“What about this?” Seung-Bae asked.

She nodded, but the gesture held little meaning. Haenyeo had nodded at every piece of clothing he’d pulled off the rack and held up for inspection. Her attention was on something or someone across the trendy clothing shop.

They’d stopped at three other shops in the mall, first for a pair of cell phones, then a shoe store. On their way to the closest of the dozens of clothing boutiques, he’d even pulled her into a jewelry store, but at each place she’d glanced disinterestedly at the items for sale, and instead zeroed in on the other shoppers, especially the ones with children.

“This is nice,” he pulled down an airy, white linen summer dress, thinking it would offset her long red hair nicely.

She nodded.

Seung-Bae followed Haenyeo’s gaze over the tops of the rows of clothing racks.  Near the back of the store, a young mother rummaged with one arm through a sales bin.  Perched on her shoulder, its miniature mouth blowing shiny baby bubbles with its own drool, was the tiny, round-cheeked face of an infant.

Until today, he hadn’t realized how many children there actually were in the world.  They were everywhere, all around him, but he’d never really noticed them before.  They’d melted into the landscape as everything familiar did.  But Haenyeo seemed to see each and every one, saw and stopped to stare with hungry eyes.

He tugged at her hand. “Come on.  Let’s go ask if you can try these on.”

She nodded until he pulled her away.

.  .  .  .  .  .

Min-Jae stabbed the red plastic spoon into his ice cream cup and stuffed a clump of the frozen chocolate and strawberry concoction Hawk had bought for him into his mouth. 

He ambled along after his friend, humming a tune as they strolled through the giant shopping mall, letting his attention drift from one group of pretty female shoppers to another.  When a particularly beautiful young woman with long, black hair passed along side them, Min-Jae spun around and took a few bouncing backward steps as he gawked at her retreating figure.  The heels of her stilettos echoed against the marble floor.  Her hips, swelling softly beneath the tight stretch of her skirt, swayed hypnotically along with the rhythm.

Min-Jae was drooling, and it wasn’t just from the ice cream.  The plastic spoon cracked between his teeth.

A second later he ran into the sharp edge of Hawk’s protruding elbow. 

Hawk had come to a stop in front of a clothing store’s front window.  On one side of the display, a trio of mannequins stood draped under cotton summer dresses in various shades of pastels and prints.  On the other side, the mannequins showed off a variety of lacy lingerie.

“What is it?” Min-Jae asked in confusion. 

Hawk ignored him and ducked inside the boutique’s entrance.

“Ya!” Min-Jae hissed as he followed, glancing around nervously to see if anyone noticed.  “What are you doing?  This is a store for girl’s cloths!”

“I know.”

“Why’d you come in here?”

“Just looking …”

“Looking for … ahh … I get it.  You want to buy Haenyeo some cloths, don’t you?”  Min-Jae grinned impishly then ventured back further into the store, beyond the racks of outerwear and towards the lingerie section.  “What about this?” he asked as he pulled a bra and set off its hook on the back wall and held it up for inspection.  “She needs this stuff too right?  She looks good in black.” He waggled his eyebrows and held the hanger against his chest; the better to model it for his friend.

“Aishh,” Hawk flushed and shook his head.  “You’re such a ert.”

“Can I help you?” the store’s clerk inquired, stepping forward with an eager smile.

“You can help me,” Hawk mumbled, “but unless you’re a therapist, there’s no helping him.”

The clerk giggled as Min-Jae pulled a lacy, pink ensemble off of the wall and eyed himself in a nearby mirror.

After several minutes of deliberation, Hawk finally chose a simple white dress, and the store clerk was kind enough to pick out a set of white undergarments to match.  Hawk blushed as she rung the items up and stowed them safely inside a bag.

            “Hyeong!”  Min-Jae shouted from near the store’s entrance.

Hawk turned to look, following the length of Min-Jae’s arm as it pointed off into the distance.  On the far side of the mall, across the open space of the central atrium, he spotted Seung-Bae lugging an assortment of shopping bags in one hand while he pulled Haenyeo along with the other.

  Behind them, still a good distance away but moving quickly, stalked two very determined looking police officers.

.  .  .  .  .  .

Officer Hong had been out of training and officially on the job for almost two weeks.  As a result, he was sharp eyed and eager to prove himself to his senior partner. 

Officer Kwan had been on the job for almost twenty years.  As a result, his rookie’s over the top enthusiasm was seriously getting on his nerves.  He picked his teeth with a sorry looking wooden toothpick as they strolled along, keeping close watch on passing shoppers and peering in through the bright glass of chic storefronts.

