Survival Of The Fittest

Sometimes, Jae wished he'd been born blonde.

It wasn't that  he disliked the way he looked. There was just something about seeing his dad's straw-blonde head weaving among all the dark-haired aunts and uncles and cousins on his mother's side that made his insides twist up with discomfort. Probably the way that blonde hair always seemed to draw his grandmother's attention.

Nobody went out of their way to get Grandmother's attention. Of her three children, only Jae's Aunt Sun was routinely in her good graces, and whatever she had had to do to get in those good graces in the first place had left a rift between her and her siblings that had never quite mended. Everyone else was constantly at risk of running afoul of Grandmother and whatever she most felt like criticizing at the moment.

Ethan Parker was one of her favorite targets, and, by extension, Jae and his mom as well. He wasn't polite enough, but he was too formal. He was too loud, but he didn't speak to her enough and she felt ignored. So on and so on. To Jae, it was like his mother had failed some series of personal tests set by his grandmother; first she'd failed by leaving the country for school, then she'd failed a second time by staying in the United States and getting involved with his father, and her third and most ultimate failure was Jae himself.

Deciding which of them had it worse when it came to their grandmother was an argument bordering on competition between Jae and his cousin Yun-hee. It swung between insisting that she hated them the most out of everyone and that the other couldn't complain because they were clearly favored, and telling each other that they were the one she disliked more. Today was the latter, with the two of them hotly debating whose birth had been more scandalous as they wandered the streets of the neighborhood.

"My parents were married when I was born," Yun-hee said, tone veering dangerously close to haughty.

"Barely," Jae retorted. It wasn't much of an exaggeration; Uncle Eun-jae and his then-girlfriend had held their wedding ceremony just weeks before Yun-hee was born. "My parents would have gotten married before I was born, but they were paying for school."

"It doesn't cost that much to get a marriage license."

"They wanted to have a real wedding." It felt like a flimsy excuse at best. Jae had never asked why his parents had waited until he was nearly in school to get married, or what had made them decide the time was right then.

"It's real as long as someone signs it, right?"

"I guess, but it's not the same thing."

Yun-hee seemed to agree with that point, at least, and shrugged. They walked in silence for a few minutes, glancing up every so often when thunder rumbled in the distance.

"You dad has an accent when he speaks Korean," she said finally. "And so do you."

"Yeah, well you and your parents and sister all have accents when you speak English. You have one right now. We call it Engrish, because you all mix up your 'L's and 'R's and it sounds really goofy." In reality, he angrily defended his mom on the occasions when someone pointed out her accent, but he was willing to ignore that right now if it would give him something to hold over Yun-hee. She hadn't stopped lording the fact that she was currently the tallest over his head for the whole week that they'd been in Seoul so far and it was grating on his nerves.

He'd managed to strike a nerve, judging from the way Yun-hee's brow furrowed. "Your dad looks goofy in family pictures. He's too white."

Jae made a dismissive noise to cover how that needled him, when he'd thought the very same thing after looking at the most recent picture they'd taken as a group. "So does your mom. She's darker than everyone else."

Dangerous territory, and he knew it. Grandmother had always favored backhanded compliments involving her daughter-in-law's complexion and comparing her to Hye and Sun, who were more fair. The fact that Yun-hee clearly resembled her mother in that respect didn't help, nor did the fact that her own younger sister Myung-hee was lighter and too young to understand how it hurt her sister when she pointed it out. The only reason Jae dared to bring it up at all was because that particular topic hadn't been broached yet this visit, so he was at less risk of getting pinched, as Yun-hee routinely did when pushed too far. It was a habit she was trying to break, at her parents' urging, but she and Jae always knew how to push each other's buttons.

Sure enough, Yun-hee stopped in her tracks, scowling. "I should hit you for that."

"Go ahead." Jae did not actually want to get hit, he was all bones and Yun-hee hit hard, but the words were out of his mouth almost before he thought them. It was a frequent occurrence in the last couple years, since Hye's diagnosis and The Move. (Capital letters required, so that one could fully appreciate how sure he was that it was ruining his life.)

She glared at him a moment more before huffing and stalking off ahead of him. Jae shoved his hands in his pockets and followed at a few steps' distance. His stomach twisted in the way it did when he sort of wanted to apologize, but she sure wasn't apologizing for what she'd said about his dad, so he kept his mouth shut.

They finally fell in step again when thunder crashed right overhead and sent fat raindrops splattering over the sidewalk. They sprinted back to Grandmother's house with their heads ducked low, and Jae had the self-control to mostly suppress his laughter when Yun-hee slipped on the wet floor just inside the front door and was sent sprawling, yelling out "Shit!" in front of all their relatives. (He'd taught her that word. She'd been adamant that he teach her how to properly swear in English and he'd agreed on the condition that she teach him to swear in Korean.)

Later at dinner, when Grandmother launched into some long-winded story that would inevitably end with a moral that most or all of her children and their families had failed to live up to, Yun-hee passed him an invisible gun under the table and they pretended to shoot themselves. It was one of the nicer bonding moments that they'd had that week.

