"Why aren't you ever interested in this stuff? His dad is actually going to be working with my dad, did you know that? Apparently, his dad isn't the brightest one in the bunch but it's his wife who actually does all the work for him when he comes home. I don't believe it, because they came over last night, and he was really nice—Jongin, are you listening to me?" Baekhyun snapped his fingers in front of Jongin's eyes and Jongin started.

"Yes, of course I am. There's a new kid who's coming to school. You're free to invite him to sit with us, if you want." Jongin hoped Baekhyun heard that for the empty invitation it was; he was comfortable with this group of people, and someone totally new would just set him on edge all day. Then again, maybe he wouldn't always be so sleepy. 

"He definitely wasn't listening to you, Baek." Chanyeol added without looking up from his phone. "If he was, he'd have heard what you said about Sehun being the center of, like, all drama ever at his last school."

Baekhyun shrugged. "I'm an open-minded person. We're open minded people. We—"

"ahhhh," said Jongin, finally paying enough attention to understand. "He's hot, isn't he? And you want to set him up with Luhan."

Baekhyun craned his head around behind him to look at the small boy and his group of friends. "Of course I'm not! I'm not! I mean, Sehun isn't gay, is the thing." he pouted. "I really, honestly would try to set them up if they were. Sehun had a girlfriend for a while at his old school but they broke up because he caught her cheating on him. It was a big thing, I think the guy she cheated on him with transferred, but Sehun didn't beat him up or anything, he just outright shamed him, and got the whole school to, too—"

"Sehun this, Sehun that." A light female voice drifted towards them and Baekhyun looked up as if being called by an angel. "If I didn't know any better, I'd think Sehun was your girlfriend." Taeyeon sat down next to Baekhyun and s an arm around his waist, pressing a light hello kiss on her boyfriend's temple. 

"Don't worry about it," said Jongin. "He's just bored because Chanyeol won't look up from his phone and talk to him."

"I'm in a fit of inspiration," drawled Chanyeol from across the table. "Don't be hypocritical." he was referring to Jongin's occasional seclusion to work on a dance routine until it was perfect.

"Well, when is his famous highness coming, anyway?" Taeyeon asked, stealing one of Chanyeol's french fries. Jongin heard Baekhyun whisper into her ear asking her if she'd eaten anything for lunch. He surreptitiously, so as not to disturb Chanyeol's love affair with his phone, slid his friend's plate towards Taeyeon and took a fry for himself.

"Tomorrow," replied Baekhyun, just as the bell rang. He rose to get to his next class which he shared with his girlfriend, and Jongin lingered with Chanyeol until the lunch room was empty.

"Why aren't you paying any attention to the puppy?" Jongin asked. He knew his voice was half whiny, but at least Chanyeol finally looked up, realizing that the dull roar of activity in the room had given way to the low, empty buzz of electricity. "I can tell something beyond inspiration is going on."

"Really," Chanyeol said, extracting his long legs from underneath the table and turning on the bench so that he was facing outward, towards the window. "It's inspiration. I'm trying to get into—wait, you can't tell anyone, okay, especially not blabbermouth puppy."

"What are you trying to get into? If it's the ing yearbook again don't hesitate to believe that I'll stop you..."

"No." Chanyeol shook his head, twirling his phone in his hand. "It's this screenwriting school, actually, and it's prestigious, and really I just decided I really wanted to do it two days ago and the applications are due tonight so I'm trying to get as much done as possible right now. The puppy has a girlfriend, and this new obsession with the new kid..."

"I didn't know you wanted to be a screenwriter."

"No one did. I'm keeping it lowkey until I'm more confident about it."

Jongin scoffed. "Perfect. Just like—let's see, the drums, the piano, the guitar—what else was there? Oh, right, that acting gig you announced you got literally totally out of the blue. You know what, I heard Yixing was pretty good at that stuff. You could ask him for help."

Chanyeol shrugged. "I don't know Yixing that well."

"I do," replied Jongin. "I just saw him last weekend, actually, we danced together."

"Of course you know him." Chanyeol rolled his eyes. "I swear there's not a soul in this school you're not lowkey best friends with. Makes me uncomfortable, I feel competitive. Maybe you're secretly telling everyone about everyone else and nothing is actually secret, because Kim Jongin knows all the secrets."

