💬'It felt like a thousand shards of glass had embedded into her chest, making her wonder how she was still breathing. How was it that even though she'd always expected that painful moment, the reality was even more devastating? To the day, she stil...
Ye-Jin had absolutely no interest in golf. She'd never even held a golf club. She'd told Hyo-Jin this vociferously.
She was that Korean-American girl who actually didn't belong to her high-school girl's golf team.
It was a running joke with her friends at the comp-sci lab. She used to be on the desktop publishing team for the yearbook and they had a good laugh when one of them wrote a Perl script that predicted which club a person belonged to, based on their first and last names.
They'd gotten into so much trouble when their supervising teacher found out, and they'd been summarily kicked out of the team. Her parents had been called in to 'discuss' her inappropriate behavior. It hadn't exactly helped that, after the stern-faced supervisor explained what she'd done, her father had let out a snort of laughter.
Her parents weren't exactly the politically correct types. They couldn't see what the problem was. Their eldest daughter had been in the golf team. Her father had asked why she was being punished: had not her software worked exactly as intended?
The supervisor had only given her abeoji a confused look. Her father then explained his reasoning: Ye-Rin had been in the golf team. The software would have been correct in that particular instance. In Ye-Jin's case, it would've been incorrect. Both girls shared the same last name and similar first names.
The software was predictive, but it was not always accurate. People were sometimes unpredictable and weren't always easy to put into neat little boxes. Sometimes they were all too predictable and liked to fit into those boxes. Neither scenarios were necessarily bad. Being able to predict people was a necessary skill, according to her father. But one had to keep in mind that people also had the ability to surprise you.
Her father had then apologized, bowing deeply at her supervisor, startling the poor man. "My daughter did not intend to label anyone unjustly."
Being kicked out of the yearbook team had not been the only lesson she'd learned then. Her father made her realize that results and expectations were completely different things.
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It was early Sunday morning and normally she would be still in bed, though with several little feet using her body as a footstool. Instead, she was standing beside a golf cart, waiting for Hyo-Jin and In-Sung to get their equipment out of their van.
Her children along with the couple's son, Pil-Gu, were messing around the golf cart. The two older boys were dangling off the rear handles of the four seater buggy, while the twins were taking turns at the wheel.
SJ had added 'Tayo' to his repertoire of dinosaurs, tractors, and diggers. He was pretending to be the blue bus, but MJ had other ideas and was struggling with her brother for control of the steering wheel. She was insisting to her dongsaeng that she was Miss Rabbit driving the children to Madame Gazelle's playgroup.
Ye-Jin paid half-attention to her squabbling twins, occasionally reminding them to play nice, while she went through her work emails on her phone.
A message alert came up and she raised her eyebrows when she saw that it was from Kyo of all people.
[ 어디야 ] Where are you?
[ 주차장 ] Parking lot, Ye-Jin typed back.
She then looked up from her phone screen. "MJ, I think it's SJ's turn now."
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