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YEAR FOUR
Sehyoon has lost track of how long he’s been washing his hands.
He pumps more soap anyways, and it’s a pursuit in itself with the little amount left. Meager beads foam out and spread along his palms, stinging the beds of his too-short fingernails and other creases too-dried-out to hold the last layer of skin. The redness looks like blood, but he tells himself it isn’t, reminds himself—
No, he doesn’t want to remember the sight of blood on his hands—but it isn’t blood. At least not anyone else’s.
The floral scent that fills the washroom doesn’t quite block out the phantom memory, but it does add noise, and he’s become obsessed with the familiar artificial lavender, far beyond its purpose. It tells him that he’s clean. He reviews his hands again, presses each knuckle and crease, and checks through the mirror too, in case it would show anything different.
“Sehyoon?”
The voice muffles softly through the door. Sehyoon’s eyes trail up to his own face.
“Are you still on the toilet? Or did you shower.”
He doesn’t realize how the tap roars until he finally shuts it off. Skipping the towel, he enters the dormroom with a long exhale as the warm light shrouds him comfortably.
It’s late, and Yuchan is already in bed, knees curled up and nose-deep in a book where he leans against the wall. Sehyoon pulls off his socks and lifts the blanket to join him. The top bunk is vacant always, its pillows and blankets added to their nest.
“How’s the book?”
Yuchan giggles, finishing a paragraph to immediately close it and set it aside. “It’s so interesting.” He pulls Sehyoon closer by the arm. “I never thought I’d like this genre, but the killer is an enigma. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t even do it. Are you in the library tomorrow? Can you get the rest of the series?”
“I’m not volunteering tomorrow, but I have time after lunch.”
“Okay.” Yuchan curls into Sehyoon, finding his damp hands and pulling them from under the sheets. Curiously, he traces along the cracking lines of Sehyoon’s palms, up to his wrinkled fingertips.
“You were overwashing. I know you were.”
Yuchan’s hands are cold, colder than usual, and Sehyoon shivers in his hold.
“Two years and you still have this habit,” Yuchan frowns and kisses Sehyoon’s knuckles.
“I’m sorry, I just,” Sehyoon can’t fully explain, “it just doesn’t feel clean. Not clean enough.”
“I’m not mad. Why are you apologizing?” Sehyoon’s hands are released, and cold fingers brush back his hair and cup his face. Cold arms wrap him tight and pull him close. Cold lips press his forehead, and Sehyoon melts when warm words are whispered, “You can always talk to me.”
Sehyoon nods his head amongst the tangles. They talk about solutions; if Yuchan can walk in and help him, if he could sing a song while washing and stop when it’s finished, if they could try a different soap. Eventually Yuchan falls silent discussing the plot of his book, and Sehyoon leaves the lamp on. Like this, he can fall asleep too, watching Yuchan pulled close to him. He doesn’t have to listen to the roar of his thoughts about how he’ll graduate soon, or the heartbeat pressed to his side, thrumming on and on into God knows what.
YEAR THREE
Sehyoon skips lunch to get more hours in the library. He owes them, really, from missing so many days in the year prior. Still, he’s happy to have this job instead of something like cleaning the gym, or God forbid, the cafeteria. It’s quiet here, and people tend to leave him alone. He’s helped here since first-year, and is probably the only student on the librarian’s good side. She even lets him eat here, because he cleans the study area anyway.
He empties his cart with a trained reflex, twice more efficient than he used to be, and it’s just mindful enough to keep his mind off things. There are always more subsections to memorize, more authors that trend with the students, more techniques to finish faster. He can basically trace back every book to who borrowed it, and he’s sure glad no one can do the same to him.
It goes in the record of course, but that’s an easy book to cheat.
It’s unnecessary now, though, as he’s just finishing his shift to fetch a book for Yuchan. “Dragons, he likes dragons now...” Yuchan doesn’t know the trends in school, and maybe he would care to, but Sehyoon would gladly entertain him with the genres his classmates find childlike. Pure romance is boring, anyway.
After flipping through a few pages, he checks out a book on his own and hurries out the library. The dash is fueled by regret with so few minutes left in the break to spend with Yuchan, and he falls flat over the stairs on the way to their dorm. Despite the swarm of students in the stairwell, no one notices.
“They found it?”
“I thought the killer was a teacher!”
“No, it really was a student! How do you explain the schedules?”
At that, it’s easy to forget the sting of his fall. He props himself back up, redirected by each statement. From his height on the staircase, he observes how they surround a girl he recognizes from his class. She gawks at their arguments and speaks up.
“Look, all i heard from the vice is that they found DNA. Like fingerprints or something.”
They erupt into a louder commotion, and Sehyoon’s stomach churns at the thought.
“Those are two completely different things!”
“Does something like that even last so long? Jiyu died almost a year ago!”
Sehyoon grasps the railing. Really, he should be frustrated they’re still talking about this. He thought a year of patience could bring back peace and quiet. He’s so used to getting frustrated —why can't everyone just forget? The whole school finally cares when the issue is murder—
but the thought of being found out, the thought of evidence…
Sehyoon clutches his book as the crowd's words drown into one thought. The stairwell grows tight, claustrophobic, and his heart races to flee the downward spiral. Everything is rushing back, pulling air from his lungs and threatening to take his life. He’s gasping, fleeing from all the noise, through the dorm’s halls like the thoughts of his mind. The sweat that coats his palms feels like more where it soils the book’s spine and pages.
