a/n: this continues from chpt 4!

The door shuts behind Jisoo and she has to physically tame the paranoia that jumps at the opportunity to scream at her psyche; Someone’s going to see! Tomorrow you’ll wake up, and they’ll say you guys did it again! Seo Jisoo, you ing moron; did you really suggest forgiving that bastard, you’re either a saint or plain stupid-

Who is she kidding. Jisoo wants to hate Joshua so damn much.

Note: wants to. As she sinks into her bed, hair unabashedly damp from her shower and tunes out the sound of Joshua’s footsteps trailing away from her dorm along the corridor, she realises that for some reason, tonight, she can’t cry.

This is university, not high school. But the world was a blur today, as it will be the next day and the days after following her virtual Armageddon the night she brought Joshua back to the same bed she lies on now. She’s locked into an emotional locker by people who know nothing but will play along for personal agendas, she’s been -shamed for being kind – wait scratch that, for being human. She’s been generalized as a person that goes against her personal morals, and oh golly, she’s become infamous in a span of less than 24 hours.

Who said uni students were more mature? It’s all the same.

But you know what’s the worst part of it all? She can’t bring herself to pour the blame on Joshua Hong, she tells herself it was the timing, it was a collective bunch of ambiguous factors that were triggered by a catalyst that saw her going into the room with him, a catalyst called Eunha, a catalyst that managed to single-handedly tear down her reputation in one day.

It’s all factors and point of view, it’s like the decline of the Roman Empire, it’s just-

Oh, all the justifying. Jisoo just wants to hate him so much, and she tells this to herself as her inner being knows it will never happen.

Humans want explantion. Humans want scapegoats.

Jisoo isn’t going to make Joshua her scapegoat, regardless of how ty he’s been in general. She doesn’t want this incident to define who she is. She wants it all to pass, and wow I just sounded delirious.

Her arms wrap self-consciously around her body and she wills herself to sleep.

She prays.

The ticking of the wall clock pounds tirelessly against her eardrums, and she wills it away; she tries.

20 minutes pass and something from somewhere in her brain tells her to work on a mindmap about the geographical hazards of transform plate boundaries, and immediately, she gets up and does exactly that, in hopes of falling asleep from exhaustion after that.

Jisoo doesn’t.

“Maybe I should do the ‘pray then flip to a random page of the Bible for advice’ thing,” she says, and her tone is skeptical, because there are days when even a Christian doesn’t want to believe that God heals all wounds; it’s too good, too intangible to be true when you’re going through a storm.

She closes her eyes and randomly, fingers a page and opens the book.

It’s James 1. Great.

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds-” she reads, and wants to bang her head against something; anything. How is she supposed to count this all “joy”????? It’s hilarious, unbelievably hilarious.

“Was James high when he wrote this,” Jisoo gripes, and immediately feels remorse for saying so, but continues to shake her head and sigh.

“It’s not going to work,” she tells herself as she settles back into bed, a sudden wave of fatigue crashing pleasantly over her.

Her last remembered thought before sleeping goes a little something like I’ll try, anyway. Research shows that fake smiles reduce stress, whatever that means…

 

Today she wears black jeans and a black hoodie and a mask and sunglasses in an attempt to be inconspicuous.

Jisoo only realises how ridiculous she looks when she sees her reflection in the glass panels of the Sociology block when she’s walking to class with Seungcheol. It’s like I’m trying to be emo-scene for the first time but had no money for dramatic make-up. Or like I’m trying to rob a bank. Or both. Beside her, Seungcheol sighs and his mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water – like he wants to say something but he can’t bring himself to.

He had insisted on bringing her to theo lecture today because of what happened the day before, and Jisoo is thankful because she’s pretty sick of hearing people ask “how did your religious prude find Joshua’s ?” and the atheist club kids from Existential Philosophy shoving her into corners and telling her about how they always knew Christians were “ing hypocrites”.

She nudges him. “You wanna say something?”

“Did Josh say.. anything to you?” he starts, sounding uncertain, sounding like there’s an underlying subduction mass of lava beneath his con