Page 27 of Free Fall #1

“Mosquitoes love me,” Sejin says as he comes over and squats beside me, watching as I stir the pot over the camp stove.

“I get enormous welts from them. Always have. I read somewhere once, back when I was still in college, that lots of kids who’ve been adopted from other countries have that reaction to American mosquitoes.

There’s a theory that human bodies become biologically adapted to the mosquitoes from the area where our ancestors are from so they don’t react as strongly to the mosquitoes from those areas.

But if we move or are transplanted, then our bodies react super-strongly to the mosquitoes native to the new area because we don’t have the resistance built in for it. ”

“Huh,” I say. “Did you react more or less strongly to the mosquitos back home?”

“In West Virginia?”

“Yeah.”

“The same. There’s been no big change. It’s not like it’s worse since I moved out here to California.”

Sejin settles in next to me, and I want to scoot closer so I can feel the heat of his body alongside mine, but I stay where I am for now, intent on making sure I don’t burn the chili. I did that once, and it’d tasted pretty foul.

“But it’s all anecdotal as far as I can tell,” Sejin goes on. “I mean, I’m not sure if there’s any actual science to back it up. Plus, it was forever ago that I read it. I don’t even remember if I saw it online, like on Tumblr or something, or in a research journal for my studies.”

“What were your studies?”

“Psychology, and then Education—enough hours to get the certifications I need to work with kids—and then I dropped out.”

“Ah.”

“How about you? Any college?”

“No.” I shake my head.

“Just high school then?”

I laugh. “Not even.”

“Really?”

I shrug. “What’s the point of it all anyway? I got what I needed from school, which wasn’t much, and went on my way.”

“Huh.”

He sounds skeptical, so I say, “Don’t get me wrong, education is important, but how that education is achieved isn’t.”

“Except when it comes to applying for jobs. I don’t know how many listings I’ve seen that require a B.A. at a minimum and grad school if you want something that pays decent.”

“Jobs schmobs. The whole thing is a scam.”

Sejin laughs. “Spoken like the true rebel I suspected you would turn out to be.”

“It’s not about being rebellious. It’s about time and how little of it we have in this life. Why waste it doing things that are pointless and useless?”

“High school is pointless and useless?”

“It can be. Just consider…when’s the last time you solved a geometry proof in your life?

When’s the last time you needed to know the name of every element?

When’s the last time all those years spent at those desks, being spoon-fed information that you’ll never need, felt worthwhile?

Isn’t there something you would have rather been doing?

Listening to KPop or traveling or something? ”

Sejin stares at the fire in the stove and then nods. “I’d have spent more time with my mom.”

“Oh? You a mama’s boy?” I ask.

“Was. I was a mama’s boy,” he says. “She died, remember?”

“Oh. Right.” I recall that he’d mentioned that before and feel guilty that I forgot.

I don’t know what to say about it either.

I never had a mother to call my own, but people seem really attached to theirs most of the time.

I imagine how I’d feel if Peggy Jo died.

It’s not a great feeling. I put my hand on his shoulder. “That sucks.”

“It does,” he agrees. His black lashes glow like gold in the firelight, and I squeeze his arm. He smiles with closed lips and doesn’t look at me. “What about your family?”

“Don’t have one,” I say, removing my hand and going back to stirring the canned chili. It’s steaming now, and ready to be served over the chips I’ve brought, sprinkled, of course, with cheese. Impromptu camp nachos.

“No?” Sejin asks. “Like no family at all?” Again, he sounds skeptical. Which makes sense. It takes a certain amount of effort in life to end up with absolutely no family. I’m not going to lie and say there was zero choice involved for me, but at the same time there were circumstances.

“To pervert Oscar Wilde, losing one parent—like you have—can be seen as a misfortune, but losing an entire family starts to look like carelessness. Did I guess where your skepticism is coming from?” I open the chips and dump a goodly amount into two biggish bowls I’ve brought, and then grab the bag of grated cheese from the supplies.

When we’re done here, I’ll have to secure all of this well to prevent any bears or other animals from moseying up the back way while we’re out here tonight.

