Once upon a time it must have been worse, but Guryong will always live up to its name. The east side of the road marks the edge of the housing projects. Those who live on the west side are forced to contemplate the view.

The fashionable types who have invaded the slums say they appreciate the neighborhood’s “grittiness.” But they don’t want to see real misery, so they ignore the pain out their front windows. So Guryong has been left to the rest of us. It remains one of the last cute-free zones in downtown Gangnam.

Sunggyu and his urchins live in the basement of a rundown building. There’s no buzzer, but even this late, there’s usually a kid or two keeping watch from behind the iron bars.

Tonight, I don’t even see who’s on duty. Whoever it is must have seen me, though, because I hear feet flying down the stairs.

Someone at the bottom shouts, “Sunggyu!” A few seconds later, the gate creaks open and he appears.

Sunggyu’s jet-black hair blend into the darkness. Two wide-but-still-small brown eyes take in the damage that’s been done to my face.

He doesn’t gasp or wince like most would. Sunggyu is completely unflappable. He steps aside to let me in, but for a moment I refuse to move any closer.

Keeping my distance from Sunggyu is the only true test of my willpower.

“Are you waiting for a formal invitation?”

Once I’m inside, I catch a whiff of vanilla bean and strawberry oil. Sunggyu leaves a trail of this fragrance wherever he goes. It’s not perfume, he says, but a product he uses for his sensitive skin. As far as I can tell, it’s the only luxury Sunggyu allows himself.

The Taiwanese hairdresser down the street sells it to him at a discount. She assumes the blood of her people flows through Sunggyu’s veins. So does the guy at the Japanese diner who slips him a free café con leche each morning. And the Chinese lady who treats Sunggyu like the son she never realized she wanted. And the tourists who always assume he can speak their languages.

Everyone wants to believe that Sunggyu belongs to them.

“How’s the other guy look?” he asks casually.

“Unconscious,” I say. Now that I’m near him, I keep moving closer.

He notices and puts a hand on my chest to halt my advance. “You’re going to need at least eight stitches.”

“Will you let me kiss you when they’re done?”

“Yes,” Sunggyu says. He never plays hard to get.

I follow him downstairs, peeling off my coat as we enter the sweltering heat. In the basement, a winding tunnel leads us past a warren of cramped rooms. The floor of each chamber is strewn with sleeping bags filled with thin bodies—some still little, others growing longer and leaner each day.

There’s plenty of space for everyone, yet they always end up clustered together. Dirty arms circle filthy torsos. Breath exhaled by one set of lungs is immediately inhaled by another.

For the past two hundred years, the Guryong Village has been home to the children that no one else wants.

A sinister mechanical hum grows louder as Sunggyu and I near the end of the tunnel. So does the heat. We pass a locked door that guards the building’s ancient boiler. The heart of Sunggyu’s colony is just a few feet away. It served as a laundry room until the machines died of old age.

At some point in the future, the boiler in the room next door is bound to blow. When it does, the colony kids won’t stand a chance. I tried to warn Sunggyu once, but all he did was laugh. Someday the sun’s going to explode too, he informed me.

But until it kills us, we should just be grateful it keeps us alive.

Someone must have struck it rich tonight because Sunggyu’s urchins are all guzzling imported beer. None of them are old enough to watch R-rated movies, but most have seen things in their own lives that would never make it past any censor. As long as they don’t get drunk and rowdy, Sunggyu lets them do as they like.

“Yo, Flick,” says a kid named Jungwoo. “Merry Christmas.” He’s thirteen. He’ll be thirty by the time his mother finishes her sentence for drug possession with intent to distribute.

“Happy Winter Solstice,” I respond as I step out of the shadows. “I’m a pagan.”

The kids are all gawking at me, and it isn’t because they’ve never met a pagan. They want to know what happened to my face—but they won’t break one of Sunggyu’s cardinal rules: Always listen, never ask.

“Want a beer?” The blond girl is Hanni or Hani. It doesn’t matter which. She’ll disappear before New Year’s. They say her father lost his job, the house, his marbles, then his life. A few months back, Sunggyu saved Hanni/Hani from a neighborhood gang, but the girl has started slipping out after dark. I seem to be the only one who’s figured out where she’s going. My guess is she bought the booze.

“Flick needs something stronger than beer tonight,” says Sunggyu. He unlocks an old trunk in which he stores a remarkable range of supplies and pulls out a bottle of tequila.

“I hate tequila,” I tell him.