Jongin smiled. "It's just because they think I'm asleep, so they talk to me!"

Chanyeol rose and swung his backpack up onto his back, his gaze slowly returning to his phone screen like it was magnetic. "We do have to go to class, you know," Chanyeol said, offering Jongin his hand to help him up. Jongin took it and rested his forearm up on Chanyeol's shoulder, leaning his whole weight onto his friend. "Ahh, but do we? We can at least take our time, right? You're so goddamn studious..."

"Yeah, and you work hard at dancing, but I gotta at least get you graduated," Chanyeol said, letting Jongin lean on him graciously. "It's what I've promised myself. I'm your secret support system."

"I don't understand why everybody has to be a goddamn support system," Jongin grumbled, feeling sleepiness setting on as the door to his classroom approached, "It's ing weird."

"And you have to stop swearing so much. You're such a marshmallow but you really, really don't sound like it."

Jongin smiled up at Chanyeol, his eyes sparkling. "I'm a burnt marshmallow, dontcha know? I'm tan, and you don't think I taste good, but inside I'm all goo!"

"So, so many things wrong with that analogy," Chanyeol replied, shaking his head and chuckling. "First and foremost being you're very, very far from being ugly. You're almost as handsome as me."

Yixing wasn't doing anything that night so Jongin texted him Chanyeol's address and then went home feeling good about himself and itching for a workout. A few hours later he looked at the clock and swore, looking around at his room. 

"Jung-ahhhh," he whined, sticking his head out his door. His sister appeared from inside the kitchen. 

"What?"

"Why didn't you interrupt me, like, an hour ago?"

"Dinner's not ready, what do you want me to do? You're a grown man." Jungah stuck out her tongue at him, and Jongin rolled his eyes, closing his door again.

"Jongin!" Jongin started, his heart jumping as he woke suddenly, opening his eyes to Baekhyun's smiling face. It's how he usually started his day; he'd fall asleep on the bus, Baek would wake him up, and they'd walk into school together. Except today it was hard, because there was a tight knot of students standing in front of the door to the school. People made way for Jongin, who was taller and had broader shoulders than most of them—plus he knew most of them. 

He expected it to be some sort of fight, but what he found when he got to the center of the knot was a skinny blonde lounging next to Zitao, talking loudly enough for everyone to hear.

"—they just never make it easy, do they? I mean, I get it, they want to make the point that youth is valuable and everything, but I really do think they're trying to put a plot to it, but it doesn't work because they're too damn artistic for their own good, you know?"

"Yeah, but just imagine a movie. And it's not just that they want to make the point, they want to make you work to get to the point, they want you to... to empathize with their characters first," shot back Zitao, but cut himself off when he saw Jongin. 

"Hey, Jongin."

"Hey." Jongin looked from Zitao to the blonde. 

Zitao seemed to realize Jongin's stare with some measure of guilt. "Oh, this is Oh Sehun. It's his first day."

"So you're regaling him with your own personal BTS theory?" Jongin smirked, touching Zitao on the shoulder briefly before sidling past him and heading to his homeroom, already thinking about the pillow that was his forearm and the fifteen minutes of sleep he was about to get before the day began, if Taeyeon came by like she sometimes did and distracted Baekhyun for a while. Unfortunatley, it wasn't to be, because Taeyeon was nowhere to be seen.

When he asked Baekhyun about it, Baekhyun opened his eyes wide and looked at Jongin incredulously. "She's out with everyone else talking to Sehun!"

"What do you mean? How does one person talk to a whole school?"

"Oh, you know what I mean, she's out there where all the excitement is. I think he's really nice. No one can figure out why you didn't stay to chat—there's already theories about you guys being rivals  or something before Sehun even started school."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever head," commented Jongin. "I was just tired, and Zitao was talking to him, and I've rehashed the BTS comeback so many times I could probably act every second of every one of their music videos."

Baekhyun pouted. "You're gonna get for it, anyway. You're so innocent, you've never had any competition before."