---

"Jae. Jae. Min-jae. Wake up."

Jae groaned and swatted Yun-hee's hand away from his shoulder. He had to share a room with her and Myung-hee at Grandmother's, and thus was left vulnerable to being shaken awake in the middle of the night. "What?"

"I want to get a tan."

He squinted at her in the darkness of the room. "You woke me up for that?"

"I was thinking about it, because of what you said today."

"...Oh." Okay, that was enough to make him actually want to apologize. "I didn't mean it."

Yun-hee sniffed dismissively. "I don't care if you did or not. But Grandmother means it. And you know, I..." She trailed off for a moment, picking absently at Jae's blanket. "I want to make her mad. Because she's so mean to my mom for it, and she thinks she can make me feel bad too, and I'm so tired of it."

Jae sat up so that he could properly mull that over without Yun-hee leaning over him. He thought that he saw the appeal of the idea for her, taking a part of herself that their grandmother hated and subtly saying that she was proud of it. "Sometimes I wish I was blonde," he said suddenly. "Because of the way she looks at my dad."

"You should dye your hair," Yun-hee said, as though it was obvious.

"No way. Mom and Dad wouldn't let me, and I wouldn't look good blonde."

"You think you look so good now?" She scoffed.

Jae rolled his eyes and shoved her back in the direction of her own sleeping spot. "God, shut up and go away."

"I'm going to do it," she said, before retreating.

"Fine, do it. Maybe she'll get so mad she has a heart attack."

"You can't say that!" Yun-hee tried to sound offended, but she couldn't quite cover her giggles at his audacity.

"I didn't say I wanted her to die or anything." Jae laid back down and wrapped the blanket around himself more tightly. Silence fell over the room again and he breathed an internal sigh of relief that they hadn't woken Myung-hee, who would have surely tattled on them the next morning. He was just starting to nod off when Yun-hee's voice drifted over to him again.

"Jae."

"What."

"You talk in your sleep and it sounds dumb."

"Your face is dumb," he muttered, but there was no venom in it. Across the room, he saw her lift her hand and shape her fingers into a gun, pretending to shoot at him. He returned the gesture, and they shared a quiet giggle before settling down for real.

Thanksgiving in the extended Parker household was a big deal. Cooking dinner was an all day affair, with Jae's paternal grandmother, aunt, and his mother all teaming up to prepare it. Everyone but the three of them was banned from the kitchen, typically leaving Jae's dad to escape back to work for a few hours and his Grandpa and Uncle Derek to argue about whether they were going to watch football or the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. Jae and his older cousin Alex were usually banished outside early on for being rowdy.

On this particular day, Alex had announced that he was going to the skate park with his friends, to which his mother had responded by telling him to take Jae along "because he's your little cousin and you shouldn't leave him out". Both Jae and Alex had protested this, Jae for being called "little" and Alex because being sixteen and ordered to bring a twelve-year-old anywhere with your friends was a fate worse than death. Alex was, as he told Jae while they walked to the skate park, practically an adult and had a driver's permit and a girlfriend named Julie who totally let him take her bra off this one time, so having to watch out for Jae was "really gay", and he'd better not do anything to embarrass Alex in front of his friends.

Naturally, all of this meant that Jae's sole purpose in life for that afternoon was to embarrass Alex in front of his friends.

He got off to a good start, making a pest of himself and complaining that he was bored until one of the older boys dug an iPad out of his backpack and handed it over to keep Jae busy for a while. He passed a good twenty minutes sitting on the steps and playing Fruit Ninja, but his interest was quickly drawn back to the skateboards.

"Alex," he called, "I wanna try."

Alex pointedly ignored him, concentrating instead on trying to flip his board or something. Jae had no idea what any sort of skateboarding tricks were called.

"Alex," Jae said, louder. "Your mom said you have to let me try if I want to."

Alex looked at him, and then very deliberately skated away towards the half-pipe.

"Alex," Jae's tone veered towards whiny. If he wasn't going to get a turn, then he was going to annoy the hell out of everyone there.

"Let him try, man," one of the other boys called. "Here." He hopped off his own board and offered it to Jae when Alex didn't immediately respond. "Have you ever skated before?"

"No." Jae took the board uncertainly. He hadn't expected any of them to actually let him try.

"Here, look, stand on it like this..." The older boy - his name was Kasey or something like that that normally started with a "C" but was instead a "K" - took Jae by the arm and led him over to demonstrate. "Just push with your back foot and then stand like this to balance."

Jae did as instructed, propelling himself a few feet. Alex and the rest of his friends had gone back to their own tricks, ignoring him and Kasey as he hobbled through the basics. By the time the sun was starting to slide down towards the horizon, he'd more or less managed to push himself around and steer without wobbling too much. Kasey took the board back for a while and skated around him, jumping the stairs.

"I bet I can do that." You just had to jump and then land, right? Couldn't be that hard. Jae skipped stairs all the time, so a skateboard shouldn't make that much difference.

