“I’m not really sure what to tell you,” Kris said from under the table. He was sweeping for glass, despite my protestations that he’d had too much to drink to do anything but cut himself. He had done fairly well – only three cuts in ten minutes. I heard another cuss from under the table. Four cuts and counting.

“Well, what do you do?”

“I move things. Boxes, crates, and the like.”  

“And what’s in these boxes?”

“I make it a point not to know,” he said wryly.

Kris had recovered some of his cheek. He was acting a bit like a clown, a sheepish schoolboy who’d been caught with his hands in the teacher’s filing cabinet. He was artificially lighthearted, like an over-flavored lemon lollipop. It was the defense mechanism he used as a last resort because it had such a high success rate.

Too bad I wasn’t one of his googly-eyed high school teachers.

“Cut it out, Kris. Tell it to me straight.”

He tinkered around with the glass shards underneath the table. I sat down at the table and waited.

 “My best guess is drugs. Drugs or illegal weapons. I…I’ll also carry messages around to people.”

My heart sank a little to hear him say that. But it didn’t crash to the bottom of my stomach. I knew rationally that just because he wasn’t actively murdering people didn’t mean that it was okay for him to be a carrier and messenger for some sort of crime ring.

It wasn’t right at all, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t let out a sigh of relief. It whistled out of me, long and low.

It was okay. It wasn’t that bad. He wasn’t doing anything that was directly harming other people. My older brother was only a minor criminal.

Those words echoed in my mind.

A minor criminal.

Criminal. My brother was a criminal. Factually, objectively speaking, he was a criminal.

My heart didn’t explode, but it began pounding and pounding against my chest. My brother was a drug carrier. Or a weapons carrier. And a messenger. If anybody found out, it would mean a trial. And with the little money we had, a trial would mean a bad lawyer. Which in turn would mean a sentence. A long one at that. All these thoughts crashed into each other, like speeding cars on a congested freeway. It made me feel nauseous.

Kris came out from under the table with a dustpan full of glass. “I think I got most of the glass. All of it, actually.” His nonchalance was beginning to drive me crazy.

“Kris, what are we going to do?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. “You can’t go on doing this forever. I don’t even think you should be doing this tomorrow. You ought to quit. Immediately, as in tomorrow. Please.”

He gave me a hard look. “I’m not doing anything. I just follow instructions.”

“Willful blindness is a crime, Kris! I’m not blaming you for anything, who the hell am I to blame you for anything when you’re doing all this for me? But please, please, please, quit.”

He began speaking very slowly, as though he were explaining things to a small child. “I can’t quit. We need to stay here so you can go to that school. I need to make money so we can pay rent, and no one else is hiring some college drop-out. Believe me, I’ve checked.”

“Let’s not talk about me for a minute. What else is keeping you here?”

At this, he struggled to control his volume. “May, you're the only reason I’m still living. The only reason. So how the can you expect me to not think about you and not talk about you when looking after you is my entire life?”

“Stop. Please, stop talking about it like that. I don’t want to be the person who’s taking your life away from you. You’re not just my older brother! You have dreams and hopes and a future that are all entirely your own, and I want you to chase after them and get your life back on track without having to worry about mine.”

“How can I do that, when I can barely take care of you?”

“Stop talking like that! I’m not your baby sister anymore. I’m your younger sister, yes, but I’ve grown up too. I’m no longer this burden that you have to keep with you at all times. This part of the argument is finished. Let’s move on. What else is holding you back from just walking out the door?”

Kris grabbed me by my shoulders. He didn’t shake me, but I could tell that he wanted to. He was every bit as frustrated with me as I was with him.

“Let’s say, just for a moment, that I can quit – no consequences. And I head for a new city. Fresh start, right? How can I leave you alone? This part of town is dangerous. You’d be a girl living alone and there’d be a gang that’s out looking for your brother. How are you going to stay safe? And then, there are other considerations. Even if you get a part time job, there’s no way you can cover the rent, even on a place that’s as trashed as this. And I wouldn’t want you to try and make minimum wage. I want you to study and graduate at the top of your class. I want you to go to the States. I know that you can do all this, but how are you going to if you don’t study? If you spend all your time working because your deadbeat brother left you all on your own? Or do you want to end up with just a high school degree working at a dead-end job, if you’re lucky enough to find one at all? Because I sure as hell couldn’t find one, and it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

“Why do I have to go to the States? My grades are good enough that I could go to a local university on a full scholarship.”

“With the job market like it is today, no employer cares who you are unless you’ve got a degree from Seoul National University.”

“That’s an over-exaggeration and you know it.”

“Maybe, but I’m just preparing you for the real world. Putting a good university on your resume will do more for you than anything else. And for you at least, it’ll be easier getting into an Ivy League than one of the top universities here.”

“You think I can’t work and study at the same time?”

“Fine. Let’s say you can. There’s still no way I’m leaving you alone here.”

“I could room with Kai.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could fully comprehend what I had said. Rooming with Kai seemed like the obvious solution to all our problems. It surprised me, how natural it had seemed to me to room with a boy I barely knew.

“Absolutely not.”

The tone in Kris’s voice made it clear that this was not an argument I could win.

A knock came from the other side of the wall.

“I think that sounds like an excellent idea.”

Apparently, someone else agreed with me.