Jihoon liked to say that Mingyu was made of rock music and teen angst.

“And cigarette smoke,” Vernon would always chime in, usually from his favorite spot in the kitchen, and Mingyu’s cheeks would turn pink. (It was actually kind of ridiculous how ashamed Mingyu was of his smoking, especially he had very little shame he felt in any other aspect of his life. He went to such great lengths to hide his smoking from his friends and his father, and neither could possibly care less. He never traveled without gum in his pocket, always kept body spray in his bag and never let anyone see him smoke. Nobody cared but him. So why, then, did he always get so embarrassed when someone brought it up?)

In Mingyu’s mind, by Jihoon’s same logic, they were all made of something.

“Yeah,” Joshua would say, poindexter that he was. “Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorous. Are you dumb, or did you sleep through biology last year?”

Josh, as an example, was made of scientific facts, miscellaneous statistics and pent-up rage. He had a mind like a steel trap, his memory damn near superhuman. If he read it in a textbook or heard it from a teacher, it was in his brain forever. Exams that made other kids cry with frustration and feelings of failure? Josh aced without a second thought, and he seemed to write complicated research papers with the same ease a toddler scribbled in a coloring book. He was so smart, in fact, that it occasionally bordered on worrisome. What else was Joshua Hong capable of? Just how deep did that wealth of intelligence truly run?

The only scholastic subcategory where he he fell short was class participation. He didn’t answer questions or contribute to class discussions, sure that his matter-of-fact attitude would read as condescending and, subsequently, threatening to the Neanderthals in his class, and he already had enough trouble with them. If keeping his hand and head down when his teacher asked an easy question about Francis Bacon would mean the difference between getting to his next class on time and getting shoved face-first into a trash can again, it was an easy choice to make.

By all accounts, Josh was probably big and strong enough to fight back. But he never had. Not even once. He’d been pantsed, shoved into lockers, thrown into dumpsters and just generally beaten into submission by guys with half his IQ. Joshua was tall enough and broad enough to generate a decent amount of strength, so why not turn it around on his tormentors? Why spend your life being brutalized at the hands of alphas? Why was he so content to be a hapless beta forever?

It was something Mingyu didn’t understand and it also something that usually turned Josh into an . Joshua’s anger at the rest of the world (the lunkheads that tortured him, the girls that wouldn’t date him, the teachers who let him get his kicked, the classmates that just looked the other way, thankful it wasn’t them) sometimes turned him inside-out and forced him to lash out at the group. It happened like clockwork every couple of months. He screamed at Vernon for smoking so much, picked on Jeonghan for the way he looked, pushed Jihoon around just because he was bigger than him. There was this look he’d get in his eyes when he snapped, this cold, unrelenting fury that everyone in their group understood. He was dangerous like that, all the raw power of a hurricane with no end in sight, and they tried to steer clear until he got it out of his system.

They’d let him blow his stack, watch as he threw things out windows and punched walls, all the while screaming himself hoarse, shouting empty threats and violent vulgarities at anyone who would listen. And then, when the storm passed, Joshua deflated, returning to his usual glory as the quietest member of their group.

If things got especially dicey, Seungcheol was really good at talking him down. He was the oldest member of their merry group of misfits and he tended to act like something of a rodeo clown. Josh would get that look in his eyes, his face tight, his jaw clenched, his fingers twitching themselves into fists, and Seungcheol knew how to get in the way and soften the blow.

That was just Seungcheol’s way.

Personally, Mingyu found Joshua’s complex unpredictability to be annoying. All that brooding and pouting when the solution to his problems were so simple? He didn’t get it. But, hey, in the grand scheme of things, who was Mingyu of all people to judge how another guy blew off steam?

Besides, being friends with Joshua came with perks. His parents were very, very wealthy and very, very busy, a winning combination for a high school senior with degenerate friends. His father owned a contracting company and his mother was a real-estate mogul. And what did that mean for Josh and his pals? Well, it meant they always had a place to go. Josh was a master sleuth, an expert at knowing when to be silent during dinnertime discussions and when to ask his folks seemingly innocuous questions. Simply put, he knew where to find empty houses. Vacant vacation homes, places under construction, new and furnished houses that hadn’t quite hit the market yet. His friends craved privacy and freedom, and Joshua knew just where they could get it.

In the grand scheme of things, his violent outbursts were a small price to pay considering he was the one who’d found them a home base.

According to Josh, the two-story Georgian Colonial was halfway between wasteland and paradise. Apparently, it was in real estate limbo, having been left to a pair of dueling siblings by a sick aunt. Though they’d mostly picked the place clean, they couldn’t agree on what to do with the house itself. The brother wanted to sell it while the sister wanted to preserve it, leaving it as-is for the next generation of snot-nosed brats that might want it. According to Josh’s mother, it seemed like the sister was simply dragging her feet out of spite. She was so spiteful, in fact, that she continued to pay the utilities just to piss off her brother.

As it stood, that two-story Georgian Colonial sat in the middle of town, completely unused and Josh decided to take one for the team. Literally. His mother had been the agent that the feuding brother had contacted about selling the house. As such, she had the key on file. Once he figured out where it was, it was just a matter of making seven copies and getting the original back before his mother noticed it was gone.

For a guy as smart as Josh, it was a cakewalk.

He handed out the keys like he was giving candy to trick-or-treaters, then hit them with house rules.

No smoking. (That rule was the first broken, as well as the most frequently broken.)

No fighting inside the house. (If you had a problem, you took it outside. Wild West rules. No dueling in the saloon.)

No bringing girls (or boys, in the case of Jeonghan) back to the house.

No breaking windows, denting walls or otherwise damaging the home.

And, most importantly, no outsiders. This was their place. Seven keys for seven guys, and that was it. It was their sanctuary, their refuge, their headquarters. It wasn’t a place to throw ragers, nor was it some sort of bachelor-pad-slash--den.

It was their hideout, and God only knew how many things each of them had to hide from.

It was ironic, of course, that the boy with the least amount of danger at home had been the one to procure their safehouse, but sometimes life was like that. When a golden opportunity presented itself, it was best not to pull at the thread that held it together. The other six didn’t question it. They just accepted their keys and offered their thanks.

It wasn’t long before virtually every house rule had been broken. Some sins were more forgivable than others (telling Vernon not to smoke was like telling a dog not to back or a bird not to fly) and others were met with much more scrutiny. But when it became clear that the epic clash of the greedy siblings had fizzled into an incredibly apathetic stalemate, when they were sure that their little slice of heaven wasn’t in danger of being pulled out from under them, they made themselves comfortable.

Aunt Helen (they actually never learned the name of the old broad whose house it had been, and Seungcheol was the one who started inexplicably referring to her as their late Aunt Helen) had simple tastes. Once her niece and nephew had gone through and claimed anything of value, the boys were left with little to work with – three old mattresses, a plastic-covered couch, a faded loveseat, obsolete kitchen appliances, a TV from the mid-seventies and one working bathroom.

Fortunately, they didn’t require very much. Most of all, they needed a place to crash when got too real. Seungcheol was the only one who didn’t live with his parents, and his landlord didn’t want teenagers hanging around the apartment complex. (At least that was what Seungcheol told them. Mingyu had a creeping suspicion that it had a lot more to do with Seungcheol not wanting them at his place. He didn’t exactly live in the nicest part of town and Dino didn’t need any more temptation.)

In time, they’d all sort of taken over a corner of the house, claiming their individual spots like cats in an alley. Jeonghan took the upstairs bedroom, the one that used to belong to Aunt Helen, because he was the only one not skeeved out by sleeping in a dead woman’s bed.

“We don’t know she died here,” Jeonghan said. He was going through Aunt Helen’s closet, trying on whatever suited his fancy. At the moment, he was donning a dated feather boa and costume earrings. “She could’ve died anywhere. Besides, I like the room. It has… ambiance.”

What it had was an awful lot of creepy porcelain dolls and the unmoving, almost living stench of rose perfume. But Jeonghan wasn’t bothered by it. In fact, he barely changed a thing once he got rid of the dolls. (He’d told Vernon that their eerie, unblinking eyes creeped out some of his boyfriends and then made Vernon promise not to mention that he’d been bringing guys back to the house.) Aunt Helen’s bedroom was almost exactly how she’d left it, just with more men’s clothing in dirty piles on the floor and more condoms in the nightstand. (Presumably.)

Jihoon took the other upstairs bedroom. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason for it beyond the fact that it boasted a twin bed and he was the smallest member of the group. The room itself was non-descript, nearly bare. White walls, white curtains, an empty dresser and lots of dust. Jihoon didn’t like to bring tons personal effects into the house, something about bad juju, but he did replace the sheets.

“Who still uses wool blankets?” he’d asked, shoving the damn thing into the bottom drawer of the dresser. He itched at his arms, the skin red and puffy, an allergy he hadn’t known about. “Was Helen a pilgrim or something?”

“That’s Aunt Helen to you,” Seungcheol had said. He’d been making Jihoon’s bed for him. “Don’t disrespect her in her own home.”

All Jihoon had contributed to his home-away-from home was a few comic books, his journal, a pack of drawing pens and his own pillow. (Something about the idea of not knowing whose head was on that pillow before his gave him the creeps. It was one of the reasons he didn’t like hotels.)

Joshua took the downstairs bedroom. His door was the only in the house with a working lock and he made use of it. He insisted on his privacy, something the others didn’t really question. (Mingyu found it odd, but Mingyu found a lot of things about Joshua to be odd. He was an only child living in a mansion with distant parents. Didn’t he have all the privacy he needed?) Mingyu had never actually been in Joshua’s room but he could make some educated guesses regarding the aesthetics. Based on everything else he knew about his friend, he was picturing sunlight-blocking curtains, a state-of-the-art stereo, a top-of-the-line computer atop a thousand-dollar desk and maybe a white noise machine. They’d all sort of made a silent pact not to bring too much in or throw too much out but since Joshua had gotten them the house in the first place, the same unspoken rules didn’t apply to him.

Vernon didn’t sleep over all that often and when he did, he usually just took whatever spot was available. It wasn’t often that the whole group spent the night at Aunt Helen’s so there was usually a bed or couch cushion up for grabs. If push came to shove, he’d be fine to sleep on the floor with a spare pillow. The only thing he really cared about was the gazebo out back. Sitting under the stars, smoking a joint and listening to 70s music on his old school iPod was pretty much his idea of paradise, and he usually ended up biking home at the end of the night and sleeping in his own bed.

Mingyu, meanwhile, slept on the couch. It wasn’t a pull-out couch and it wasn’t particularly comfortable but the protective plastic had kept the upholstery clean and soft. Given that he was the biggest guy in the group, a three-cushion sofa wasn’t the most perfect fit, but for him, it was Xanadu. He’d never been an insomniac, someone fast to fall asleep and a sound sleeper after the fact, so what did he care? He treated the little coffee table like a nightstand, using it to hold his phone, charger, wallet and Gatorade. (He hid his cigarettes under the couch and kept his lighter in his pocket as he slept.)

Dino usually crashed on the loveseat, which sort of made him Mingyu’s roommate, but sleeping in the same room didn’t make Mingyu understand the kid any more. (And was it really considered sleeping in the same room if Dino was usually completely passed out and barely breathing?) Tiny as he was, even Jihoon couldn’t sleep comfortably on the small loveseat, but Dino didn’t seem to mind. Mingyu could only imagine the pain he’d feel if he spent a night curled up on that lounge, all the stiffness in his neck and joints, but he figured all the Vicodin Dino took probably helped ease the post-loveseat soreness.

Mingyu didn’t have anything against Dino. He actually kind of liked him. There was something charming about the kid. Next to Joshua, he was likely the smartest guy in the group but while Joshua was all book smarts and fun facts, Dino was streetwise. He was resourceful, quick, innovative. There were very few problems he was unable to solve one way or another, and life had yet to throw Dino anything he couldn’t handle.

But that wasn’t for lack of trying. At just sixteen-years-old, he been given a whole hell of a lot to handle, but who among them hadn’t? They’d all been put through the ringer in some way or another (though Mingyu regretfully considered Joshua and Vernon to have gotten a much better hand than the rest of them) so why was Dino the only one who needed copious amounts of drugs to deal with it?

“Vernon needs drugs to cope,” Jihoon had once pointed out when Mingyu brought it up. They were downtown the year before, taking in the annual food truck festival. They were perhaps the two most different members of the group, everything from height to skin tone to social status. Mingyu was tall, dark and handsome, a jock who played on the baseball team and gave weaker kids wedgies because he didn’t know how to handle with the way his dad treated him. Jihoon was petite, pale, a sensitive, intelligent geek who liked to read and draw. But at their cores, they were the most similar. They tended to hang out the most outside of the group and when they did, they tended to talk about their friends. It was from a place of concern, though, not malice or jealousy. It was simply easier to discuss the group’s problem when most of the group was someplace else.

“He smokes a lot of weed,” Mingyu shrugged, taking a sloppy bite out of a chicken taco. “But that’s a far cry from what Dino does. He’s only a sophomore and he’s high all the time. On the hard stuff, Jihoon. Vicodin, Adderall, Xanax. Shouldn’t we, like, do something?”

