I'll Vote for You
My heart kept churning with an ominous restlessness. Then, in the next moment, it would settle into a comfort as soft as being wrapped in warm clouds. The real problem was that I never understood why the ease arrived, or why the unease returned. The common cause was unmistakable. Kang Eui-tae, his face still mottled where the bruises were slowly fading. That man, and no one else.
He carried a wavelength all his own. No—everything about him was like that. He despised the ordinary; some days he moved like a quiet ripple, other days like a storm-tossed wave. He gave a stray dog a place to sleep, food, water—yet never a name. Just in case, I asked him once. Wouldn’t it hurt so badly you couldn’t even eat if that dog turned up dead on the roadside or got dragged off by a dog butcher? It had only been a few days earlier.
He had just started English on top of the math he already excelled at, and the extra strain had left him raw. I wanted to make excuses for how cold his answer had been.
“Is that so.”
“‘Is that so’ is a pretty vague answer. Sad. Not sad. Usually it’s one or the other.”
He slowly set his pen down and stared at me, blank. After turning my question over carefully in his head, the answer he produced was startling.
“If I have to pick one, then not sad. It’s not even my dog. But if a dog butcher took it, or someone beat it to death, I’d go find them.”
“Go find them?”
“Ask why they killed the dog I was feeding. If they don’t have a good reason, make sure that person never walks down a street again.”
Without telling him, I gave the dog a name: Heindung-i. When the weather turned cold, Heindung-i would come looking for him more often, more desperately. Maybe it would even whimper to be let inside the house. Would he refuse even then? Guaranteeing Heindung-i’s right to walk was a good thing, but the direction was completely sideways. For a dog that didn’t have many days left, were home and walks really the only two choices?
“Yang Ji-eon.”
“Yes?”
On the days Mom left for her side job at the factory, his wooden porch became a private study hall until late evening. After the sun went down he came out to light a mosquito coil, tilting his head.
“Hungry?”
“No.”
“You look like your energy’s gone.”
It was strange. Conversations with him were always this bland, this short. If they were gum, they were the kind that had already lost every trace of sweetness. No flavor at all, yet I kept chewing out of habit. I felt a little guilty comparing him to flavorless gum, but the reason he occupied my thoughts so often lately was probably nothing more than that—habit, or the wretched hope that some sweetness might still appear.
Thud. While I drifted into another daydream, he set a glass of orange juice on the table. The sight of his back as he carried the tray and opened the sliding door made me want to call out to him.
“Excuse me.”
He turned around with his own glass of orange juice still at his lips. The man who had locked the door earlier claiming he’d finished studying for the day and was just loafing around looked slightly flustered, as if he hadn’t expected me to speak first.
“Something’s been bothering me.”
I had been sure he would ignore me and disappear inside, but he came back and sat at the desk. He finished the juice without ever taking his eyes off me; the weight of that gaze was hard to bear. Feeling responsible for the atmosphere, I cleared my throat and glanced away.
“What.”
His patience never lasted ten seconds. In truth I hadn’t stopped him because I had some grand question. My eyes scanned the desk for anything to ask about. The yellow orange juice became the first candidate.
“There are plenty of other juices. Why is it always orange?”
It came out sounding like a reporter’s interview, but he drained the glass without a single change of expression. He set the empty cup down carelessly and answered.
“Just. The lady at the store said this one’s the most popular.”
“Who…”
“The super lady.”
“Oh.”
“Want me to buy something else?”
I had assumed there must be some special reason for the single flavor. I had even wondered if he was allergic to plum, grape, or mango. When the awkward silence returned, only my heart broke into a cold sweat. I needed another reason to keep him there. The next target became the man whose face still carried wounds and fading bruises. He had already lost interest and was fiddling with a lighter; the sight alone pulled a sigh out of me.
“Why did you get hurt? No—rephrase. How did you get hurt? Someone hit you, right?”
The question I had been carefully avoiding for fear of souring his mood spilled out on a random day, in the middle of an awkward silence. He set the lighter on the table and leaned his back comfortably against the pillar, looking at me with the lazy face of a long afternoon.