He hears Yuchan call his name and pull him into the room, asking him what’s wrong, and then he is filled with sorrow and apology. Yuchan pulls the book from his hands and hugs him, shields him from his fears and all he can say is a repeated sorry, sorry this is the only thing I can’t tell you.
But Yuchan isn’t mad. He kneels Sehyoon in his hold onto the carpet and rocks him, absorbing all of his trembles and smoothing out the knots in his back. He doesn’t care if Sehyoon is filthy, and maybe he doesn’t know and doesn’t smell what Sehyoon does, but he still holds him secure, still sings Sehyoon’s favourite song and urges Sehyoon to sing along.
And maybe the lyrics pull him out of it. Maybe Yuchan’s hands around him—soft and cold and brushing his face like a snowflake—make him float a little, make his throat unknot and let him hum along. Maybe pulling Yuchan forward, ice lips thawing the numbness of Sehyoon’s own, makes everything okay.
“Sehyoon listen to me.” Yuchan’s breath chills against his mouth. He looks the same as when Sehyoon met him years ago in this room, youthful and bright. “I trust you and I worry about you but whatever it is going on out there, whatever happens outside this room, as long as you come back in one piece, I’m here for you.” He holds Sehyoon against his chest, heart steady and quiet and same as ever. “You don’t have to tell me.”
Sehyoon wonders if Yuchan already knows.
~
Whatever it was that Sehyoon’s classmate had heard from the vice principal, it doesn’t reach him again.
It still worries him, makes him relapse into skipping classes and falling out of his friend circle, but Yuchan is always there, safe in their dorm and easily reminding Sehyoon that he is safe too, even if just in that moment.
It’s his favourite thing to watch Yuchan tell his wild stories, to play their made-up card games, to sing old sappy songs together and hold Yuchan too close to be following school principles. It’s never too repetitive to stay so long in their dorm, and maybe Sehyoon finds too much comfort in repetition, but he couldn’t ask for anything else.
—Except how there are things he blames himself for, like Yuchan feeling colder as time goes on that sometimes he even complains about it. So Sehyoon had gathered the blankets from both bunks, their coziest sweaters, and the warmest hugs he could give, and Yuchan never mentions it again.
Still, some days, it really gets to him. Like the morning he shook Yuchan awake in fear that he would never get up. Or tonight, when Yuchan pulls himself around Sehyoon and kisses him full and deep, caging Sehyoon between his arms and asking for more.
It’s overwhelming, how everything falls into place. How Yuchan’s fingers curl under Sehyoon’s shirt, cold and rough as ice. How his eyes look a shade too dark, too close up and too different from what Sehyoon is used to. How his heartbeat drums way too loudly against Sehyoon’s own, louder than any thoughts, any words Sehyoon could muster. Sehyoon never thought he’d be one to deny Yuchan, especially like this, but everything is too much, and far too real.
But when denied, Yuchan doesn’t ask for why. He kisses Sehyoon’s cheek, makes a comfortable distance, even suggests normal things they could do to pass the time, and it’s too simple to fall back into habit with Yuchan, too easy to ignore the feeling of…
well, whatever it is Sehyoon has gotten himself into.
~
“It’s our one year anniversary,” Yuchan says one lunch break. “I have something planned for you later.”
It hits Sehyoon like a—a sock to the face. “One year? Since I asked you out?”
His head feels light as Yuchan beams. “Today. Do you have volunteering?”
“No but—” Sehyoon shifts on the desk chair as he puzzles together his thoughts. “What is it?”
“Sehni, I won’t tell you right now. Wait ‘til after your last class, when there’s more time.” Yuchan wobbles in his spot, never good at keeping in excitement. “Why? Is something else up?”
Sehyoon curls up into his seat, looking up at the calendar above the desk. “Well I can skip, but there’s a—
Knock knock.
Sehyoon’s eyes look back to Yuchan from where they had darted to the door, but the boy is nowhere to be found. He breathes—once, twice—but the only heartbeat he can hear is his own. He barely has a moment to react when the door swings open.
“Kim Seh—oh sorry. Was someone else in here?”
Sehyoon surveys the fourth-year with attempted calmness, but his shock is obvious. “No,” is the only explanation he can give.
“Well, alright then.” The student discards his look of confusion to refocus. “I knew you like to skip the cafeteria, and there was an announcement about the event after school.”
Sehyoon agrees quietly and gets a nod back.
“I assume you already knew about it but it’s to pay tribute to Jiyu. A year-later kind of thing. To keep students aware and use the buddy system and curfew and stuff. It’s for our safety, you know? More important for first-years, but you still shouldn’t skip.”
Sehyoon nods his head awkwardly. “Thank you. I’ll show, don’t worry.”
“Alright,” the fourth-year eyes him with a smirk. “Do you room alone?” He peaks up at the top bunk, which has nothing but a dusty bedsheet.