Jihoon snorted.

“Sure,” he said. “Then, right after that, we’ll have an intervention for Jeonghan’s addiction.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head, his bangs moving with the breeze. “Come on. Let’s go see if we can find a decent dessert truck.”

He let the topic drop for a few months, then brought it up to Seungcheol.

Seungcheol was the uncontested leader of their group, the oldest and the wisest. He’d battled alcoholism in his teens and come out the other side something of a standup guy. He’d been living on his own since he was seventeen, working two (sometimes three) jobs to make ends meet. Now, at twenty-two, he didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t get in trouble with the law. He kept an eye on the rest of the guys, made sure that they ate, that they slept, that the went to school, that they didn’t OD or bleed to death.

He and Seungcheol had gotten burgers after Seungcheol got off work, and they ate them outside the restaurant and watched cars drive by.

“Don’t worry about him,” Seungcheol had said. “The kid has his demons but we all do. He’s paying his dues. I was wild in my teen years, too, and look at me now. Sometimes you can’t bounce back until you hit rock bottom. He’s still in school and he’s not a thug. You know how hard he works to help keep food on the table at his house. Everyone needs an escape.”

“He’s sixteen,” Mingyu said, aware that his birthday a month before only dictated him Dino’s senior by two years. “He should escape by playing videogames or something.”

Seungcheol smirked and put a big hand on Mingyu’s shoulder.

“The kid’s a hustler,” he said. “He’ll be okay. Better he work through his now and sort himself out before college. Things only get worse as you age. Trust me. It’s better this way.”

Mingyu wanted to point out that Dino’s parents could barely afford electricity, let alone college, but he bit his tongue and reached for another fry. Sometimes he felt like he and his friends were all wearing glasses and all saw things through different lenses. What was perfectly clear to Jihoon and Seungcheol didn’t make a of sense to him and Vernon, and what made sense to Dino and Jeonghan was absurd to Joshua.

They were seven very different boys. He figured the same could be said for any group of friends but he thought that his circle operated at extremes. At times, it didn’t even feel like they were all the same species.

They could be an obnoxious bunch of motherers but Mingyu knew how they all seven of them got to be exactly the way the way that they were. It wasn’t by accident or by chance, though some could argue it was by fate. It was nature and nurture, or too much of the former and not quite enough of the latter. They were direct products of their environments, for better or for worse, and when it came down to it, all they really had to count on was each other.

Whether or not that was a good thing was still up for debate.

Take Jeonghan, as an example. He was, perhaps, the member of the group Mingyu knew least. The same rules applied to Jeonghan that applied to everyone else in their group – if anyone ever laid a hand on him, Mingyu would rip them to shreds with his bare hands – but they weren’t super close. They had no common interests, no overlap. Their personalities clashed. Mingyu tended to be hyper-masculine, inflating his ego to protect the insecurities that lay beneath. It was something he inherited from his father and something he hated about himself, but it was something that made him look sideways at Jeonghan, a guy about his age that routinely slept with men and kept himself looking prettier than any boy ought to.

Jeonghan kept his long hair perfectly groomed, and was known to wear eyeliner and polish his nails. Maybe it was his confidence that bothered Mingyu, the way that Jeonghan could walk the halls in a women’s jacket and high heeled shoes and have more honest-to-goodness self-esteem than he could, or maybe it was just his teenage homophobia coming to a head and prickling in his underdeveloped brain. In the grand scheme of things, though, he didn’t hate Jeonghan. Jeonghan was a good person. He was loyal, charming, funny. More than once, when Mingyu forgot his wallet or just didn’t have enough cash to get by, Jeonghan bought him lunch, or gave him half of whatever he’d brought for himself. When Mingyu was close to getting kicked off the baseball team, Jeonghan tutored him in history and expected nothing in return.

But Jeonghan also slept around. He was just a year younger than Mingyu but had developed a real reputation for having with older guys. Not a year or two older, not a case of an underclassman sleeping with college guys. He ed with older guys, adults, middle-aged guy with wives and kids and jobs in finance. As far as Mingyu knew, Jeonghan didn’t date, didn’t associate with guys his own age. There were other gay guys at school, even a few in their grade, but Jeonghan wasn’t interested.

Mingyu walked in on them once, Jeonghan and a forty-year-old rolling around in Aunt Helen’s bed. It was back when he was still new to the group. Jeonghan was barely sixteen. Because he had nowhere else to go that night, Mingyu simply sat downstairs and watched football videos on his phone. Seungcheol showed up after work, the way he always did on Thursdays, and asked Mingyu whose car was in the driveway.

“Jeonghan is upstairs ing some guy,” Mingyu blurted out. “Not, like, a teenager but a guy. A man. I knew he was gay but… that guy could be his father. Why is he doing that? He brags about having with guys but I always thought that he meant kids our age. Does he always mean adults?”

His questions were met with silence. Seungcheol nodded slowly, the only sign at all that he was listening to what Mingyu was saying. He rubbed his jaw, took a deep breath and then sat beside Mingyu on the couch, nodding his chin at Mingyu’s phone. Knowingly, Mingyu shut it off and slipped it into the pocket of his hoodie.

“You know about Jeonghan’s home life?”

“He’s a foster kid,” Mingyu said, one of the few things he knew about Jeonghan. They’d had a class together when Mingyu was in tenth grade. The topic of adoption had come up in a debate and Jeonghan had mentioned something about it.

Seungcheol nodded again.

“But do you know why he’s a foster kid?” He didn’t. Why would he? He’d only known Jeonghan a few months. Seungcheol in a breath and said, “Jeonghan was abused as a kid. A lot, actually. By his mother’s boyfriend, and then some guys in foster care.”

“Like me?” Mingyu asked, piping up with a pathetic sort of hopefulness. His tone was regretful, shameful but for a split second, he thought that he had someone to relate to, that he had a new friend who would understand him.

“No,” Seungcheol said. “Not like you.” He smiled sadly. “These guys… touched him. him, Mingyu. It happened for a few years. And this…” He gestured up to the ceiling, meaning to point to Aunt Helen’s room. “This is just how he deals with it.”

“How do you know all this?” Mingyu asked, his throat suddenly dry.

“People trust me,” Seungcheol said with a lopsided grin. “They tell me things. Same way I know about your dad.” Mingyu shrank under Seungcheol’s gaze, hyper-aware of the way his friend’s eyes suddenly fell to the bruise on his jaw. “I know it seems ed up but don’t think too much about it, okay? He’s sixteen. That makes him legal. Don’t feel like you’re doing anything wrong or that you’re complicit somehow, okay? This is just Jeonghan’s baggage. Don’t worry about it.”

Mingyu bit the inside of his cheek and nodded, processing his words. Then he asked, “Is that why Jeonghan’s gay? Because of what happened to him?”

All in one motion, Seungcheol scoffed, rolled his eyes and punched Mingyu in the thigh.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Of course not.” Mingyu looked offended for a minute, suddenly self-conscious about his own ignorance, and rubbed the sore spot on his thigh. Seungcheol was stronger than he looked. Seeing this, Seungcheol sighed and put his hand on Mingyu’s shoulder. It was the first time he’d done that, but it would become a pretty regular gesture between them. “You hungry? I think we’ve got some food in the fridge. I was thinking breakfast for dinner. You like potatoes and eggs?”

So that was Jeonghan, then. For whatever reason, learning more about Jeonghan made Mingyu respect him more. They still weren’t compatible, guys that wouldn’t be friends in any other universe, but Jeonghan was just a kid doing his best, just like the rest of them. But Mingyu really didn’t like the idea of his friend being passed around by men the same age as their parents and teachers. He didn’t know him that well at the time but the thought of Jeonghan being used like that made his skin crawl.

But it was Jeonghan’s cross to bear.

They all had their burdens.

They all had different reasons for staying at Aunt Helen’s. For Jeonghan, it was because he couldn’t bear to be around his foster parents. Whether they were abusing him, too, or if he just plain didn’t like them, Mingyu didn’t know. But Mingyu could relate. Mingyu hid out at Helen’s because he didn’t want to be near his father.

Joshua went because he was lonely, or at least that was Mingyu’s take on it. He had no friends, no girlfriend, no one to talk to at home. His parents were too busy making money to pay much attention to their kid, and his aggressive personality was likely to scare off any classmates stupid enough to try and get close to him. Without Helen’s house and the rest of the guys, what did Joshua have except a big, fat bank account?

Vernon hung out because Vernon didn’t have anything better to do. At nineteen-years-old, he was the second oldest of the group, and he was set to repeat his senior year for a third time. He was a pizza delivery boy, a classic under-achieving stoner with wealthy parents who had given up on him.

Jihoon had once expressed how sad he felt for Vernon, something that Mingyu couldn’t understand.

“You feel bad for a rich kid who smokes a lot of dope?” Mingyu asked. “Why?”

“His parents don’t give a about him,” Jihoon said.

“Why do you say that? They haven’t kicked his , haven’t kicked him out, haven’t done anything to him.”

“Exactly,” said Jihoon. “They don’t care. You have to care about someone to kick their and kick them out.” (Mingyu disagreed there.) “If they gave a , they’d cut him off, throw his out, make him work harder. But they’ve given up. They don’t care. They’re just going to let him waste away to nothing. Dude, he’s still going to be in remedial math when he’s twenty-five. It’s sad. He’s never going to be anything.”

Mingyu preferred not to look at it that way. Vernon was a nice enough guy. He laughed a lot, giggled, like a little kid, and always seemed to be smiling. But Mingyu couldn’t say much about him other than the fact that he smoked more in a week than most kids did in a year. It seemed like Vernon only hung out with them because no other group wanted him. (But really… wasn’t that true for all seven of them?)

Jihoon went to Aunt Helen’s because he craved the freedom to be himself. Being himself at school meant eating lunch in dumpster and being himself at home meant ridicule from the rest of his conservative family. He wasn’t big enough or manly enough for his father and older brothers. Comic books and sci-fi novels and animated films weren’t for men and any time he showed any real interest in something, they set out to destroy it.

At least at Helen’s, he could draw in peace.

Besides, he genuinely liked the other guys. He considered them to be friends. What was better than hiding out with your friends?

Mingyu wasn’t sure why Dino hung around. He was something of a wild card, a kid who always seemed to be talking too fast and doing too many things at once. It was no secret that he was high most of the time, always hopped up on something and buzzing around the house like a strung-out hummingbird, but Mingyu never truly understood his role in the group. He was the baby, sure, and, arguably, the most ed up, but what purpose did he serve? What spot did he fill?

Mingyu knew that Dino’s family was poor. His parents were working-class, doing their best, and he had two younger sisters. Not many reputable employers were looking to hire a doped up sixteen-year-old and so Dino couldn’t make money the old-fashioned way. But he loved his family and he wanted to help so, in true Dino fashion, he got creative.

He wasn’t willing to sell himself (he was no Jeonghan, after all) but he was willing to sell other things. It wasn’t uncommon to find him digging around in the trash, collecting bottles or looking for valuables under the pier. If he could get his hands on it, he’d try and sell it. Smooth-talker that he was, he usually succeeded.

But Dino’s priorities were split, fifty-fifty. He cared deeply for his family and wanted nothing more than to help provide for them. He loved his sisters endlessly and would go to the ends of the earth to make sure they had enough to eat and clothes to keep them warm. But he also had a nasty drug habit that demanded his attention.

As it were, all of the money he received from any of his various “odd-jobs” was divvied up between his family and his habit. Half the money went to his family’s fridge and the other half went up his nose.

It was an incredibly delicate balance, especially for a sixteen-year-old boy, and it kind of made Mingyu’s problems seem paler in comparison. Sure, his father smacked him around but at least he wasn’t hopelessly addicted to anything yet. Their group seemed to operate on a sliding scale of . Was it wrong that he was comforted by the fact that he didn’t have it the worst? Or was that sort of selfishness simply a side-effect of adolescence?

Mingyu’s life had been pretty great until he turned ten. On his third day of fifth grade, his mother was killed in a car crash. He hadn’t known it was even possible to feel grief like that, didn’t know that humans were capable of such pain. But things only got worse from there. He thought he’d been dropped to the depths of hell the day they buried his mother, but his suffering was just getting started.

Beyond just being an angel that kept hot meals on the table and monsters out of his closet, Mingyu’s mother was, it turned out, was the thing keeping his father together. His father was inherently distant, a blue-collar guy with simple tastes and a bad temper. He was the type to get irrationally angry over minor inconveniences but Mom was always there to guide him gently back to a calmer path. He was wound too tight, overworked and underpaid with an ego too big for the few skills he had. But Mingyu’s mother loved him anyway, and that love was the thing that had always kept him hinged.

With her gone, he was free to be himself, a small, cruel man who put in sixty-hour work weeks at jobs that didn’t matter, working for people who didn’t respect him. He came home angry, fists curled, back sore. He drank his dinner, inhaling six-pack after six-pack of cheap beer, and planted his in his ratty old recliner, eyes glued to TV until he inevitably passed out from exhaustion and inebriation. 

