Free How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee

work, but I also resented how she had managed to make a bright, cheerful life without us.
    â€œHow is your father, that silent, no-talk man? Still all laughs?”
    The way she said it—as if he were some man from her distant past, a silly man safe to mock—made me feel protective of him.
    â€œHe’s doing all right. Still discovering the universe in a stopwatch. He misses you, you know.”
    â€œDaehan, now, you know what I’m going to ask you.” She pulled on a down jacket. “It’s dangerous, the way you are. Why are you suddenly here in the middle of the school semester and how did you get here? How could your
abba
not tell me you were coming?”
    â€œIt was Abba’s idea.” I told her it wasn’t exactly his fault and that he had tried calling her several times after he’d bought the ticket, which was when I learned that she had suddenly ditched her cell phone.
    â€œThere were work problems.” Her jaw went tight. “How can that man pull you out of school one day and send you across the globe without checking with me first?”
    So much had happened in the few days we hadn’t talked and I didn’t know where to start. The suicide attempt that wasn’t actually a suicide attempt didn’t seem like a good place to begin, and I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Adam. She ruffled my hair as if I were a surly poodle that required humoring. She knew me better than anyone else and normally would have questioned me with a sushi knife’s precision, sensing that something was wrong.
    Instead she said, “Let’s get something to eat,” and didn’t listen when I told her once more that I’d already eaten a camel’s weight in food.
    â€œCome on, put on your shoes,” she said. “What if I hadn’t been at home? I can’t believe your
abba
.”
    The unfamiliar helium in her voice left me dazed. Her behavior, flying from one world and landing in another, all of it unsettled me.
    â€œHow rash of him.” She began to sniffle. “Something terrible could have happened to you.”
    â€œI won’t go back, Mom.” That one sentence came out in English.
    â€œAfter a few weeks here, you’ll come to your senses. You can do anything with that wonderful brain God has given you—I won’t let you ruin it,” she said, and slipped into black flats. “Goodness, I have so much to do and now I’ll be worrying half the time about you.”
    That was when I heard a cough.
    It was a small apartment; there weren’t many places to hide. I headed in the direction of the cough and opened the bedroom door, but there was no one there.
    â€œWho is it?” I said. “Who’s here?”
    My mother seized me by my shoulders, trying to pull me out of the room, but I had shot up in the past year and I pulled away and flung open the wardrobe doors one by one.
    Behind one of them was a man. Deacon Shin from our church in California, folded up like a broken chopstick and squeezed in between my mom’s dresses. The severe-looking, graying man with round eyeglasses didn’t look so different from my dad, but he was crucially not my dad. A man who was talkative and sang solos in the choir, who was the first to rescue a cat stuck in a tree and volunteer to flip burgers at church barbecues. A man not my dad, but a man who had somehow become closer to my mom than my dad. Nearly five thousand miles closer. An arm’s length closer. The other life beyond the missionary work.
    Deacon Shin released a long, painful breath. He said, “Daehan.”
    â€œI can explain,” my mom said, as if there were any possible legitimate explanations for our church deacon hiding in her closet.
    I ran out of the bedroom. The hypocrisy, it was too much for me.
    I don’t remember how I wiggled out of my mother’s grip and spun past her. I don’t remember where I struck her to get away