“It’s all I have. I’ll just give you enough to make you nice and numb.”

“I’ll take the pain. You know I don’t drink.”

“You will tonight. Doctor’s orders.” He points to a chair and fills a paper coffee cup to the halfway mark. “Bottoms up.” Sunggyu watches with his sharp eyes to make sure I obey. When the first gulp is down, he leaves to gather his supplies and start preparing the operating room.

The kids are still gawking at me. I don’t want to look up at them. I don’t want to know them. I don’t have any pity to spare.

I’m nothing like Sunggyu. And I don’t believe in his little pet project. He picks up these strays all over the city and brings them home, knowing they never stay for good.

But the longer they’re with him, the weaker they’ll be when they’re back on their own. He makes sure they’re fed and sews up their wounds. He coddles them and cuddles them when he should be teaching them how to survive.

I haven’t been around long enough to know how a eighteen year-old boy came to form his own colony of urchins. But I do know what happens to the kids who seek shelter here.

Sunggyu works his off to delay the inevitable, but they all disappear in the end. Some are “rescued” by the very people they were trying to escape. Some are picked up by the cops and delivered to jail—or worse, sentenced to foster care.

To my knowledge, at least one of Sunggyu’s kids has been murdered. Most simply leave and never come back.

I’m getting worked up just thinking about it. What really pisses me off is that they don’t even try. They’re all marching toward the cliff like a herd of lemmings. I know Sunggyu thinks I can do something to stop them. He claims the kids all look up to me. And he’s right—they do.

Because I use big words. Because although my clothes may need washing, but they have all the right labels. Because even though I’ve gone feral, they can tell that my childhood years were spent in a wealthy home. The reasons they look up to me are stupid. And what Sunggyu doesn’t know is that I can’t help him save them.

Because soon, I’ll be leaving him too.

• • •

“So Wendy’s gonna stitch you up?” A kid who resembles a cocker spaniel and answers only to Seung breaks the silence. Anyone who hears Seung’s sob story is liable to jump off a bridge.

He’s got my attention. “Who the crap is Wendy?” I ask.

“Seung’s started calling us the Lost Boys,” Hanni or Hani explains with a roll of her heavily lined eyes. “Even though half of us are girls. And if we’re the Lost Boys, I guess that means Sunggyu gets to play Wendy.”

“You can be Tinkerbell if you want,” Seung offers thoughtfully as he casts his little movie.

“And Flick can be Peter Pan.”

The world shakes. I cannot believe he just stepped on that land mine. The name explodes in my head.

This is why I do not drink. This is why I do not drink. This is why I do not drink. I take a gulp of tequila and wipe my mouth on my sleeve.

“I’m not Peter Pan, you moron. But I used to know him. And you can take my word for it. Peter Pan is dead.”

They all go quiet at the not-very-well-concealed anger in my voice. Even Seung’s face wears a hungry look that tells me he’s desperate for more. They’ve all been waiting for months to hear my hard-luck story. They’ve been gnawing on the bones of their own misery, and now they want to feed on a fresh piece of me.

They have no idea how poisonous I am.

“Wait—Peter Pan dies at the end of the movie?” Dami is the only one who didn’t catch on.

“The kids in Never Land are dead from the very beginning. That’s what the whole story’s about!” My voice has risen to a shout. “The Lost Boys are dead. Why do you think they’ll never grow up? Never Land is the afterworld. Peter Pan is the one who guides lost souls to the land of death.”

They don’t know.

“Are you saying Never Land is supposed to be heaven?” This from Dami. I really didn’t want to analyze a classic work of children’s literature at one o’clock in the morning. But at least the conversation isn’t about me anymore.

“Heaven’s just another myth,” I say. Anything to keep them distracted.

“You’re wrong,” the girl insists. Her innocence offends me.

“Oh yeah, Dami? You think there’s some wonderful, magical place where you get to go if you’ve been a really, really good girl? Well, take it from me—there isn’t. There’s just hell. Have a look around. You’re already here.”

“Flick!” Sunggyu’s come back to get me. I swallow the last of the tequila, crumple up the cup, and toss it into a corner. I don’t say goodbye. I just follow Sunggyu back to his quarters.

It’s not much to look at, but I always feel better in Sunggyu’s room. There’s a tiny window, for starters, which lets in a little cool air. And a proper bed, which may be lumpy but beats the hell out of a park bench. Tonight it’s serving as a makeshift table for Sunggyu’s surgical instruments.