“Yeah, my roommate… well, it used to be… Yuchan…” Each word grows quieter and the fourth-year blinks at him as seconds roll by, almost as if he couldn’t hear.
“Ohhh…! Oh, Kang Yuchan. Right.” His voice is laced with more curiosity than concern. “Were you guys like, friends?”
Sehyoon feels the frustration build up again, and hates how quickly it can turn into tears. “Yeah. He was my friend. Are you going? I’m a bit busy.”
Awkwardness fills the room, and the other boy’s voice turns apologetic. “Sorry. Okay. Honestly, I’ll make sure they mention him tonight too. We can’t keep losing students like that.”
As soon as the door clicks shut, Sehyoon exhales, eyes brimming and refocusing. He smears the anger into the sleeve of his uniform and searches the room. “Channie?” He hears nothing but the fear in his own voice. “Chan?”
“Why did you call me that?” It comes from the top bunk.
“Channie?”
“No, Yuchan.” Yuchan turns over. “I heard you just now— Are you crying?” Yuchan skips the ladder to hop down, hands quickly gracing over Sehyoon’s shoulders.
“Where…?” He reaches for Yuchan’s wrists. “Why were you up there?”
Yuchan shushes him softly. “My bunk?”
“No, you— I couldn’t see you. You disappeared.”
Yuchan moves Sehyoon’s hand to his own face as he talks, “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” He leans into Sehyoon’s touches, where Sehyoon strokes through ungrowing hair, searches through unaging eyes. He bleeds them back into his memory like it’s his last chance to, and pulls him in tight. Yuchan whispers more assurances into his ear and Sehyoon is tired of holding him like glass.
Yuchan is not glass, or a mirage, or a fixation in Sehyoon’s mind. He’s here, and maybe he’s not perceptible to others, but he laughs and sings and learns things beyond Sehyoon’s influence and control. He reflects sunlight and smiles and emits warmth beyond temperatures, and Sehyoon wonders if he stole Yuchan from some ethereal place not unlike himself. The thought usually bothers him, but no one else can see Yuchan like this. There’s an angel in his room and no one would even care.
“Don’t worry about tonight. What’s happening later?”
Sehyoon pouts, trying to gather himself and understand what Yuchan is talking about. Slowly, the moments he’d thought Yuchan disappeared are replaced with relief. “No,” he sighs against Yuchan’s shoulder, giving his own warmth to the embrace, and thinks of the clueless students celebrating Jiyu like a martyr. “No, fuck later. I just spent one year with my boyfriend.”
Yuchan rattles at that. “You’ll have plenty more, don’t worry.”
YEAR TWO
Honestly, this library could be ancient, and Sehyoon could spend years mastering its layout and cleaning every shelf. That’s usually his job, but Sehyoon has been breaking a couple of rules these past few months.
Maybe he’s delirious, or maybe he’s just coping, but he’s starting to believe his every action is to cope. Nothing is for enjoyment anymore, and his task here is probably making him more restless, giving him false hope instead of giving into hopelessness.
Still, he welcomes himself in with the help of the key he stole a week ago after figuring it’s probably more convenient than rigging the record book. More stealthy, maybe, but Sehyoon has become a master of that too.
He flicks on his lamp as he enters the religion section. It’s one of the dustiest, and he muffles a sneeze trying to switch out unwanted books for new ones. He pulls out a chair, deciding he’ll stay the night and skip morning classes like last week. His new obsession has surely messed up a lot more than his performance and priorities.
It’s all messed up anyways— this boarding school his mother sent him to, the uptight students and teachers who claim to care about their futures, and especially the way they made him stay in that dormroom. He’s gotten used to all that though—even the room. Some nights he couldn’t dream of catching a minute of shut-eye, but these days he finds a bit of comfort in the loneliness, eyes losing focus in the void of darkness over the top bunk. Maybe with this book, he’ll actually be able to see something up there.
Sehyoon isn’t religious like his parents. He likes to think he isn’t anything like them, obsessed with his future with no time to think about the past, trying to accomplish their own dreams through their son, but frankly they know don’t anything about him. They hadn’t known that placing him far from their magnifying glass would get him here. They hadn’t foreseen that trapping him in a birdcage boarding school would fail to protect him from getting hurt, or rather, from hurting others…
No one was hurt again. Not since Yuchan. None of the spells or rituals had required something so dramatic, and as much as he would consider shedding blood for Yuchan at this point, he probably wouldn’t be able to stomach it. It was just innocent spells, drawing perfect circles and arraying stolen candles and maybe a few latin verses here and there. Some ingredients were barely attainable, and maybe the attempt with the dead bird felt close, but nothing was giving him any results.
He had delved thoroughly through each textbook, each wild superstition that could promise him a chance to speak to Yuchan again, just for a few moments. After that last day with him, with every word and expression embroided into the fibres of Sehyoon’s memory, he just needs some closure.
He’s just facing it. Everyone runs away, too caught up in the webs of their lives, but Sehyoon reads every word about mortality and feels closer to control.
