Fox Girl Read Online Free PDF

not Sookie’s. It was instead an ageless mask, cool and deadly, capable of swallowing the jewel of a man’s soul.
    Â 
    One Thursday, no sheets were hanging in the yard. Thinking Duk Hee must have snuck in a boyfriend, Sookie and I waited in the ditch, kicking away a pile of rotting lettuce leaves and fish bones to set up a game of seesaw in the dust. We pried a board loose from the shed Crazy Lady Li slept in at night and balanced it across a brick. We jumped for a while in the hot sun, until we were too thirsty to continue. Dragging our feet through the gray dirt to Sookie’s apartment, we peered through the kitchen window, but couldn’t see much through the boards; it was too dark. We stomped around the building, shouting at each other—“We’re home from school now!” and “It must be past dinnertime!” hoping Sookie’s mother or her Joe would at least throw down some won for us to leave.
    When one of Sookie’s neighbors—a yong sekshi who had just started working at the same bar as Sookie’s mother—opened her window and threw water on us, I called her a fat hippo whore.
    The GI girl waggled her butt at us. “See me, see yourself,” she sneered and slammed her window shut.
    I wanted to pound on that girl’s door, then on her face when she opened it, but Sookie stopped me from marching over there. “Stop fooling around,” she scolded. “Something’s wrong.”
    Sookie hit the door of her own apartment with the brick we had used to balance the seesaw and splintered the frame by the doorknob. After pushing our way in, we were forced to realize the room was empty. “Omoni,” Sookie called out in the darkness. “Omoni!”
    We lit a lamp. Our faces looked sharp and ghostly. “I have to go home,” I whispered.
    Sookie nodded. I didn’t move.
    â€œGo on, Hyun Jin,” she said, lifting her chin toward the broken door. “It’s okay.”
    â€œOne of her boyfriends probably asked for her at the club,” I offered. “And she had to go, right?”
    We both knew she wouldn’t have worked at the clubs on the day she checked in at the clinic. It was against official policy. But Sookie said, “Right, She’ll be home soon or in the morning, like always.”
    â€œI’ll meet you here before school,” I said, though I didn’t need to remind her of our established routine.
    Sookie turned away from me, leaving me in the dark room. I wanted to ask her to come home with me, to eat with me at my house. But I knew and she knew my mother didn’t like to feed her. “Stray cats will keep coming back if you feed them,” my mother always said about Sookie, though not in front of my father. My father had a soft spot for my friend. But I knew he wouldn’t stand up for her against my mother. My mother was the head of the house and the kitchen; she was the boss of the food.
    When I stopped at her house the next day for school, the door was wide open. Sookie lay sleeping in the middle of the floor, the lamp still burning dimly by her head. She hadn’t bothered to lay out her blankets and the ondol floor was cold. She hadn’t even bothered to fire up the heater before curling in on herself like a wounded animal.
    â€œSookie,” I whispered. Clearing my throat of its scratchy worry, I tried again, louder: “Sookie, time for school.” I shook her shoulder, tickled her toes. She kicked out at me, then growled. “Shushushu,” I crooned. I sat cross-legged behind her and stroked her hair. I thought I heard her whimper. I hugged her, trying to pull her into my lap. We were the same size, but she made herself as small as possible to fit across my legs. I stroked her, humming softly. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I crooned even though I was afraid, too. I kept thinking what her mother had told us: that we were in the midst of a war, and that