripped the white mug a little tighter, the heat nearly burning his palms. Tae was the one who had left, he was the one that had abandoned the Russian boy when he had begged for him to stay. Granted, there were more than enough reasons for him to leave, and Val couldn’t feel any enmity for him because

he had left. It was the returning that irritated him, the fact that he had approached him and talked to him and asked him to come to a late lunch or early dinner or whatever this was. They didn’t have anything to talk about, and Val sure as hell didn’t want to start explaining his life to this boy. The last thing he wanted was to be criticized and judged by another person, someone else who had no idea of what had gone on in his life, who had no right to pass judgment on him and would anyway. “How have you been doing?” The question was spoken tentatively, as though trying not to breach any bad subjects. Val gave a little shrug. “I can’t complain. I’ve been doing well enough for myself.” He sipped the coffee again; it wasn’t very good, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, or however the saying went. Coffee was coffee and he didn’t get enough of it to be picky. “You?” “Good, I suppose,” the silver-haired boy replied, one fingertip sliding up and down the slick side of his glass. The condensation made a little squeaking sound as he moved it along. “I graduated, sent out a few resumes to see if I can get a job. I’ll be in Chicago for two or three more days, then we’re going down to San Antonio.” Val gave a little nod as though it was interesting, though he was really only half paying attention. All around him there were tantalizing smells of all sorts of food being served, and it was like a slow, merciless torture; he hadn’t eaten for the past three days. His stomach was starved and there were people eating on every side, and he could hear the sound of food sizzling each time the door opened to the kitchen, and it was going to drive him mad if he couldn’t get something into his stomach soon. Coffee could hardly take the edge off of it, but it was better than nothing… and better than the tap water in his run-down, rat-infested apartment. It was a miracle that the water hadn’t been shut off yet, because he knew he was at least a month behind on the payment, if not more. The phone service had been cut off about four months ago, and the electric company was starting to send him letters of increasing hostility. In all likelihood he could use all the unpaid heating bills as fuel during the winter to keep the place warm—not like it would take much, since there were probably prison cells that were larger than his apartment. Hell, there were closets bigger than his shithole, but it was his, and it kept the rain off of his head, so it was good enough. And it wasn’t as though there was any food in his pantry for the rats to steal, and he had managed to scrape together enough money to get some zinc phosphide to lay down as poison, mixing it with some peanut butter as bait. He hadn’t seen as many of the rodents now as there were when he moved in. He had apologized when he laid the poison down.

After a few more minutes of awkward silence the food came; it took nearly all of Val’s willpower not to start eating like a starving man, which, coincidentally, he was. He tried to take small bites, like a normal person, eating at a normal pace. His sandwich wasn’t going anywhere. And it tasted like the most incredible, delicious reuben that he had ever had, even though he knew that the food here wasn’t five-star cuisine and the place really wasn’t much more than a cheap diner serving cheap fare. But, oh God, it was food, real food, sustenance for his aching belly. And he had coffee to cure the caffeine jitters, and maybe take the edge of the nicotine ones. He hadn’t gotten a chance to smoke yet today, and he was feeling the effects. When the check came, Tae took care of it, paying with some platinum credit card that likely carried a balance on it that was more than anything Val had ever had. But the Korean boy had always been wealthy, and Val had always been poor— it was something both of them were used to. For a vicious moment Val wondered how well Tae would do if their places were switched, if he, the Korean boy who always wore designer clothes and ate chocolate with every meal, could survive living in Val’s shithole, slum apartment on his four hundred dollar paycheck, barely enough to even make rent, nevertheless pay for food and water and electricity. But then he realized that he was thinking of cruel things, that he wouldn’t have wanted Tae to have to try to live like that. He didn’t want anyone to live like him, to know that ends would never, never meet regardless of how hard he tried. He went to bed hungry every night but was too stubborn and proud to go on welfare, to accept handouts or pity from anyone. So there was something else that he turned to that he knew well. He would just never tell Tae about it. The Korean boy would only worry about him, and there was no reason to trouble his mind with that sort of thing. The check returned in the little black sleeve, carrying with it that platinum credit card, the balance probably hardly changing after paying for their cheap little meal.