Kasey grinned and handed the board over again. "Go ahead."

Jae backed up and mounted the board again, pushing himself forward to build up speed. He just had to jump right before he hit the stairs.

The stairs... the stairs were closer and taller than he'd first thought.

He wasn't sure what exactly went wrong. Maybe he wobbled too much at the wrong time, maybe he just froze up. Maybe he just sucked at skateboarding and it was an omen.

Regardless of the cause, Jae did not, in fact, jump the stairs. Instead, he lost his balance and tumbled down them, scraping up his face and landing squarely on his left arm at the bottom.

The next few minutes were a blur. The pain hit him a few seconds after he landed, jolting all the way up from his wrist to his shoulder, and he didn't know if his face felt wet because he was bleeding, crying, or both. He could hear Kasey yelling for Alex and then Alex yelling at him, but the breath had been knocked out of him and he couldn't answer. At some point, someone was helping him turn over and sit up, and he was vaguely aware of Alex talking to someone on the phone. He noticed Kasey's discarded board, and the gouge that the concrete had left in its surface, and that almost felt worse than his probably-broken arm.

Jae spent Thanksgiving evening in the ER, having been loaded into his dad's car once Alex got through to him and he rushed from his office to the park. His wrist was indeed broken, and he would spend the next month or so with it in a sling, swinging between irritation and embarrassment at how it had gotten broken and quiet relief that it wasn't his drawing hand.

Alex informed him that his wipeout was "totally gay", but he also drew a dragon on Jae's cast, so Jae pretended that made it alright.

It was nearing eleven when Ethan got home. He'd gotten caught up in organizing his office that evening, then stopped by his parents' house with the intent of just picking up a few of his old things that he'd been storing there, but instead got swept into a lengthy discussion about his family. He'd forgotten how quickly rumors spread in a town like Kingman.

"How is Hye's health?" His mother had asked after dancing around the subject for a good while. Always Hye's "health" lately, not anything else about her. "I heard Jae was having some problems at school."

That at least was true, if the parent-teacher conference he was supposed to attend next week meant anything. Even then, Ethan suspected that a few of the teachers might be cutting Jae more slack than usual since one or two of them had been his teachers once upon a time (which was probably how his mother had found out about Jae's disruptions in class in the first place).

"Hye is doing fine, and Jae just has some problems talking out of turn. He's twelve, most kids have a hard time watching their mouths."

His mother nodded. "Of course. I just hope Hye's... issues... aren't affecting him too badly."

Ethan gave her a flat look. "He's twelve. Of course her illness is affecting him. I would have had far worse problems in school if I'd spent the better part of a year thinking you were dying, I promise you." He was trying to keep irritation from creeping into his voice, but it had been a long day at the end of a longer week, he was very tired, and his patience for the way his parents had never seemed to be able to figure out how to act naturally around Hye and Jae had worn thin long ago.

"I worry about you not being home enough," she continued. "I don't think it's healthy for Jae to be on his own that much."

You sure haven't been offering to babysit, though, was the response that Ethan bit down on and swallowed. "We're doing the best we can right now. I know you're trying to help, Mom, but I really need to get going now. I'll talk to you later." He gathered up his boxes and shouldered his way out the door, repeating she's trying to help to himself all the way out to the car.

Fifteen, twenty years ago, he had desperately wanted to get out of Kingman. It had taken moving back to realize that he had missed his hometown, but being so close to his family again was a double-edged sword. He had matured past the point where he genuinely believed that he was smarter and more sensible than the rest of them (mostly), but having them pry into his personal life and offer their opinions would always grate on him.

The TV in the living room was still on when he trudged through the front door. He tried to step lightly, but Hye still noticed and turned to him as he peered into the living room. On the other side of her on the couch, Ethan could see Jae curled up beneath the knit blanket that was normally draped over the back of it. Hye lifted a finger to her lips and indicated Jae; he was asleep.

"Sorry I took so long," Ethan whispered, shuffling over to the couch and bending to kiss Hye's cheek. "My mom wanted to talk."

She nodded understandingly. "We thought we'd wait up, but..." She shrugged, nodding in Jae's direction again.

"It's been a long week for everyone." Ethan pulled the blanket back from Jae and, with some effort, scooped him up into his arms. Discussing the parent-teacher conference could wait until tomorrow.

Hye watched with raised eyebrows as he started towards the stairs carrying Jae. "I don't think you'll be able to do that much longer without throwing your back out," she murmured.

He grunted. "Probably not." But for now, he could. He got to Jae's room and tucked him in without incident before returning to the living room to help Hye up. Stairs were still difficult for her most of the time.

"What did your mom say?"

"The usual. I'll need to ask Jae's teachers not to go around saying things to her."

Hye snorted. "I see."

"She's trying to help."

"I know. That makes it more annoying because you can't tell her off for it."

"Things will settle down. It'll all work out." He kissed her gently.

"Maybe."

"Maybe." It was enough for now.