My Seoul Man

Chapter 44

"That was some quick thinkin', dude," Yoli said. "Pullin' that t-shirt up like that."

We'd just seen a little clip of the fire that had made it to at least one national news broadcast.

The camera had panned past AJ too fast for anyone to recognize him even if he hadn't pulled his t-shirt up over his nose like he was trying to protect himself from the smoke and fumes. And his hair pretty much covered up his eyes, too.

But he said, "You just can't ever tell what'll happen, you know? My Angels started using this face cream I use after someone caught a screenshot the jar in the background of a live stream. When it started flying off the shelves, the company approached me to do commercials, of course—that was cool. But you can never let your guard down. They'll search on something like...the kind of tree you were standing in front of, trying to figure out where you were."

"You're joking," Yoli gaped.

"Happened to a friend," he said. "Someone tracked down what kind of tree it was and where they bloomed at that time. It didn't work, because there were lots of places it might be. But the fact that she went that far blew our minds."

Ronnie snorted, "Jeezus, how do you even have a life? I mean, I can't even imagine having to worry about that kinda shit all the time!"

AJ rubbed one of the legs I'd draped over his lap and said, "I think I'm good this time, though. I mean, I'm just a blur in the background. And we're in Nowheresville, New Mexico, too, so I doubt it'll go international or anything."

"I don't know," I said. "Belle being there it got it on the national news. And there's the racial angle. It's all over Black Twitter."

"Do Black kids like K-pop?" Yoli asked.

"I wondered, too," I said. "But I've noticed that Black fans have some of the best reaction channels on YouTube. And they're the ones who dance the most at those pop-up events where they play random songs and the crowd does all the steps from the videos. It's guys, too, right? Not just girls."

"Caitlin Benson," AJ said. "Biggest NCT fan on the planet. Just watching her squeal and go so nuts over every move they make—it reminds me how much we mean to so many people. And how blessed we are, too."

I knew how blessed he was for sure. And that those blessings had begun flowing my way from the moment we bumped into each other in that parking lot back home.

I mean, there I was, licking my wounds in a sky suite in a Vegas-sized Harrah's jutting out like the proverbial sore thumb in the middle of a tiny desert rez run by a tiny desert tribe whose name I couldn't even begin to pronounce properly. Soothed by and grateful for the opulence.

We would've gotten a regular room for free, thanks to Wally's connects. But AJ told him he'd done enough and booked the suite because it was relatively cheap compared to the ones he was used to, being in Nowheresville, N.M.

But I was also kind of ashamed of myself at the same time. Because it was a tiny desert reservation where a lot of the actual members of the tribe couldn't afford a regular room, let alone a suite.

And those very angry men had blown everything up because they couldn't, either, probably. And couldn't stand having that casino there to remind them of it. Or a rich Black stock contractor stepping around a dance floor with the kind of women who refused their advances in the club.

And of course, a "chink" had kicked the shit out of one of their boys. "Fuckin' chink thinks he's Bruce Lee or somethin'," I heard one hiss.

Seems like people revert to slurs from 'way back on purpose when they're really mad. The ones Rita heard at the dinner table at home, that have deep-rooted, centuries old hatred in them.