I pull off my shirt and take a seat on a folding chair. Sunggyu uses bottled water and sterile gauze to clean the blood from my face and neck.

He’s furious, but he’s holding back until my wound is stitched and the bleeding has stopped. Sunggyu only has a handful of rules, and I have a feeling I’ve just broken the one he considers most sacred. Not long after we met, he shared his big theory with me.

He believes that, even in the worst situations, all a person needs to survive is ONE GOOD THING.

It sounded so stupid that I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. It could be anything, he insisted. Maybe it’s something no one else understands. Or something that might not even exist. It could be a guardian angel. An invisible friend.

Or ‘benevolent extraterrestrials who’ll solve mankind’s problems and probably won’t eat us,’ I’d chimed in when the subject began to make me uncomfortable. Sunggyu did not appreciate the joke as much.

The point is, it doesn’t matter how silly it seems. Here in Sunggyu’s colony, you’re never, ever allowed to mess with someone else’s ONE GOOD THING. Apparently Dami’s is heaven. I’m pretty sure I didn’t destroy some kid’s dream of harps, clouds, and halos with a few tipsy words.

But Sunggyu knows I could have.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Shut up and don’t move, or I’ll sew your lips together,” he replies as the curved needle pierces my flesh.

Despite the tequila, I’m not too numb to feel each and every one of the nine stitches he gives me. By the time he’s done, his anger seems to have cooled. The left side of my face is aching.

“I did my best, but you’ll probably have a scar,” he says.

“Good. I’ve been meaning to add a few more to my collection.”

“How could you be such a f—ing jerk, Flick? Dami’s a little girl.”

“What? She’s thirteen. She’s old enough to know the truth.”

Sunggyu snorts. “The truth? You think you’ve found it?”

“You don’t really believe in all that heaven mumbo jumbo, do you?” I ask.

I’ve only spoken a few simple sentences, and Sunggyu already looks ready to strangle me. “After all this time, that’s what you want to know? Not . . . where did you grow up, Sunggyu? How did you get here? No, you want to know if I believe in heaven.”

“Where did you come from?”

“You wouldn't know where it was if I told you. But I’ll make you a deal, Flick. I’ll tell you every goddamn thing I’ve ever thought about heaven if you tell me what the hell happened to Peter Pan.”

He must have been listening the whole time. Now he’s hit me with a er punch, and Peter’s real name almost flies out of my mouth. But I catch it in time. “Captain Hook chopped him up and fed the pieces to the crocodile.”

I always serve my lies with a grain of truth. But Sunggyu tastes nothing but bull. When he doesn’t respond, I can feel a gulf growing between us. I should take the opportunity to let him go, but I’m not strong enough yet.

Just before it’s too late, I reach out and grab hold of him. Once, when I was in the mood to argue, I asked him what he thought would happen if someone were to lose his ONE GOOD THING. There’s always another one out there if you’re willing to look, he told me.

Whenever I kiss him, I find myself starting to believe all of Sunggyu’s strange, silly theories.

• • •

The sliver of window at the top of Sunggyu’s room is open when we fall asleep. No one could cram himself through the opening, but it’s wide enough for Peter Pan to slip inside. He’s leaning against a wall—one foot on the bricks and one on the floor.

He crosses his arms and shakes his head as he inspects my face. “You’re a f—ing mess,” he says.

“I bet you’ve seen worse.” He knows what I mean.

“Touché,” he responds with a tip of his green felt hat.

“Why are you here, Myungsoo?”

“You know as well as I do. This isn’t the way my gift was meant to be used. I grace you with stealth and cunning, and you choose to rob drunks and pick fights. But it was nice how you saved the girl from that thug tonight. Makes me think there might be hope for you yet.”

“I wasn’t trying to save her. I wanted to steal her wallet.”

Myungsoo laughs. “If you say so.”

If he’s right—if the wallet was just an excuse to help her—then I’m nowhere near ready.

“You don’t have to do this.” He’s suddenly serious. “You can come with me. Never Land is everything you’d want it to be.”

“Never Land doesn’t exist, Myung-ah.”

“Then where do I go when I’m not with you?” I don’t have the heart to answer.

“That’s okay, I knew you wouldn’t come. You want to stay here with him, don’t you?” He nods to where Sunggyu is sleeping on his side of the bed.

More than anything, I think. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I owe you, Myung. You’re still my one good thing.”

“I’m dead. It’s time to find another.”