Lie Again! Chapter 69

Chapter 69. I Know, But (4)

 

“Jin!”

 

The brunette who hurriedly got out of the car—it was Amanda.

 

Startled by the unexpected face, Jin stared at her blankly.

 

Amanda strode over quickly, examined Jin from head to toe, and after confirming she seemed unharmed, let out a breath of relief. Then she sank down beside Jin.

 

“….”

 

“….”

 

An awkward silence hung between them for a moment. Normally, unable to endure silence, Jin would have brought up something—anything—but she kept her mouth shut, staring only at her shoes. She had neither the will nor the energy to speak.

 

“Want to go to the beach?”

 

It was Amanda who broke the silence. At the sudden, out-of-the-blue suggestion, Jin looked up at her. Amanda’s profile was calm and unreadable, as if no particular thought occupied her mind.

 

“There’s a place I used to go to nearby.”

 

After a brief hesitation, Jin nodded without asking questions. Anywhere was fine, as long as it could take her out of this feeling.

 

“Don’t you need to tell your host mom?”

 

About ten minutes into the drive, Amanda, turning the steering wheel, jerked her chin toward the clock on the central panel as if it had just occurred to her. It was pointing close to two.

 

“It’s fine.…I snuck out.”

 

The small deviation that had once seemed like it would be a one-time thing had happened several times. The reasons varied. It was awkward to say that Evan, who she’d gone on a date with yesterday, was coming over again today; she wanted to stay together just a little longer.

 

Today, it had simply been hard to explain. If she told Riley, she would surely insist on driving her, and Jin didn’t want to interrupt her evening—nor did she want to arrive at that party in Riley’s car.

 

Jin caught herself absentmindedly murmuring about her habitual deviations and glanced at Amanda, suddenly alert. She expected to be lectured. 

 

But contrary to her expectation, Amanda only curled her lips into a smile.

 

“Good job.”

 

Adjusting the steering wheel, Amanda continued what she had momentarily paused.

 

“I skipped practice tonight too.”

 

Amanda skipped practice? Jin had never once seen her miss tennis practice, considering her goal was to be selected for varsity next year.

 

Jin looked at her in confusion. Feeling her gaze, Amanda shrugged.

 

“Joey called me urgently. Said it seemed like something happened to you, but she couldn’t move right now. So, I came.” 

 

Jin pressed her tongue against her teeth. Rumors traveled fast in Crawford. It wasn’t hard to imagine the SNS post already uploaded a few hours ago—the video that must’ve captured her.

 

How many people saw that pathetic sight of her being dragged out by the wrist by Evan? It’s the worst. I just wanted to change my mood for a bit—why can’t I even have that.

 

No. That’s not it. More than that, the fact that Amanda skipped practice because of this—

 

“…I’m sorry.”

 

“Why are you sorry? That was my choice.”

 

Just as a sense of helplessness began to wash over her whole body, followed by a surge of anger, and her emotions became tangled in a mess once again, Amanda’s blunt words fell. Hearing the voice of someone who was sincerely puzzled, Jin, who had been deep in thought, spoke again. 

 

“Thank you for coming.”

 

“That sounds much better.”  

 

Amanda smiled faintly.

 

* * *

 

The black water rushed in with a whoosh, swallowing up sand and stones embedded here and there, then receded again with a whoosh, as if nothing had happened.

 

The moon pulls the sea; the earth pushes it back. In silence, the two of them gazed at the black waves shaped by the moon and the earth.

 

“Not long after I started middle school, I got a nickname. Misfit Miller.”

 

At the sudden low voice drifting over, Jin turned her head toward Amanda. It was a word she remembered from some time ago.

 

‘I forgot who you were for a second. Misfit Miller.’

 

The sneering words Joey had spat with twisted lips on the day she and Amanda fought.

 

“You’ve heard it before, right?”

 

Social misfit Miller. Jin nodded at Amanda’s explanation.

 

“I’ve always been like that. It was hard for me to say things I didn’t mean. Well. Rather than hard, I guess I just didn’t understand.”

 

Amanda scooped up a handful of fine sand. The damp grains sifted through her fingers, piling loosely along the path her hand traced, forming a small mound.

 

“I couldn’t understand why I had to say I was okay when I was angry at someone, why I had to give compliments like ‘cool’ or ‘amazing’ for things that seemed trivial, or why I couldn’t call something pathetic ‘pathetic’.” 

 

The small sand wall she’d built like a fortress crumbled back into flat grains with one sweep of her hand.

 

“I wondered why everyone wasted time like that. Especially when I saw them smiling sweetly to someone’s face and then talking behind their back. It all seemed like hypocrisy to me.”

 

“….”

 

“And when I said that—when I told them that their hypocrisy felt fake—they couldn’t keep smiling.”

 

She wondered what she had thought in front of those strangely distorted expressions. That was when the nickname started. And when the other kids gradually began to avoid her. 

 

She recognized something was wrong with her increasingly isolated school life, but she never felt like fixing it.

 

“But one day, Mr. Wayne called me in.”

 

Jin, who had been quietly watching the sand castle being made and undone beneath Amanda’s hands, turned at the familiar name.

 

“He kept prying into things, like whether I liked tennis or why I didn’t play doubles.” 

 

And young Amanda had easily sensed why this teacher, who never indulged in idle chatter in class, was asking her such things.

 

Had being alone become that noticeable even to teachers? He’d probably launch into some tedious lecture about how it was better to make friends soon. Would he let her go before the school bus left?

 

But what came through her ears was unexpected.

 

“Do you know the rules of a tennis serve?”

 

When Amanda abruptly asked mid-story, Jin shook her head.

 

Turning her eyes to the ground, Amanda brought her index finger to the sand. Her finger created shallow furrows, and before long, a tennis court with sharp corners emerged. 

 

“The first serve has to go into the diagonal service box. Otherwise, the game can’t proceed.”

 

Her long finger pointed to the service box behind the half-line dividing the court.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because that’s the rule. Even a ball that lands inside the box is hard to return, so if it were allowed across the entire court, nine out of ten serves wouldn’t even be returned and the game would end before it began.”

 

Jin nodded. Certainly, without any information about the direction, trajectory, or force of the ball, if someone just attacked randomly, the match would likely end with nothing but serves—no rallies at all.

 

“That’s what he said I was doing.”

 

“….”

 

“Mr. Wayne said if you keep firing off aggressive shots that break the rules, eventually no one will want to play with you.”

 

Though much time had passed since that day, Mr. Wayne’s final words were still vivid in Amanda’s ears.

 

At the end of that short conversation that had struck somewhere deep inside her, as she was about to leave the room, his final advice had followed her out.

 

‘Human relationships are not much different from a tennis rally. The rhythm shared with the other person, the thrill of predicting the ball’s arrival and hitting it back. Think carefully on what I’ve said.’

 

“That became my brake. …Aren’t you curious how someone like me became friends with someone as loud and chaotic as Joey?”

 

“…I am.”

 

“She’s exactly the same as before. Every time she chatters beside me, the words ‘you’re annoying, go away’ rise up to the tip of my tongue.”

 

Amanda stopped talking and let out a small sigh, as if even the thought was exhausting. Jin let out a soft laugh as she vividly imagined Joey following Amanda around and chirping like a little bird. 

 

“Mr. Wayne’s warning kept stopping my mouth at the last second. So I just decided to endure it and see how the rally would unfold.”

 

“….”

 

“And that turned out to be the best decision I ever made.”