And so he reads carefully through the very last text, which he had avoided at all costs. Tracing a finger over the dusty paper, it’s easy to laugh a little as his last hope pulls him into long verses and gruesome drawings, the reality under his palms more horrifying than his own imagination. He shuts the book with something between frustration and satisfaction, over weeks of reading leading to a dead end like this.
~
From there it’s no more books, no more rituals, and no more volunteering at the library. He attends class, as it’s easier than long hours of discipline and detention, and his teachers have stopped expecting anything from him since the incident months ago. That, or they care just as little as everyone else.
He finds himself straying outside of the campus on long nights, etching words into the trees with a knife from the kitchen, and ignores the fact that maybe his stealing habits have gotten out of hand as well. It’s therapeutic to run into the empty night where no one can hear him talk to himself, to carve his foolish thoughts into the trees on display for no one to see, to loot and steal when life could so easily rip things away from him before he even knew what he had.
A name presents itself on a tree where he wrote it a week ago, and the peeling skin of the birch obscures it from the likes of anyone else. His thumb traces over it with the rest of his fingers wrapped around his blade. It splinters right away.
“If you could see me now, what would you think?” Sehyoon doesn’t really believe in such things, but he says a lot these days, despite himself.
He drives his knife into the wood, depicting nothing in particular. It just looks like anger: blind and foolish. The words from each page repeat in his ears and race past his eyes, as books are all his memory is used to absorbing. “A human heart,” he sighs to himself, with the lamp-lit view of those awful descriptions embedded into his mind. That line especially. “Just take mine.”
He wanders back to the path, upstream to where dusk breaks behind the silhouette of the school. He inhales the damp air, reminding him of that cold and rainy day, five months ago. Yuchan’s cheeks were flushed and shivering, and Sehyoon had hoped it wasn’t just from the weather. Now, he reaches in front of himself as if to stroke them, remembering the tufts of hair permanently ruined by the wind, the curiosity in Yuchan’s eyes, coffee brown like the small stain on the collar of his uniform. At the strain of Sehyoon’s arm, he realizes that this is the most comfortable he’s ever felt reminiscing that memory, and as he lets go, something presents itself in the river in front of him:
A boy sprawled out, with streams of water that drench his uniform, splay out his hair, and smooth whatever features fall beneath. It catches the glow of the sky, sparkling and still and too familiar, down to the white noise. And, at the certain stench of death, the memory plays in full.
~
Seo Jiyu has been missing for three days. Sehyoon would’ve known earlier if he’d paid attention to literally anything, but it had only been a day when Sehyoon had found his body, and twenty-four hours barely count for anything in a school full of mischief and swayed rules. How he died, Sehyoon didn’t know, and didn’t like to think about, but the autopsy could easily say something about him, and not enough library research could really ease that fear.
Nonetheless, here he is, in his (and Yuchan’s) room past midnight with a shitton of candles, a bucket of bleach, a book, and Seo Jiyu’s bloody, lifeless heart. Maybe he should have some rosaries and a bible or something, but he had long decided that this was it for him—specifically when he had caught his stupid reflection before burying the knife—there is no going back, and he has no vision for the ritual’s failure. It’s likely for the best, in case he fucks up for being a non-believer or something.
He reviews the page with wild determination. Whether it’s because he’s nose-deep in a book again, resurfacing a last glimmer of hope, or the fact that he had just cut open a human body, he doesn’t know, but there’s a fire in him brighter than he’s ever felt, burning each second into his senses, branding each letter into his mind.
Wait until the third hour. A bead of sweat rolls down his throat as he watches the clock strike into the hour, wondering how much the dead value science’s calculation of time over dorm furniture.
Hold out the heart in your left hand and recite the verse. Sehyoon curls his bare fingers under the lifeless muscle for hopefully the last time, overcome by that unforgettable stench since he unearthed the damn thing, and with a final wince, starts his chant.
Call your beloved’s name and place their belonging in the middle. Is Yuchan his ‘beloved?’ He could review the definition a hundred times, but the whole point of all this is to get those answers. Sehyoon places Yuchan’s radio in the middle of his summon circle, secretly hoping it isn’t an object of exchange. He sits back. “Kang Yuchan.”
Blow out all the candles.
It takes a minute, and the last flame seems to pull all his oxygen with it. In a second, he’s engulfed by a heavy, endless darkness.
He’s alone in their room, blood on his hands, heartbeat piercing through his skull, louder and louder. He can barely breathe with the horrible smell of candles and bleach and blood filling his lungs. He can’t shake how the liquid mixes with his sweat and jewels between the webs of his fingers, snaking down his arm, probably all over the floor and impossible to fully clean. He can’t cope with the overwhelming grief, and how he had to succumb to all this useless, horrid pursuit, and cover himself in death instead of just accepting it. Even after all this, he couldn’t accept that Yuchan was gone.
He collapses onto the floor, probably choking to death and probably about to meet his maker for this utter foolishness. He doesn’t know how long he’s there, grasping his throat with a bloodied hand and knocking over the candles, but he falls asleep like that, drained by his own existence and fading into the lonely darkness. He is too tired to notice the weight gone from his hand, and the loud constant thrum that cancels out anything else.
