He's got the whole world in his hands | Jeongin

Chapter two

All Minsi could remember was a swirl of memories from that night. She wasn't much of a party person, but she wanted to get loose that night. Her mom had her stressed and to her added annoyance, the constant nagging of Minho and Han begging her for a chance to get shitfaced together, it was one she couldn't resist. 

Sometimes you're thrown into unexpected situations in life. Life has a way of curling its fingers around your throat at the worst times. Falling victim to fate or whatever it was called, Minsi reached her limit. When Minho showed up at her college dorm with a tipsy Han Jisung in toe, it wasn't hard to cave. 

The insistent begging, the flushed rounded chipmunk cheeks of Han, the puppy dog eyes of Minho, was a temptation that she couldn't resist. A sin, her mother would have called it. Young alcoholics with zero self-control. How God pitied them, supposedly. Maybe if their parents would have raised them in the pews, then they wouldn't turn out this way. 

Bullshit. 

Her sun-kissed fingers curled around the page she was writing in. Ripping it from the notebook and tossing it aside, she began to sketch again. With the angled pen, her wrist moved in fluid movements. Over and over, again and again. She wasn't good at it, but she needed something to get her mind off the former conversation. 

She knew the police would be involved at some point, but she didn't expect them to show up at nine in the morning. She was still sound asleep upstairs. In a pair of red and black striped boxers and a white t-shirt, loud snores filtered through her throat and nasal cavity. 

Alarmed onyx eyes met hers. There was fear written all over her mother's face when her matching eyes opened. When her mother said the police were there, she knew it was game over. Maybe it was putting too much faith in the law to hope that they would have called her instead. 

She shoved her messy hair into a ponytail at the top of her scalp. Pieces of shiny black hair poked out in every direction. Her mother was just a fly on the wall. When officers spoke to Minsi, they couldn't see her mom hiding behind the kitchen wall, but Minsi could feel her presence. The annoyance saturated her skin and poked at every bone in her body. 

"We just have a few questions about August sixteenth." 

There was no getting out of it. She might as well make them comfortable. Despite the hatred for her mother, she still knew manners. She opened the door wider and let them inside. The pair hesitated before stepping inside, but they didn't go further than the entryway. 

Her mother's soft footsteps scampered away, but her bedroom door never closed. She was perched on the edge of her perfectly made bed. Her spine was straightened and her ears perked up. What crimes had her daughter committed? Was she here to be detained?

That's when Minsi spilled her version of events that night. They were drunken and discombobulated. She tried her best to remember, but from the glances the cops were shooting each other, it was clear that it was another dead end. Just another drunk college kid. 

"If you remember anything else, please don't hesitate to reach out." 

She was slipped a business card from one of the cops. She remembered staring at it until her vision blurred. The numbers went fuzzy and collided with one another. She blinked, snapping herself out of it, forced herself to smile, and thanked them for reaching out. 

She felt more like a puppet on a string than anything. The moment the door shut, her mother was already there behind her. Still dressed in her white nightgown, her eyes squinted into half-moons. "Why were they here? What about Suki? Suki from the church?" 

Suki used to go to their church until she got older. After she found her mother dead when she was sixteen, things had never been quite the same. Minsi couldn't blame her. Since she was studying psychology, she understood what Suki was going through. At the time, she didn't, but people grow and change. They learn new things, expand their horizons, and life goes on. 

Minsi forced herself to nod. "They found Suki dead out behind the house of a frat party."

"Why was there talk of that demon board?" 

"They're called ouija boards, Mother. Drunk kids were just screwing around with it. They were so drunk, they barely understood what they were doing." 

"Conjured up the devil and now Suki is dead." Her mother shook her head and stormed towards her room. 

Minsi thought she was off the hook until the word began to spread through the telephone. Her mom was from two decades ago. She didn't like cell phones and found herself attached to the sense of security from her house phone. She often twirled the cord around her fingers and laughed while she talked with friends. 

Her mother was a gossip fanatic. Always hungry for new stories and discussing the past, she'd use a toothpick to nibble on cut up fruit. Minsi grew used to her mother's incessant babbling. One hand with a toothpick and the other wrapped around the phone's cord. Her mother's loud giggles woke her up when she used to live at home. 

At first, the sizzling news was that Suki Yoon was dead. Then it ebbed into conversations of the devil and the ouija board. When someone found out Minsi was in attendance and not at the religious university her mother insisted she was at, her friends rang her for answers. When one of her classmates confirmed they attended the same university, the one with the devil board and Suki's murder, the tea was piping hot. 

And so was Nari Park's anger towards her daughter.