A young girl wakes up in the morning and looks around the room. Is she expecting something or someone to be there? Does she think the room will be different than when she went to sleep the night before? She falls back asleep for a few minutes, but her alarm goes off and she wakes up again. She turns on the light and we see her face clearly for the first time – she appears to be about 15 years old, with long black hair and bangs which go just below her eyebrows. She’s wearing an oversized red t-shirt with a big yellow star on the front. She looks over at the clock, even though she knows what time it is: 7:30AM.
Her name is Hye-Jin. It’s Saturday, and there was no need to wake up so early, but she thought it would be a good idea to get an early start. Now she’s not so sure, but what’s done is done. She gets up and walks out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. She’s unconcerned about noise, scraping her flip-flops across the floor as she walks. She lives alone, so who cares? If she wakes up her stupid neighbors, big deal? They were jerks. In the bathroom, she brushes her teeth, splashes water on her face, and washes her hands thoroughly. Despite the fact that she washed and sanitized her hands frequently and with all types of products, she never let anything except water and lotion touch her face. She had a big problem with acne a year ago and tried all kinds of products, but none of them worked. Finally, she just gave up and it got better. After that, she decided that simple was best –and it was much cheaper, anyway.
After her morning toilet (she loved that expression) she went back into the kitchen for a little snack (toast, iced tea, and an Oreo cookie) and then went back to her bedroom to get dressed. She tried to meditate and sit on the edge of her bed for a few minutes, but she got bored. Oh, well. Skirt, Converse sneakers, some kind of shirt. That didn’t look right, so she put on jeans and a sweater. The sweater was just tight enough to imply that she had something to show, but loose enough to not really show it. Not that she was worried about having small breasts for a 15 year old – she was just worried about people realizing she was 15. She shouldn’t be living here alone in an apartment in New York and working at Starbucks if she was a 15 year old girl from Korea, but she was. Anyway, what was she going to do today? It was her first Saturday off in months and she had no idea how to spend it. Her friends would be asleep for hours, and her coworkers were stuck behind the bar making cappuccinos and lattes for the early morning laptop crowd. At 8:05AM, she walks out the door and takes the elevator downstairs, unlocks her bike, jumps on and rides away.
She rides down First Avenue from 21st Street all the way to Houston against the traffic. At Houston Street, she turns left and heads east, but then changes her mind and makes a U-turn. She bikes up Houston all the way to Sixth Avenue, and then heads uptown, eventually making her way to Jane Street. She bikes to the river and checks out some piers, slowly riding up and down streets she’s never been to. She buys a coffee in a deli and drinks it on a stoop and thinks about her life.
One year ago, just before her 15th birthday, she went to America on a school trip. She visited Hawaii, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York. The night before she was supposed to come home, she slipped out of the hotel and went to a bar with one of her friends. They didn’t have any idea about where to go, so they walked downtown and tried to act like they had a destination. Along the way they stopped in a store for cigarettes and met a guy who took them to a bar on Avenue B. When the bar closed, Hye-Jin’s friend went back to the hotel and Hye-Jin didn’t. At the time, it felt like a perfectly natural thing to do (although her friend freaked out about it). Tell everyone I ran away, she told her friend.
She went home with the guy and spent the next few weeks hanging out in his apartment. She emailed her parents every day (from a proxy server, even though she was pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to trace it) and told them she was perfectly OK. Of course, they were frantic and insisted that she come home, but she held her ground. She knew her parents and the police and Interpol and who knew who else was looking for her, but how hard is it for a Korean girl to slip under the radar in New York City? Pretty easy, that’s how hard it is. For the first month she stayed home most of the time, anyway.
The guy went to college out of state and was going to sublet his apartment, but he let Hye-Jin stay there and pay half the rent. She got a fake ID in Chinatown and got a job at Starbucks, and told her parents she was in California. She had no idea whether they believed her or not, but after about six months she stopped being paranoid around cops and slipped into life in the city. She told her neighbors she was 18 years old and a foreign student studying at SVA, and they seemed to believe her. Her English was better than it would have been had she stayed in Korea studying all day and all night, and her parents always pushed her to study English anyway. In a weird way, she thought her parents might be happy knowing her English was so good. As long as she was safe (she kept emailing them almost every other day) they were probably happy.
The coffee finished, she walks her bike back to the deli, buys a newspaper and sees the headline, something about a shooting at a college in Virginia. Then she notices the picture on the cover of every paper on the rack and a chill comes over her. The guy on the cover is him. Before she has time to react, a man grabs her from behind and slaps a pair of handcuffs on her, as the bike and the newspaper fall to the sidewalk. The man throws her into the back of an unmarked car and sits next to her as they speed off. We finally got you, Hye-Jin, the driver tells her – it’s time to go back to Korea.