Some nights, he didn’t fall asleep and some nights, shouting at ESPN and Fox News wasn’t enough to quell his rage. His anger was chronic, tangible, a terminal disease that rotted him from the inside out. He’d once been a man that stood tall and now he hunched, his body creaking like an old, wooden floor. His hatred for the world, the world without his wife, took its toll. It was like a wildfire, raging inside of him and everything Mingyu did seemed to only fan the flames.

As a kid, he’d kept track of the reasons he got hit. In his juvenile mind, if he could figure out the rules to the game, he stood a chance of winning. His father was grieving and he was taking his grief out on Mingyu. Okay, fine. Mingyu could deal with that. He’d just have to be on his best behavior. He left his baseball cleats in the doorway and his father tripped, and that earned Mingyu an open-hand slap across the face. He’d tried to make his own dinner and started (but then extinguished) a small fire, and the smoke alarm woke his father from his nap. That had gotten his arm twisted behind his back.

He mapped it out in his brain. He needed to listen. He needed to speak softly. He needed to be respectful. He cleaned up after himself, he did his homework, he took out the trash without being asked. He was the perfect son.

But he still got hit.

He got hit for breathing too loud, for showering too early in the morning, for asking about the grocery list, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He got hit because his father wanted to hit him.

Mingyu quickly grew out of trying to be the perfect son and instead just tried to survive. He timed his comings-and-goings so that he could spend as little time around his father as possible. When they were forced to be in the same room together, he spoke only when spoken to and kept his head down. He was curt but polite and made sure to avoid all of his father’s hot-button issues.

Was it a perfect system? No. He still managed to earn himself dozens of black eyes three broken bones. But by the time Mingyu was thirteen or fourteen, things had sort of plateaued. He and his father had reached something of an apathetic coexistence. Dad worked two jobs to keep the lights on, leaving Mingyu home alone to fend for himself. Other young teens might’ve used the opportunity to woo girls or start drinking recreationally but Mingyu wasn’t willing to risk it.

One beer can, one wrapper, one whiff of foreign perfume and his father would’ve dislocated every bone in his body.

Mingyu spent as much time as possible at friend’s houses, pretending their well-adjusted, well-intentioned parents were his own and that there were two adults somewhere that loved him. And when he was alone, he tried to relish in it. He exercised (lots of push-ups and sit-ups while he fantasized about the day he’d be big enough to fight back) and went to the batting range and spent lonely nights walking the backstreets of his neighborhood.

At least when he was alone, nobody was hitting him.

By high school, Mingyu had become a bully.

He wasn’t proud of it and in reality, it didn’t bring him the relief he thought it would. His father would come home drunk and call him a worthless piece of , and Mingyu would go to school the next day and wail on an innocent classmate who’d done nothing but look at him wrong. Dad would throw him over the coffee table for forgetting to start the dishwasher and Mingyu would spend the next day going on a rampage, shoving kids into walls and towel-whipping weaker guys in the locker room.

It didn’t make him feel any better, but once he’d been branded a bully, it was kind of hard to break the habit. He was who he was.

(It was ironic now that he was friends with Jihoon and Joshua, two kids who seemed to have been born with targets on their backs, but Mingyu would eviscerate anyone who dared to mess with them when he was around. What happened when they were apart, however, was their business. They needed to stand up for themselves someday. They needed to learn how to stand on their own two feet.)

Mingyu was turning sixteen when he met Seungcheol. He’d been smoking outside a local convenience store, eye swollen shut from a recent, unexpected beating, when an older, smaller man approached him.

“You should quit,” he said. “Those things will kill you.”

“I know you?” Mingyu asked, already sizing him up. He was fresh off an -kicking and just dying to work out some unresolved rage. Unless this guy was trained in jiu jitsu, Mingyu could definitely take him.

“You know Joshua?” Seungcheol shot back. His confidence was… abundantly clear. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans, his chin up, his shoulders back. He could’ve been the owner of 7-Eleven for all the assurance he carried in his body language.

“Hong?” Mingyu raised an eyebrow. At that point, he and Joshua were acquaintances at best. They had two classes together and had been partnered up once for a history project. Joshua was sort of an oddball but Mingyu admired his dry sense of humor. “I know him. Why?”

“What about Jihoon?”

“Jihoon Lee?” Mingyu asked, blowing smoke in the other direction. With his free hand, he gestured near his chest. “About ye high? He’s my friend. Again, why?”

Jihoon and Mingyu had met by chance. Jihoon was a grade younger than him but he’d found Mingyu in the back of the library once, icing a bruise, and given him tips on how to avoid getting taken down by a bully. Mingyu smirked, wanting to tell this little guy that he was the bully, not the one getting bullied (at least not in the traditional sense) but Jihoon had been so genuine in his delivery that he didn’t feel it appropriate. He just thanked him and asked if there were any bullies Jihoon needed taking care of.

A weird friendship had been born that day.

The fact that this guy, this arrogant, square-jawed guy, knew both Jihoon and Josh was… unlikely. It was an uncomfortable coincidence that didn’t lend itself to a grungy alley that smelled like piss and blue raspberry Slurpee.

“They’re friends of mine,” he said. “We’ve kind of got a group of guys that hang out. Jihoon mentioned that you might be interested.”

Uneasy, Mingyu blew a smoke ring.

“Why would he say that?”

The guy pointed to his Mingyu’s eye.

“Where’d you get the shiner?”

Mingyu squinted with his good eye.

“What’s it to you?”

“A guy needs like-minded friends,” he went on, unbothered by Mingyu’s indifference. “Guys like us need to stick together.”

“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mingyu spat, throwing the remainder of his cigarette to the ground and stomping it with the toe of his Converse.

“Jihoon vouched for you,” he continued. “He said you’re a good guy with somewhat of a rough home life and that’s sort of our thing. I like to help out guys like you, guys like Jihoon.”

“Are you a narc or something? A social worker?”

The guy laughed and it made him seem five years younger.

“I’m just a guy who’s been through some ,” he said. “I see younger guys struggling and I want to help. No one was there to help me. I guess I’m trying to be the person I needed when I was younger. And I trust Jihoon’s judgment. He says you’re a good guy that needs a little help.” He opened his arms, smirking smugly. “So he sent me.”

Mingyu was a complicated mix of concerned, off-put and confused, but didn’t make any move to walk away or brush him off.

Then the man offered his hand.

“I’m Seungcheol,” he said. “Let me buy you a soda or something and I’ll tell you a little about myself. If you still think I’m a narc, you can tell me to off. You can even keep the soda.”

Mingyu grinned. There was something about this guy, something that felt strangely… significant.

He wasn’t sure why but he felt something in that moment, something important, something worth remembering. So he did. Every detail, from the smoke on his tongue to the color of Seungcheol’s sneakers. It was a unity born in a dirty sort of serendipity, but it was significant to Mingyu all the same.

Then he reached out and shook his hand.

“Alright,” he said. “Whatever.”

They went inside the 7-Eleven, Mingyu bought him a Coke and Slim Jim, and the rest was history. He was introduced to Vernon and Jeonghan a few days later, and they all met Dino six months after that.

Back-alley destiny was really a force to be reckoned with.

Two years had passed. They had Aunt Helen’s state, and each other. What else was there?

They all had their crosses to bear, the demons from which they needed to escape.

Joshua had his anger, his disassociation, his lack of community ties.

Jihoon had his loneliness, his depression, his fleeting sense of self.

Jeonghan had his baggage, his ual transgressions, all the half- older men on his phone.

Vernon had his underachieving nature, his dependency on dope and his otherwise empty personality.

Dino had poverty, trouble with the law and a rampant drug addiction.

Seungcheol had nothing but love to give, an insatiable need to help people.

And Mingyu? He had a drunk for a father, a scurrilous man who didn’t know or care if his only son was dead or alive. He had a bad habit of picking on weaker kids to fruitlessly try and recover the shattered pieces of his self-esteem, and a dozen empty packs of cigarettes stuffed under his mattress.

They were imperfect. Mingyu thought he saw pieces of himself reflected in the other guys and pieces of them in him. He shared Jihoon’s yearning and Josh’s rage and Seungcheol’s sense of loyalty. They were the same, but different, and the reflections of each personality and each story made up the shining mirror that was their group.

Of course there were struggles. These were the teen years, after all, and they were supposed to be messy. Regardless of the darkness, there was an innocence there, a naivety, and blanketed in the warmth of ignorant adolescence, Mingyu felt safe. He knew firsthand how cruel the world could be, saw it himself and saw it on the faces of his friends, but he also knew joy. He knew fun. He knew humor and solidarity and brotherhood. One day, he hoped to know freedom.

Still, he thought it was a minor miracle that he managed to graduate high school. Joshua graduated with him, though he had a much higher GPA than Mingyu. The other boys came to the ceremony, even if Mingyu’s dad claimed he had to work that afternoon and just couldn’t get his shift covered, and Josh’s family took everyone out for an expensive dinner afterwards to celebrate.

The boys decided to memorialize the occasion on their own about a month later. Mingyu and Josh had graduated their own way, so why not celebrate their own way, too?

To be fair, Mingyu didn’t normally do drugs. He’d smoked with Vernon once or twice but didn’t care for it and the that Dino was into scared him. But when Seungcheol produced a small bag of white powder from his backpack and proudly declared it a graduation present, Mingyu had a hard time saying no. It was Seungcheol, after all. He’d never do anything that would hurt any of them, never put any of them in danger.

Besides, the drugs hadn’t been Seungcheol’s only present.

Joshua, Jihoon and Vernon were already with Seungcheol when Mingyu showed up late to Aunt Helen’s. Vernon, probably the first to arrive, was already stoned off his gourd and babbling about the origins of the universe. There was food on the table, fried chicken and fixings from the fast food place where Seungcheol sometimes picked up shifts, and Mingyu dug in, not bothering to explain why he was late.

He took his usual spot on the couch that also served as his bed and watched whatever grainy 90s sitcom was playing on Aunt Helen’s fossil of a television set. Though greasy, the food hit the spot and refilled his energy, and the company of his friends, however apathetic they seemed, did a lot to quell the sore spots in his soul.

A moment later, Seungcheol pulled something from his backpack.

“Here,” said Seungcheol, tossing a small, wrapped box at Mingyu. Even with a full plate of food in his hands, Mingyu snatched it from the air with the grace of a polished athlete.

“What’s this?”

“Most people call it a gift,” Seungcheol deadpanned. “It’s a token of my affection, you see, with the purpose of celebrating and commemorating a special occasion. Open it, you dope.”

Mingyu did as he was told and seconds later, he found himself both embarrassed and touched. It was a Zippo lighter, one of the good, refillable ones with the shiny silver exterior. Seungcheol had gotten it engraved with Mingyu’s initials and a message – Congrats on graduating but please quit smoking.

He laughed out loud, his cheeks taking on an unfamiliar shade of pink as he slid the lighter into the pocket of his jeans.

“Thanks, man,” he said, trying not to look as flustered as he felt. “I love it.”

“You’ve earned it,” Seungcheol said, slapping his arm. “You’ve come a long way.”

Mingyu really wanted to believe him, wanted to believe, perhaps naively, that his hardships had built up his character and made him someone greater than who he’d been.

It had been a rough year.

Mingyu had graduated by the skin of his teeth, the exact opposite of Josh who had graduated third in their class. He’d had somewhat of a disappointing baseball season and a real bone to pick with Mr. Simmons, his English teacher that seemed to be hellbent on making his life worse than it already did.

And then there was Yoona.

He wasn’t sure enough had gone on between them for her to be considered his first love. He was pretty sure he’d loved her but what did that even mean? They’d met at a party the summer before senior year and he was smitten the second she said hello. She was smart, and pretty, the type of all-American high school girl that all the teen movies said would end up with a guy just like him – athletic, arrogant, kind of stupid and not quite good enough for her.

They’d gone on a few dates, spent a few more house parties all tangled up together on the couch and on the dance floor, stayed up late texting each other when they should have been sleeping or studying. He’d even gotten to second base once after a baseball game where he’d hit the walk-off homer and been everyone’s hero.

But their small town was becoming a cesspool. There were lots of groups like his, lots of ed up teenagers with nowhere to go and nothing better to do but get into trouble. The only real difference between Mingyu’s friends and the local thugs was that those other gangs didn’t have Seungcheol to keep them on the straight and narrow. With a severe shortage of mentors and reliable father figures in town, crime rates were up, and it didn’t take long for that sort of deviance to find its way into Mingyu’s life.

More specifically, though, it found Yoona.

There was a modern-day bandit on the loose, a lone-wolf type, some real low-down piece of who was responsible for a string of recent robberies. It had started at the beginning of June and quickly grew into a pandemic. He’d been targeting high school kids, stealing cell phones and tablets and computers and wallets, all while wearing a creepy plastic clown mask he’d probably picked up at the party store for a buck.

Mingyu had heard about it, both through the grape vine and on the local news, but thought nothing of it. Beyond the fact that he was poor and had absolutely nothing of value worth stealing, Mingyu was bigger and stronger than this prick. Though nobody saw his face through the mask, all of the victim’s reported their attacker to be about 5’7.

