일곱

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Appa says the second day of something is always better than the first because you know what to expect, and he's right. The Hotbox is slightly more tolerable today. I sacrifice my long waves for an updo and tie the scarf as an headband, which keeps the sweat from rolling down the back of my neck. Anna has taken preventative measures too, bringing in a battery-powered fan from home that she mounted between our stations. Our biggest obstacle is juggling bathroom breaks, because we're drinking more water.

Halfway through my shift, I get my thirty-minute break. Taking off my green vest, I head upstairs to the cafe, where I find not too full. The sugar cookie Taehyung gave me yesterday was pretty delicious, so I buy two and find an empty table in a private nook under the pirate ship. I pull out my phone and look up what's been happening since I've clocked in today.

Jonghyun "Victorious" Kim was a professional surfer who won a bunch of World Surf League championship titles and Triple Crowns in the 20th century. According to his online biography, he's continually ranked as one of the top surfers of all time. it looks he died a few years ago. There's a photo of a life-size memorial statue out by the surfer's crosswalk, taken at sunset, with a bunch of flowers and surfboards propped up against it.

I start to read about how he grew up in a poor Korean family and started surfing at the age of six, and how he fostered this entire multigenerational family of professional surfers: his son, Seokjin Kim, and his grandchildren -

Wait, Taehyung has a younger sister, Eunjin, sixteen, and she's a state and nationally ranked surfer who'll be competing professional for the first time this fall and predicted to join a yearlong world tour starting next January. But Taehyung won't? And what happened to his dad?

A shadow falls over my phone. I hit the power button, but not fast enough.

"Reading up on me?"

I close my eyes for a moment. How did he find me up here? "Are you stalking me on the security cameras?"

"Every move," Taehyung says. Metal legs squeak against the slate floor as he spin another chair around backward and straddles it, legs spread. He crosses his arms on the chair's back. "If you wanted to know something about my family, all you had to do was ask."

"I'm good, thanks." I start to gather up my stuff, but I'm only halfway through the first cookie, so it's pretty obvious that I just sat down.

"I saw you staring at my appa today." An accusation.

"I wasn't -"

"You were."

A tiny groan escapes my mouth. My shoulders fall. "I didn't know . . .I mean, Anna kind of mentioned something happened, but I didn't know what, exactly, so I was just . . ." Just what? Digging my grave a little deeper? "Curious," I finally finish.

"Okay," he says, nodding his head slowly. "So what do you already know?"

I turn my phone on. "I got to here," I say, and point to the article.

He leans over the back of the chair and looks at the screen. "Ah. That's it? So you know who my grandfather was and how he died?"

"Didn't get to the death part," I say, hoping that doesn't sound as bad as I think it does.

He doesn't seem to take offense. "He was a big wave surfer. That means he had steel balls. Too stupid risks, even when he got too old to be doing it. In the winter, after big storms, the waves will crest very high, up at the Secret Garden. He took a big risk one morning after a storm when I was thirteen. I watched him from the cliffs. The wave ate him whole and spit him out onto the rocks. That's why call it Secret Garden by the way. He wasn't the first one to die there. Just the famous one."

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