“Laugh when everyone else laughs. Talk the same way they do. Praise him just because he’s the older brother. I couldn’t do any of that.”
“Why not? It’s so easy.”
“Is it easy?”
We stared at each other with the mutual incomprehension of someone from Earth facing someone from Mars. I crossed my arms with the hand that had abandoned the pen. Sensing the approach of an argument, he sat with one knee raised and a blank expression.
“Even if it isn’t funny, you laugh when they laugh. If they badmouth someone, you at least nod. If they do something well, you praise them. Rather than get hit for not being able to do that, I’d rather just close my eyes and force it.”
“It’s not like you’re slacking off and failing at your actual work. Why should you live hypocritically for people who aren’t even family? They don’t pay you extra.”
“Everyone else does it.”
“Does what.”
“Hypocrisy. Pretending. False kindness—literally, false good.”
He furrowed his brow as if my words made no sense. That expression was still better than the ridiculously indifferent face he usually wore.
“But.”
“Even if it’s false, it’s still kind. Even if it’s false, it’s still good. That matters to me. It matters to other people too.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about…”
He raked both hands through his hair as though the conversation itself exhausted him. When he looked at me again, his face showed complete disagreement.
“Think about it. Theory of original evil, theory of original good, theory that human nature is neither. Of the three, I lean toward neither. It’s a little different from how I actually feel, but… there really can be people born bad, and the opposite too. In the end the good we aim for is still one thing, right? Is it so wrong to package your words so they look nicer to other people?”
I had expected him to sneer coldly and pick a fight. Instead he took a moment before answering.
“If the inside isn’t kind either. If the real heart isn’t that.”
“Kang Eui-tae oppa.”
It had reached the point where calling someone only a year older by full name and “ssi” felt wrong. Since the subject had come up, I decided to settle the titles. I lifted the orange juice as if making a toast.
“I don’t know with what heart you gave me this orange juice. I don’t know what your true heart is, oppa.”
“……”
“I’ll probably never know, not for the rest of my life. I can only guess, or believe whatever you decide to tell me.”
“So.”
His upper body leaned closer, invisible ears pricked. It was the moment I should have backed away, yet somehow I needed to say this now.
“Other people’s true hearts—even parents and children never really know them. Everyone might be holding a one inside, but they never show the one as it is. They add flesh or cut some away.”
“Mm.”
“Do you understand? The true heart isn’t even pretty to begin with, so I’d rather they at least put on some hypocrisy. Who wants to see an ugly true heart, right?”
“Mm…”
“A person who pretends and at least smiles on the outside is better than one who shows their evil nature. The complaint that you hate someone for hiding their true heart with lies is funny too. How would you even know what that true heart is?”
After pouring out the entire passionate speech and coming back to myself, I found him sitting with his mouth tightly shut, both arms on the table, upper body tilted forward, clear eyes scanning me from head to toe. The man who had come home with black eyes simply because he couldn’t manage a single flattering word had frustrated me so much that my words had run long.
As the speech wound down, the sight of him lying across the desk staring at me without expression, and of myself delivering a long moral lecture like some self-righteous sage, finally triggered a delayed wave of shame that burned through me.
I recovered my reason and carefully picked up the pen I had thrown earlier.
“No. I mean, too much hypocrisy is a little… but that…”
“Ji-eon-ah.”
“Yes?”
When he dropped the surname and called me that way, half-teasing, unpleasant goosebumps rose along my forearm. The wind that brushed over the chicken-skin flesh sank straight into the bone, and suddenly I became a pitiful child shivering even in the middle of summer. A chill reached my chest; my stomach turned sharp and empty.
“If you ever run for village head,”
“…Yes?”
“I’ll cast a vote for you.”
There was no way to know how positively my blood-and-flesh speech had landed on him. After all, this was the same man who answered my advice to live a little hypocritically so he would get hit less by talking about a village-head election. But I seemed to have grown used to that half-joking tone of his.
Just… those words made me smile.