“Why do you always get sick? Almost more than twice a month, I swear.”

“Am I supposed to have an answer to that one?” I retorted irritably, and Jongin shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, either.”

Chapter 1

“Mira, your homework. And soup.”

Being sick didn’t feel very nice, but I was already used to it.

As long as I could remember, I was a sickly child. Too skinny, too short, and everyone told me I was malnutrioused (which was not true, because I probably ate more than two normal people combined). I got tired easily. There was also the fact that I was extremely weak—I had no physical strength whatsoever. I had once fractured a bone when I was accidentally knocked over in gym class.

I had no immunity to colds whatsoever, either. Whatever was going around, I caught it. In my brother’s words, I was the opposite of Jongin.

Jinyoung was considerably healthier than I was, though he often worked late and came home half dead. Still, healthier than me.

Jongin was on another level of humanity—in other words, sometimes I wondered if he were still human. He never seemed to be exhausted, was fit, and everyone loved him. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for me.

From the bed, I peered up at my brother and Jongin. Jongin was holding a stack of papers and a couple of textbooks, while Jinyoung just had a bowl and a spoon in his hands. Both were chatting cheerily while I was huddled miserably in my bed, with a killer headache and a burning high fever.

“Homework,” Jongin echoed, dropping the stack of papers on the bedside table, while Jinyoung did the exact same with the soup. “Do you want me to get you a pencil?”

I stared despairingly at the stack of papers and tried to think of an excuse to use tomorrow at school, other than ‘I was sick.’ I doubted that I could do homework—my head hurt a little too much for that, and whenever I blinked, everything I saw had a twin. In fact, in my eyes (quite literally), there were four people standing in the room instead of two. Slowly, they merged together into one. I figured that this wasn’t going to help me do homework.

“No,” I managed to rasp out, throat dry. I would’ve asked for water, but it hurt too much to swallow, and getting dehydrated seemed to be the lesser pain of the two. “I can’t concentrate or focus on anything. My head already hurts, so if I do, it’s going to get even worse than before. I’ll just skip school tomorrow. I’m sick, remember?”

“Then there’ll be even more homework. It’ll accumulate.”  

“Besides,” Jinyoung snorted. “You were just on your phone less than thirty minutes ago. You’re not fooling anyone by saying you can’t see properly.”

I blinked, and two of my brothers appeared again. They, yet again, turned into one person. “I can see two of you,” I stated—and this wasn’t a lie—raising my arm and pointing at the one I believed to be the real Jinyoung. “And I’m dizzy. Staring at tiny words on a piece of paper and attempting to write my own is going to give me a killer headache when I wake up tomorrow.”

Jinyoung blinked, then shrugged nonchalantly. “Suit yourself,” he threw over his shoulder before exiting the room. “Jongin, don’t stay for too long if she doesn’t do the homework. Make her sleep.”

“Mmhm.”

I glanced up at Jongin. He was still wearing the school uniform, though he had a different jacket over the short-sleeved t-shirt. His hair was in the same hairstyle I remembered he had two years ago, when he had first come to the same class as me, though today, it was a little tousled from the baseball hat he had in hand. Though Jongin had completely grown on me during those two years—I hadn’t even expected to become such good friends with him that he would be delivering my homework. In fact, I hadn’t expected to become good friends with anyone—if he hadn’t been so hellbent on befriending me, I’d still be on block one, alone, using all my spare time to go on the internet. Even now, I wondered why and how we had become friends. Some things, however, never changed, I decided—he still had his hands stuck in his pockets, back slouched and… I blinked. Keeping my eyes open for too long was rather painful, and they felt watery for staring at Jongin too long (I could, actually, stare at him all day though, if I weren’t so sick). There was an uncomfortable span of silence from my brother’s absence in the room.