Chapter 1 — A Girl with Nothing

Cedar Gap, Arkansas.

Highway 62 came down out of the Ozark foothills, crossed the creek that gave the town its name, and flattened out into a strip of gas stations, a Dollar General, and three churches before climbing again on the far side. The high school sat on that second hill, east of the Walmart Supercenter, which everyone treated as the actual center of town.

Beneath the late-August sun, a girl was pedaling her bike up the hill.

She was a small girl wearing a backpack over both shoulders, the way nobody else at her school wore it. She had straight black hair cut just below her chin and a face still round with the last of childhood. Her eyes were narrow and her expression rarely moved. If she had lived in Los Angeles, or in the suburbs of northern Virginia, she might have disappeared into a crowd. In Cedar Gap, she gave the impression of being the only one of something.

The girl's name was Yeonha Carter. Her teachers pronounced it "Yona," or "Yawna," or gave up halfway and just said "Miss Carter." She had stopped correcting them in ninth grade. Even if she wanted to complain to the people who had given her that name—a Korean mother and an American father, who had each contributed half without consulting anyone—it was no longer possible.

The eleventh-grader Yeonha Carter was, for all practical purposes, alone in the world.

Her father had died in a traffic accident on a highway outside Pyeongtaek when she was six. He had been a civilian contractor at the American base there, a large, quiet man from Arkansas whom she remembered mostly as a smell of coffee and machine oil. Her mother had raised her alone in a small apartment near the base, working through the not-very-large amount of insurance money he left behind, and then, in the spring of Yeonha's third year of middle school, her mother went out saying she was meeting a friend in Incheon and did not come back. She left behind a bank book, the deed to nothing, and a single page of notebook paper that said, in her neat schoolteacher's handwriting, that she was sorry, and that Yeonha should eat properly.

The police classified it as a voluntary disappearance. Adults are allowed to disappear if they want to. Nobody had explained this to Yeonha before, but she learned it quickly.

Her father's parents in Arkansas—grandparents she had met exactly twice, once as a baby and once at the funeral—filed for guardianship through a lawyer in Fayetteville. There was no one on her mother's side to object. By the time the paperwork cleared two courts and one embassy, it was August, and Yeonha started ninth grade at Cedar Gap High School four days after landing at the airport in Tulsa.

The sadness of being abandoned by one's only parent, the kind that got a whole tearful episode in the dramas her mother used to watch, was surprisingly faint, even to her. She and her mother had never talked much when they lived together. It wasn't that she hated her. Yeonha was simply a girl who did not get attached to people.

Her grandparents were kind to her in the way people are kind to a foreign exchange student who is never going home. Her grandmother cooked large dinners and asked if the food was too strange for her. Her grandfather offered her rides in his pickup every morning and accepted, every morning, that she would rather ride her bike. They went to church on Sundays and no longer asked if she wanted to come along. The three of them lived together politely, like tenants sharing a kitchen.

There was no one in her classes she could call a friend. She wasn't in any clubs. Football games were on Friday nights and she had never been to one. She didn't have anything that could really be called a hobby, either.

She had never thought a life with absolutely nothing in it was particularly inconvenient.

The bike she was pedaling was an eighty-nine-dollar Huffy from the Walmart, bought with the first month of the survivor benefit that arrived from the government on the third of every month—her father's last, punctual contribution to her upbringing. Her grandparents put the rest into an account with her name on it and told her it was hers for college. Nobody at Cedar Gap High rode a bike to school. The moment they turned sixteen, everyone drove: hand-me-down pickups, dented Civics, one boy's enormous lifted truck that could be heard from a quarter mile away. Riding a bike on the shoulder of a highway with no sidewalk, in the wet August heat, with the cicadas roaring in the trees like static, was something only she did.

A pickup passed her, close enough that its mirror stirred her hair, and climbed the hill toward the student parking lot. She wondered, faintly, whether it would be fun to live that kind of loud life. Then she stopped wondering and kept pedaling.

Every morning she packed her own lunch—rice, whatever was left over, folded into a container her mother had once used—because the cafeteria food was cheap but not free, and she was saving even that money, though she couldn't have said what for. Lately she had started to become aware of the fact that she had nothing. No family she was attached to, no friends, no plans for after graduation. The things that could be called pleasures in her life amounted to listening to the radio in her room and taking imaginary trips on the map app on her phone, at most.

It happened in the morning, before first period.

She was locking her bike to the rack by the gym—a rack that existed, as far as she could tell, entirely for her—when she heard it. Through the propped-open side door of the band hall, over the ordinary noise of the parking lot, came the sound of an electric guitar.

It was not a song. Whoever it was played the same short phrase over and over, five notes, stumbling in the same place each time, then getting through it clean, then stumbling again. The sound was thin and bright and slightly ragged, like a voice. It cut through the humidity in a way nothing else in Cedar Gap did.

Yeonha stood by the bike rack holding her lock and listened until the first bell rang.

That kid has a guitar, she thought, walking to class. Whoever it was, they were different from her, who had nothing. The bike she rode every day was just a tool for getting to school and to the Walmart. It wasn't anything to her. It didn't change her empty life.

She wondered if having that thing called a guitar would change anything.

School ended without her feeling that she had gained anything in particular, and Yeonha went out to the bike rack. Through the band hall windows she could see the shapes of instrument cases stacked on shelves, and along one wall, three or four guitar cases standing upright, leaning together like people waiting for a bus. She looked at them for a while. With Yeonha's knowledge, all she knew about guitars was that they were something that cost a certain amount of money.

Instead of turning left out of the parking lot toward her grandparents' house, she turned right, down the hill, onto the frontage road that ran along the bypass toward Rogers. She didn't really have a goal in mind. The frontage road was flat, and the evening air moving past her face was easier to ride through than the hill she climbed every day. Or maybe there was something down this road that would make her stop caring about hills at all.

She rode for a few miles past car dealerships and a Sonic and a tractor supply store, and stopped her bike in front of a building.

It was a big box of a building, red and white, slightly out of proportion with everything around it, sitting in a half-empty parking lot at the end of a strip mall. The sign had a picture of a guitar on it. Cold air leaked out through the glass double doors, carrying the smell of carpet and the sound of somebody, somewhere inside, playing something badly.

Yeonha put down her kickstand, and began to look at the guitars hanging in the window, starting from the edge.

차용 목록 (Borrowed from Super Cub, vol. 1 ch. 1)

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