The two been assigned to patrol the upper levels of one of Seoul’s largest shopping malls, the same mall that had been plagued recently with a string of daylight robberies.  Based on surveillance footage and eye-witness accounts, the mall’s management and security staff had attributed the illegal activity to a wily and highly organized ring of petty thieves.  The local district police had agreed to provide additional on-site security in a concentrated effort to catch the elusive culprits, but as of yet, things had been nice and quiet.

Still, Officer Hong wasn’t about to let his guard down.  It was his heightened focus for anything unusual that caused him to spot the red-headed girl.  Foreigners weren’t so rare in Seoul as to be especially significant, however this particular head of hair stood out like a red herring amidst the sea of black.  It only took a moment for the unfortunate connections to click inside his head.

“Oh? Sunbaenim …,” Officer Hong grabbed his senior partner’s arm and pointed.  “Look at that girl.  Isn’t that the same girl from the missing person’s bulletin we saw at the station this morning?” 

Officer Kwan pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and leaned forward, squinting thoughtfully as he tried to make out the face of the foreigner his rookie was gesturing towards.  She exited a clothing boutique a few stores down from where they stood, and her hand was held by a tall, handsome Korean boy who cast adoring smiles at her as they walked along.

“Hrmph,” Officer Kwan replied.  “It may be … it may be … let’s go get a closer look.”

.  .  .  .  .  .

Hawk and Min-Jae rushed along the mall’s fourth floor walkway, peering over the railing and across the expanse of the atrium at the oblivious couple on the opposite side and the two police officers that tailed them.

“Why doesn’t he see them?” Hawk fumed.

“Will Seung-Bae get arrested?” Min-Jae worried.

Hawk came to a halt at a sharp turn in the walkway.  He griped the handrail and chewed on his lip as he watched Seung-Bae swing Haenyeo’s hand in his own with a flirtatious abandon, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.  As if he was happy.

The police inched closer.

“We have to do something,” Hawk announced.

He leaned forward, willing Seung-Bae to turn around, but instead his friend pulled the girl into a glass elevator.  For a moment, the doors hung open, just long enough for Hawk to take a mental snapshot of the couple inside.  They stood, shoulders brushing and fingers intertwined, as if they’d become more intimate with each other.  Seung-Bae turned, looking down into her uplifted face and giving her a warm smile – a smile Hawk had never seen on Seung-Bae’s face before.  And then, she smiled up at him in return; a smile so full of innocence and hope that, though Hawk knew he shouldn’t feel it, a wave of heated jealousy washed through him.

Just as the two police officers approached, the elevator’s doors closed.  The carriage slowly began its descent to ground level.  Hawk released the breath he’d been holding.  They had gotten away.  But beneath the relief, he felt drained and inexplicably defeated.

He looked down at the shopping bag in his hands – the bag that held the dress he’d just bought for her.  But Haenyeo had already been wearing a new dress, also a white one. It had hugged the curves of her chest and waist, swaying and swirling around her knees with the rhythm of her hips as she walked along … along beside Seung-Bae, his best friend. 

Hawk crushed the bag in his fist.  “Aishh, you’re such an idiot,” he muttered to himself before hurling the crumpled mass into a nearby trash can.

A heartbeat later, the world turned upside down. 

A loud siren began shrieking.  Across the atrium, the two officers turned.  The younger one, eyes widened with alarm, pointed towards the place where Hawk was standing, then began a dead sprint towards the curve of an adjoining walkway, and headed right for him. 

Hawk involuntarily took a step backward.

In fact, everyone was staring at him.  No … wait … everyone was staring past him. Hawk turned.

Behind him, just in front of an elegant footwear boutique, Min-Jae stood with a startled expression on his face.  In his hands he held a pair of gaudy, gemstone-studded high-heeled sandals.  The tag that dangled from their strap marked them for sell at 500,000 won.  And Min-Jae wavered, as if in disbelief at his own actions, two paces beyond the store’s theft detection system.  It blared angrily to insure every single person in the general vicinity knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that someone had just stolen an item from the sacred sphere of its charge.

Hawk’s draw dropped. “What did you do?”

“I thought setting of the alarm would distract them,” was all Min-Jae was able to say before a uniform clad body sailed through the air and tackled him to the ground.  His arms were pulled up behind his back and his cheek pressed uncomfortably onto the cold, marble floor. 

“Ha!” The senior officer huffed gleefully as he approached the scene.  He clapped his hand onto his young partner’s shoulder and tried to catch his breath.  “Good job!  Good job! Get him up,” he instructed.  “Let’s get this punk to the station for questioning.”

Min-Jae blinked in confusion.  Realization of the impending consequences of his rash action flashed across his face. 