“No, no, of course not,” Sejin says. “I’m just trying to imagine life with no family. Mine’s pretty big. Sixteen cousins, half a dozen aunts, a bunch of uncles, and loads of meddling. You really have no one?”

“No one at all.”

“How…” He clears his throat, watching me stir the chili some more. Then I guess he decides to just go for it, and I admire that he has the balls to ask. “How did that happen?”

“Ah, it just kind of did.” I add as an aside, “Remember, I never claimed to be a good cook.”

I use a big serving spoon scavenged from the depths of my silverware drawer back in my van to scoop the goop over the bowls of chips.

“But I guess it all began when my mother abandoned me sometime after my sixth birthday, and I got passed around twelve or so different foster homes before I finally just set out on my own a few months before I turned eighteen.”

“Twelve homes? Over eleven years?”

“Yup. My cute little mug didn’t seem to stir their hearts enough to make up for my weirdness, I guess.”

“I’m…sorry.”

“Cheese okay?” I sprinkle it on liberally when he nods, and then pass the bowl over to him, along with a spoon to grab whatever the chips don’t hold.

“I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, to be honest, so it’s probably okay.

I remember almost nothing of my mother, except that she had long brown hair.

I think? I’m not even sure of that. In fact, I don’t remember much of anything until my second or third foster home. ”

“Wow. What do you remember from there?”

“Eating rocks.”

Sejin blinks at me as he tries to process what I’ve just said. “Did you say eating rocks?”

“Yeah. I used to take handfuls of the gravel from their driveway, put it in my mouth, kind of chew it around, and then spit it out again.” I take a big bite of nachos, enough to keep me from having to talk for a few seconds, and he does the same.

“Was it pica?” he asks, once he swallows. “You know, some nutritional deficiency that made you want to put rocks in your mouth?”

“Maybe. I mean, I wasn’t getting a lot of nourishment back then for a lot of reasons. It was hard to get me to eat. I was super picky.”

“I was picky when I was young too. Nothing but my mom’s PB&J would do for lunches. I must have eaten three thousand of them.”

“What about you?” I ask, glad to change the topic to him. “What do you remember from Korea?”

“Korea? Oh, nothing.” He shakes his head.

“I was brought over when I was eight months old. My parents picked me up from the airport. They had me delivered to them, basically. They used to joke that they should have named me Air-Mail.” He laughs, and his eyes do that half-moon thing.

“Anyway, there was a woman who took me from my foster mother in Korea and delivered me to my parents in West Virginia. I remember none of that. My first memory is of my grandfather dangling my feet in the Pocatalico river—that’s a little river near to where I grew up, and close to my grandparents’ house. I was probably three.”

“Were they a white family?” I ask, though I suspect I know the answer.

“Yep. Good ol’ redneck white Appalachians,” he says.

“I was the only non-white person in my family and, like I said, it was a big family.” He pops a nacho in his mouth, seeming to consider as he chews.

“Another early memory I have is of being in a crowd of my girl cousins, all of them arguing over who got to pretend I was their baby, and all of them kissing me—cheeks, head, arms—until I started to cry. They smothered me with love!” He laughs, and my heart lightens.

Sejin might have lost his mom, but it’s obvious the concept of family isn’t the dead space that it is for me.

“Did you feel different? Growing up non-white in an all-white family?”

“Sometimes. I remember wondering why my skin was darker than everyone else’s, why my eyes had a different shape, but I didn’t worry too much about it.

My mom and dad were upfront about my adoption—I mean they kind of had to be—so I knew that I looked different from the rest of the family because I was born in another country.

I know other kids in my situation might have had more problems with the whole thing than I did, but sometimes I think that’s a failure in myself, you know? ”

“Explain,” I say, scooping up chili with my chip, and putting it into my mouth. The flavor isn’t as smoky as when I’ve made it over a campfire and not a stove, but it’s still tasty and hot.

“Like…okay, a year or so ago, I was watching some KPop music videos on YouTube and this related video came up in my Recommended. It was called something like ‘Korean Kids Adopted Into American Families: The Truth,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, this is about me!’ So, I watched it…and, I don’t know…”

He shakes his head, eats another nacho, and then shakes his head again. “It just made me feel more isolated and alone than I ever had before.”

“Why?”