YEAR ONE
Sehyoon grows a little less terrified. Maybe orientation is bound to be overwhelming with the crowd of seniors that greet him, so much that he gets lost on the way back to his dorm, but finding it occupied isn’t so bad.
He double checks the number before padding in, and the door is left open to emit soft music into the hall. It’s a gentle shift from all the chaos, lulling him in with piqued curiosity, making him relinquish previous fears of having a roommate, which were left on edge when such a person showed up too late to meet this morning. He first spots the unopened suitcase next to his own, and quickly draws his eyes to the source of the sound on the top bunk.
A boy sits criss-cross with one palm under a mug, and the other propped forward as he watches a radio with intent, as if holding onto every note and lyric. With some effort, Sehyoon could translate it roughly into something loving and sweet, and decides it’s his favourite song. He hears himself speak up, “Who is that?”
“HUH?” The boy snaps his head and spits his coffee, spraying it onto the bare mattress. “When did you—?” He sets down his coffee and scampers over the bed, wide eyes looking between Sehyoon and the spill. “What? Me?”
Sehyoon’s face goes hot, feeling at fault, and the song fades into english dialogue. “The song— I mean,” he bows ninety degrees, “you, and the song, the artist…” He rises to bow a second time. “I’m Kim Sehyoon.”
The boy hangs open his mouth, and for a second, Sehyoon’s fears rush back, but then he giggles loudly, loosening his limbs and dismounting the bed. “Don’t do that! I thought I heard a ghost. Ah seriously.” He bows his head with a smile, the only stray of shyness evident in how he fixes his collar, but this close up, he looks a lot more relaxed. Friendly. “Kang Yuchan.”
Sehyoon greets him politely, unable to think of much where his feet are glued to the floor, but Yuchan is quick to skip formalities.
“The artist was Etta James.” He spells it out, leaning onto the ladder and thinking, “The song, At Last, it’s really popular now, on this station. I’m sure it’ll come on again. Do you like radio?”
Sehyoon's mouth follows his thoughts, “I never had one. Where did you get that?”
Yuchan responds fluently and Sehyoon chuckles, tension easing in his shoulders. His new roommate might be loud and coffee-driven, but something about it is bafflingly amusing. He relaxes into conversation for the first time that day, curiosity in motion.
~
Yuchan is loud, and Sehyoon wants to find it annoying. He sings in the morning, howls in the cafeteria, and then there’s his damn radio. Sehyoon is studying strenuously and the radio mixes into his thoughts and forces him to take breaks. He’s so used to the dead-silence of his own room, allowing him to fall completely into his textbooks, but dare he move to turn it off and Yuchan will be filling the air with his own voice. His whole existence is loud, down to the long snoring nights. Sehyoon is losing sleep too.
He starts to work in the library, oftentimes leaving a few hours to himself for that precious silence, but one day Yuchan appears beside him not-so-silently. It doesn’t help that he’s reading over Sehyoon’s shoulder, right up in his space.
“Is that english?” It seems to boast throughout the room, into the thinning lines of Sehyoon’s patience. He shushes and ignores him, as the answer should be obvious.
Yuchan whispers this time, “That’s so cool. What’s it about?”
When Sehyoon makes no move to answer, Yuchan finally scoots out of his bubble, chair creaking at the hinges. Sehyoon can only get through half a page like that, and when Yuchan pops the question again, Sehyoon shuts his book and gets up.
“Did you finish? Where are you going?”
Sehyoon barely looks over his shoulder. “I volunteer here. I’m going to work.” He goes to the front to sign out the book himself, and begins loading a cart. If he can’t even get silence here… no, he’ll wait for Yuchan to leave.
He rolls the cart back through the aisle, and Yuchan is still there, eyes fixated on Sehyoon’s every move. He looks bored, but patient and quiet, and he watches Sehyoon go through the motions of his job. “You can’t just loiter in the library; Ms. Jung will kick you out.”
Yuchan sits up straight, side-eyeing the infamous librarian at the front desk. He shrinks back, finding no excuse for himself, and finally gets up. Sehyoon sighs and falls into his quiet focus until it’s interrupted again by the skid of a chair.
“What are you doing?” Sehyoon sounds accusatory.
“What? I’m reading a book.”
Yuchan moves his finger to his lips, and Sehyoon glances to Ms. Jung before abandoning his cart. He strides over to nudge the cover and sighs. “Hansel and Gretel? I read that when I was a kid.”
“Is it good?” Yuchan immediately lights up, not catching the bite in Sehyoon’s voice.
“It’s silly.” Sehyoon steps back, watching Yuchan turn the first page, and realizes that Yuchan likes silly things. He likes everything that Sehyoon has shown him, or is at least completely curious.
“Kim Sehyoon,” it’s Ms. Jungs voice, warning, and Sehyoon is quick to return to his cart. Reluctantly, he works for a solid hour, late into the afternoon, checking the study area periodically, but Yuchan doesn’t leave. He flips through one fairy tale after the other, accumulating a small pile on the table. When the cart is empty, Sehyoon fetches Yuchan’s finished books to return too, and even that action doesn’t break his attention. Defeated, Sehyoon pulls out his novel again and takes the seat beside him.