"What are you talking about, competition? You're not making sense," Jongin whined, resting his head on his arm. 

"You might not be the most popular kid in the school by the end of the day," was all Baekhyun said before the teacher appeared and he turned around. Jongin felt his phone buzz in his pocket incessantly for the rest of the day, but, frustrated, he kept shoving it back into his pants. They were all messages asking if he'd met Sehun yet. Jongin finally conceded when Chanyeol convinced him to come hang out with a big group in the park after school. 

Zitao and Yifan met them outside the school, Sehun lounging in between them, exactly where he had been the day before, nearly to the point that Jongin wondered if he'd moved at all, or if that was just his permanent position. Now that Jongin was looking at him more closely, he realized that Sehun's face was one of the most unique he'd ever seen all angles and subtleties that seemed to hint at a deep pool of emotions underneath. It was such a subtle face that you were constantly dragged back to the surface, questioning whether there'd ever been anything there at all, back to whatever smirk, or snigger, or look of disgust Sehun was wearing.

Yifan led the way to the park, chatting with Jongin about his latest fight with his dad while Jongin vaguely heard loud conversation between the others behind them. And that was how the rest of the afternoon went, really: Jongin talked to one kid or another, and Sehun talked to everyone else, so that at the end of the day Jongin felt like he'd had a fairly enjoyable afternoon but Baekhyun kept asking him on the way home if he hated Sehun. Jongin replied that he'd never thought about it, but he was sure he didn't hate the new kid.

The next day in school Jongin felt eyes following him in the hallway and he looked behind him to find himself staring into Sehun's intent, angular face. "I don't think I got a word in edgewise to you yesterday," Sehun said timidly. He was skinnier than Jongin, and that was rare. "It's like... you were always there, but never there, you know?"

Jongin smiled softly. "I have trouble paying attention to more than one thing at a time. Did you have fun? I hope it's not too much of an adjustment. Our school's a little smaller than most schools."

"Yeah, I like it a lot, actually. It's very chill, you all didn't, you know, interrogate me or anything."

"What, is that normal or something?" Replied Jongin. Baekhyun had just come up beside him. "To interrogate the new kid? Seems a little savage to me."

"I'm suprised you haven't come to the revelation that high schoolers are the saveagest." Sehun smiled patronizingly. "Besides, I've learned to have a louder bark than bite. Don't tell me I'm going to have to retrain myself."

"Of course not! We're not going to beat you up!" Jongin's eyes flew wide, but Sehun just giggled. Seeing he was joking, Jongin calmed down and leaned against the locker, putting his hand in his pocket. "Anyway, you seem like a smart kid. Like you'd be really good at language. Interrupt me if I'm wrong, but YIfan—you know Yifan. He's amazing at languages. You should study together sometime. I might even tag along, but I'm atrocious, so—" Sehun was looking at him strangely. "What?"

"It's actually insane how quickly you go from one thing to the next," Sehun said. "It's fluid, but it's so fast—I mean, one minute you're all worried about me getting beat up and the next you're telling me how smart I am and—okay, so I was reading this book the other day—" he looked at Baekhyun— "don't get me wrong, I don't read often, but I was, and there was this character Kai who was, he was just really suave, you know, he had a lot of gravitas. He had a lot of sprezzatura."

"What's sprezzatura?" Asked Jongin.

"What's gravitas?" Asked Baekhyun.

"Kai, sprezzatura is—it's a studied nonchalance, you know, it's just a general coolness. Which I wouldn't normally peg you for, you know, except for if I didn't know you, and I saw you walking down the hall with your earphones in, and then I'd be like, damn, that Kai—" Sehun chuckled, and his voice was deep, now that Jongin thought about it. "He has some sprezzatura."

"Ahh, I see," butted in Junmyeon, whose locker was next to Sehun's. "It's because Jongin's a dancer. He's really good." 

Jongin swatted Junmyeon playfully. "Stop, you'll make me blush."

"Oh, so you're going to be in that talent show thingie?"

"You know about that?" Jongin asked suprised. The hallway was almost empty and Baekhyun was tugging on his sleeve because they had to get to the next class. "I actually—" he was getting pulled away— "I'm actually going to a different audition thingie that day, so I can't do that show."

