Chapter 1
Rain on the Papers April 1947, and the road to the village school outside Gwangju was nothing but mud after the thaw.
Jeon Jungkook, 19, walked it every morning with his lesson books wrapped in cloth and his father’s old jacket hanging loose on his shoulders. He passed Kim Taehyung’s mulberry field at the second hill, where Taehyung, 20, spent his mornings tying young branches and humming to keep the silkworms calm. Jungkook never stopped. He’d been teaching for three weeks and he didn’t think anyone had a reason to talk to him. But that afternoon the sky turned without warning and rain came hard, fast, the kind that smears ink before you can close a book. Jungkook slipped on the wet path and crouched over his papers, shielding them with his jacket, when he heard running footsteps. “Hey! You’ll ruin them!” Taehyung was suddenly there, holding an umbrella made of oil paper stretched over mulberry leaves, and he pulled Jungkook under it so they were both dripping and breathing hard while the rain drummed on the leaves. Jungkook looked up, surprised, and asked, “You read them?” Taehyung grinned, water running down his nose, and said, “I only read the parts the rain didn’t take.” Jungkook’s ears went red. “They’re not good poems.” “They’re wet,” Taehyung replied. “That’s different.” They stood like that until the storm eased to a drizzle, and then Taehyung pressed the umbrella into Jungkook’s hands. “Take it to school. Bring it back when the sun’s out.” Jungkook hesitated. “I don’t know your name.” “Kim Taehyung. I work this field. You’re the new teacher?” “Jeon Jungkook. I teach the children.” Taehyung nodded once, like he was memorizing it. “Then we’ll see each other tomorrow, Teacher Jeon.” Jungkook walked the rest of the way with the umbrella over his head and his papers dry for the first time all day. That night he wrote a new line at the bottom of his lesson book: Rain didn’t take everything. The next morning he took the longer path through the mulberry trees, and Taehyung was already waiting with two cups of barley tea and a dry rag for the umbrella. Jungkook didn’t say no to the tea.