Like this, Yuchan is serene—the comfortably silent company Sehyoon would usually ask for in a roommate or friend. He quickly falls into the dreamscapes of his novel, settling into the atmosphere he’s been searching for. Yuchan doesn’t bother him, he just smiles and turns a page.
-
“Sehyoon?”
Sehyoon stirs a little, eyes blinking heavily as he adjusts the incline of his head.
“It’s almost dinner. Do you want to go eat?” The shoulder he leans on vibrates with the voice, soft. Yuchan has his hands on the same book, probably rereading it by now.
Sehyoon groans. “Wake me up when it’s halfway through.” The position is sore, and Yuchan shifts from time to time, but who is Sehyoon to complain about being uncomfortable?
-
The next week, Sehyoon studies with the radio on, alert and well rested. He catches Yuchan’s eyes over his own book at the voice of Etta James. Sehyoon decides that a little break could come a long way.
~
The door bursts open, directly pulling Sehyoon out of his wait.
A big heave, “Okay,” and Yuchan sounds like he ran up the stairs. He leans against the doorframe for a moment before looking up to where Sehyoon leans up on the edge of his bed. “Where were we, just now?” he starts, shutting the door and reclaiming his pillow on the carpet.
“What was that about?” Sehyoon prods.
“Don’t worry about it. Was just another thing from my father.”
“He got you something?”
“No, not some thing, Just another mouthful of—” Yuchan scowls, “can we get back to this? I don’t want to think about it.”
Sehyoon bites his tongue, relating to that area of stress. He hands Yuchan his copy of their novel and takes back the lead, now set on it as a distraction.
They started like this a few months ago—with Sehyoon reading to Yuchan—it had helped the both of them sleep. Then they got really into this one series, and Yuchan adopted the role of dialogue. He had so much fun with it, well-capturing the personality of each character, from standing tall with pride to clenching imaginary wounds. Even Sehyoon got some acting in, absorbing the role of an ominous, and sometimes merciless narrator. Yuchan’s characters even complained to him when he rooted too strongly, but all in good humour. Nights turned into evenings, to long afternoons, and they got easily carried away in debate and imagination.
Yuchan grasps his queen of hearts—one of the several royals from his deck used as a figurine sometimes—and laments her passing, already forgetting his earlier dispute. He sheds the sloppiest, fakest tears that catch onto Sehyoon’s arm when he clings to him, bursting Sehyoon’s bubble of personal space.
He enters Sehyoons bubble a lot, and Sehyoon finds himself swimming in it. He swims in Yuchan’s warm hugs, and how he gives the biggest hello’s and shares his food. He swims in Yuchan’s wild acting, too often exaggerated and emotionally driven. He likes Yuchan’s presence that’s so loud and uncomfortable and new, and Yuchan responds before Sehyoon can understand what he said out loud. “Huh?”
Yuchan falls back into Sehyoon’s mattress. “I want to stay in this room forever,” he repeats.
Sehyoon imagines Yuchan, forever youthful and following his imagination. “You can’t do that here,” he says. “You sing and act and tell stories through your own language. You have dreams. This school isn’t a place for dreams. It’s for discipline and reputation.”
“I’m getting better at studying.”
Sehyoon jerks back his head to find Yuchan’s pout. “Kang Yuchan, I wasn’t insulting you!”
Yuchan hits his back with a hollow smack. “I know... It’s not perfect, and I don’t know about my future and all that crap the principal is so obsessed with. But anyway, I like reading here with you. Studying isn’t so bad.”
Sehyoon feels guilty how maybe, it’s with insecurity that he views the other, who everyone knows as tall and confident and funny, sprawled out beside him. Kang Yuchan, the devilish child who holds curiosity over any challenge of pride, lays in his bed, aloof and complimenting him with that handsome smile.
Sehyoon kicks his knees up over Yuchan’s bare ones. “Most people don’t.” It sounds incredibly lame, but he continues, “Most boys would rather have their noses in some girl’s perfume than these boring fantasy novels.”
The look Yuchan gives him is a bit weird, like grossed out, and Sehyoon is about to take back what he said when Yuchan counters it. “That whole thing is boring. Kissing girls—it’s boring.”
Sehyoon can’t pinpoint the tone, and he tries to catch the lines in Yuchan’s face, but he’s kicked out of balance by a sudden tackle, and that’s the end of it.
~
Sehyoon is thinking about Yuchan too much. It’s horrible, because he always had too much to think about, too many assignments to do and study sheets to memorize and responsibilities to uphold, and Yuchan is standing out as a distraction. Fiction was always his designated distraction, and he even directed his interests to novels that could be educational, but he had never phased through so many stories until this whole school year.
It was really meant to help Yuchan—and it was working. The kid studies like never before, independent and motivated for his grades and parents, but it’s taking a lot of Sehyoon’s own time. It feels like his goals are falling from his grasp, and this freshman year is supposed to set them up for the years to come, but Sehyoon worries that maybe he is the sand that’s slipping.
Because he looks at Yuchan, bright and growing, and it feels like everything everyone told him he was, everything Sehyoon was supposed to be, sounds downright boring.