Mingyu sort of half-hoped that the bastard would try to sneak up on him. He’d pound the son of a into the pavement and be hailed a hero by the whole town. Hell, the police might even give him a reward. (And he could really use the money. Now that he was eighteen and out of school, his father was demanding he pay rent. The number he likely pulled out of his was astronomical and Mingyu was having trouble scraping it all together. Why couldn’t he have been better at baseball? His dad liked to remind him over and over and over again that he was a failure, a weak athlete who never had any shot at college ball, let alone the pros. That’s why Mingyu had been slinging hash at a local diner, though he’d been keeping that detail to himself, and that’s why he’d been late to the graduation party. He was taking whatever shifts were available, desperate to get the money together before the end of July.)

Three weeks before graduation, he’d had plans with Yoona and two of her girlfriends. They were supposed to meet at 6:45 but his new boss, a sadistic, uppity prick with a superiority complex, made him work an extra hour just for s and giggles. His phone had died in the middle of his shift, meaning that he couldn’t call Yoona and tell her he’d be late. In the end, he didn’t show up until 8:15, not even bothering to change out of his work clothes because he didn’t want to be any later.

But it was too late. The cops were already there.

The bandit had struck again and this time, he’d brought along two friends. Maybe he’d decided that being a lone wolf just wasn’t quite as advantageous as working in a team. Whatever it was, he’d come with backup and it had paid off. After liberating the girls of their money, jewelry and devices, the guys got greedy. Apparently, it hadn’t escalated to but that was purely by chance. Forcible touching, the police had called it, and then a good Samaritan had come upon the scene and the guys got scared off.

Mingyu had been over an hour late to his date and someone had d and mugged his girlfriend. Almost-girlfriend. Would-have-been-girlfriend. Now-ex-girlfriend. When he’d shown up, she was wrapped in a shock blanket, crying, and talking to police about her mother’s pearls that she’d likely never see again. She saw him but she couldn’t look at him.

After that, she’d stopped calling, stopped meeting him for lunch, stopped walking with him to class. She didn’t look at him in the hallway, didn’t answer his texts, didn’t acknowledge that he even existed. He understood completely and didn’t blame her for any of it. He was supposed to be with her that night and he wasn’t. He was supposed to protect her and he didn’t and she hated him for it.

He hated him, too.

Yoona was going to a good college while Mingyu would stay in town and amount to exactly nothing. Of course their relationship, whatever it was, had come with a time-limit. He’d been playing with house money since the day that he met her. But this wasn’t how he wanted it to end.

He spent the three days after that binge drinking at Aunt Helen’s, puking his guts out and making empty threats at the other guys because that was how Kim men mourned the women they loved.

No tears, no feelings, just destruction. He was his father’s son.

So when Seungcheol arranged the powder from the bag in four neat lines on the coffee table that usually served as his nightstand, Mingyu didn’t even bother asking what it was. It was a gift, and a way to celebrate the end of a ty year, and Mingyu could accept it at face value.

Jihoon could not.

“?” he asked, looking up from his comic book. He’d been on the love seat, sitting quietly. Mingyu knew he was jealous of him and Joshua, knew that Jihoon hated high school and wanted out sooner rather than later.

Seungcheol shook his head.

“You think I’m made of money?” he smirked. Jihoon didn’t smirk back. “No. It’s ketamine. It’s like but it won’t ruin your life after one hit. The perfect celebration drug, young man.”

“I thought you’re Mr. Clean and Sober,” Joshua said. He was sitting on the floor, playing on his phone. Aunt Helen’s house didn’t have wifi but Josh could afford the best data plan Verizon had to offer.

“I won’t be partaking,” Seungcheol said nobly. “This is a gift for my friends. I’ll be here, as always, to make sure nobody dies.” He tipped an imaginary hat and bowed graciously. “What would you do without me?”

“Probably just take some weed from Vernon,” Joshua said without looking up from his phone.

“So you don’t want any, then?”

“I didn’t say that,” Joshua said smugly. He locked his phone, slid it in his pocket and moved himself towards the coffee table, bowing his head and snorting an entire line of ketamine without missing a beat. Mingyu wasn’t sure whether or not to be impressed. Joshua fell back onto the floor, grinning, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“Thanks, captain,” he said, giving Seungcheol a mock salute. “Nothing like getting high and watching The Golden Girls.”

“Making Aunt Helen proud,” Vernon chortled from where he sat at the kitchen table. He laughed at his own joke, then looked to Jihoon. “If you don’t want to try K, you can have a joint, Jihoon. No peer pressure in this circle.”

Jihoon looked to Seungcheol as though looking for permission and Seungcheol just smiled.

“Party how you want, kid,” he said. “No judgment.” Jihoon seemed placated by that and nodded in Vernon’s direction. Vernon ran a hand through his hair, wavy and unruly, and smiled back, his usual, carefree beam. Mingyu wondered if Vernon ever frowned, then watched as he clamored out from behind the kitchen table, hopped over the back of the loveseat and landed beside Jihoon, offering him what was left of his blunt. He wrapped his arm affectionately or perhaps protectively around Jihoon’s shoulders and nodded at Seungcheol.

“Where’d you get this anyway?”

“I have my sources,” he said. “Why? You want some?”

Vernon shook his head.

“Not my style,” he said, ruffling his hair again. He put his hand on his chest, presenting himself proudly. “I’m an organic man.”

From the floor, Joshua snorted with laughter.

“Can you imagine Vern on something stronger than suburban weed?” he asked. It sounded rhetorical. He threw his head back and laughed some more, and when he looked back to the group, he was wearing a familiar expression – the sleepy, dazed face he sported when he made fun of Vernon. “Life is a mirror, man,” he mocked, slowing down his speech and adding Vernon’s characteristic cool-guy drawl. “It, like, reflects . Life is a reflection, man. You know?”

He laughed so hard, he fell over and Vernon rolled his eyes and flipped him off.

“Mingyu,” said Seungcheol. He looked down at the three lines left on the table and asked, “You wanna try?”

The front door opened before Mingyu could answer. Jeonghan walked in, threw his bag in the corner, and joined them in the living room with his usual contended swagger.

“Hey, gents,” he said, his eyes falling to Joshua who was still rolling around the dusty floor. “Did I miss the party?”

“It’s just getting started,” said Seungcheol. He patted the empty couch cushion between Mingyu and himself and wolf-whistled, but Jeonghan was distracted by the goods on the coffee table.

“You bastards,” he said. “You got started without me?”

“Sorry,” said Joshua, making himself sit back up. “You’re right. It’s ladies first.”

Jeonghan flipped him off, too, then knelt beside the coffee table and inhaled the second line of powder. It was so smooth, it seemed like something out of a movie, like something from the scene of an 80s music video. Then Jeonghan stood back up, wiped the excess powder from his nose with a delicate finger, and fell giggling into Seungcheol’s lap.

They had always been close, always been comfortable being physically affectionate. Seungcheol laughed, too, pulling Jeonghan closer to his chest, and Mingyu unconsciously angled his body away from them. Seungcheol noticed this and frowned but Jeonghan didn’t seem bothered.

“Don’t mind him,” said Jeonghan, sitting up straighter so he was straddling Seungcheol’s thigh. “Mingyu is a wonderful young man but he’s…unevolved. He still thinks he can catch homo by close contact, like it’ll rub off on him. Gotta be careful, Cheolie. Those gay cooties will get you every time.”

Everyone laughed, even Jihoon, and Mingyu felt stupid. He slumped down where he sat but Seungcheol didn’t let him get too far, reaching over Jeonghan and slapping Mingyu’s thigh.

“Take a hit, big guy,” he said. “This party is for you, too. You graduated! You’ve earned the right to have a little fun.”

Still feeling stupid, and still trusting Seungcheol with every fiber of his being, Mingyu shrugged his broad shoulders and leaned over to the coffee table. He was entitled to a little fun, wasn’t he? After all he’d been through, why not party with his friends?

He hesitated, suddenly feeling every bit as inexperienced as he was, then he lowered his head and fumbled his way through snorting the third line of white powder. He’d never inhaled anything before and it burned his nose. He winced and coughed, causing Joshua to laugh again, but then sat up straight, shook his head and re-centered himself.

“Atta boy,” Seungcheol said, smirking proudly.

“Welcome to the club,” Vernon said, grabbing a Snapple bottle off the coffee table and raising it like a champagne glass. “Hear, hear!”

“One of us, one of us!” Joshua chanted, a reference to some obscure movie that only he and Jihoon had ever seen. “Gooble gobble, gooble gobble!”

Mingyu fell back against the couch, not sure what would come next. His heart drummed against his chest, expectant, and his hands clenched into fists over his knees. It wasn’t how he’d expected to spend his night but at least he was among friends. At least he was safe, safe to experiment and safe to play.

“Hey, speaking of drugs,” Jeonghan said, still draped across Seungcheol like a sweater, “where’s the baby?”

“Dino’s coming,” Seungcheol said. “He said to start without him.”

Jihoon had taken a few hits from Vernon and then gave him back the blunt, watching Seungcheol and Jeonghan with careful eyes.

“Probably off getting into trouble,” Vernon said, puffing away. “You know how kids are.”

“No one knows it as well as you,” Joshua said. He was still laying on the floor. Mingyu was pretty sure the drugs hadn’t hit him yet and Joshua was just being an for the sake of being an . “You’re repeating senior year for, what, Vernon, the fourth time?”

“You’ve got a real mouth on you tonight,” Seungcheol said wryly. “Why don’t you go put some food in there instead. I think we like you better with your mouth full.”

Joshua closed his eyes and smiled.

“Now you sound like all of Jeonghan’s ex-boyfriends.”

“Hey!” Seungcheol roared but Jihoon intervened.

“Ignore him,” he said. “Let him be a . He’ll tire himself out.”

“Yeah, you tell him,” Joshua continued smugly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Blessed are the peacekeepers for they shall be called the children of God.”

Mingyu had started to sweat. It was a combination of his fear of the unknown (he’d never done real drugs before – what was going to happen to him?) and the sudden tension that filled the room. Joshua could be an , but why was he being one now? This was his party, too.

“Life is like a mirror,” Vernon said, already back inside Vernon Land where he belonged. “You were being a douche-lord but you made a good point, Joshy. Life is like a mirror.”

Without opening his eyes, Josh gave him the double-guns.

“Anything for you, babe.”

It was another few minutes before Mingyu started to feel anything. He’d gotten lost in his thoughts, lulled into serenity by the dull buzz of the surrounding chatter. Life was like a mirror. Why did Josh think that was stupid? Vernon understood it. Did Vernon see it, too? The way that they all reflected off of each other? Life was like that, reflective, but also just as fragile. It could break, it could shatter.

“Seven years of bad luck,” Mingyu mumbled. His mouth felt dry. He looked around the room. Jeonghan was off of Seungcheol’s lap and had made himself a plate of food. He was standing across from the TV, eating. His lips were moving, saying something but Mingyu wasn’t listening. He felt warm, content, slightly drunk despite not having a drop to drink since that whole incident with Yoona.

His ears were ringing slightly and his body felt heavy. He felt tired, but not in a bad way. Not fatigued, but drowsy. Not exhausted but… cozy. He also wanted more food but didn’t trust his legs to support him. So he stayed where he was and kept looking around.

How much time had passed while he was daydreaming?

Joshua was on the love seat now, right next to Vernon, his feet on the coffee table. Jihoon was in the kitchen, sitting near the window. Seungcheol was still on the couch but preoccupied with his phone.

“What’d you say, kid?” Seungcheol asked absentmindedly. “You okay? You need something?”

“Seven years of bad luck,” Mingyu repeated, trying to annunciate. “If you break a mirror, you get seven years of bad luck. Life’s like a mirror, but when do you get those seven years of bad luck?”

Vernon laughed out loud and clapped his hands together, looking genuinely delighted.

“Spoken like a true stoner,” he giggled. “Another one bites the dust. Thanks, Seungcheol. I was getting lonely here. All this time, I thought Mingyu was a choir boy.”

“A choir boy who smokes like a chimney and beats up losers like me and Jihoon,” Joshua laughed.

“God, just leave him be,” Jihoon yelled from across the room. He was eating a cookie. Seungcheol must’ve brought dessert, too. Joshua turned to look at Jihoon but Mingyu turned to look at the TV. Someone had changed the channel and now cartoons were on. “Leave him alone, Josh. Seriously.”

“Fine, fine,” he said with a sigh, sounding bored. There was no challenge in it for him so he didn’t care. “I’ll leave your bully alone. Another alpha getting more than he deserves.”

“You’re such a , Josh,” Vernon giggled. “Mingyu is good to you.”

“He’s not good to people like me,” Joshua retorted.

Mingyu opened his mouth to defend himself but found that he couldn’t. He couldn’t find the words or the strength to speak them. Joshua was right, anyway. Mingyu was a bully. He didn’t smoke that much anymore, though, and that was what he wanted to correct. But he didn’t. He just looked at the TV and watched a cartoon wallaby shout at his friend, the turtle. He laughed because it was a ridiculous concept, unbothered by the fight about him happening all around him.

“Just leave him alone,” Jihoon said. “He’s a good guy with a bad reputation.”