He was being dragged away, so he flashed Sehun one last smile before turning around again.

"See ya, Kai," Sehun yelled after him. 

"It's Jongin!" Yelled Baekhyun over his shoulder at Sehun as the tall, thin image of the boy receded behind them. 

And that was it, those were the few seconds they shared, one-on-one, for the next three months. Sure, they were together constantly, so that Jongin had ample opportunity to study that face, and as he studied it, he found he became more and more fascinated with it, without knowing exactly why. He felt a strange compulsion to understand it and the softness that he only saw whenever there was a lull in the conversation, and nobody was really saying anything, at least not to Sehun.

Sehun had, by some means, gotten himself his very own crew—not in the sense that he wasn't perfectly nice to everyone else, but in the sense that he always sat with Junmyeon, Yifan, and Zitao, but there was always someone else at their table, not like Jongin's table, not like the way he always had the same people, and how he maintained his relationships privately. A relationship with Sehun was something to brag about now, especially among the female faction of the school. Jongin began to expect the repeated questions, at first occasional—once every few days—and then it was every day: "Why do you always sit with the same people? Why don't you ever sit with Sehun? Do you guys not like each other or something?"

Jongin wondered if he knew Sehun best in the whole school. He had to convince himself constantly that that was ridiculous; of course he couldn't, because they never talked. Sehun hadn't called him Kai again since that one day, and Jongin had asked Yifan to ask him exactly which book that was, but Yifan had forgotten and Jongin felt bad asking him a second time. Sometimes he wondered if he was obsessed, because he thought about Sehun more than he thought about his own friends. Jungah even asked him if he had a new crush. 

The quiet mumble of conversation drove him mad sometimes, swirling around him like it did every day, and he, trapped in the center of it, not looking at anything, not seeing anything, not hearing anything; his body barraged all the same. The lights were florescent and harsh but they'd become like home because he'd spent so long, so many long hours of his life below them. And they did seem so long, didn't they—not because he counted the seconds and the hours, but because he was so tired the whole time. Being tired was a state of being, and he saw it in everyone else's eyes, shining like a sputtering spotlight, the exhaustion affecting the way they smiled at each other even when they shook with caffeine and pills.

He liked to listen to music; of course he did, he was a dancer and dancers and music were the same thing, if they got it right. And even composers, with their exciting lives, even composers tried to condense that effect that repetition could have on life. Again and again and again and again. If we only live once, why we keep on doing the same ? 

His mind was a symphony. Why didn't he talk to Sehun? Was speaking not sacred enough—not as sacred as looking at him? He knew Sehun felt him staring at him from across the room sometimes, but then again, Jongin understood the way Sehun worked. He understood that Sehun had friends in public, that Sehun had everything in public. After two months, Jongin almost couldn't remember when he hadn't been a part of the school—that one unsure piece that brushed uncomfortably against his mind now and again and then disappeared. 

Then Sehun called him Kai one day when they were getting out of school, and Jongin accompanied him and his friends to his house, chatting quietly with Junmyeon in the seat behind Sehun on the bus. It hadn't really been a decision, not in Jongin's mind. Sehun called him Kai, and that was that; he was going. He was so curious it ached; he was so bored it ached—he wasn't used to his hear aching, only his body, and only after hours of sweat. During the whole ride there, he was looking at the nape of Sehun's neck, slender and graceful just like the rest of him, the whole time, and concentrating on it fiercely as if it held all the answers in the world. 

Again answers danced away like shadows and Jongin was left in a hazy basement apartment as one kid after another drifted away for after-school classes or dinner with their families until Jongin blinked and Sehun was sitting cross-legged with his back against the couch looking at Jongin and biting his lip. 

"So?" Sehun asked when he was sure Jongin was paying attention.

"So?" replied Jongin.

"So? Why have you been avoiding me?" He sounded a little bit petulant. The hood on his sweatshirt was pulled up so only a few blond strands of hair escaped and Sehun's face was framed in dark purple.

Jongin sighed, still intoxicated by the lazy catharsis of the night. "I haven't been avoiding you, Sehun. I've been... captivated by the strange notion that a conversation with you is a conversation with six people and that sort of endeavor seemed kinda... tiring."