Every morning Yuchan is his coffee: bitter greetings and strong music, with a little bit of sweetness mixed in. Every meal Yuchan is his downtime, pulling him from his textbooks and asking about himself and his day, like reminding him of his values. Even in the classroom, Yuchan is there whether they share a schedule or not. He’s on Sehyoon’s mind, whether in the freshness in his performance or the jokes between his pages. Even when he is focusing, he’s more confident and healthier, and he can’t directly blame Yuchan but it’s a lot better than before, when he has a long presentation or a big test.
As he reviews for final exams in his last period, even that anticipation is not too much, because it’s mixed with the expectation that he’ll retire the day to something different, even if it just means studying with good company.
The books in his arms are less heavy, the greetings on his tongue less strained, and the staircase up the dorm is shorter with how he started skipping steps.
The librarian let him off today and he’s a little too excited to surprise Yuchan. “Chan! Guess what I—” a little too excited when he finds Yuchan half buried in a mountain of clothes, suitcase waiting open on the carpet.
“Hey,” Yuchan looks up with that expression that Sehyoon is starting to understand less and less, and then resumes his folding.
“What’s up? Are you packing so early?” Sehyoon sets his books on the desk. “School isn’t up for another month.”
Yuchan smiles when he sees Sehyoon start to help him. “I can do this on my own! You’re gonna study right? You’re skipping library duties.”
Sehyoon carefully folds a collar in place, noticing a barely-there stain of brown. “Ms. Jung let me off today. She has a good side you know.”
“I’m sure even she would pity her only helper, who spends more time in her study area than his own duties.”
“Not anymore!” Sehyoon absorbs Yuchan’s laugh like a captivating melody. It feels a bit foolish. “The early bird here is you. Don’t you need at least one shirt for tomorrow?”
“Yeah well,” Yuchan almost interrupts him, looking up. His hands crumple into a hoodie and he pauses to stretch it out. He often wears it over his uniform, and it suits him, bright yellow and standing out from the rest of the school. He sets it aside. “I’m transferring tomorrow.”
“Classes?” Yuchan doesn’t look at him as Sehyoon looks for a better answer himself, but he can’t find any. “Leaving?”
Yuchan hums to himself, as if unsatisfied with silence but having no words to fill it. He looks at Sehyoon, just staring, eyes relaxing into thin lines and Sehyoon feels a bit laid bare. He wants Yuchan to answer him, and sit closer and ask to read another story. He wants to look at Yuchan for an eternity, but right now it feels like he can’t hold contact for another second.
“With four weeks left?” Sehyoon asks. “With exams left? And final assignments? Course selections?”
“It’s not my control. I can’t do anything.” Yuchan is still holding his stare, and even while Sehyoon can’t return it, he can feel it heavily.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“To my father it makes sense. With my grades and shitty potential. What doesn’t make sense is why he put me here in the first place. Wasting his time and money.”
“He has heaps of money,” Sehyoon says. “It probably rots in his bank and stinks up his nose and makes him stupid. To do all that stupid.”
“I don’t have a say.” It’s frustrating how Yuchan just accepts every word, how he’s probably already used to it.
“He’s wasting your time.”
Yuchan falls horribly still. Even as his arms fold over another garment, he moves like a statue. Sehyoon follows him, ignoring his studies and folding clothes into the afternoon. Yuchan wants to sleep early, and Sehyoon can’t object—not when he asks to read him to sleep with leave the radio on, and to sleep in Sehyoon’s bed, because he’s no longer a student and the rules don’t apply to him.
Yuchan falls quiet easily, with no coffee or silence to keep him up and hustle his thoughts. His head rests slack in Sehyoon’s lap, warm breath fanning at Sehyoon’s ankle, and it’s too peaceful for how quickly time passes. Sehyoon doesn’t want to move him or fall asleep, and is sure that his body wouldn’t let him anyway. Yuchan is here, angelic and beautiful and vulnerable, and Sehyoon would pluck him from any heaven or sky just for the sun to stay below the horizon and keep him close like this. Yuchan is his coffee, bittersweet and keeping his eyes open, dark hair smooth between his fingers and lulling him awake. The radio plays low and ambient, and Sehyoon translates the lyrics to Yuchan in his sleep, the words of love and heartbreak too heavy on his lips, because Sehyoon is in love.
Sehyoon wants to hold him so much closer, and hear him laugh and act and sing, and read him to sleep when he’s sad, so many more times. Sehyoon wants to tell him he is beautiful and watch him grow up beautiful and tell him that it will be okay. Sehyoon loves Yuchan and knows that it will be okay, because Sehyoon knows that Yuchan deserves better.
Like liquid in his fingers, Sehyoon loses his grip, growing weightless as the radio grieves him and the moon falls low in the sky.
-
Except for the music, everything is murky. It’s not uncommon to wake up like this, radio murmuring and head tucked under the blankets, and when Yuchan wakes up first he takes extra long in the bathroom, but Sehyoon doesn’t have to listen long to realize he’s not there.