“He wasn’t good to Hoseok when he shoved him in the locker, and he wasn’t good to Soonyoung when he pulled his pants down in front of everybody and he wasn’t good to Kyungsoo when he threw him across the locker room. I must’ve missed all the other good deeds in Mingyu’s past.”

“I’m sorry for all that,” Mingyu said, sighing heavily. “I was an but that’s not me.”

Seungcheol turned to him slowly, then examined him.

“We know,” Seungcheol said, giving him a light punch in the shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“My dad’s an , too,” Mingyu tried to explain but Joshua cut him off.

“Whose isn’t? Get over yourself, Mingyu. Grow up. Make your own choices.”

“I know,” Mingyu said. He could feel his heartbeat throughout his whole body. The hazy sleepiness was beginning to subside, his arms and legs feeling a little lighter, but everything still seemed to be happening a beat slower than it should. “I know that.”

Joshua smiled, a cruel, humorless smile, and said, “Good. Self-realization is so important.”

Mingyu let his head fall back to the cushion behind him. He couldn’t tell if he liked this or not. He certainly didn’t care for the feeling that he wasn’t in control of his own body. He was half-hoping that that sensation would pass and give way to something more pleasant. Euphoric was a word that Dino threw around a lot and Mingyu had to believe there was some truth to that. Dino was the expert, after all. It wasn’t that he felt entirely unpleasant so far, but that he’d been hoping for something more outright enjoyable.

Wasn’t the point of drugs to feel good?

He let his eyes land squarely on the television and then unfocus, just barely letting himself be consumed by the colorful cartoons that flashed and danced behind the glass. He laughed at the slapstick element of it, suddenly finding unexpected common ground with Vernon who sometimes smoked himself into a stupor and then spent a few hours watching Minecraft videos on his phone, completely entranced.

Some time passed. Mingyu’s growling stomach reminded him that he was conscious and he looked to the kitchen table to see if any food was left.

“Can I have more chicken?” he asked.

Seungcheol, who was still beside him, nodded.

“Go for it,” he said. “I’d prefer you eat it all instead of it going to waste.”

Confident that his legs were now strong enough to carry him, Mingyu stood. All the blood rushed to his head, enough to make him giggle but not enough to send him back on his . He felt pleasantly buzzed, like his heavy haze had faded into a much more familiar and much more agreeable type of high.

He made his way across the living room, stepping over Josh who was sprawled out on his stomach playing poker on his phone, and his strides felt airy. A few pieces of chicken remained in the bucket and, not in the mood to be bogged down by polite social conventions, Mingyu picked the whole thing up and hugged it protectively to his chest.

“I love chicken,” he said, mostly to himself as he reached for a drumstick. Then he looked to Seungcheol and said, “Thanks for dinner.”

“Don’t mention it,” Seungcheol said, not looking up from his phone. When no response from Mingyu came, Seungcheol glanced up and gave him somewhat of a forced smile. “Really, don’t worry about it. I get it such a discount, it’s practically free.”

“You’re a good leader,” Mingyu said, his mouth full of extra-crispy chicken skin. He moved closer to his friends, leaning against the wall so that he could still see the TV. “You take good care of us.”

From the couch, still sitting pretty beside a clingy Vernon, Jihoon snorted.

“Oh no,” he said. “Mingyu’s a lovey-dovey drunk.”

“No, I’m not,” Mingyu protested, chewing slowly. “I just appreciate Seungcheol for looking out for us. He feeds us. He gives us gifts.” He dropped a hand down to pat the lighter still in his pocket. Okay, maybe he was a lovey-dovey drunk. “I appreciate what he does. That’s all.”

From the floor, Joshua laughed. He was propped up on his elbows, his dark eyes fixed on the cards on-screen. Mingyu would’ve bet anything that Joshua was gambling with real money rather than just a free-to-play video poker app. He definitely needed to be risking thousands of actual dollars, otherwise, it wouldn’t have held his interest.

“Oh, captain, my captain,” he declared. He looked up at Seungcheol, a dark, trouble-making glint in his eye, and said, “Mingyu loves you. I think you might be his hero, Seungcheol.”

“Eat me,” said Seungcheol, not bothering to take Joshua’s bait.

“It’s not just me,” Mingyu went on, not registering what Joshua was trying to do. Perhaps he was too high, or just too stupid, to avoid walking right into a trap. “Seungcheol is good to all of us. Dino, Vernon, Jihoon, Jeonghan.” Mingyu’s forehead creased and he glanced around the room. “Hey, where’d Jeonghan go?”

Joshua laughed again, high-pitched and cold, the humorless giggle of a budding super villain. It was eerie the way it echoed off the walls of Aunt Helen’s house, a joyless harbinger, a sign of things to come, something that felt strangely like the unnatural calm before a storm.

“Oh yeah!” said Josh, grinning. “He really takes care of Jeonghan. Right, Seungcheol? He’s something of a special case for you, right? You pay extra-special attention to him.”

“Shut the  up, Josh,” Seungcheol growled. His eyes narrowed, his face twisting into a mean scowl that Mingyu had never seen before. Seungcheol rarely raised his voice, the type of guy who almost never got angry. But for whatever reason, Joshua had gotten under his skin and in an instant, Mingyu saw Dr. Jekyll give way to Mr. Hyde. “I mean it. Watch your ing mouth.”

Still smiling like the Joker, Joshua pushed himself up and sat with his legs crisscrossed and back straight. There was a challenge in his eyes, a dare. He’d gotten Seungcheol to bite and now he just needed to reel him in. This development had caught the attention of Jihoon who looked nervously across the room, his eyes crossing behind Vernon’s back.

“Guys, come on,” he said meekly. “Let’s not do this.”

“No, Jihoon, this is important,” Joshua said, faking the arrogance in his voice. He was putting on a show the way he tended to do sometimes, so bored inside his own life that he needed to shake things up just to keep himself from falling asleep. “Mingyu needs to know the truth about Seungcheol. Hero worship is dangerous. He’s old enough now to hear the facts and make his own decisions. He’s a big, tough man. Aren’t you, Mingyu?”

Unable to discern the insult from the rest of Joshua’s spiel, Mingyu shook his head, dazed, and said, “Seungcheol is a good guy. What do you mean? What truth? He helps us.”

“Does he?” Joshua rocked his head from side to side, from one shoulder to the other, pretending to think. “Perhaps he does. He buys us dinner, buys us drugs, buys us beer. But it’s not free, is it, Seungcheolie?”

“Ugh,” Vernon groaned dramatically, running both hands through his unruly hair. “Why do you have to be like this, Josh?”

“What do you mean it’s not free?” His face was pulled tight, an uncomfortable grimace. He felt dumber than usual, unable to keep up with what his friends were saying. He wanted to blame the drugs but in reality, wasn’t he just an idiot? Wasn’t that what Joshua always implied? Wasn’t that was his father always told him?

“Seungcheol is happy to help as long as he gets his wet,” Joshua went on, smiling proudly. His tone was dripping with venom, something acidic that Mingyu thought would somehow actualize and burn holes in the floor of Aunt Helen’s home as it spilled from Josh’s mouth. “How old was Jeonghan when you met him? Fifteen? And how old were you? Twenty? Twenty-one?” He scoffed and looked Seungcheol up and down, sneering in disgust. “Is that even legal?”

Mingyu felt like he’d been punched and he physically recoiled, an instinct that he’d developed from years of being used as a heavy bag.

“Wait, what? You and Jeonghan?” He looked to Seungcheol who was staring daggers at Joshua, his nails digging into the fibers of Aunt Helen’s couch, threatening to tear the upholstery. “When did… Why would you…” He blinked a few times, suddenly feeling dizzy. He was still holding the bucket of chicken and the smell of grease wafted up into his nostrils and sent a lead brick to his gut. “Jeonghan sleeps with older guys because of what happened to him as a kid. You told me that.”

“And how do you think he knows that?” Joshua asked petulantly, sitting up straighter and failing to hide the look of bliss in his eyes. He lived for this. “Don’t you ever notice, Mingyu, that when Jeonghan is getting mixed up in some , Seungcheol is right there with him? Remember Mr. Enders?”

“The gym teacher?”

“You know, of course, that Jeonghan slept with him a few months ago, right? And who do you think helped arrange that? Who do you think drove him to the hotel and made sure no one saw Mr. Enders there?” Joshua laughed like a madman when Mingyu stared blankly in response.

“Why would you do that?” Mingyu asked dumbly. He asked dumbly because he was dumb. A big, dumb jock, too high for his own good and holding a bucket of chicken.

Joshua shrugged flagrantly. Seungcheol was still avoiding Mingyu’s gaze.

“My theory,” Josh said flippantly, “is that he likes to watch.”

Seungcheol exploded off the couch, both fists cocked, but Vernon was off the loveseat fast enough to interfere and force him back down.

“You son of a !” he roared. “You watch your ing mouth!”

“Okay!” Jihoon said, jumping up so that he could offer his assistance in some way. “Let’s all cool off. We’re all friends here.”

“He’s not my friend,” Joshua said, shrugging. It was so simple, so cold, delivered with the same apathy of his usual regurgitated statistics and fun facts. That in itself hit Mingyu like a right hook to the jaw, hurting him more than it hurt Seungcheol. What did he mean they weren’t friends? They were all friends. They were a family. Weren’t they?

“You really need to relax,” Vernon said. He had one hand on Seungcheol’s chest, keeping him seated, and the other pointing fiercely at Joshua. “You’re not in any position to be talking this much .”

Joshua made a noise halfway between a laugh and a scoff, the sound of pure, unadulterated amusement.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really,” Vernon bit back. It was the most backbone Mingyu had ever seen Vernon show and he wondered if his loyalty to Seungcheol ran deeper than it seemed. “You ain’t perfect either, or have you forgotten all about what almost happened in May?”

Joshua’s smile widened into something beyond joy. He was loving this. He’d set it all into motion and he was finally receiving the reaction he’d been hoping for. He was the kid in class who watched others build tall towers with blocks just to come by and knock them down. He relished in the madness that followed, the chaos and the destruction.

“Yeah, Columbine,” Seungcheol muttered. “Why don’t you tell Mingyu about your little Trench Coat Mafia plan, huh? The one that Jihoon stopped?”

Mingyu snapped to look at Jihoon. He looked even smaller than usual, eyes on the floor, cheeks flushed. His head was still spinning, reeling with everything Joshua had forced upon him. Jeonghan and Seungcheol? Really? He felt something in the back of his mind, something thin and fragile, beginning to crack.

“Josh,” Mingyu said. “What did you do?”

Joshua held open his arms, gesturing to Seungcheol.

“By all means, leader-nim, please spin a story for young Mingyu. Tell him the tale of the big, bad wolf and how Prince Jihoon saved the day.”

“Go yourself, Josh,” Vernon muttered, rolling his eyes.

Seungcheol only hesitated for a second, his eyes finally risking a glance in Mingyu’s direction.

“Back in May, Joshua left his bedroom door unlocked. Jihoon thought he was here. He wasn’t. He knocked and opened the door and what should he find but dozens of papers, dozens of plans on how Josh here was going to shoot up the high school just in time for graduation. He had lists of people he was going to kill and detailed exactly how he was going to do it.”

The room fell silent.

Joshua’s smile was reserved.

“What?” he said quietly. “A boy can’t fantasize?”

“You had three guns and the makings of a bomb in your footlocker,” Jihoon blurted miserably. Even with his head down, Mingyu could tell he was on the verge of tears. His fists were clenched at his sides and he was cowering like he was expecting to be hit. “You were really going to do it. You were really going to come to school and kill a bunch of people. You were going to kill some of our friends.”

“They aren’t my friends,” Joshua said, flabbergasted. “And they’re not yours either, Jihoon. Grow up. They terrorized us for years. Why so much sympathy for the devil?”

“I knew I should’ve called the cops on your crazy a long time ago,” Seungcheol said. He moved to stand up again but Vernon pushed him back down.

“I should’ve called them on you, too,” Josh said deliriously. Somewhat sluggishly, he raised his right hand to his ear, sticking out his pinkie and thumb to make a phone. “Hello? Officers? I’ve got a fifteen-year-old friend who s with older guys. Teachers, truck-drivers, whoever you’ve got. Do I know of any specifics? Well, I know a twenty-one-year-old who s him in return for booze and rides to work.” Joshua threw his head back and snorted with laughter, only laughing harder when he saw the look on Mingyu’s face. “Oh, Mingyu. Get real. Didn’t you ever wonder why Seungcheol doesn’t hang out with anyone his own age?”

From the couch, Seungcheol growled again, an angry, hungry predator that needed to be restrained. But Vernon held strong.

He felt it again, something cracking. It had started off small, a nameless, faceless itch at the base of his brainstem, but it was growing rapidly, splintering and turning into clusters of webbed fractures. But what was it that was breaking? His grip on reality? His fleeting grasp on sobriety? His perception of his friends? His deep-seeded loyalty? Or was it that mirror, the one he held up to keep himself safe. He saw pieces of himself reflected in all of his friends, after all. If Seungcheol had been preying on Jeonghan all this time, if Joshua was truly capable of such violence, what did that mean for him? Who were these people? And, more importantly, who was he?

The front door opened and Jeonghan returned. Mingyu didn’t bother asking where he had been, deciding almost immediately that he didn’t particularly need to know.

