“My mom’s not dead. My grandmother is,” I responded. The boy quietly exclaimed, Ohh. He looked around at the other kids, caught some of their eyes, and they snickered together.
“Oh yeah? I’m sorry. Let me ask you again. How did it feel to see your grandma die in front of you?” he asked. Some of the girls booed, Hey, that’s not funny.
“What? You guys wanna know too,” he said, shrugging and raising his hands. His voice was smaller now.
“You want to know?” I asked, but no one replied. Everyone stood still.
“I felt nothing.”
I closed the window and walked into the classroom. The noise returned, but things couldn’t go back to the way they had been a minute ago.
25
That incident made me kind of famous. Of course, not in a good way by normal standards. When I walked down the hallway, the crowd parted like the Red Sea. I heard murmurs here and there. That’s him, that boy. Well, he looks normal. Some of the seniors came all the way to our floor to see me. That’s the boy who was at the murder scene. The boy who saw his family bleeding to death in front of him. But said he felt nothing without batting an eyelash.
The rumors grew bigger and bigger on their own. Kids who claimed they had gone to elementary school or middle school with me said they had borne witness to my strange behavior. The gossip became outrageous, as gossip often does. According to one rumor, I had an IQ over 200. According to another, I would stab anyone who came near me. One even claimed that it was I who killed Mom and Granny.
Mom used to say that every social community needs a scapegoat. She’d given me all this training because she thought I had a very high possibility of becoming one. Now that Mom and Granny were gone, her prediction turned out to be true. The kids quickly realized that I didn’t react to anything they said and started asking me weird questions or more blatantly making fun of me. Without Mom to come up with sample dialogue for every new scenario, I was utterly helpless.
I was a topic at the teachers’ meeting as well. They received calls from parents complaining about how, despite not acting in a visibly strange way, my presence itself was disrupting the class. The teachers didn’t quite understand my situation. A few days later, Dr. Shim came to school and had a long meeting with my homeroom teacher. That evening, he and I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, with jjajangmyeon between us. When we almost finished them, Dr. Shim got to the point after beating around the bush for some time, basically suggesting that school might not be the best place for me.
“Are you saying I should quit school?”
He shook his head. “Nobody can tell you to do that. What I mean is, can you put up with all this kind of treatment until you come of age?”
“I don’t care. You know that, if Mom has told you about me.”
“Your mom wouldn’t want you to be treated this way.”
“Mom wanted me to live a normal life. Sometimes I get confused what that actually means, though.”
“Maybe it means living an ordinary life?”
“Ordinary . . .” I mumbled. To be like others. To be ordinary without having experienced terrible ordeals. To go to school, graduate, and if lucky, go to college and get an okay job and meet a woman I like and get married and have kids . . . things like that. Put differently, to not stand out.
“Parents start out with grand expectations for their kids. But when things don’t go as expected, they just want their kids to be ordinary, thinking it’s simple. But son, being ordinary is the hardest thing to achieve,” he said.
Looking back, Granny must’ve wanted an ordinary life for Mom, too. But Mom didn’t have it. Dr. Shim was right—being ordinary was the trickiest path. Everyone thinks “ordinary” is easy and all, but how many of them would actually fit into the so-called smooth road the word implied? It sure was a lot harder for me, someone who was not born ordinary. That didn’t mean I was extraordinary. I was just a strange boy wandering around somewhere in between. So I decided to give it a try. To become ordinary.
“I want to continue school.” That was the decision I came to that day. Dr. Shim nodded.
“The problem is how. My advice to you is this: remember that the brain grows. The more you use it, the better it becomes. If you use it for bad, you’ll grow a bad brain, but if you use it for good, you’ll have a good brain. I heard certain parts of your brain are weak. But if you practice, you can make them stronger.”
“I have been practicing a lot. Like this.” I pulled the corners of my mouth upward. But I knew my smile didn’t look like other people’s smiles.