He sits up, shoulders knotted out, and checks the clock under the voice of the morning host. 10:15. The room is so plainly empty, and the lack of evidence that Yuchan ever lived here feels so normal, like Sehyoon could go back to his assignments without a thought. Did Yuchan already leave? Sehyoon pushes back his hair and dresses quickly, fitting the radio into his pocket and stepping outside. The halls are as calm as any weekend. Students are tense and tired over exams, and he wonders if any of them received a farewell from Yuchan, and if Yuchan was too hurried to give one to Sehyoon. He would wake him, right?
No, Sehyoon knows Yuchan had left him to sleep. Yuchan got up carefully and tucked Sehyoon in and rolled out his suitcase without a word. For some reason, he can’t imagine Yuchan saying goodbye, not even in the past. It feels selfish now, as he jogs down the building and through the halls. What would Sehyoon tell him instead? Have a good life? I’m happy for you? I realized last night that I’m in love with you?
Sehyoon is selfish, and it powers through his limbs—that self-pity and doubt—and leads him past the main office, where the principal is too busy chatting with visitors to notice him. He walks out into the rain, catching the droplets on his hair and clothes, and he trembles, tense. Sehyoon doesn’t want to be driven by ‘love,’ but of all the things that have ever moved him, Yuchan is the least questionable.
Determined, he searches the parking lot with no clue what Yuchan’s car might look like. He checks every window, and then leads back to the roundabout, looking onto the street. The yellow hoodie is just a clothing article, just worn on another pedestrian in the likes of this town, umbrella overhead and hauling a suitcase into the trunk of a car across the street. Sehyoon crosses it.
“Do you never say goodbye?”
Yuchan swings around, both hands on his umbrella and eyes shaking. Rain pours into the trunk.
“Sehyoon,” he stands frozen, eyes bulging through the glasses he never wears. “I’m sorry.”
The cloud of thoughts seem to clear out. “I’m not mad,” he shakes his head.
“Please, come, you’re soaked.” He guides Sehyoon under his umbrella. The wind pulls slightly against it, bustling through the trees around them and pushing up Yuchan’s hair, but Sehyoon shivers with something else. “I’m really leaving. I’m sorry.”
“No, Chan, I’m happy for you. It always felt wrong, having you here. This school is confining and wrong, and only for one type of person five-hundred times. You’re not five-hundred people, you’re one, and original, in five-hundred ways. You deserve freedom.”
Yuchan’s eyes crease. “That’s a weird way to put it.” He tugs a hand through his hair. “It feels like the world is ending. You say it like that, but somehow I never felt so free. You seriously got to me. Could you tell I used to be scared of you?” He blushes, a smile passing his cheeks. He moves his hand there as if to warm his face from the cold. “But you taught me so much.”
Sehyoon disagrees, “No, that’s all you. I’m no different from everyone else.”
“You are! Sehyoon. You’re so absorbed in everything you learn and teach. You don’t really care if something is silly, or stupid sounding. I can ask for anything, and you tell me so much. I grew, because you made it so interesting. I’m so stupid, I didn’t even know people like to study! And that’s a compliment. I do it now.” He holds Sehyoon’s hand even though it drips with rain.
“You’re not stupid.”
“I know.”
“You’re curious and compassionate. You live off stories and songs and bright things, and you give life to them.”
“Thank you.”
“You carry all your intentions on your sleeve, and you see possibility in almost everything, and you’re not ashamed of the things you—you love,” the words bubble in Sehyoon’s chest, “not afraid of failing, and your confidence is contagious,” the hand in his is so warm, “and whatever it is you learned here, you’re gonna take it with you, and become someone big, someone who inspires people, and reaches their hearts—”
“—’re so unrestrained—”
“I love you,” Sehyoon breathes. And like an overcurrent, the words stop.
There’s a glint in Yuchan’s eyes from where the sun peeks out in the east, and suddenly Sehyoon can’t hear the rain. A word moves on Yuchan’s lips, barely sighing out, and like the turn of a page, he blinks, and the glint is gone. Sehyoon is not hoping for a response, but now it feels like he doesn’t want one.
He steps backwards, water trickling into his hair and rinsing his shoulders. He’s sorry that he’s selfish, and despite how Yuchan is leaving, he can only say it now. But most of all he’s sorry that like this, lost and somber at the edge of his parent’s car, Sehyoon thinks Yuchan is so frighteningly beautiful, and so he turns and wills the image away.
He trembles, hoping the rain will wash Yuchan’s apology from his mind, the pulse in his ears make him forget the way he whispered, and the cold in his fingertips numb out the ghosting warmth. He should turn back and be with Yuchan for that much longer, but he can’t bear to see another second of that sad smile, or else he might imagine it for years— just Yuchan like that, far away from him living his own fruitful life, sorry to Sehyoon.
The honk he hears is loud and long, but not loud enough to drown out the call of his name, and not long enough to make him turn around in time.
But Yuchan is already gone. It doesn’t feel like it, with how heavily they just spoke, and it certainly doesn’t look like it. He just renders his best friend, asleep on the road, umbrella rolling away with the wind. He just wonders what song he should sing to wake Yuchan up, and how much coffee he’ll need to feel himself again.
He’d do whatever to make Yuchan free of his burdens, even for just a moment.