Heir To Nothing But You

Orientation Week Has The Body Count Of One Ego

Orientation was held in an Auditorium, where the smell of fresh paint mixed with the anxiety of new students.

Chi sat cross-legged between Sae-rom and a mountain of welcome folders that doubled as a makeshift shield as she listened to the program coordinator drone on about visa regulations she had memorized from the three separate PDFs she had read over the past week.

“You’re not even taking notes,” Sae-rom drawled.

“I read the handbook on the plane,” Chi replied.

“Nerd.”

“Scholarship recipient. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

All around them, exchange students from dozens of different programs chittered excitedly in clusters about their class schedules, dorm room Wi-Fi passwords, and first impressions of Seoul, the way people barter at foreign currency exchange counters – eager, if a bit uncertain, about the value of what they were trading.

Chi liked this group, liked the sense of arrival and displacement that clung to their every word, every carefully modulated tone of voice that suggested to the outside world that yes, they most definitely belonged here .

It made Chi’s own plan to live in this city, this country, feel less like a solitary quest.

During the break, a girl from the Media program – who had bent over two rows to introduce herself – suddenly leaned closer and asked the question Chi was rapidly realizing would follow her for the entire semester.

“Is it true you slept in Choi Ji-hoon’s apartment last night?”

Chi coughed politely into her coffee. “I did not sleep in – there was a mix up in the housing arrangements.”

“That’s what everyone says at first.”

“There is no first. It is entirely coincidental.”

The girl looked unconvinced, but the program coordinator had already stood back up at the podium, introducing the heads of different programs.

When the head of her own department stood to give the welcoming speech, the girl announced – as if by afterthought – that this year, her staff had the wonderful opportunity to partner with a number of corporate sponsors to provide internship opportunities in the fields of communications and media, including the Choi Group’s media and PR divisions.

Her name was Saerom. She elbowed Chi so hard in the ribs, the girl nearly spilled her folder of documents.

“Did you hear that? Corporate sponsor. That means fate,” Saerom said.

“That means a conglomorate that owns half the city, that he just happens to have a certain amount of … say over.”

“It means fate.”

“It does not mean fate.”

At lunch, Chi learned more about Choi Ji-hoon in the span of forty-five minutes than she had about most world leaders in the combined span of twenty-two years.

He was the only son of the billionaire industrialist and shipping magnate Choi Dae-sung, whose business empire covered most aspects of the economy, from steel manufacturing to logistics, which meant that half of the country’s exports passed through one of his ports on their way overseas.

He was twenty-four, finishing his degree in business administration at the business school, which he had somehow managed to prolong for two extra years by switching his electives to literature, painting, and sailing, none of which had anything to do with business studies.

He was the captain of the university sailing team, which, according to Sae-rom, was the only place on campus where no one asked him about taking over his father’s company, and – according to the girls’ whispered gossip – had a reputation.

“A reputation?” Chi asked, suddenly far more invested in this conversation than she should have been.

“The clubs-and-cameras kind,” the girl – her name was Min-jun, Chi learned – replied cheerfully, as if she’d been waiting for someone to ask. “Every few months there’s a new picture surfacing. Him, leaving some girl’s apartment in the morning. Both of them, supposedly. My cousin’s boyfriend is one of his teammates. She says he’s actually pretty nice, which is, I think, worse than if he hadn’t been.”

Chi thought about the little model ship in his apartment, the one she had almost fallen asleep on last night, in the middle of his collection of various tools that could have been used to carve wood. She thought about the almost-empty package of toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet, the ones he had, perhaps, kept as a backup in case of emergencies.

None of it added up to the rumors, and Chi thought, perhaps selfishly, that she was grateful.

“Good thing I’m not going to be one of his girls,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

Saerom grinned knowingly at her through the rice in her bowl. “Sure. Good thing,” she said.