"Everything's tiring if you go into it tired," retorted Sehun.

"You're not wrong."

"It's all in your mind. You can't let it permeate, Kai."

"You certainly like words, don't you?"

"What, you think that's snobby, maybe? Psshh, think you're an elitist. Normal life can be very interesting. People always tell me I use big words and I'm suprised because I totally talk like everyone else. But you're about to ask me why I think you're elitist and I'll tell you: you only muster your energy or your focus when you feel like it and when you don't feel pressured or whatever, or when you're going to enjoy it, like you do when you perform."

"You've never seen me perform." Something was rising in Jongin's blood but he wasn't sure if it was excitement or nervousness. Perhaps it was merely interest.

"Who's to say? Of course you don't remember all the rumors at school after the talent show because I wasn't there and you weren't there and the school was excited because—well, because neither of us were there, you know what I mean? Kai," Sehun said, leaning forward, as if to make sure Jongin was looking at him. He sat up again when he was met with more intensity from Jongin than he'd expected. "I went to your show." Jongin's eyes widened and he looked at Sehun in genuine shock. Sehun only shook his head.

"No, don't go all Jongin on me now, I don't need that. I'm just saying that—okay, I'm blackmailing you, why don't you look at it that way. I saw you turn. up. I saw you as this embarrassingly cute fanboy—​you didn't even preform! I can tell from your eyes that you think life is boring but—well, you remember that, don't you?"

"I think it's amazing that you're able to analyze me without having really talked to me," responded Jongin, but, as he found time and time again with himself, he couldn't get his voice to take on a harsh timbre. "Sure, I remember that show. There was some real talent here. I'm confused, Sehun, am I supposed to be defending myself or something? Because I've seen the same thing in your eyes—and then, actually, now that I think about it—actually, I've seen the absence of it too, and that just blew me away."

"How romantic. You saw it in my eyes." Sehun smirked, picking at the edge of his sweatshirt. There was the finest sheen of smoke in the air because Sehun's mom was cooking and had turned off the fire alarm in the apartment. The grey carpet felt rough as Jongin rubbed the pad of his index finger on it absently. He knew that neither of them really knew what the other was talking about, because they were speaking in shadowy metaphors and sparse language, but the sound of their voices being absorbed by the material around them was soothing and it was its own form of communication.

"We're such lost ing teenagers," He said after a pause, leaning his neck all the way back so that his adam's apple was exposed, staring at the ceiling. "Do you think all teenagers feel caught up in it all?"

"I don't think it's the getting caught up that's so bad. It's the not feeling like we can choose what we get caught up in. For instance—and allow me to veer from the deepness you so tend towards—you totally could have come and talked to me. I'm annoying sometimes, but I'm really a very nice guy and you—like, I mean—" he was a little flustered, and Jongin was suprised when he heard a slight lisp escape Sehun's mouth. "I mean—you just, the way you talk to people is basically begging them to reveal their souls to you, even if you clearly don't know it. You're just you."

"Yes, correctamundo, I'm just me, what do you want from me?"

"Let me call you Kai."

"Fine."

"Really?" Sehun looked up at him through his lashes, and something was different, but Jongin felt his stomach clench and something in the way he'd been trained to see the world held him back, even as he looked into those two shining brown pools. The aversion grew exponentially, too quickly for Jongin to realize that it was happening or for him to stop it, and he clenched his jaw tight. Why did he feel like some sort of trained dog? Watching himself from outside his own body, Jongin rose quickly, startling Sehun who had been sitting very close to Jongin, to the point that their knees had been pressing together, bony casualties of teenage growth painfully sharp. 

"Yeah. No one deserves to be a just you." Jongin looked down at Sehun with what he'd been told was a smoulder. "Call me Kai." And then, propelled by that black aversion to anything besides what was supposed to happen that was roaring deep in his gut, Jongin left the house with a deep bow to Sehun's dimpled mother and began the long, lonely journey home. He didn't feel particularly in the reflective mood on the bus; instead, he thought about how often Sehun probably had to get his hair dyed to keep it so consistently blonde. It suited him.