My Seoul Man

Chapter 19

AJ only managed to make one quick phone call from an actual broom closet at the big arena where the first fan meeting was going to be held.

He said, "We have exactly 60 seconds if we're lucky so please don't say anything that'll make me miss you even more than I've been missing you all day, okay?"

So I chuckled and said, "There's raw sewage spewing out of all the toilets at our old school."

"Okay, mission accomplished. But what the fuck?"

I didn't tell him about the job stuff. I just wanted to make him laugh. So I told him how that poor woman had gotten sloshed with shit—anything that would amuse and not worry him.

But after that, I'd kind of sleepwalked my way through the rest of my workday. Feeling all kinds of mixed emotions...

I needed my Mama Sadie so bad. I want to sit down at the kitchen table and shuck some peas. We did that like some people finger rosary beads, you know? It calmed and centered us.

So after school I went over and stretched out between two rows of collards in Sadie's garden the way I often had when the world got too weird or too wonderful for me to handle.

Took out my cell wanting to stare at a picture of AJ and wound up laughing my ass off at this very goofy Korean TV show he'd told me how to find on this Viki app where I could see all his appearances on shows and dramas.

This show was set in what looked like a little classroom where all these grown men dressed in school uniforms made celebrities—also dressed in uniforms--say and do things that didn't make any sense to me.

I mean, they played little kid games. Korean versions of Tag, Simon Says, Hide and Seek and stuff like that wearing crazy hats and deely-bopper things on their heads. Silly shit like that.

They had AJ play Korean hacky sack with this ball with all these streamers on it. He killed it, too. Kicked it over 50 times before it sailed too far away for him to run over and keep it going like he had before.

And they made him dance to random songs from all his albums, sometimes slowed 'way down or sped up so fast he shouldn't have been able to do all those music video moves--I couldn't believe he was so gracious and funny and totally down for whatever.

I mean, they even had him taste some super-hot ramen that made him whoop and fan himself. He chased this one chubby, middle-aged host around the room trying to get him to eat some, too--the hosts loved that of course. Laughed 'til tears ran down.

I was lying there shaking my head when Jennie came rushing down that row looking like she'd seen a ghost or something.

Which...she had, in a way.

Cause she bellowed, "Girl, don't you know we found Sadie layin' out here like that?!"

I didn't know. They'd been real close mouthed about the details of her death, possibly so I wouldn't get all sad and shaken up every time I looked out at that garden.

I struggled my way up off the ground and said, "I was picking crowder peas and I got...I don't know, I just...I think the heat got to me."

She came over and started slapping dirt off my back and butt. "Ain't the heat, it's all this nonsense goin' on over there at your job! How the hell the bathrooms blow up?"

For some reason we both kinda burst out laughing when she said that. And I told her, "Kids used to do stuff like that just before finals when I was in school. Pull the fire alarms or call in a bomb threat or something so they'd have to postpone the tests for a day or two."