“Hyeong!” he wailed.

“Min-Jae!” Hawk cried back, gaping in horror as the two police officers hauled his misguided friend up onto his feet.  He followed them outside to a waiting squad car where Min-Jae disappeared behind the backseat door.

            “Hyeong!” Min-Jae howled, pressing his face to the window and leaving a wet and foggy patch on the glass.

“Don’t worry!” Hawk tried to calm him.  “I’ll call your Dad!  He’ll get you out!”

Min-Jae’s mouth formed a perfect “O.” His face twisted in terror. “Hyeong!  No!  Don’t call my Dad! Hyeong! You know he’ll kill me!”

“Don’t worry!”  Hawk called out as the police car began to pull away.  His mind raced, trying to think of something to say to give his younger friend a hope. 

“Park Min-Jae!”

Min-Jae turned.  Through the rear window, Hawk caught a fleeting glimpse of his pale, stricken face.

            “Don’t worry, everything will be fine!”  Hawk shouted after him.  “Hwaiting!” he added with an encouraging shake of his fist. 

Good luck was all he could think to say.

.  .  .  .  .  .

            “And then, he just walked away … can you believe that?  He didn’t even have the decency to pay the bill before he left!”

With each shopping bag she added to the crook of her arm, Ye-Rim had revealed to Bo-Ra a bit more of the tragic story of her lunch date with Tae-Won, and, as a result, she’d begun to feel a little bit better.  But the afternoon had only just begun.  The six upper levels of the mall were all waiting for her perusal, and she was still a long ways away from being full on cheering up. 

She stabbed the elevator button as, beside her, Bo-Ra stood examining her manicure, looking distracted and, somewhat, bored. 

Ye-Rim grimaced.  She and Bo-Ra had always been more like best friends than cousins, but these days they really only saw each other when Bo-Ra was home for breaks in her university schedule.  It was obvious that Bo-Ra had forgotten the importance of at least pretending to pay attention to the details of best friend boyfriend woes. 

Or was it that Bo-Ra thought she was better, more sophisticated, because she’d spent time studying overseas?  Whatever was the cause of Bo-Ra’s haughty detachment, Ye-Rim didn’t like it.  It was making her feel childish and insecure, and that was killing her shopping buzz.

Ye-Rim jumped in alarm as a shrill howling suddenly sounded overhead.  She tilted her head back to look upward towards where the loud noise was blaring from.  A crowd of curious onlookers began to gather outside an upper level store, and, weaving towards them along the walkway raced a uniform clad figure. 

“Oh Bo-Ra look,” she cried. “The police are chasing someone.”

But there was no answer.

“Bo-Ra?”

Ye-Rim turned to find her cousin standing perfectly still, staring intensely into the now open elevator carriage.  It was the flaring of Bo-Ra’s nostril’s that gave her away.  She looked furious.

            The couple inside stepped out, holding each other hands as they glanced up towards the chaos above.

“Oh!” Ye-Rim blinked.  “You’re Kim Seung-Bae… what are you doing here?  And who is that?”  She glanced down to where his fingers intertwined with the red-headed foreigner’s. “Is she your girlfriend?”

Seung-Bae paused, blinking back at her for a moment before his eyes looked away to settle on Bo-Ra’s frozen face.

“Choi Bo-Ra,” he nodded politely.  “Hello.”

Bo-Ra’s eyes widened as she stared back at him.  Her cheeks began to redden.

“I’ll see you later tonight, at dinner,” Seung-Bae said, and then he hurried off, dragging the strange foreign girl behind him.

The wheels in Ye-Rim’s head were a little slow, but gaining momentum, and as the pair walked away realization hit her.

“Ya!” she hissed to Bo-Ra.  “That’s that girl!”

Bo-Ra marched stiffly into the vacant elevator.  Ye-Rim hurried to follow. The doors slid closed.

“You know her?” Bo-Ra questioned.

“She’s the one who was flirting with Tae-Won at the club the other night,” Ye-Rim whined, stomping her stiletto-heeled shoe onto the floor.  “How could Kim Seung-Bae date a girl like that? She’s obviously a player. She was all over Tae-Won, and right in front of Seung-Bae too.  That must be why he dragged her out of the club,” Ye-Rim reasoned. “Wait, Seung-Bae’s having dinner with you tonight?”

Ye-Rim wasn’t certain what was going on, but Bo-Ra was looking rather pale and agitated.

“Ehh…” Ye-Rim’s nose crinkled as, within the enclosed space, an unpleasant scent found its way into her nostrils. “What is that smell?” She eyed Bo-Ra, first skeptically, then in accusation.  “Was that you?”

But Bo-Ra ignored her.