Jeonghan, always a bit faster-to-the-punch than Mingyu, picked up on the tension right away. Mingyu figured it was tangible, like stepping out of an air-conditioned room and out into the thick fog of mid-summer humidity.

“Oh boy,” said Jeonghan. “What’d I miss?” He scanned the room, looking at each face individually, but stopped on Seungcheol. “You okay?”

Joshua giggled and said, “The queen is back to comfort her king.”

Jeonghan’s eyes narrowed. He looked annoyed but not especially hurt as he said, “Go yourself, Joshua.” He sat on the arm of the couch, right next to Seungcheol, and Vernon lowered his hand, apparently confident that Jeonghan’s presence alone would be enough to quell the murderous rage still burning in Seungcheol’s eyes.

Vernon took a step back and Mingyu took a much closer look at Seungcheol and Jeonghan. Their body language seemed to broadcast something that Mingyu had just simply never realized. Jeonghan put his hand on Seungcheol’s back, something that any one of them might’ve done to calm a friend down, but his touch lingered. He rubbed circles with his palm and Mingyu watched as Seungcheol relaxed into his touch, his jaw finally beginning to unclench.

So it was true, then.

The door opened again. In walked Dino with a smile on his face, a young man completely oblivious to the warzone into which he’d just stumbled headfirst. He had his backpack slung over his shoulder and his lime green t-shirt boasted a lizard wearing sunglasses.

“Sorry I’m late,” he announced boisterously. “What did I miss?” He seemed to take it in all at once – the way Jeonghan was comforting an obviously irate Seungcheol, the way Vernon and Jihoon stood in the middle, awaiting a physical altercation that had yet to come, Joshua on the floor looking like a kid who’d just taken cookies from the cookie jar, the drugs on the table and Mingyu standing against the wall, holding a bucket of chicken. “Wow,” he said, smirking. “I guess I missed a lot. You guys sure know how to party.”

“The gentlemen were just clearing the air,” Jihoon said diplomatically, putting on a brave face for the youngest member of the group. He stood up straighter, the tears threatening to spill from his eyes moments before suddenly retreating back into their ducts. “You know how guys are. Things are just getting a little tense.”

Dino nodded, a wrinkle appearing in the center of his forehead.

“I’ll say.” He shrugged off his bag and tossed it near the coffee table, looking to Mingyu and the food still in his arms. “I’m starved, man. You sharing?” Mingyu didn’t have words to say, didn’t trust himself to open his mouth, so he just offered Dino the bucket. Thanking him, Dino pulled out a piece of chicken and shoved most of it into his mouth.

“Where were you?” Vernon asked, blowing the hair out of his eyes and returning to his place on the loveseat. Dino’s entrace seemed to have punctured the balloon and now that the hot air was rushing out, everyone could breathe a little bit easier.

“Working,” Dino said, a vague term that could’ve meant literally anything. “Bills are piling up at home. Like, worse than usual. My sister Katie needs to get a tooth pulled and, as you could imagine, we don’t have dental. So I’ve been hustling my little tushie off for the last month.” He tossed the chicken bone in the trash and the grease off his fingers. “But the good news is we finally have enough and I can take a little breather.”

Mingyu couldn’t tell if Dino was high or not. Statistically, historically, he probably was. But practically? Mingyu couldn’t tell the difference. Dino did a lot of drugs and, as such, likely had a high tolerance for them now. How did they make him feel? Was it anything like how Mingyu felt in that moment – lost, small, dazed, heavy?

Dino never seemed sluggish or goofy like Vernon when he was high. Was that just because different drugs had different effects? Most of the time, Dino had boundless energy and he always seemed to be in pretty good spirits. Yeah, sometimes he took too much and it knocked him out cold but most of the time? He was downright chipper and completely high-functioning. For a guy with so much going at home, he seemed happy. How much did his addiction factor into that?

Mingyu felt nauseous. Maybe it was from the chicken, or maybe it was because he was suddenly finding out that two of his closest friends had been ing in secret and another had had very real plans to shoot up their high school. Or maybe it was just the ketamine.

“On the plus side,” Dino continued happily, buzzing like a bumblebee as he wiped his hands on his pants. “I managed to scrounge up enough to get Josh and Mingyu graduation gifts. Aren’t I a good friend?” He laughed, then kneeled beside his backpack, undoing the zipper and digging around inside.

“That backpack is too big for you,” Seungcheol said, the first thing he’d said in a while. “You’re a small kid. That can’t be good for your back.”

“If you’re worried about back pain,” Dino teased, looking up at him, “you should know I’m well-covered.”

He began pulling things from his bag and placing them on the floor. Textbooks, papers, crumpled up dollar bills. Mingyu leaned his head against the wall and shut his eyes for a minute. He was hyper-aware of the lighter in his pocket. It seemed to ignite on its own, burning through the denim and branding the inscription directly into the skin of his thigh.

It was a gift from Seungcheol, the man he’d considered to be his protective, noble older brother. But with all these deep, dark secrets rearing their ugly little heads, how was he supposed to feel?

He didn’t have the heart to tell Dino that he didn’t want any more gifts.

He opened his eyes. Dino was still pulling things out of his backpack.

An iPod, an Apple Watch, a Rilakkuma wallet, a tablet.

Then, finally, a string of pearls.

He recognized those pearls, remembered complimenting them when Yoona had met him for dinner wearing a dress with a neckline that almost made him drool into his spaghetti.

Yoona’s pearls. Yoona’s wallet. Yoona’s phone.

The realization of it washed over Mingyu in waves.

What would a kid as poor as Dino be doing with tablets and smart-watches if he wasn’t stealing them and pawning them? How was a kid like Dino making money if he wasn’t mugging people? How was Dino paying for his little sister’s dental work if he wasn’t the ing piece-of- bandit that was terrorizing the town.

“Those pearls,” Mingyu said, his voice as loud and clear as gunshot across the dusty room. “Where’d you get those pearls, Dino?”

“Don’t worry,” said Dino. “They’re not your gift!” He laughed at his own joke and Mingyu took a long step forward, dropping the bucket of chicken. It clamored softly against the floor, getting everyone’s attention, but Mingyu had Dino by the front of his shirt before anyone could voice their objection.

“Dino,” he said, his back teeth clenched and grinding. “Where did you get those pearls?”

Looking into his eyes, Dino seemed to piece it together. He’d made a grave mistake, only he’d just now realized it. He tried to squirm out of his grasp but Mingyu was a lot stronger than him.

“H-hey, look, Mingyu. I…I…I… buddy, come on. I didn’t–”

Mingyu dropped him and shoved him aside, sending Dino stumbling back but keeping him on his feet. Mingyu squatted next to his bag and turned it upside down, all of the contents falling to a pile on the floor.

More valuables, more money, and a plastic clown mask.

It was then that Mingyu truly felt it. He could see it his mind’s eye as clearly as he could see all the guys in Aunt Helen’s living room. He watched the mirror that was his life slip from the wall and fall to the floor. It hadn’t just cracked – it had shattered. Shards of glass were everywhere, splintering and exploding like shrapnel. He felt them bury themselves into the soft tissue of his brain and his heart, and even despite all the beatings he’d received as a kid, he couldn’t remember anything quite as painful as this.

Seungcheol’s head dropped to his chest.

“Oh, Dino,” he said quietly.

“Jesus,” Jihoon muttered. “Oh, Jesus.”

Mingyu was too fast for any of them. Before anyone could lift a finger, he’d reacted, lifting Dino up by his collar and slamming him down into the coffee table, shattering it in the process. It was nothing short of a blind rage, Mingyu’s fist connection with Dino’s face over and over and over again. He was seeing red, unsure if it was a metaphoric side effect to his fury or just the blood flowing freely from Dino’s mouth and nose.

It took Vernon, Joshua and Seungcheol’s collective strength to pull Mingyu off of him. They pulled him back towards the wall while Jeonghan and Jihoon rushed to attend to a broken and bloodied, but still very conscious, Dino Lee.

“You robbed Yoona!” Mingyu shouted gracelessly, struggling hard against the restraints being forced onto him. “You robbed my ing girlfriend. You ing felt her up, you sick son of a . What, no girl wants a pathetic addict like you so you have to  girls now?”

“I didn’t do that!” Dino shouted back. Tears streamed from his eyes, mixing with the blood that seemed to be coming from everywhere else. “That was the other guys! I told Siwon to stop! I told them that we just needed their money! I’d never hurt anyone, Mingyu! I didn’t touch her! I swear!”

Mingyu roared again, the cry of a caged animal trying to break free of its constricts, and attempted to rush him again. But with Seungcheol and Joshua each bracing one of his arms and Vernon pushing him back by the torso, it was no use.

Jeonghan had run to the kitchen to get a rag (and where he was even going to begin with Dino was beyond all of their comprehensions) while Jihoon tried to get Dino to sit up.

“Stop,” Seungcheol said quietly. “You got him. You punished him. Just stop.”

“Oh, off, Seungcheol,” Mingyu said, using all the strength and adrenaline he had left in him to shake free of his human restraints. “What the would you know about it, huh? What the do any of you know about anything?”

“Mingyu, I’m sorry,” Dino said, wiping some of the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You gotta believe me. I didn’t know. I didn’t–”

He was cut off when Jeonghan pressed the rag to his mouth.

“All this blood,” Joshua said, his sick way of trying to break the tension, “is getting me excited. Should we go to my footlocker and make this a really fun night?”

“Just this once,” Jihoon pleaded, sounding two steps past exhausted, “can you please stop talking, Joshua? Please? Just shut the up. Just stop.”

Chatter ensued. Banter, even. Joshua laughing and teasing and Jeonghan asking if Dino was okay and Seungcheol trying to quiet them all down. The room was spinning. Mingyu felt like one wrong step would send him tumbling to the floor. He had an inkling that, if that happened, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. The ground was opening up, threatening to swallow them all whole, and Mingyu knew one thing and one thing alone – he needed to get out.

Two hours before, he thought he’d understood everything. He thought he’d understood his place in the world, his place in the group. He thought he’d been living a life based on brotherhood and loyalty and love. He thought he’d seen the beautiful parts of life reflected in the faces of his best friends, but everything he thought he knew was a lie.

Seungcheol had been sleeping with Jeonghan. Joshua had been plotting to murder them all. Dino had been the one that terrorized Yoona and cost Mingyu his one and only shot at love.

And all he knew was that he needed to get as far away from these people as possible.

So that was what he did.

Taking one last look around Aunt Helen’s estate, the place that had been his home away from home for nearly two years, Mingyu took off like a bat out of hell. Though he’d driven to Aunt Helen’s that night, he didn’t trust himself to drive home. He only lived two-and-a-half miles away so Mingyu did what any reasonably-stoned and emotionally distraught teenage boy would do – he ran.

He ran the entire way, letting tears fall freely from his eyes and dry right there on his cheeks.

He arrived home not long after, pleasantly surprised to find his father already passed out in his recliner. That was good. That gave him a lot more options and a lot less restrictions. If his father had been awake, he would’ve pointed out the tear-stains on his skin, and then Mingyu would’ve finally snapped and beaten his father to death right there in their tiny kitchen.

But since he’d already put himself down for the night, no such violence was needed. Well, no further violence. He hadn’t really noticed it until that moment but his knuckles were bleeding. He’d probably cut them on Dino’s teeth.

Dino. His friend, Dino. Dino, the kid who traumatized his girlfriend. Dino who he’d nearly killed in Aunt Helen’s living room. God, Aunt Helen was probably rolling in her grave. What had those dirty boys done to her home?

He had no ties here, he realized all at once. At least not anymore. His mother was long gone, dead and buried without the chance to see her only son grow into a man. His father was worthless, an insecure shell who worked through his problems by beating his helpless child senseless. Yoona would never talk to him again, betrayed and violated by a guy Mingyu had considered to be his friend.

And his friends… Those guys he’d spent two whole years of his life with? He didn’t have them either. Not anymore. This, Mingyu thought while standing in his kitchen and watching his father’s chest rise and fall while baseball highlights played on TV, was what it meant to be all alone.

But he was eighteen now, a recent high school graduate. He had no parents, no friends, no obligations, no responsibilities. He was truly free. And Mingyu decided, that simply, that it was time to test the limits of that newfound freedom.

And he knew that if he didn’t do it then, he’d never have the guts to do it again.

He went into his bedroom and packed a small duffle bag, finding out the hard way just how little he had to his name. He packed two additional outfits, some socks, some underwear, some toiletries, the rest of his cigarettes and his wallet. But his wallet was bare. Under his mattress, alongside the empty carton of cigarettes he’d been pretending he didn’t have, was almost three-hundred dollars – the money he’d been saving for “rent.” His father had circled the date on the calendar, the last of the month, in red ink, saying that Mingyu had until then to get together the cash or he’d throw him out on the street.

Pulling the wrinkled bills out from under his bed and shoving them haphazardly into his duct-tape wallet, Mingyu said, “Not if I throw myself out first.”

