Free I'll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin

word. Miru cleared her throat and continued .
    “If I don’t find out what happened to the man my sister was looking for, I won’t be able to live with myself.”
    A while back, before the semester started, Miru was reading one of the professor’s books. It was a collection of essays that had come out six years ago. Miru suddenly asked me if he was a bachelor. I said that if by bachelor she meant someone who lives alone, then yes. She said she thought she knew why he lived alone. It was strange to see her talk that way about someone she had never met. The book she was reading, which was his only published work aside from two books of poetry published when he was younger, consisted of reveries on poetry, with no mention of his private life. He had not published anything else since that book, including any poetry collections. The only way to read his more recent work was to dig through old magazines in the library. Until Miru brought it up, I had never given any thought to the fact that he wasn’t married, even though it was obvious he was a bachelor. I asked her how she knew .
    “I think he’s seen something,” she said, and muttered under her breath, “It must haunt him.”
    I asked her why she said that .
    “Look,” she said. “What do you suppose this picture is doing here?”
    She showed me the page. There was no mention of the artist, but I knew at once who it was .
    “Arnold …
    I stumbled on the pronunciation of his last name, so Miru finished for me .
    “Arnold Böcklin.”
    She seemed to be turning something over in her head. Then she said she wanted to sit in on his class. I wondered aloud why someone who had stopped going to her own school would want to go to someone else’s, but then I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe the professor’s class would help her turn her life around. Whenever I told her she should start acting like a normal college student again, she would retort, “You’re one to talk!” She was becoming more like her sister every day. She said she would do whatever it took to find the man who had disappeared, the one her sister had failed to find. But how are you supposed to find someone who’s dead? I didn’t know what to say to her .
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    I saw Jung Yoon in class today. I thought that was her first name, but I guess it’s just Yoon, and Jung is her family name. Turns out she was taking a break from school. She looks like she’s lost weight. But then again, even when she was a new student, she never seemed happy or excited. I wonder what’s bothering her. I could tell she didn’t recognize me. One time, I walked behind her all the way to school. She was deep in thought, and the feeling coming off her was very strange. She stopped in front of the school. Just stood there without going in. I stopped, too, and waited to see what she would do. How often had I watched her from a distance? I had also watched her once as she was sitting by herself at school reading Emily Dickinson. She stood in front of the gate with her head down, scuffed the ground a few times, and then turned and walked away. She was gone in an instant .
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    That day, I didn’t see her on campus at all. I found out later that she had applied for a leave of absence. She always kept her distance from others. Come to think of it, I’d never properly spoken to her except for one time when she was a new student. During that first semester, all of the students in our department had gone to Ilyeong on an overnight retreat. Out of all of those students, she was the only one who caught my eye. I still remember the way she looked: black hair falling to her shoulders, black vest over a white shirt, snow-white sneakers, stubbornly closed mouth. While everyone else sat in a circle next to the river and sang, she stared into the glowing flames and refused to sing along. The next morning, I woke up hungover on the floor of the guesthouse next to the others who had passed out drunk and got up and