He threw his bag over his shoulder and left his bedroom, quickly and quietly washing the blood from his hands in the kitchen sink. He was acutely aware of the drugs still in his system, but beginning to regain conscious control over himself. If only at a very basic level, Mingyu knew that showing up to the bus station with Dino’s blood on his knuckles would almost definitely hinder his escape. And that simply wouldn’t do.

He dried his hands on a dish rag, the sting of coarse fibers against his raw skin more of an afterthought than an actual reaction to the pain. Next to the towel was a stack of overdue bills – cable, electricity, water, gas. Next to that was his father’s wallet, keys and phone charger. Mingyu smirked, not risking a laugh.

After all these years, karma, even just a little bit, tasted so sweet.

He opened his father’s wallet, unsurprised by the meager contents, but still pocketed the forty-one dollars and a Subway gift card. Then, a thought occurred to him like a lightning strike.

The emergency fund.

His father had started it years before, back when his cruelty came in spells rather than radiating off of him like a fine, toxic mist. Mingyu couldn’t be sure if it was still there, aware of the likeliness that his father had dipped into it for beer money or to gamble away on horse races, but he remembered where it was. He approached the fridge on quiet feet and reached up behind a box of cereal long past its prime.

There, his long fingers found a dusty Pringles can. He gave it a shake, his heart skipping a beat when he heard something other than potato chips rattling beneath the lid. Hands shaking (was that the drugs, or his nerves?), Mingyu popped the plastic top, stifling a scream of joy when he found a wad of cash. It couldn’t have been more than two hundred bucks but it was something.

Hastily, he closed the canister and replaced it, figuring his father wouldn’t even notice it had been disturbed. Shoving his wallet deep inside his duffle bag, Mingyu headed for the back door. He stopped only when his eyes caught a glimpse of an old photo on the wall. The frame was dusty and the picture was faded but there it was – his family. It had been taken the year before his mother had died, a picture of all three of them at Mingyu’s ninth birthday. They looked happy, but they were strangers to him now.

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. His hand hovered over the doorknob, and Mingyu looked over his shoulder, stealing one last glance at his father. How long would it take Dad to notice he was gone? Days? Weeks? Would he ever notice? Would he ever care?

Shrugging his shoulders, and deciding he didn’t want to stick around to find out, Mingyu opened the door, stepped out into the darkness and never looked back.

He had to slum it to the bus station and took a well-known shortcut through the woods. It took him past a lake, something of a popular hangout for local lowlifes. That night, it was empty and eerily still. That was okay, he decided. He didn’t want to talk to anyone anyway. In his pocket, his phone buzzed furiously, his friends – or whoever those people at Aunt Helen’s were – trying to reach him.

He plucked it from his pants pocket, looked into the screen and then chucked it across the lake, pleased by the way it skipped smoothly like a flat stone. Then, from the same pocket, he produced the lighter Seungcheol had given him. Did he really know the man who’d given him this gift? He squeezed it so hard that his hand ached, then that, too, followed his phone into the depths.

The lake rippled and protested before going still and Mingyu looked down at the man reflected in the murky water.

He didn’t know him, either.

The bus station was operational 24 hours a day, good news for Mingyu who didn’t arrive until after two AM. Pulling some money from his wallet and trying to somehow appear more man than boy, Mingyu bought a one-way ticket to the city.

“Hope you brought a good book,” said the woman behind the glass. “The bus doesn’t come in for another hour, and then it’s a seven-hour ride.”

Suddenly wondering if he was still high and whether or not she was able to tell, Mingyu thanked her and took the first empty seat he saw. With nothing to occupy him, no phone or book or even a stupid magazine, Mingyu found himself alone with his thoughts.

In his current state of affairs, hurt and betrayed and alone and still doped with ketamine, that was a dangerous situation. Instinctually, Mingyu’s mind regressed back to some games he used to play as a child. When his father was wailing on him, or when he was hiding in his closet anticipating a beating, Mingyu had invented ways to bide his time and distract himself.

Sometimes he recited baseball statistics, trying to recall every batting average of every player on the Pirates. Other times, he tried to name every single kid in his class alphabetically. He tried to conjure up every word he could think of that started with R or L, or tried to recite his favorite movie word-for-word.

That night, he summoned up the alphabet game. He picked a topic (that night, he started with fruits) and tried to think of something for every letter of the alphabet.

Apple, banana, coconut, durian… eggplant?

The bus arrived when he was struggling to think of a type of car that started with K. Certain that he’d sobered up, Mingyu was feeling more confident, more mature. He was polite and respectful as he boarded the bus, his back straight and his head high. He stashed his duffle bag in the overhead compartment and took a seat against the window.

No one sat next to him.

A bit later, the bus pulled out.  With his head rested against the window, Mingyu watched as his hometown slowly faded into the distance, the lights of his past and everything that went along with it dimming until all he saw was darkness.

Good riddance, he thought, shutting his eyes. He crossed his arms over his chest, the pathetic embrace of a man with no one left to hug him, and his breathing slowed. Whether it was the rocking motion of the bus or the sudden loss of adrenaline or the inevitable exhaustion of the night finally hitting him, Mingyu fell asleep.

He awoke seven hours later, a different person in a different city.

And it didn’t take Mingyu very long at all to learn two harsh, distinctive truths.

The first was that living on your own was a lot harder than Mingyu thought. He tried to be smart with his money but he was only eighteen, a kid who’d never had to be in charge of his own finances before. What did he know about budgeting? Before long, he was homeless.

That was when he discovered the second truth, and that was that the despair he felt on the bus that night barely scratched the surface of what it meant to be alone. It barely did justice to the world. In a city of almost nine million people, Mingyu was completely and utterly alone. Homelessness was something he’d never expected to endure and it was a colder, crueler reality than he’d ever dared to dream.

Still, he was lucky. He was a big, strong, conventionally attractive man. He could defend himself, protect what little he had, but still clean up well enough that people took him seriously and wanted to help him. He didn’t understand how some of the others survived. The teenage girls and the elderly women… how did they defend themselves? The mentally ill, the physically disabled, the otherwise unappealing… how did they survive? Mingyu, with all of the advantages he had, nearly died twice, once from dehydration and the other from exposure, and he’d only been in the city for a few months.

How did the rest of the homeless population do it? How did anyone?

After eighteen years of arguable misfortune, though, luck seemed to finally find Mingyu. A group of social workers had teamed up with some philanthropist, some wealthy, mildly famous bachelor who wanted to give back, and launched a pilot program designed to help a select few bums get back on their feet. If things worked out, they’d introduce the program on a larger scale.

Mingyu was one of those lucky few bums. He was also the program’s biggest success story. It was something for the headlines – a teenage runaway getting a fresh start and proving that, with a little hard work and determination, anyone could turn their life around. He’d had to lie his of, of course. He’d been testing out different backstories on everyone that he met, trying to ascertain which story got the best reaction. It was about balance. He wanted sympathy but not pity. He wanted respect but without seeming too proud to accept charity.

He settled on something close to the truth – when he was twelve, both of his wonderful parents were killed in a car accident. With no next of kin, he was shipped to foster care where he was abused by his new parents. (He even had the scars to prove it.) When he turned eighteen, they kicked him out with nothing but the clothes on his back and he decided to make a new life for himself in the city.

It was perfect. It made people feel bad enough that they wanted to help him, but with a masculine, independent edge that kept them from looking down on him.

Honestly, it was so smart that he was surprised he was capable of thinking it himself. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as his father and Josh had always told him he was.

But he didn’t think about his father or Josh or the other guys. At least not at first. It was so much work just trying to survive that he didn’t have time to reminisce. It cost too much to take a stroll down memory lane and he just didn’t have the cash to fund it. Then, once he was given a job, all he cared about was working hard. He was reliable, resourceful, grateful, humble. He impressed his new bosses and the social workers. They bought him some new clothes and put him up in a shelter. The wealthy philanthropist was so impressed by Mingyu’s drive and work ethic that he put up the first and last month’s rent on a ty apartment.

By his nineteenth birthday, Mingyu had a steady job and a roof over his head. He had food in his fridge (nothing spectacular – usually discount chicken, instant ramen, peanut butter, crackers and whatever produce happened to be on sale that week) and clothes in his closet. His apartment wasn’t spectacular and the three deadbolts on his door were put to use often, but it was his.

His life was blissfully simple. The harder he worked, the better he felt. With nothing else to do (no friends or family to distract him), he picked up extra shifts. He made more money and earned brownie points with his boss who told him that, if he kept up the good work, he’d be promoted to shift manager.

By twenty, he’d started taking classes at the community college near his apartment. He’d stayed in touch with the social workers who’d changed his life, entirely too grateful to forget about them once his life had improved, and they’d helped him receive financial aid.

He’d been studying at the library one afternoon when he saw her, a girl so pretty that he lost his breath. She had headphones in, completely engrossed in whatever it was she was writing, and it took Mingyu twenty-three minutes to work up the nerve to approach her. When he did, he realized that she wasn’t writing but sketching. With a shaky voice, he introduced himself. She smiled at him, said her name was Umji and when Mingyu asked what she was drawing, she told him about her project for art school.

It was love at first sight – for both of them.

It was just before his twenty-first birthday when Mingyu started to think about Aunt Helen’s estate and the friends he’d left back in his dirty hometown. He attributed the suddenly clarity to the newfound stability in his life. Now a respected shift-manager, Mingyu made a lot more money. He’d moved to a nicer apartment and even gotten a cat. Umji was his girlfriend and most of his nights off were spent studying on the couch while she sketched and painted and Boba the cat slept in the window. He’d even quit smoking.

His life was no longer perched precariously on the edge of a cliff. It had been a long time since he’d been shivering in an alley, panhandling for pocket change and digging in dumpsters for something to eat. He was happy now, stable, loved, and once his brain had healed up enough to serve as a working projector screen, the memories all came rushing back.

Jeonghan. Joshua. Vernon. Dino. Jihoon. Seungcheol. His mother. His father. Yoona.

He woke up crying one night, a nightmare so vivid that it ripped him from the warm embrace of a deep sleep, and with Umji beside him, panicking as she tried to calm him down, he had no choice but to tell her about his past. He’d buried it for a reason – the memories were still so real that they could hurt him.

But the more he told her, the more he realized that the past was in the past. The shrapnel that had embedded itself into the soft parts of his body the night everything had come crashing down? It was all gone now. All that remained was scar tissue. And once he’d told her all the bad stuff – the stuff about his father, the stuff about his almost-girlfriend, the stuff about Josh and Jeonghan and Seungcheol – all the good stuff seemed to come back, too.

Without all of the cobwebs cluttering that part of his past, Mingyu remembered the good times. He told Umji about how he used to play flag football with Vernon, about all of the festivals Jihoon had dragged him to. He told her about meeting Seungcheol, about how one of the most important friendships of his life had been born outside a 7-Eleven, and about Joshua had tried to teach him how to play guitar but that he ultimately at it and stuck to sports. He told her about how Jeonghan had tutored him and kept him from flunking out and about how Dino, the baby of the group, somehow acted like the strictest mom-friend imaginable.

And she listened. She listened to every last story, good and bad, and loved him anyway. The confidence it instilled in him was palpable. He’d been living in fear since the day he met her, certain that if she ever peeked into his past, she’d run screaming. But she didn’t. He’d told her everything and was met with nothing but support and compassion. She loved him for him, both who he was now and who he had been then, and the sense of security he felt with her was incomparable.

He’d never felt so safe before.

And that safety drove him to a realization – he needed to go home. Not for good. Not forever. Not for more than a few days, in fact. His home was in the city, with Umji and Boba and his British Literature professor who challenged him and made him work beyond what he thought he was capable of.

But he’d left home in the dead of night and now three years had passed. He needed to go home, see his friends, see his father. He needed the closure for himself. He didn’t want to be the type that burned bridges, and he didn’t want to be the sort of coward who ran from his problems and locked the door behind him.

He needed to go home.

Umji offered to go with him, wanting to support him on his homecoming, but he told her that he had to go alone. Someday, perhaps, he’d take her back for a visit, show her the 7-Eleven and the lake and Aunt Helen’s estate, but for now, this was on him.

He kissed her goodbye and rented a car, not wanting to go back to the night where a dirty Greyhound bus had been his chariot to the ball. Besides, it had been a while since he’d driven anywhere and he thought it would do him good to clear him head.

It took nearly eight hours to get there and the drive tired him out. He checked into a hotel, feeling strangely like a big fish in a small pond, and slept deeply. When he awoke, it was dawn and he knew in his heart that it was time to face his demons once and for all.

He shaved in the hotel bathroom that morning and took a good, long look at himself when he was done. The man reflected in the mirror was not the scared, stoned kid he’d been the night he left. He was different now. He was better. Seeing his friends again, seeing his father gain, would help put into perspective all of the progress he’d made. Above all, Mingyu really needed the closure. He couldn’t fully commit to his new life with his new family until he closed this chapter of his past once and for all.

For Umji, and for himself, it was a bullet he was willing to bite.

He didn’t know how to find his friends. He’d chucked his phone into the lake the night he’d left town and it wasn’t as though he’d memorized any of their numbers.

So he started with his father. He drove to his old homestead, not expecting the goosebumps that rose up on his skin the second he pulled into the driveway. He didn’t recognize the other car but it had been three years. Without a second mouth to feed, his father probably saved up enough for an upgrade.

His hand shook a little as he knocked on the door, an echo of the scared boy he’d once been, but when the door opened, he was met with surprise. He didn’t recognize the woman standing in the doorway.

“Hi,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Mingyu,” he said. “Mingyu Kim. I grew up here. I was… I’m sorry. I’m looking for my father.”

“Oh, you’re Mr. Kim’s son,” she said. “He sold us the place two years ago.”

That was… hard to believe. His father was the type to attach ridiculous emotional sentiment to the most miniscule totems. He’d once beaten Mingyu silly for touching his late mother’s apron for that very reason.

“Do you know where he is now?” Mingyu asked, but the woman shook her head.

“Sorry, honey. We never heard from him after we moved in.”

Mingyu found himself smack dab in the middle of disappointment and relief. He thanked her, apologized for intruding and sat in his rental car.

“So much for closure,” he said.

He fished his phone from his bag and decided that his best bet was to locate Jihoon. Jihoon had been his closest friend in the group and Jihoon would likely know where everyone else was. Mingyu had looked him up on Facebook at least three times before leaving the city but had been too much of a wuss to reach out to him. Now, sitting in the driveway of his childhood home, discovering that he didn’t know or especially care if his father was dead or alive or trapped in a ditch somewhere, Mingyu decided to be a man.

He typed up a very straightforward message and sent it without reading it over.

Hey Jihoon. You’re probably surprised to hear from me. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to reach out to you. I’m back in town for the next few days and I wanted to see you and catch up. I’ve been thinking a lot about you guys and all the good times we had. I’m sorry I left the way I did, but I miss all of you and I want to repair the damage I caused. Maybe we can all get together and I can apologize one-by-one. Is Dino still mad at me? I don’t know if he’s the type to hold a grudge. (LOL) I didn’t know how to find the other guys but I found you on here and thought it was a good place to start. I hope you’re well. Talk to you soon.

The reply was swift, all things considered.

Mingyu… Wow. It’s been a long time. I have off today and I happen to be in the area. We can meet up at Wolf’s Diner if you remember where that is. Meet you at 1?

Mingyu couldn’t help the way his heart fluttered in his chest. It was as though he’d been transported back to his teens, like he was meeting the guys for dinner and movies at Aunt Helen’s. He knew it was nothing. In the grand scheme of things, meeting Jihoon for lunch at Wolf’s was nothing like their rendezvous as kids, but it still excited him. He couldn’t wait to see him, couldn’t wait to catch up and reminisce.

He rushed over to Wolf’s Diner and sat in the car until 1 o’clock on the dot. He went inside, asked for a booth, and ordered a soda, downright giddy with the prospect of a reunion with his high school best friend. He had pictures of Umji and Boba on his phone, locked, loaded and ready to share, and was trying to decide if he should tell the story of his humble beginnings in homelessness when Jihoon approached the booth.

Mingyu nearly keeled over from excitement and surprise.

“Holy ,” he said, the first words he’d spoken to any of his old friends in over three years. “Look at you! You’re all grown up!” He jumped to his feet and pulled Jihoon into a bear hug, unable to believe his eyes. Jihoon was still short (Mingyu hadn’t expected him to grow much more) but he looked like an adult now. His hair was shorter, curlier, dark brown instead of platinum blonde, and he wore a college t-shirt and jeans. He looked nothing like the timid little kid that Mingyu remembered. “Jesus, man, look at you. How are you? How have you been?”

Jihoon seemed off-put by all the attention but that had always been Jihoon’s way. He took the seat across from Mingyu and looked him over carefully.

“Jeez,” he said, appearing almost reluctant in his delivery. “You’re like a man now.”

“Same to you!” Mingyu gawked. “How old are you now?”

“Nineteen,” he said. “I’m a sophomore.”

Mingyu smiled proudly.

“Good for you, man. Seriously.” He clapped his hands together, his heart drumming wildly in his chest. Jihoon signaled the waitress and ordered a black coffee, looking skittish as he shifted in his seat. Mingyu chalked that up to nerves. It had been three whole years and he had returned suddenly and dramatically. Jihoon hadn’t been expecting it and he didn’t know how to react. It was understandable. In the same circumstances, Mingyu probably would’ve reacted the same way.

“Where you living now?” Jihoon asked after a few sips of coffee.

“I live in New York,” he said. “The city! Can you believe that?”

“No,” said Jihoon, two hands wrapped around his mug. “I can’t.”

“I’ve got a girlfriend that loves me and a cat that’s kind of an and full-time job but I take classes at the college, too, trying to get my degree.” He was talking too fast and he knew it. He was overwhelming Jihoon and that wasn’t his intention. He took a deep breath and offered Jihoon a genuine smile. “I’m sorry. I’m coming on too strong. It’s just really good to see you, Jihoon. Tell me how you’ve been. Tell me what you’ve been up to. Tell me about the other guys!”

Jihoon bit the inside of his cheek.

“I’ve been okay,” he said. “I’m in art school. I’ve got a girlfriend now, too. I work at a coffee shop on campus and my dad just retired. As for the other guys…” Jihoon trailed off. His index finger circled the brim of his cup and he blinked rapidly, something he used to do when he was upset. He looked up and studied Mingyu, searching his face for clues. “About your message, Mingyu…”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“You really don’t know, do you?” Jihoon said quietly, a rhetorical question directed at himself. It was a strange question, cryptic and muted, and the alarm bells in Mingyu’s head began to sound.

“Know what, Jihoon?”

He shook his head, looking stunned, and then began to speak with more seriousness and candor than Mingyu had ever heard from him.

“Vernon moved away first. Just packed up and moved to LA. We still talk sometimes but to the best of my understanding, he is a beach bum. He makes ends meet somehow but I don’t think he has a job.” That in itself was kind of sad. Mingyu always figured that that would be Vernon’s path, but he’d hoped against hope that it could be different. “Jeonghan and Seungcheol started dating, like officially dating, a few months after you left. They’ve been together ever since and they moved up north together last year.”

Mingyu laughed but he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t particularly funny.

“I guess they really loved each other after all,” he said. “Good for them. Seungcheol always had a soft spot for Jeonghan.”

Jihoon made a face, pure confusion like Mingyu had just started speaking Bulgarian to him, but shook his head and went on.

“And Josh… well…”

“Where’s Josh?” Mingyu snorted. “Some big engineering firm or something? Did he invent the latest viral app, that smart sonofa?”

“Joshua’s in jail, Mingyu,” Jihoon said. “A year after you left, Jos started dating this girl. She cheated on him and he found out and he killed her and the guy she slept with.”

The diner fell silent. Or, at least, it did for Mingyu. The only thing he could hear was a cracking sound in the back of his mind, the sound of something fragile beginning to fracture.

“What?” he said, barely a whisper.

“I mean, you remember that last night at Aunt Helen’s, right? When we told you about Josh’s plan to shoot up the school? He had that darkness in him, that violence, that rage. He was always wound too tight. But they gave him the max. It was premediated, something he’d planned in advanced and followed through on. He’ll be in jail for the rest of his life. He’s not a danger to anyone but the other inmates now, I guess.”

Mingyu tried to blink through the sudden spots in his vision. His mouth was dry. He still had half a glass of soda but couldn’t make his hands reach for it. His arms felt impossibly heavy, just like that night at Aunt Helen’s.

“Dino,” Mingyu said, remembering the last member of their group. “Where’s Dino? What’s he doing now?”

Jihoon looked flabbergasted again, recoiling like he couldn’t understand anything Mingyu was saying. He took a deep breath, shaking his head, and leaning heavily against the back of the booth.

“You really don’t know?” he repeated. “I mean, how could you? I guess you wouldn’t. But I just… I thought you knew. Somehow, I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?” Mingyu asked, already afraid of what the answer would be.

Jihoon stared at him for another second and then said, “Mingyu, Dino died the night that you left town.”

There it was again, that cracking, shattering sound. He felt it just as sharply as he had that night at Aunt Helen’s. Everything he knew, his perception of the world, hitting the ground and disintegrating into millions of pieces.

“What?” he asked, his voice cracking. “What did you say?”

Jihoon looked away, his eyes latching onto anything but Mingyu.

“Dino sobered up after your fight and he wanted to apologize. He felt so bad about what happened and he was adamant about that girl, whatshername, the one that you liked. He wanted you to know that he didn’t touch her. So he followed you and took the shortcut through the woods. Only, I guess he wasn’t as sober as he thought he was because something happened. He drowned in the lake.”

Shattering. Everything was shattering, breaking, crumbling. Not just the mirror of his life and the way he remembered his friends but the entire world. The ground outside cracked and split open. The walls of Wolf’s Diner burst and gave way, toppling down with the shingles and the gutters from the roof. Jihoon was suddenly made of clay, pieces of his face chipping off and dropping to the table in heavy chunks.

“The police were actually looking for you for a while. They knew you fought with Dino and thought maybe you did it but we all vouched for you. It was eventually ruled an accidental death and they closed the case. I mean, he was a kid but he was also a drug addict and a thief. The cops didn’t care that much. We cared, though. He was our friend. We tried to find you but we couldn’t. It would have been nice if you were at the funeral but it was a nice service otherwise.” Jihoon shrugged his shoulders. They popped off and fell under the table, crumbling and breaking and turning to powder just like everything else around them. “Nothing was the same after that. We were all pretty messed up. Vernon couldn’t deal with it and stopped hanging out with us. Jeonghan started doing a lot of drugs but Seungcheol got him clean. Joshua got more violent. I think that’s when he finally snapped and stop bothering to hide it. I had a really hard time dealing with it.” Unconsciously, Jihoon looked to his wrist. Mingyu did, too, and found a series of short, straight scars on his skin. “Everything changed that night, I guess. I don’t even know what happened to the house. I stopped going, too, eventually.”

Mingyu was dizzy, his body threatening to give out and send him out of the booth and into the rubble. That was how he’d die. He’d fall to the ground, land with his face against the gravy-stained carpet of Wolf’s Diner, and then the rest of the roof would cave in and bury him. A fitting end to his time in town.

Joshua… Dino… Seungcheol and Jeonghan and Vernon and Jihoon…

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how he’d remembered it. This wasn’t how it had been reflected in his mind. He remembered happiness and brotherhood and sitting around that old TV set, watching bad kung-fu movies. He remembered fried chicken and trips to the 7-Eleven and listening to indie bands in Seungcheol’s car. He remembered looking through Jihoon’s drawings and listening to Joshua play the guitar and watching Dino bounce off the walls of Aunt Helen’s. He didn’t remember the drugs. He didn’t remember the blood. He didn’t remember all of the red flags. He didn’t remember all of it going so horribly, horribly wrong.

What was left to do when your dreams gave way to grotesque nightmares? How do you reconcile with your own mind when you can’t trust your memories?

“Mingyu, I’m sorry if this is a lot to swallow,” Jihoon said. He reached for Mingyu’s hand but Mingyu jerked his arm away, defensive, overstimulated, crumbling, shattering. “I’m sorry. I half-hoped you knew and that’s why you never came back. There’s nothing left here. I’m only in town because I was visiting my dad but I don’t come back here unless I have to. I don’t know what good times you’re remembering but… it’s different for me. You know what I remember? A bunch of no-good teenagers squatting in a stranger’s house to hide from how ed up our lives were. But, hey, I mean, everyone remembers it how they have to, right? I’m sorry if this is different from what you remembered but… it’s the truth. Wouldn’t you rather know the truth than live a lie?”

He couldn’t take it anymore. His skin hurt. He felt like he was cracking, too. He wasn’t a man made of flesh and bone, but a sad shell made of glass. And that glass, like everything else, was beginning to splinter. He needed to leave before it shattered him once and for all. This time, if he broke, he didn’t think anyone would be able to pick up the pieces. This time, nobody would be able to put him back together.

“I need to go,” he said, standing so hastily that his knees bumped the table and clattered the silverware. “I need to leave.”

“Mingyu, you don’t have to,” Jihoon said, exasperated. Regret broadcast itself clearly on his face and Mingyu could tell he was grasping at straws trying to make up for it. “I’m sorry. Let’s have lunch. Tell me about your life now. Really, I want to hear it.”

“I need to leave,” he repeated, frantic.

Jihoon said something else but Mingyu was already out the door and jogging to his car. It was all too much. The gravity of it all, contrast of his reality versus Jihoon’s. After all this time, his mind had crafted something beautiful out of the ashes of truth, and he couldn’t stand in the wake of its shadow anymore. If he accepted it, accepted that his memories were false, if he accepted that Dino was dead and it was probably his fault, if he accepted that his friend Josh had murdered two people and that Jeonghan had ended up with a man who’d likely been abusing and manipulating him since he was a kid… if he accepted any of it, the he’d be crushed under the weight of its cold juxtaposition.

Umji had just put him back together. He couldn’t let this place break him. Not again. If he shattered again, that would be it for him. There’d be no coming back from it a second time. Not even Umji would be able to save him from that.

He unlocked the door to his rental car and caught sight of himself in the window, the last mirror he’d ever face standing in the ruins of his hometown, and decided simply that he didn’t know, or want to know, the man reflected back.